About Me

Q: Everyone wants to know: How did you get your name Jon?

A: My parents wanted a boy. My mother, a May Queen at Blue Mountain College where Tennessee Williams wrote about its “yellow jonquils and gentlemen callers,” named me Jon Maher Horgan, an awful name for a child who suffered placement in all boys P.E. classes and draft evasion notices.

Writers are born readers. Mother took me to the library every Saturday to return books. If I had read them all, I could check out 3 more. My idea of a good book is one that keeps you up all night. When I was fussed at for being a daydreamer, my grandfather Big Daddy said, "Dreamers are the saviors of the world and the architectures of heaven."

Having won 2 Best Actress awards at two universities, I dreamed of going to New York to be an actress where I would support myself by writing novels, such was my naiveté. My dreams faded into the Tide box, babies and bottles, three beautiful children.

To support my writing habit as a single mom, I have been a writer, journalist, columnist, editor, university & high school English teacher, yoga teacher, actor, theatre director, advertising director, talk show host and a founding mother of the New Orleans-Tennessee Williams Writing Conference.

I was the first female journalist allowed into the New Orleans Saints NFL locker room in the early 1980’s. Shower curtains partitioned off stalls to give players privacy to change clothes. I could tell two of them were up to no good.

Towels draped across sexy manly torsos, they flashed me. Full frontal nudity. Determined to maintain my cool and not to be shocked, I turned my head. To this day, I regret not looking.

Q: Why do I like writing?

A: I don’t have to wear lipstick and mascara at the same time. I can write in my nightgown or birthday suit. I don’t have to get in a car to go anywhere. Writing is easy; getting published is hard.

Everyone wants to write a book. I tell writing students, Rule #1 is: Tie your fanny to the chair.

In the year of Covid, solitude is an aphrodisiac. Quarantine lends itself to craft. The writing life is solitary, ideal for a recluse.