About Jen Smither

I grew up in central Florida, which is the kind of thing that sticks with you no matter what other choices you make in life. Like many writers, I was devoted to writing and reading just about anything, with a strong preference for Ann Martin’s The Baby-Sitters Club and RL Stine’s Fear Street series.

Because I don’t often remember to say “no, thanks,” I’ve worked as everything from a full-suited Easter bunny hiding eggs on a golf course (you try it) to a photographer’s assistant at a daycare/llama farm. I was briefly the world’s worst waitress, and I worked at a pet store where the morning checklist often included the item “Catch the loose parakeets.”

I earned a Bachelors degree in English with a concentration in Creative Writing from Florida State University and then moved to Washington, DC, in pursuit of a real job and a real salary. After a few years, I landed in Columbus, Ohio, fortuitously near the childhood home of RL Stine. Maybe central Ohio has a way of bringing out the curiously dark sides of otherwise lovely people, because that’s when my writing began to take on the darker flavors of the supernatural and magical realism.

Before moving to Ohio, I never understood why “April is the cruelest month,” as TS Eliot said. But here I stay, bundled up when I’d rather be barefoot, and here I’ve built my life. I do marketing work by day, and I spend the evenings and weekends with my husband and daughter, vaulting between rock music lessons, gymnastics, birthday parties, jazz concerts, library programming, metro parks, and old cemeteries. We live in a haunted mansion with a few ghosts, two fish, and a snail named Escargot de la Mer. And during the hottest, most humid weekend of every summer, my regular writing group, the Naked Wordshop, retreats to the swampiest parts of Ohio just to make me feel more at home.

My writing tastes have expanded to include flawless writers like Virginia Woolf, Shirley Jackson, Lucia Berlin, and Chas Addams, along with other classics like "The Yellow Wallpaper," Moby Dick, and The Great Gatsby. I’m an absolute sucker for Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey and Maturin series. I also own way more Indiana Jones-related books than anyone reasonably should—including a couple in the "Find Your Fate" series by, you guessed it, RL Stine.

My fiction writing is currently focused on short stories that fit into my overpacked schedule, though I’ve previously drafted a novel and self-published online horror comics. My writing has appeared in Lowestoft Chronicle, Worker’s Write, and the Gay City anthology, Ghosts in Gaslight, Monsters in Steam.