JEAN G-OWEN
From ducking stools to hash tags...
Herstory reclaimed
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Wyuen Pyne is a medieval phrase meaning ‘women’s pain, women’s punishment’. Across centuries, women’s refusal to conform has been staged as spectacle: ducking stools plunging so-called scolds into rivers, bridles forcing tongues to stillness, racks stretching bodies in the name of faith. These punishments were both acts of law and public performances designed to choreograph female obedience.
This book answers back. Blending poetry, prose, herstory, cultural commentary and images, Wyuen Pyne reimagines women whose names survive in fragments, whose stories were bent into allegory or whose defiance was branded as sin. From Lilith, the first to say No, to Scheherazade, who turned storytelling into survival, it gathers saints, mothers, daughters, thinkers, rebels and witnesses across scripture, folklore, courtroom records and myth. But the reckoning doesn’t stop at the past. It cuts into the present, where women’s voices confront new forms of control.
For those who couldn’t speak and those still to be heard.
This is their reckoning. It is long overdue.
An erudite and enjoyable read!
Read review by Emily Gillatt-Ball here
The way this book brings together women's struggles, triumphs and perspectives feels urgent and alive...What I love is the range of women's voices, each sounding uniquely itself. I also loved how the images give those voices room to breathe. Smart, lyrical and grounded in deep research, this is a powerful read that stays with you.
Michelle Rollings
Listen to Jean's short story 'Piranha' here...
Between the Brown Banks: A London Lyric
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Between the Brown Banks: A London Lyric is a poetic sequence shaped by walking, witnessing, and return. Moving along the course of the Thames, Jean G-Owen writes as flâneuse and mudlark, gathering fragments of a city in flux. Here, London is both intimate and estranged: a place of reinvention, rupture and reflection. The river—Old Father Thames—threads through the work as witness and bearer, holding grief alongside the sediment of history.
From the spectral undercurrent of St Paul’s to the charged spaces of Westminster, South Bank and Greenwich, these poems explore what a city keeps and what it lets go. Interwoven with this central sequence are companion pieces that deepen the emotional register—meditations on memory, mortality and the unresolved question of what it means to endure.
This Figmentum chapbook offers a passage through London that is at once personal and political, grounded and mythic—written in the knowledge that love, like the city itself, is always subject to change.
Less
Killing Your Darlings:
editing as an act of murder
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Killing Your Darlings goes beyond the cliché to become a sharp, engaging, scalpel-wielding guide to self-editing-for writers who aren't afraid to get their hands ink-stained. With gallows humour, literary side-eyes, and brutally honest advice, Jean G-Owen leads you through the crime scene of your own draft, uncovering everything from purple prose and bloated flashbacks to sluggish pacing, beige sentences, and the occasional anatomically challenging sex scene. Whether you're pruning a poem, hacking through a novel, or just trying to make your sentences behave, this book will help you cut clean— and laugh darkly while you do it.
What people are saying
This is an excellent book on editing written by very highly regarded editor, publisher and writer Jean G-Owen. I have found it so useful, no waffle, just lots of really helpful advise.
Mary Grand
bestselling author of murder mysteries
Bites of Love: Poetry & Images
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The poems and images in this slim collection address the vicissitudes of love and how it bites us in unexpected ways.
Since the beginning of storytelling, poets have contemplated the universal theme of love in all its manifestations. Yet it remains an enigmatic, never-ending quest. As Zelda Fitzgerald says:
Nobody has ever measured, even poets, how much a heart can hold?
Touching on grief, betrayal, loss, disappointment, and hope among other topics, Jean G-Owen's candid reflections add another chapter to love's lexicon. Each poem and image will leave its own indelible mark on the reader.
Listen to Jean's poem to her beloved sister Maureen
The Pain of Glass
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The Pain of Glass how sharply it cuts, how shrewdly it distorts. In this haunting collection of poems, prose, and images, Jean G-Owen blends the personal with the universal, exploring life's fractures and the beauty they reveal. From relationships ruptured by love and loss to surreal encounters and walks
through London's cracked streets, this book unflinchingly examines fragility and resilience.
Both raw and intimate, The Pain of Glass is a fearless reckoning with life's sharp edges. leaving an indelible mark long after the final page.