Jenny Fosket is a writer living in Berkeley. Her stories are inspired by the intersections of motherhood, gender, bodies, and health. She was a professor of sociology for many years and left to dive into fiction writing. She still loves sociological stories and through her fiction illuminates the ways we all embody and experience social problems.
When she is not writing, Jenny enjoys swimming or paddling in the San Francisco Bay, hiking in her local wild places, or holing up in sun-soaked corners reading books. She is currently attempting to swim every day and blog about it.
Books
Jarred Loose by Water: A Year of Swimming in Oceans, Bays, Rivers, Sloughs, Estuaries, Lakes, and a couple of Pools is a memoir about wild swimming and the power of nature and community. It will be published by Sibylline Press in 2028. Read about it here.
Integral Impact: Transforming the Engineering Industry was written for Integral Group, a deep green engineering firm. Celebrating ten years of deep green engineering, Impact tells the story of Integral Group through the projects, people, and endeavors that most encapsulate its ethos and influence. A free digital copy of the book is available from Integral.
Living Green, written with Laura Mamo, explores the social and human side of sustainability by looking at the many ways people create “green” communities–from communes and ecovillages to low-income and mainstream green housing.
Biomedicalization is an edited volume analyzing the shifts in medicalization theory (to what we term biomedicalization) in light of the increasing technoscientization of biomedicine (i.e., developments in molecular genetics and information sciences).
Short Fiction
Mermaid Boy (2019) in Menda City Review issue 34.
Like a Rocket (2013) in “Marilyn” issue 06 of Literary Orphans. This story also appeared in their Best of compilation.
Reckless Burning (2013) in Forge 7.2
Articles & Book Chapters
I’ve written a lot about women’s health. In particular, the ways women’s bodies are pathologized and medicalized, the ways risk gets constructed vis-a-vis gender, and the politics of breast cancer. Here are a few:
“Constructing High-Risk Women: The Development and Standardization of a Breast Cancer Risk Assessment Tool” in Science, Technology and Human Values, Volume 29 (3), 2004.
“Scripting the Body: Pharmaceuticals and the (re)Making of Menstruation” with Laura Mamo, published in Signs, Volume 3.
“Problematizing Biomedicine: Women’s Constructions of Breast Cancer Knowledge” in Laura K. Potts’ Ideologies of Breast Cancer: Feminist Perspectives, 1999.
Works in Progress
Wildfire (in submission)
After losing her daughter in a wildfire, Cassie leaves her small town, Northern California life to grieve in the anonymity of the city. When an unlikely friendship draws her back into her old life, she learns that her daughter and the eclectic group of homesteaders she lived with are being blamed for the fire. Convinced that her daughter is innocent, and determined to be the mother she failed to be when her daughter was alive, Cassie sets out to prove it. In doing so she becomes embroiled in clashes between radicals on both sides of the political spectrum and uncovers a shady underside of the newly legalized marijuana industry
The Lunatic’s Ball (in submission)
Bea doesn’t know what happened thirteen years ago that left a boy dead and her sister institutionalized, but now that the same thing is happening to her daughter, she’s going to risk her career and family to find out.
In 1976 Bea is the only woman graduate student in wildlife biology at UC Irvine and she’s determined to be the best. But with 7-year-old twins, one of whom thinks she’s a bird, and a loving but unhelpful husband, she has to start working through the nights just to keep up. When she totals her car coming home from the lab early one morning, she realizes she needs help. Reluctantly, she reaches out to her parents from whom she’s been estranged for a decade.
Thirteen years earlier, Bea’s sister, Rose, was involved in the death of a neighbor boy at their summer lake house and sent to a mental hospital. In the aftermath, the family splintered. Bea’s only connection with her sister is in her fear that her daughter’s obsessive bird behavior is a sign that she’s as crazy as Rose.
When, to Bea’s surprise, her parents invite her and her family to join them at the lake house, the reunion starts off promising. Then old resentments surface, secrets emerge and Bea realizes there is a lot more to the story of her sister and the dead neighbor boy than she ever imagined. When her daughter’s behavior goes from eccentric to dangerous and her sister threatens to disappear from her life again, Bea realizes she needs to get to the bottom of what really happened that summer in order to truly reconcile with her family and understand her daughter.