Welcome to Janice Dempsey's Personal Site
Loving the life I live....
I trained in the 1960's as a fine artist at the Central School of Art in London (UK) and earned a living for over thirty years as an art teacher in secondary schools, with a break of 9 years in the 1980's when I went abroad to Brunei and Bangladesh with my husband, then became a mother. When I retired from teaching, I continued to paint and also became interested in writing poetry. As Jan Windle, for three years after separating from my then husband, I went to southern Italy as often as I could, drawing and painting in Sorrento and on the Amalfi Coast. Meeting Dónall, the poet and spoken word performer whom I later married, changed my life again. We are a strong partnership, publishing poetry pamphlets and collections and hosting monthly spoken word events and book launches, online since the pandemic began in 2020. Our publishing website is dempseyandwindle.com. I began to take a vigorous interest in our small garden during the pandemic, and so I hope to add a page on this site that I'll devote to images and notes about my garden. I'm in the process of adding copies of a journal I wrote as Jan Windle, on a now defunct blog, as a memoir for myself of my visits to Italy, where for one season I painted and sold my pictures in Positano before exploring the north and east of the country. (Links under 'BLASTS FROM THE PAST' below)
- What is this site for?
- There may occasionally be poems by me.
- What will not appear on this site?
- There will be no articles on politics. Politics are important to me but this is not a place where I shall discuss them.