When in Japan...

Janet Bellinger, a teacher in Ontario, Canada has had her first novel published. "Teacher on the Run" is the story of Whitney, a young Canadian ESL teacher who accepts a teaching position in Nagoya, Japan, and learns how to make each moment count, in the Buddhist way. Whitney also finds out that she has taken on more than she had imagined as she learns of the contradictions inherent in Japan and also that one small pebble can indeed make a very big splash in the water. Janet has written an uplifting and informative story as well as one that was entertaining and affirms the life force of young people.

Orangeville, Ontario, Canada (PRWEB) December 26, 2005 -- Janet Bellinger's first novel, Teacher on the Run has recently been published by Publish America. ISBN: 1-4137-9973-6. It is available at Booklore in Orangeville, Ontario, the Publish America website, Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble and Chapters.ca.
    
Janet wrote the majority of the novel in 2002, but returned to it in 2005 in order to execute revisions to it. The book is about Whitney, a young, Canadian English as a Second Language Teacher (ESL) who accepts a teaching contract in Nagoya, Japan. She soon learns, however, that she has more on her plate than teaching, when she meets Ando Kano, the father of one of her students and noted Nagoya surgeon. She also becomes entranced by the Buddhist notion of making each moment in time count.
    
Whitney finds herself smack in the middle of intrigue as an unsavoury pair in a red car haunt her footsteps. Whitney makes a stunning show of heroism in the story's climax and learns that one person really can make a difference.

Janet reports that she did a lot of research on Japan before she wrote the novel, and also researched ESL teaching. She became interested in ESL at teacher's college at the University of Toronto, in 1976, when it was recently new and she did a project on it. She did not, however, take the course until after she wrote the book.
    
"I do things backwards from the way many people do them," she says, laughing. "I think most people would take the course, then write the book. But I had to take the course in order to generate more ESL information for the book. It's the same with visiting Japan. I have travelled to a lot of places but I've never been to Japan. I wanted to write about a place which I'd never been so I'd have to find out about it. My husband and I are going there now I've already written the book."
    
Janet has also written a book of poetry, called "Silver Sighs," which will be published by Publish America in 2006 or 2007. She is presently working on another novel, called "Reflections on the Window Pane."
    
Besides being an author, Janet also is an ESL teacher and substitute teacher with the Upper Grand District School Board.
    
She has not yet convinced the school board though to hire her as a permanent classroom teacher.

"Ironically,they do not think I would do a good job of teaching Literacy," she says. "I read Camus, Tolstoi, Hemingway and others as a young adolescent, but I do not give the right answers in interviews."

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