Janna Cawrse Esarey

Janna Cawrse Esarey was born in 1971 in San Diego, California. When she was just an ankle biter, her family relocated to Yokosuka, Japan, where her dad was a dentist in the Navy. When Janna was four, her parents went ocean sailing with friends. They capsized (twice) in a typhoon off the coast of Japan.

The family moved to Seattle where Janna grew up. In high school, Janna fell in love with Crosby, Stills, and Nash’s song “Southern Cross” and swore she would one day sail the world. Janna’s mom, recalling her own typhoon experience, didn’t know if this was an idle threat or a cruel joke.

Janna attended Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, where she fell in love with a fisherman. He dumped her. While Janna was earning an MA in English at Georgetown, that fisherman came crawling back. She dumped him. After Janna taught in New Orleans with Teach For America, a program committed to ending educational inequity, that fisherman came crawling back again. This time they tied the knot and set out across the Pacific on a 35-foot sailboat.

During the two years that Janna spent sailing from Seattle to Hong Kong, she wrote for sailing magazines, including SAIL and CRUISING WORLD, and anthologies, including MORE SAND IN MY BRA and SWEAT AND THE CITY. It wasn’t until she moved back to the States in 2006 that she began serious work on her relation/ship memoir, THE MOTION OF THE OCEAN: 1 SMALL BOAT, 2 AVERAGE LOVERS, AND A WOMAN'S SEARCH FOR THE MEANING OF WIFE. Janna blogs about relationships for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer at “Happily Even After.”