In The Jewel Cave Adventure Herb and Jan Conn trace the early history of Jewel Cave (discovered around 1900) and describe exploration before 1959. Then they tell with humor of the day the little cave took possession of them, and with quiet excitement of how that day in Jewel Cave led to nearly two decades of dedicated exploration and mapping--accomplished by Herb and Jan and with small groups of friends--during which the cave grew to over 50 miles of the most intricate three-dimensional networks of underground passages in the world. Fifteen excellent maps--including a giant folded map--guide the reader through the maze as the cave is extended mile by mile. 
Herb and Jan are originals. They built their stone house against a rock wall, and made their living by playing the guitar, lecturing, and swinging on a rope to clean off the faces on Mount Rushmore. Their humor is as wild as their adventures. Herb and Jan will introduce you to the marvels of a world underground few people could imagine. 
 The Jewel Cave Adventure is also the story of Herb and Jan Conn. Unassumingly, they describe the rigors and joys of two lives dedicated to an unconventional goal.

Jewel Cave Adventure: Fifty Miles of Discovery in South Dakota

Conn, Jan

Conn, Herbert

Cave Books

Beauties on Mad River collects together fifteen years of poetry that has appeared in three Signal Editions: The Fabulous Disguise of Ourselves, South of the Tudo Bem Café (1990), and What Dante Did With Loss (1994). This is poetry that, in the words of George Elliot Clarke, "maps not so much the world as the soul." Almost half the poems in this volume are new - many of the 'keystone' poems inspired by the spirit of the eastern lyric form, the ghazal. "Through the medium of the keystone poems," Conn states, "I perceive more clearly now, and in ways that I did not previously, the themes of individual earlier pieces... These 'plateau' pieces have functioned for me as true keystones, as revelatory glimpses back into my work of the last fifteen years."

Beauties on Mad River (Library of Public Policy and Public Administration)

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

Véhicule Press

Poetry. "Wonder and hunger to know things drive Jan Conn's JAGUAR RAIN. Wonder draws her as a scientist and writer into the forest of Brazil where she marvels both at life's inventiveness and at the story of the gifted botanist-artist Margaret Mee who hunted orchids in Brazil from the 1950s to the 1980s. So the self in these poised riotous poems is split, the vision compounded, layered. Conn wonders simultaneously at the world she sees firsthand and at teh character of a woman fearless to see more, at the intricacies of plants and insects and those of the imagination, at the rampant forest and the human mind. JAGUAR RAIN is a powerful celebration of both nature and art"--John Steffler. Jan Conn lives in Barrington, Massachusetts. She is a scientist whose current biological research focus is on the population of malaria mosquitoes in the Brazilian Amazon. Field work has taken her there since 1973. JAGUAR RAIN is her sixth book of poems. In 2003 a selection of her Amazonian poems won second prize in the CBC Literary Awards.

Jaguar Rain: the Margaret Mee Poems

Brick Books

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Books by Conn, Jan