J. Niki – Custom Ornament
How the penname J. Niki came to be is an interesting story. In
1971, at twenty years of age, Janice worked part-time in the Men and Boys Department
of K-mart, while attending college. She wrote lyrical verses on the small
tablets K-mart provided for price checks and would leave them in her smock
pocket. The next day the verse would be gone. Her aunt encouraged her, for fear
of her getting in trouble at work, to sign a name other than her own. This is
how Janice decided to use her first initial and the name of a Haley Mills
character from the movie “Moon-Spinners.” The verses continued to go missing
from the smock pockets, and this is when Janice realized she had her very first
fan.
J. Niki continued to write as a hobby, while working in
Medical Technology for the Department of Defense. She would be asked to write
poems for retiring military officials and also ended her lectures with lyrics
as a personal trademark.
“Reaching Out in Troubled Times” is the first volume of
inspirational verse J. Niki published. She wrote it for family and associates faced
with life’s inevitable challenges. She
added her own photographs of flowers she had taken while traveling between D.C.
and southern Virginia. She also added Scripture from the Holy Bible which she
uses as her source of morality, direction, and strength.
This ornament is a great example of the collaboration
between an individual with an image in mind, and our artists getting that idea
translated onto paper and finally to a 3-D mold.