Jan Nichols Murdock, who worked for Yale from 1957 to 1978, 13 of those years as the secretary to Beekman Cannon, the formidable Master of Jonathan Edwards College, has died after a long illness. She was 94.
Murdock's professional trajectory was an unusual one. She was working as Cannon's full-time secretary in the 1960s when she first earned recognition as a poet, publishing poems in such journals as The Atlantic Monthly, Saturday Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Yale Review. She ultimately published two books - "Mostly People," in 1966, and "Emblems of Passage," in1968, (both published by Rutgers University Press) - under the name Jeannette Nichols.
And she earned this literary success despite never having earned a college degree. That is until, in 1983, she was accepted to Yale as a student following the creation of a Bachelor of Liberal Studies (B.L.S.) program that allowed students who had never entered college, or whose careers had been interrupted, to earn the equivalent of Yale's bachelor of arts or bachelor of science degree. The program was the precursor to the current Eli Whitney Students Program.
Murdock then had the unique experience of becoming affiliated as a student with the same residential college where she had been a secretary. She would say how grateful she was to her husband, the late Shepard Murdock, for his support, financially and otherwise, during those years.
As a secretary who ruled the Office of the Master in Jonathan Edwards with efficiency and aplomb, Murdock had watched many JE undergraduates receive their degrees. Now, in 1986, she herself received her own, graduating Summa Cum Laude, with Honors in English, and with a Phi Beta Kappa key.
"I wanted to go through the complete experience of being an undergraduate," she told the Yale Daily News at the time. "I wanted the structure of learning - it challenges you to go further with yourself."
Murdock began her adult life with the ambition of becoming a painter. When she turned to poetry instead, she said that she wanted to do graphically with poetry what other artists did with painting. "It opened up a means of expressing myself," she said.
Later in life she returned to the visual arts, becoming am accomplished photographer. She was an expert in creating Polaroid transfer images, a photographic process in which the emulsion (the image layer) is peeled from a developing Polaroid print and transferred to another surface, such as watercolor paper or wood. Through this process she explored images from past eras. She taught at the Creative Arts Workshop in New Haven, and displayed her work statewide and locally through IMAGES, a much-celebrated annual photography exhibition of the Shoreline Arts Alliance.
Murdock's husband predeceased her by many years. She leaves her late husband's four sons and his granddaughter as her closest relatives. Funeral services will be private.
