About me
Jen Merrill is an Illinois-based writer, musician, marketing project
manager, and gifted family advocate. The mom of two, she
homeschooled one twice-exceptional son through high school while
happily sending his younger brother off to school every morning. Those
days now in the past, she is settling into the somewhat quieter life of an
empty-nester. She is a music educator by trade, with degrees in music
education and flute performance. Long before she picked up a flute as a
child, however, Jen wanted to be a writer, something that didn’t happen
until she opened a Blogger account in 2006 and never looked back. Her
writing focused mostly on gifted families and advocacy until the
pandemic hit and instead of writing she took up staring into space. Her
book, “If This is a Gift, Can I Send It Back?”, struck a nerve with families
who suspected Jen was living in their closet. Her second book, on the
needs of gifted parents and self-care, is in progress; it is taking
significantly longer than anticipated because of the aforementioned
staring into space, complicated by living as the gooey center of the
sandwich generation. In addition to writing on her long-time blog,
Laughing at Chaos, she has been the creative editor of the GHF Learners
Journey newsletter and has published articles in the Understanding Our
Gifted Journal, the 2e Newsletter, Variations 2e, and the Huffington Post.
Jen has presented at the National Association for Gifted Children
conference (2013, 2022), the World Council for Gifted and Talented
Children conference (2013), the Supporting Emotional Needs of the
Gifted conference (2016, 2017, 2018, 2020, 2022), and the Illinois
Association for Gifted Children Parents’ Day (2017, 2018). She was
also the keynote speaker for the Twice-Exceptional Children's Advocacy
conference (2016) and the SENG conference (2019).
Jen brings both her acquired wisdom and her experience as a teacher
and mentor to her work in the service of parents, teaching them
techniques and mentoring them into their own versions of success. Her goal is to support the parents of gifted and twice-exceptional kids, because
they are the ones doing the heavy lifting and are too often ignored,
patronized, and discredited. It is her hope that her sons never have to
deal with these issues when they raise their own likely gifted children.