Her father, Paul, is a retired U.S. senator. One brother, John, is a congressman, who represents Maryland's 3rd District. The other brother, Michael, lost a spirited race for president of the Baltimore City Council.

But Janet, the least known Sarbanes family member, is far from what she matter-of-factly calls "the family business" of politics. She's a 40-year-old creative writing teacher and fiction writer in Los Angeles, who does much of her writing in a weekend house in Joshua Tree in the Mojave Desert.

Her collection of short stories, "Army of One," was published in March by Otis Books, a relatively new press of the Graduate Writing Program of the Otis College of Arts and Design, in Los Angeles. Otis specializes in poetry and translations, and publishes two books a year, Sarbanes said.

"I was the prose person for this year," she said. "Last year, it was a translation of the French modernist (Severo) Sarduy."

The Bryn Mawr grad is proud of her father's career and accomplishments, and said she respects politics as a way to "live other lives" and to "develop an expansive view."

"I admire my dad and how his life has been involved and entwined with the people of Maryland," Sarbanes said.

But she's not running for anything.

"I like to make things up, and not have to fact-check them," she said. "You can't do that in politics."

She was back in L.A. last week after spending the month in Guilford with her parents, Paul and Christine. Though she visits twice a year, this was a longer visit than she had in a long time. She reconnected with her roots and finished writing a novel that she is now shopping around. (An earlier one is abandoned in a drawer).

The recent downtown development surprised her, as did campus expansion at Bryn Mawr, where she graduated from high school after attending Mount Royal Elmentary/Middle School in Bolton Hill.

"Baltimore is very different," Sarbanes said Aug. 17, her last day in town, sitting on a bench outside the Bryn Mawr performing arts center that wasn't there when she was a student. (When she was there, the girls still wore bloomers and tunics for athletics. For the record, she played basketball and badminton.)

She, too, is very different now. She used to campaign for her dad, a five-term senator who was the Senate's longest-serving member when he retired last year.

Campaigning, she said, "was a group effort" in the family.

But after graduating from Bryn Mawr in 1985, she earned an undergraduate degree in comparative literature from Princeton University and a doctorate in English from UCLA. Then, she joined Teach For America, a kind of Peace Corps for educators who commit two years of teaching in urban and rural public schools. She taught in Inglewood, near Los Angeles.

For the past eight years Sarbanes has been a creative writing and Humanities teacher at the California Institute of the Arts.

But she considers herself a writer first. "If I could write all the time, I would," she said.

Sarbanes returned to Guilford this summer as a published author for the first time -- not exactly as a prodigal daughter, but with a well-reviewed book under her belt. Four hundred copies of the book's 1,000-book printing run have been sold.

"Not bad," she said. (The L.A. Weekly prefaces a glowing review of "Army of One" and another writer's collection of short stories by observing, "Despite the fact that no one buys the books, there's no stopping short fiction."

The book's 10 stories range in subject matter from a woman who has a romantic encounter with a space alien to a 10-year-old named Alexa, who wants to be a writer, like her Aunt Sophie, and interviews her aunt for a class report.

"What made you want to be a writer?" the girl asks in the course of a running e-mail conversation called "Dear Aunt Sophie," the first story in the book.

"I got bored and disgusted with people. It was like they were on a loop and it was all coming around again ... ."

"So did you start writing because you wanted to make people different?"

"I did want to make different people, Alexa, people who were more interesting than real people -- or no, who were made out of the most interesting parts of real people, called characters."

In "Alien Encounter," a woman who lives on Jupiter Avenue near the Alien Contact Society meets her "special someone," a short being with bedroom eyes, shell-shaped hands and a large head.

He's wearing white coveralls and a purple ski cap, and leaning against a tree, staring at the horizon.

"Are you lost?" she asked politely.

The alien's gray face turned the color of his ski cap. He laughed, a little heh-heh like a cat bringing up a hairball, and kicked at the ground.

"Well," he said, rubbing his little alien nostrils. "The sign said Jupiter."

"My characters grapple with finding themselves in isolated situations or (with) finding themselves (within) communities," Sarbanes said.

As a writer, she has kept some connection with politics. Her new, unpublished novel is tentatively titled "Wendy America: Adventures of a President's Daughter."

It's about a First Daughter who runs away from the White House and has an odyssey.

So, is she going to help Paul Sarbanes write his memoirs?

"You sound like my dad," she said. "Frankly, I don't think I'm the best candidate for that."

'Army of One' is available for $12.95 at Small Press Distribution, www.spdbooks.org.

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