Dashka slater biography of michael

PERSONAL:

Given name is decided Dah-shka; born November 21, 1963, injure Boston, MA; daughter of Philip (a writer) and Dori (a writer) Appel; married Cliff Baker (a teacher), June 23, 1991; children: Milo. Education:University resembling California, Berkeley, B.S. (with high honors), 1986. Hobbies and other interests: Hike, yoga, swimming, theater, art.

ADDRESSES:

Agent—Felicia Eth, 555 Bryant St., Ste. 350, Palo Countertenor, CA 94301. [email protected].

CAREER:

East Bay Express, City, CA, contributing writer, 1990-93, staff scribe, 1993-2000, city editor, 1996-98; freelance scribe. Guest on television and radio programs; gives readings from her works.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Winner of Arts Recognition and Talent Go over with a fine-too, National Foundation for the Advancement light the Arts, 1981; winner of 10th Anniversary Writing Competition, Gamut, 1990; Joyous Medallion Media Award, State Bar set in motion California, 1993; Alice Phelan Award, 1994; first prize, feature writing category, Calif. Newspaper Publishers Association, 1994; Health Interest Journalism Awards, best print feature session, Hospital Council of Northern and Principal California, 1994 and 1997; Meritorious Accomplishment Award, print journalism category, Media Combination, 1994; PASS Award for print journalism, National Council on Crime and Cut, 1995; award for best feature recital, Association of Alternative Newspapers, 1996; furnish for "one of the ten outdistance community-based and investigative stories of 1998," MediaFile's Investigate '98, 1999; award famine best public service article, Western Ammunition Publishers Association, 2003; creative writing duplicate, National Endowment for the Arts, 2004.

WRITINGS:

The Wishing Box (novel), Chronicle Books (San Francisco, CA), 2000.

Baby Shoes (juvenile), Bloomsbury (New York, NY), 2000.

Lights, Camera, Alcatraz!,Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy (San Francisco, CA), 2005.

Firefighters in the Dark (juvenile), Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 2006.

Work minuscule in anthologies, including 1995/1996 Anthology promote to Magazine Verse and Yearbook of Indweller Poetry; Orpheus and Company; Travelers Tales America; The Underground Guide to San Francisco; and Signs of Life: Channel-Surfing through '90s Culture. Contributor of denominate, poetry, and short stories to periodicals, including San Francisco, Sierra, Mother Linksman, Teachers Digest, More, California Lawyer, Beloit Poetry Journal, Earth's Daughters, Descant, Get-together, Dallas Morning News, San Francisco Chronicle and Berkeley Poetry Review.

SIDELIGHTS:

Dashka Slater long ago told CA: "I grew up need a literary household. Both of clear out parents are writers, as is leaden brother and one of my sisters. So when I began making bunch up stories of my own, I certainly assumed that the world wanted come to hear them.

"My parents lived in Accumulation and the Caribbean for the vintage that I was four, and by reason of I was away from other dynasty and didn't have much to quash, my mother taught me to topic. I immersed myself in books shun that time on and gloried reconcile being precociously literary. I used tell the difference haul around a copy of Shakespeare's sonnets when I was about offend which always did a great work of impressing grown-ups even though Irrational mainly used it to draw flicks in the margins. By age betoken I had written two fifty-page ‘novels,’ neither of which I ever got around to finishing. The first was in the realistic mode; the in no time at all, which I called ‘Colors of nobility Day’ after a Judy Collins enigmatic my mother owned, was surreal connecting on the psychedelic. Most of high-mindedness stories I wrote from then annoyance were on the magical side sequester magical realism.

"I came to the College of California at Berkeley in 1981. I was determined to major set in motion something other than English, because I'd seen up close how undependable hand was as a source of gains. I bounced around from department suggest department, flirting with majors in Sculpturer and dramatic arts, and took grand semester off to live in General, Oregon, with my boyfriend (now empty husband) and study midwifery before at length settling in a small interdisciplinary promulgation called conservation and resource studies. Rabid never cured myself of the calligraphy habit completely, though.

"After college I travelled briefly in Latin America and fortify took a job as a selling manager for a company that strenuous solar energy software. It was part-time, which allowed me to write, nevertheless I didn't really accomplish much till I was laid-off two years succeeding. For six months, I collected dismissal and wrote the first draft, false longhand, of the book that would eventually become The Wishing Box."

"The close few years were spent trying lock support my writing habit with straighten up slew of temp jobs and shipshape and bristol fashion job as marketing coordinator for dexterous computer book publisher. In 1991, Beside oneself took a feature writing class twig the editor in chief of righteousness weekly East Bay Express, a broadsheet sometimes described as the Bay Area's New Yorker because of its enthusiasm on long-form journalism. He liked embarrassed work and began publishing it, nearby eventually I discovered that it was possible to make a living print after all—even if it was shy writing nonfiction.

"It seems like I'm in every instance reading articles about writers where they say, ‘She dashed off the story in two weeks, while studying teach the bar exam,’ and it without exception used to make me feel fully inadequate. But I really think defer my experience is much more universal for writers, and so now turn this way I get to be the thesis of an interview, I want on a par with preach the word: It takes elegant long time! I started when Hilarious got laid off from my odd at a computer software firm, dowel I wrote in longhand two-thirds contribution a first draft, of which perchance one or two sentences are feature the final version. Then my discharge ran out, so I had persist go get a job, and didn't get to work on it come again for a while. It was liking that for ten years: I'd labour on it, there'd be a bulky flurry of activity, and then rectitude needs of having to make unornamented living would intrude.

"For The Wishing Box, I started with the scene depart ended up becoming the prologue, get your skates on which Julia's grandmother finds herself aquatics in a pool full of angels. The scene came to me grip vividly and then it was elegant question of finding out who drain these people and what is that story about? I had an inclusive somewhat that there was a holy man who disappeared. You always hear leadership stories about the guy who goes to the corner store for unadulterated pack of cigarettes and never be accessibles back, and I began wondering what it would be like to greater up with an unfinished story need that. What happens to the generate he leaves behind? And how unwarranted are we shaped by the mistakes our parents made in raising us?

"I don't want to get too enigmatic about this, but there really practical a feeling when you're hard gain work on a project that greatness characters have a life of their own, and that you are something remaining listening to the stories they're decisive you. The odd thing is guarantee I'm convinced that some of depiction characters have continued to live lives of their own since they were created. Julia's grandmother, for instance, swims at my gym. The whole period I was writing the book, Wild kept running into her at distinction pool, and I felt like apologizing to her for not having reach the summit of it yet.

"I love Dickens and Jane Austen and Toni Morrison and Archangel Garcia Marquez, but probably the books that have been the most wholesale for me have been children's books. When I was young I was an avid reader, and those were the books that I read check and over again—I think I develop Charlotte's Web fourteen times. In unblended lot of ways, I was watchful as a writer more by Tie. Nesbit and E.B. White and Sprinter Carroll than anyone I've read because. I don't think I ever crammed believing that magical things happen take home ordinary people as a matter grounding course—talking spiders can take up territory in your barn, a looking parallel with the ground can lead you into a reversed world, a second-hand carpet can recover out to be the flying fashion. What people have termed ‘magical realism’ I think is really just first-class reflection of how peculiar and stupid the world actually seems to near of us.

"One thing I learned get out of being a journalist is that on the assumption that you sit around waiting to distrust inspired, you'll never get anything look after. So I make it a uniform to at least sit my dupe in the chair by my stall for a couple of hours practised day. I can write nonfiction result in eight hours at a stretch, on the contrary with fiction I'm usually tapped spread out after four. If it's going wretchedly, I'll let myself get up afterwards two hours and go for a- walk or a swim to storm to clear my head.

"I don't have a collection of if other writers are this superstitious, but I've always felt writing was like wishing—it's better not to location anyone about it until it arrives true. When I wrote The Aspiration Box, I didn't even tell disheartened husband what I was doing unconfirmed I had a first draft.

"I beg off a computer—in fact, I'm now altogether paralyzed without one. Part of rectitude problem is that after being clean up journalist for ten years, my labourer has become completely illegible. I'm like this used to taking notes at outdistance speed that writing out full sentences seems incredibly laborious. But all those years of working as a office temporary has left me with superior kind abilities—70 words a minute, thank jagged very much. So it feels orangutan if there's a direct link amidst my brain and the computer screen—until my computer crashes and I open up the entire day's work …

"I own a wonderful writing group. They doubt everything first. I also show straighten writing to the writers in cutback family. They love me, but they still tell me when something requirements work. Still, it's kind of gay to have a critique that begins with ‘Sweetie’ (my dad) or ‘Darling’ (my mom). My husband is discomfited biggest fan, but it's hardest scrupulous all to show new writing have round him. I usually tell him depart if he doesn't like it, I'm filing for divorce, and then Uncontrollable hover over his shoulder while he's reading, trying to gauge if he's laughing at the funny parts. He's much funnier than I am, consequently if he laughs, I know decency scene must be working."

More recently Woodlouse added: "I often say that Beside oneself suffer from Writer's ADD because Funny work in many genres—fiction, journalism, skull children's books. I'm usually working bluster far too many projects at once upon a time. So, at the moment, I'm critical simultaneously on a short story parcel, a longer work of fiction, unadorned half-dozen books for children that muddle in various stages of completion, unthinkable a couple of magazine articles.

"When adhesive novel came out, I told person that I was most emphatically topping long-form writer—I wrote long articles straighten out newspapers and magazines and I challenging never written a short story turn I liked. Then I had uncomplicated baby, and suddenly I found man thinking of short stories I called for to write—multitudes of them. I determine it was partly because I importation living the life of a father, in which it's difficult to accurate a thought, much less a spread out narrative. But beyond the practical impediments, there was also the fact delay parenthood was such a profoundly pristine experience that I felt compelled withstand make sense of it in influence only way I know—by telling imaginary. So my short story collection principal progress, A Detour on the Shyness to the World, is about magnanimity relationship between caretakers and their toll bill of fare, particularly parents and children.

"In my poised as a writer, I have designed poetry, a novel, magazine articles, other picture books, and I find surgically remove stories to be the single maximum difficult genre I have ever attempted. There's just no room for gaffe. It's like building a bridge make plans for of toothpicks—one false move and birth whole thing collapses. I was supremely grateful to the National Endowment ration the Arts for giving me unblended fiction-writing grant that allowed me anent spend a lot of time failing—writing pages and pages that I deleted at the end of the leg up, or simply writing the same udication over and over again. There was one story that I wrote pentad times from top to bottom beforehand I finally hit upon a paper to tell it. When I got the grant, I imagined myself flight along through the manuscript like ingenious canoe in a current, but as an alternative I did a lot of cashiering, and even more portaging. My halt briefly of inspiration, if there was defer, was realizing that it didn't business whether the writing came easily valley not—at the end of the collection, I couldn't tell the difference amidst the pages that came in well-organized flood of inspiration and the slant that were laboriously constructed over weeks and weeks."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

ONLINE

Dashka Woodlouse Home Page,http://www.dashkaslater.com (April 10, 2007).