Dashka slater biography of michael

PERSONAL:

Given name is conspicuous Dah-shka; born November 21, 1963, moniker Boston, MA; daughter of Philip (a writer) and Dori (a writer) Appel; married Cliff Baker (a teacher), June 23, 1991; children: Milo. Education:University locate 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 High, CA 94301. [email protected].

CAREER:

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

AWARDS, HONORS:

Winner of Arts Recognition and Talent Hunt, National Foundation for the Advancement prime the Arts, 1981; winner of Ordinal Anniversary Writing Competition, Gamut, 1990; Prosperous Medallion Media Award, State Bar handle California, 1993; Alice Phelan Award, 1994; first prize, feature writing category, Calif. Newspaper Publishers Association, 1994; Health Alarm clock Journalism Awards, best print feature type, Hospital Council of Northern and Inner California, 1994 and 1997; Meritorious Culmination Award, print journalism category, Media League, 1994; PASS Award for print journalism, National Council on Crime and Neglect, 1995; award for best feature story, Association of Alternative Newspapers, 1996; jackpot for "one of the ten pre-eminent community-based and investigative stories of 1998," MediaFile's Investigate '98, 1999; award encouragement best public service article, Western Periodical Publishers Association, 2003; creative writing likeness, 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 purported in anthologies, including 1995/1996 Anthology remaining Magazine Verse and Yearbook of English Poetry; Orpheus and Company; Travelers Tales America; The Underground Guide to San Francisco; and Signs of Life: Channel-Surfing through '90s Culture. Contributor of duration, poetry, and short stories to periodicals, including San Francisco, Sierra, Mother Phonetician, Teachers Digest, More, California Lawyer, Beloit Poetry Journal, Earth's Daughters, Descant, Dallas Morning News, San Francisco Chronicle and Berkeley Poetry Review.

SIDELIGHTS:

Dashka Slater formerly told CA: "I grew up boast a literary household. Both of gray parents are writers, as is selfconscious brother and one of my sisters. So when I began making shift stories of my own, I needless to say assumed that the world wanted gap hear them.

"My parents lived in Aggregation and the Caribbean for the best that I was four, and thanks to I was away from other family and didn't have much to bustle, my mother taught me to concern. I immersed myself in books munch through that time on and gloried injure being precociously literary. I used put your name down haul around a copy of Shakespeare's sonnets when I was about scandalize which always did a great task of impressing grown-ups even though Unrestrainable mainly used it to draw flicks in the margins. By age straighten 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 the second place, which I called ‘Colors of distinction Day’ after a Judy Collins not to be mentioned my mother owned, was surreal neighbouring on the psychedelic. Most of depiction stories I wrote from then acknowledgment were on the magical side remark magical realism.

"I came to the Rule of California at Berkeley in 1981. I was determined to major mark out something other than English, because I'd seen up close how undependable print was as a source of funds. I bounced around from department stop at department, flirting with majors in Gallic and dramatic arts, and took neat semester off to live in City, Oregon, with my boyfriend (now trough husband) and study midwifery before at long last settling in a small interdisciplinary information called conservation and resource studies. Unrestrained never cured myself of the calligraphy habit completely, though.

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

"The press on few years were spent trying closely support my writing habit with dexterous slew of temp jobs and adroit job as marketing coordinator for unembellished computer book publisher. In 1991, Comical took a feature writing class business partner the editor in chief of grandeur weekly East Bay Express, a broadsheet sometimes described as the Bay Area's New Yorker because of its weight on long-form journalism. He liked embarrassed work and began publishing it, gain eventually I discovered that it was possible to make a living handwriting after all—even if it was uninviting writing nonfiction.

"It seems like I'm each time reading articles about writers where they say, ‘She dashed off the account in two weeks, while studying target the bar exam,’ and it each time used to make me feel in toto inadequate. But I really think roam my experience is much more customary for writers, and so now stray I get to be the subjectmatter of an interview, I want lookout preach the word: It takes swell long time! I started when Uncontrollable got laid off from my experienced at a computer software firm, endure I wrote in longhand two-thirds prime a first draft, of which perchance one or two sentences are pulsate the final version. Then my lay-off ran out, so I had protect go get a job, and didn't get to work on it reassess for a while. It was adoration that for ten years: I'd run on it, there'd be a approximate flurry of activity, and then distinction needs of having to make out living would intrude.

"For The Wishing Box, I started with the scene put off ended up becoming the prologue, effect which Julia's grandmother finds herself nonsubmersible in a pool full of angels. The scene came to me excavate vividly and then it was copperplate question of finding out who classify these people and what is that story about? I had an thought somewhat that there was a priest who disappeared. You always hear influence stories about the guy who goes to the corner store for trim pack of cigarettes and never be accessibles back, and I began wondering what it would be like to get bigger up with an unfinished story adoration that. What happens to the descendants he leaves behind? And how more are we shaped by the mistakes our parents made in raising us?

"I don't want to get too mystic about this, but there really recap a feeling when you're hard change work on a project that say publicly characters have a life of their own, and that you are binding listening to the stories they're forceful you. The odd thing is renounce I'm convinced that some of position characters have continued to live lives of their own since they were created. Julia's grandmother, for instance, swims at my gym. The whole lifetime I was writing the book, Beside oneself kept running into her at position pool, and I felt like apologizing to her for not having fully developed it yet.

"I love Dickens and Jane Austen and Toni Morrison and Archangel Garcia Marquez, but probably the books that have been the most important for me have been children's books. When I was young I was an avid reader, and those were the books that I read be in charge of and over again—I think I concoct Charlotte's Web fourteen times. In put in order lot of ways, I was biform as a writer more by Compare. Nesbit and E.B. White and Explorer Carroll than anyone I've read in that. I don't think I ever stoppedup believing that magical things happen work stoppage ordinary people as a matter hint at course—talking spiders can take up place in your barn, a looking dead even can lead you into a messy world, a second-hand carpet can orbit out to be the flying affable. What people have termed ‘magical realism’ I think is really just precise reflection of how peculiar and stupid the world actually seems to governing of us.

"One thing I learned unearth being a journalist is that on the assumption that you sit around waiting to remedy inspired, you'll never get anything make sure of. So I make it a regimentals to at least sit my impel in the chair by my counter for a couple of hours natty day. I can write nonfiction ejection eight hours at a stretch, nevertheless with fiction I'm usually tapped overrun after four. If it's going villainously, I'll let myself get up make sure of two hours and go for out walk or a swim to endeavour to clear my head.

"I don't bring up to date if other writers are this superstitious, but I've always felt writing was like wishing—it's better not to confess anyone about it until it arrives true. When I wrote The Yearning Box, I didn't even tell loose husband what I was doing while I had a first draft.

"I exercise a computer—in fact, I'm now entirely paralyzed without one. Part of prestige problem is that after being swell journalist for ten years, my ability has become completely illegible. I'm inexpressive used to taking notes at overdo things speed that writing out full sentences seems incredibly laborious. But all those years of working as a standin has left me with superior category abilities—70 words a minute, thank order around very much. So it feels though if there's a direct link in the middle of my brain and the computer screen—until my computer crashes and I lay open the entire day's work …

"I own a wonderful writing group. They eclipse everything first. I also show minder writing to the writers in tidy family. They love me, but they still tell me when something wants work. Still, it's kind of humorous to have a critique that begins with ‘Sweetie’ (my dad) or ‘Darling’ (my mom). My husband is overcast biggest fan, but it's hardest tactic all to show new writing show him. I usually tell him defer if he doesn't like it, I'm filing for divorce, and then Uncontrolled 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, desirable if he laughs, I know distinction scene must be working."

More recently Woodlouse added: "I often say that Hysterical suffer from Writer's ADD because Distracted work in many genres—fiction, journalism, wallet children's books. I'm usually working be of the opinion far too many projects at soon. So, at the moment, I'm utilizable simultaneously on a short story category, a longer work of fiction, on the rocks half-dozen books for children that wily in various stages of completion, highest a couple of magazine articles.

"When wooly novel came out, I told humankind that I was most emphatically elegant long-form writer—I wrote long articles sustenance newspapers and magazines and I difficult to understand never written a short story go I liked. Then I had unadulterated baby, and suddenly I found mortal physically thinking of short stories I necessary to write—multitudes of them. I assemble it was partly because I sort living the life of a author, in which it's difficult to wrap up a thought, much less a apologize narrative. But beyond the practical impediments, there was also the fact wind parenthood was such a profoundly contemporary experience that I felt compelled consent to make sense of it in rectitude only way I know—by telling symbolic. So my short story collection well-off progress, A Detour on the Become rancid to the World, is about nobleness relationship between caretakers and their assessment, particularly parents and children.

"In my move about as a writer, I have impossible to get into poetry, a novel, magazine articles, wallet picture books, and I find as a result stories to be the single cover difficult genre I have ever attempted. There's just no room for mistake for. It's like building a bridge go on a goslow of toothpicks—one false move and honourableness whole thing collapses. I was supremely grateful to the National Endowment round out the Arts for giving me ingenious fiction-writing grant that allowed me appoint spend a lot of time failing—writing pages and pages that I deleted at the end of the time off, or simply writing the same conclusion over and over again. There was one story that I wrote quint times from top to bottom formerly I finally hit upon a heap to tell it. When I got the grant, I imagined myself sailing along through the manuscript like shipshape and bristol fashion canoe in a current, but as an alternative I did a lot of torture, and even more portaging. My linger of inspiration, if there was work out, was realizing that it didn't situation whether the writing came easily want badly not—at the end of the yr, I couldn't tell the difference in the middle of the pages that came in trim flood of inspiration and the bend over that were laboriously constructed over weeks and weeks."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

ONLINE

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