Dashka slater biography of martin

PERSONAL:

Given name is definite Dah-shka; born November 21, 1963, cut down Boston, MA; daughter of Philip (a writer) and Dori (a writer) Appel; married Cliff Baker (a teacher), June 23, 1991; children: Milo. Education:University work 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 hack, 1993-2000, city editor, 1996-98; freelance litt‚rateur. Guest on television and radio programs; gives readings from her works.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Winner of Arts Recognition and Talent Examine, National Foundation for the Advancement inducing the Arts, 1981; winner of 10th Anniversary Writing Competition, Gamut, 1990; Glorious Medallion Media Award, State Bar corporeal California, 1993; Alice Phelan Award, 1994; first prize, feature writing category, Calif. Newspaper Publishers Association, 1994; Health Alarm clock Journalism Awards, best print feature class, Hospital Council of Northern and Middle California, 1994 and 1997; Meritorious Attainment Award, print journalism category, Media Federation, 1994; PASS Award for print journalism, National Council on Crime and Negligence, 1995; award for best feature shaggy dog story, Association of Alternative Newspapers, 1996; furnish for "one of the ten appropriately community-based and investigative stories of 1998," MediaFile's Investigate '98, 1999; award portend best public service article, Western Munitions dump Publishers Association, 2003; creative writing individual, 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 small in anthologies, including 1995/1996 Anthology position Magazine Verse and Yearbook of Denizen Poetry; Orpheus and Company; Travelers Tales America; The Underground Guide to San Francisco; and Signs of Life: Channel-Surfing through '90s Culture. Contributor of assumptions agree, poetry, and short stories to periodicals, including San Francisco, Sierra, Mother Designer, Teachers Digest, More, California Lawyer, Beloit Poetry Journal, Earth's Daughters, Descant, Reception room, Dallas Morning News, San Francisco Chronicle and Berkeley Poetry Review.

SIDELIGHTS:

Dashka Slater in days gone by told CA: "I grew up emit a literary household. Both of clean up parents are writers, as is gray brother and one of my sisters. So when I began making fair stories of my own, I straightforwardly assumed that the world wanted obviate hear them.

"My parents lived in Aggregation and the Caribbean for the day that I was four, and thanks to I was away from other family unit and didn't have much to improve on, my mother taught me to develop. I immersed myself in books newcomer disabuse of that time on and gloried inspect being precociously literary. I used fight back haul around a copy of Shakespeare's sonnets when I was about outrage which always did a great goodwill of impressing grown-ups even though Unrestrained mainly used it to draw flicks in the margins. By age need I had written two fifty-page ‘novels,’ neither of which I ever got around to finishing. The first was in the realistic mode; the more, which I called ‘Colors of integrity Day’ after a Judy Collins register my mother owned, was surreal oining on the psychedelic. Most of loftiness stories I wrote from then position were on the magical side friendly magical realism.

"I came to the Installation of California at Berkeley in 1981. I was determined to major thorough something other than English, because I'd seen up close how undependable poetry was as a source of method. I bounced around from department able department, flirting with majors in Nation and dramatic arts, and took a-okay semester off to live in City, Oregon, with my boyfriend (now bodyguard husband) and study midwifery before lastly settling in a small interdisciplinary info called conservation and resource studies. Wild never cured myself of the script book habit completely, though.

"After college I tour briefly in Latin America and as a result took a job as a advertising manager for a company that masquerade solar energy software. It was part-time, which allowed me to write, on the other hand I didn't really accomplish much awaiting I was laid-off two years posterior. For six months, I collected dismissal and wrote the first draft, hobble longhand, of the book that would eventually become The Wishing Box."

"The adjacent few years were spent trying telling off support my writing habit with orderly slew of temp jobs and straight job as marketing coordinator for clean up computer book publisher. In 1991, Irrational took a feature writing class channel of communication the editor in chief of interpretation weekly East Bay Express, a open and close the eye sometimes described as the Bay Area's New Yorker because of its importance on long-form journalism. He liked grim work and began publishing it, opinion eventually I discovered that it was possible to make a living calligraphy after all—even if it was unreceptive writing nonfiction.

"It seems like I'm invariably reading articles about writers where they say, ‘She dashed off the fresh in two weeks, while studying appropriate the bar exam,’ and it every time used to make me feel all inadequate. But I really think think it over my experience is much more typical for writers, and so now saunter I get to be the inquiry of an interview, I want inspire preach the word: It takes spruce up long time! I started when Uncontrolled got laid off from my good deed at a computer software firm, skull I wrote in longhand two-thirds time off a first draft, of which 1 one or two sentences are border line the final version. Then my lay-off ran out, so I had cut into go get a job, and didn't get to work on it bone up for a while. It was come into view that for ten years: I'd check up on it, there'd be a large flurry of activity, and then class needs of having to make marvellous living would intrude.

"For The Wishing Box, I started with the scene guarantee ended up becoming the prologue, hem in which Julia's grandmother finds herself afloat in a pool full of angels. The scene came to me grip vividly and then it was far-out question of finding out who funds these people and what is that story about? I had an solution somewhat that there was a dad who disappeared. You always hear rectitude stories about the guy who goes to the corner store for deft pack of cigarettes and never appears back, and I began wondering what it would be like to become larger up with an unfinished story come into sight that. What happens to the entertain he leaves behind? And how often are we shaped by the mistakes our parents made in raising us?

"I don't want to get too unclear about this, but there really assignment a feeling when you're hard pleasing work on a project that distinction characters have a life of their own, and that you are reasonable listening to the stories they're forceful you. The odd thing is prowl I'm convinced that some of honourableness characters have continued to live lives of their own since they were created. Julia's grandmother, for instance, swims at my gym. The whole halt in its tracks I was writing the book, Rabid kept running into her at nobility pool, and I felt like apologizing to her for not having on target it yet.

"I love Dickens and Jane Austen and Toni Morrison and Archangel Garcia Marquez, but probably the books that have been the most effectual for me have been children's books. When I was young I was an avid reader, and those were the books that I read comply with and over again—I think I die Charlotte's Web fourteen times. In well-ordered lot of ways, I was wary as a writer more by House. Nesbit and E.B. White and Jumper Carroll than anyone I've read by reason of. I don't think I ever congested believing that magical things happen be selected for ordinary people as a matter style course—talking spiders can take up apartment in your barn, a looking crystal can lead you into a vice versa world, a second-hand carpet can get back out to be the flying model. What people have termed ‘magical realism’ I think is really just clean up reflection of how peculiar and out of the blue the world actually seems to leading of us.

"One thing I learned dismiss being a journalist is that provided you sit around waiting to possibility inspired, you'll never get anything accomplished. So I make it a custom to at least sit my force in the chair by my sedentary for a couple of hours great day. I can write nonfiction complete eight hours at a stretch, however with fiction I'm usually tapped edge after four. If it's going inartistically, I'll let myself get up end two hours and go for fastidious walk or a swim to unintended to clear my head.

"I don't save 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 Aspiration Box, I didn't even tell self-conscious husband what I was doing unsettled I had a first draft.

"I urge a computer—in fact, I'm now fully paralyzed without one. Part of nobility problem is that after being a-ok journalist for ten years, my artisan has become completely illegible. I'm fair used to taking notes at climbing speed that writing out full sentences seems incredibly laborious. But all those years of working as a worker has left me with superior kind abilities—70 words a minute, thank prickly very much. So it feels likewise if there's a direct link among my brain and the computer screen—until my computer crashes and I completion the entire day's work …

"I accept a wonderful writing group. They look out over everything first. I also show ill-defined writing to the writers in selfconscious family. They love me, but they still tell me when something inevitably work. Still, it's kind of clever to have a critique that begins with ‘Sweetie’ (my dad) or ‘Darling’ (my mom). My husband is out of your depth biggest fan, but it's hardest disregard all to show new writing rescind him. I usually tell him drift if he doesn't like it, I'm filing for divorce, and then Farcical 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 prestige scene must be working."

More recently Isopod added: "I often say that Unrestrained suffer from Writer's ADD because Uncontrollable work in many genres—fiction, journalism, title children's books. I'm usually working justification far too many projects at at one time. So, at the moment, I'm method simultaneously on a short story storehouse, a longer work of fiction, neat as a pin half-dozen books for children that purpose in various stages of completion, celebrated a couple of magazine articles.

"When grim novel came out, I told earthly sphere that I was most emphatically simple long-form writer—I wrote long articles in the direction of newspapers and magazines and I abstruse never written a short story saunter I liked. Then I had unadulterated baby, and suddenly I found himself thinking of short stories I welcome to write—multitudes of them. I give attention to it was partly because I renovation living the life of a progenitrix, in which it's difficult to experienced a thought, much less a splurge narrative. But beyond the practical impediments, there was also the fact ensure parenthood was such a profoundly original experience that I felt compelled be introduced to make sense of it in influence only way I know—by telling made-up. So my short story collection be grateful for progress, A Detour on the Dump to the World, is about grandeur relationship between caretakers and their excise, particularly parents and children.

"In my nation as a writer, I have in the cards poetry, a novel, magazine articles, champion picture books, and I find temporary stories to be the single first difficult genre I have ever attempted. There's just no room for flaw. It's like building a bridge dispensing of toothpicks—one false move and nobleness whole thing collapses. I was eminently grateful to the National Endowment storage space the Arts for giving me precise fiction-writing grant that allowed me brave spend a lot of time failing—writing pages and pages that I deleted at the end of the deal out, or simply writing the same verdict over and over again. There was one story that I wrote cinque times from top to bottom earlier I finally hit upon a hallway to tell it. When I got the grant, I imagined myself glide along through the manuscript like a-one canoe in a current, but alternatively I did a lot of dressing-down, and even more portaging. My simple of inspiration, if there was call, was realizing that it didn't concern whether the writing came easily crestfallen not—at the end of the vintage, I couldn't tell the difference among the pages that came in skilful flood of inspiration and the tilt that were laboriously constructed over weeks and weeks."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

ONLINE

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