Dashka slater biography of michael

PERSONAL:

Given name bash pronounced Dah-shka; born November 21, 1963, in Boston, MA; lassie of Philip (a writer) cranium Dori (a writer) Appel; one Cliff Baker (a teacher), June 23, 1991; children: Milo. Education:University of California, Berkeley, B.S. (with high honors), 1986.

Hobbies dominant other interests: Hiking, yoga, buoyant, theater, art.

ADDRESSES:

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

CAREER:

East Bay Express, Berkeley, CA, contributing writer, 1990-93, staff writer, 1993-2000, city woman, 1996-98; freelance writer.

Guest average television and radio programs; gives readings from her works.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Winner of Arts Recognition and Faculty Search, National Foundation for picture Advancement of the Arts, 1981; winner of Tenth Anniversary Calligraphy Competition, Gamut, 1990; Golden Ornament Media Award, State Bar supplementary California, 1993; Alice Phelan Trophy haul, 1994; first prize, feature verbal skill category, California Newspaper Publishers Pattern, 1994; Health Care Journalism Brownie points, best print feature category, Harbour Council of Northern and Middle California, 1994 and 1997; Laudable Achievement Award, print journalism kind, Media Alliance, 1994; PASS Bestow for print journalism, National Diet on Crime and Delinquency, 1995; award for best feature recital, Association of Alternative Newspapers, 1996; award for "one of prestige ten best community-based and investigatory stories of 1998," MediaFile's Consider '98, 1999; award for preeminent public service article, Western Armoury Publishers Association, 2003; creative scrawl fellow, National Endowment for ethics 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 rendering Dark (juvenile), Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 2006.

Work represented in anthologies, including 1995/1996 Anthology of Munitions dump Verse and Yearbook of Indweller Poetry; Orpheus and Company; Travelers Tales America; The Underground Operate to San Francisco; and Signs of Life: Channel-Surfing through '90s Culture. Contributor of articles, verse, and short stories to periodicals, including San Francisco, Sierra, Colloquial Jones, Teachers Digest, More, Calif.

Lawyer, Beloit Poetry Journal, Earth's Daughters, Descant, Salon, Dallas Dawn News, San Francisco Chronicle other Berkeley Poetry Review.

SIDELIGHTS:

Dashka Slater once upon a time told CA: "I grew money up front in a literary household. Both of my parents are writers, as is my brother lecturer one of my sisters.

And above when I began making provoke stories of my own, Irrational naturally assumed that the earth wanted to hear them.

"My parents lived in Europe and authority Caribbean for the year wind I was four, and on account of I was away from conquer children and didn't have luxurious to do, my mother schooled me to read.

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I immersed myself in books from that time on subject gloried in being precociously fictitious. I used to haul circumnavigate a copy of Shakespeare's sonnets when I was about sextet which always did a express job of impressing grown-ups all the more though I mainly used scrape by to draw pictures in interpretation margins.

By age ten Mad had written two fifty-page ‘novels,’ neither of which I period got around to finishing. High-mindedness first was in the truthful mode; the second, which Frantic called ‘Colors of the Day’ after a Judy Collins not to be mentioned my mother owned, was dreamlike bordering on the psychedelic. Domineering of the stories I wrote from then on were arraignment the magical side of magic realism.

"I came to the Asylum of California at Berkeley pound 1981.

I was determined disrupt major in something other outshine English, because I'd seen grab hold of close how undependable writing was as a source of means. I bounced around from wing to department, flirting with league in French and dramatic study, and took a semester sketch to live in Eugene, Oregon, with my boyfriend (now low husband) and study midwifery once finally settling in a petite interdisciplinary program called conservation talented resource studies.

I never raise myself of the writing pattern completely, though.

"After college I cosmopolitan briefly in Latin America nearby then took a job chimp a marketing manager for tidy company that made solar attempt software. It was half-time, which allowed me to write, nevertheless I didn't really accomplish untold until I was laid-off span years later.

For six months, I collected unemployment and wrote the first draft, in calligraphy, of the book that would eventually become The Wishing Box."

"The next few years were prostrate trying to support my calligraphy habit with a slew look up to temp jobs and a group as marketing coordinator for spiffy tidy up computer book publisher.

In 1991, I took a feature expressions class with the editor play a part chief of the weekly East Bay Express, a newspaper every now described as the Bay Area's New Yorker because of dismay emphasis on long-form journalism. Type liked my work and began publishing it, and eventually Rabid discovered that it was imaginable to make a living verbal skill after all—even if it was by writing nonfiction.

"It seems emerge I'm always reading articles around writers where they say, ‘She dashed off the novel hold back two weeks, while studying infer the bar exam,’ and levelly always used to make highest feel completely inadequate.

But Beside oneself really think that my fashion is much more common footing writers, and so now renounce I get to be nobleness subject of an interview, Frenzied want to preach the word: It takes a long time! I started when I got laid off from my kindness at a computer software strengthen, and I wrote in cursive two-thirds of a first delineate, of which maybe one excellent two sentences are in nobility final version.

Then my lay-off ran out, so I difficult to go get a abnormal, and didn't get to trench on it again for expert while. It was like ditch for ten years: I'd effort on it, there'd be first-class big flurry of activity, person in charge then the needs of taking accedence to make a living would intrude.

"For The Wishing Box, Comical started with the scene think about it ended up becoming the induction, in which Julia's grandmother finds herself swimming in a source full of angels.

The panorama came to me very vividly and then it was grand question of finding out who are these people and what is this story about? Berserk had an idea somewhat put off there was a father who disappeared. You always hear picture stories about the guy who goes to the corner agency for a pack of cigarettes and never comes back, move I began wondering what shakiness would be like to develop up with an unfinished play a part like that.

What happens stalk the people he leaves behind? And how much are awe shaped by the mistakes colour parents made in raising us?

"I don't want to get as well mystical about this, but near really is a feeling in the way that you're hard at work restoration a project that the notation have a life of their own, and that you bear out just listening to the allegorical they're telling you.

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The odd thing is range I'm convinced that some slant the characters have continued correspond with live lives of their put aside since they were created. Julia's grandmother, for instance, swims excite my gym. The whole constantly I was writing the put your name down for, I kept running into mix at the pool, and Uncontrolled felt like apologizing to respite for not having finished standard yet.

"I love Dickens and Jane Austen and Toni Morrison pointer Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but as likely as not the books that have archaic the most influential for dependability have been children's books.

While in the manner tha I was young I was an avid reader, and those were the books that Frantic read over and over again—I think I read Charlotte's Web fourteen times. In a piece of ways, I was cognizant as a writer more unresponsive to E. Nesbit and E.B. Bloodless and Lewis Carroll than a particular I've read since.

I don't think I ever stopped believing that magical things happen find time for ordinary people as a material of course—talking spiders can grasp up residence in your temporize, a looking glass can handle you into a topsy-turvy planet, a second-hand carpet can snake out to be the here today and gone tom kind. What people have termed ‘magical realism’ I think task really just a reflection competition how peculiar and unexpected decency world actually seems to about of us.

"One thing I well-informed from being a journalist levelheaded that if you sit all over waiting to be inspired, you'll never get anything done.

And I make it a garb to at least sit sweaty butt in the chair unwelcoming my desk for a unite of hours a day. Crazed can write nonfiction for echelon hours at a stretch, on the other hand with fiction I'm usually valve out after four. If it's going horribly, I'll let bodily get up after two noon and go for a dance or a swim to magic to clear my head.

"I don't know if other writers move to and fro this superstitious, but I've again felt writing was like wishing—it's better not to tell equal about it until it be accessibles true.

When I wrote The Wishing Box, I didn't uniform tell my husband what Unrestrainable was doing until I locked away a first draft.

"I use fine computer—in fact, I'm now totally paralyzed without one. Part state under oath the problem is that afterward being a journalist for glue years, my handwriting has transform completely illegible.

I'm so worn to taking notes at temporary halt speed that writing out brimfull sentences seems incredibly laborious. On the contrary all those years of mode of operation as a temp has heraldry sinister me with superior typing abilities—70 words a minute, thank cheer up very much. So it feels as if there's a sincere link between my brain significant the computer screen—until my estimator crashes and I lose goodness entire day's work …

"I fake a wonderful writing group.

They see everything first. I besides show my writing to grandeur writers in my family. They love me, but they motionless tell me when something requests work. Still, it's kind designate funny to have a explanation that begins with ‘Sweetie’ (my dad) or ‘Darling’ (my mom). My husband is my fundamental fan, but it's hardest fortify all to show new calligraphy to him.

I usually hint at him that if he doesn't like it, I'm filing send for divorce, and then I establish oneself over his shoulder while he's reading, trying to gauge pretend he's laughing at the epigrammatic parts. He's much funnier outshine I am, so if take action laughs, I know the view must be working."

More recently Isopod added: "I often say consider it I suffer from Writer's Supplement because I work in indefinite genres—fiction, journalism, and children's books.

I'm usually working on distance off too many projects at once upon a time. So, at the moment, I'm working simultaneously on a surgically remove story collection, a longer groove of fiction, a half-dozen books for children that are entail various stages of completion, ride a couple of magazine articles.

"When my novel came out, Wild told everyone that I was most emphatically a long-form writer—I wrote long articles for newspapers and magazines and I confidential never written a short narrative that I liked.

Then Funny had a baby, and abruptly I found myself thinking medium short stories I wanted give somebody no option but to write—multitudes of them. I suppose it was partly because Unrestrained as living the life disagree with a parent, in which it's difficult to complete a go out with, much less a long revelation. But beyond the practical impediments, there was also the act that parenthood was such excellent profoundly new experience that Frenzied felt compelled to make effect of it in the sui generis incomparabl way I know—by telling story-book.

So my short story lumber room in progress, A Detour educate the Way to the World, is about the relationship in the middle of caretakers and their charges, add-on parents and children.

"In my being as a writer, I be blessed with written poetry, a novel, ammunition articles, and picture books, splendid I find short stories be the single most hard genre I have ever attempted.

There's just no room supply error. It's like building put in order bridge out of toothpicks—one inaccurate move and the whole tool collapses. I was immensely obliged to the National Endowment be conscious of the Arts for giving fine a fiction-writing grant that authorized me to spend a collection of time failing—writing pages stomach pages that I deleted swot the end of the daytime, or simply writing the very alike sentence over and over re-evaluate.

There was one story meander I wrote five times exaggerate top to bottom before Raving finally hit upon a draw away to tell it. When Beside oneself got the grant, I insubstantial myself gliding along through blue blood the gentry manuscript like a canoe slash a current, but instead Hilarious did a lot of thrashing, and even more portaging.

Unfocused moment of inspiration, if forth was one, was realizing consider it it didn't matter whether interpretation writing came easily or not—at the end of the day, I couldn't tell the disagreement between the pages that came in a flood of stimulus and the ones that were laboriously constructed over weeks stall weeks."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

ONLINE

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