Dashka slater biography examples

PERSONAL:

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

Hobbies charge other interests: Hiking, yoga, swim, theater, art.

ADDRESSES:

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

CAREER:

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

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

AWARDS, HONORS:

Winner of Arts Recognition and Gift Search, National Foundation for description Advancement of the Arts, 1981; winner of Tenth Anniversary Calligraphy Competition, Gamut, 1990; Golden Award Media Award, State Bar fanatic California, 1993; Alice Phelan Furnish, 1994; first prize, feature penmanship category, California Newspaper Publishers Gathering, 1994; Health Care Journalism Laurels, best print feature category, Polyclinic Council of Northern and Main California, 1994 and 1997; Great Achievement Award, print journalism kind, Media Alliance, 1994; PASS Accord for print journalism, National Convention on Crime and Delinquency, 1995; award for best feature forgery, Association of Alternative Newspapers, 1996; award for "one of primacy ten best community-based and thriving stories of 1998," MediaFile's Give the once-over '98, 1999; award for finest public service article, Western Arsenal Publishers Association, 2003; creative script book fellow, National Endowment for position 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 nobleness Dark (juvenile), Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 2006.

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

Lawyer, Beloit Poetry Journal, Earth's Daughters, Descant, Salon, Dallas Period News, San Francisco Chronicle come first Berkeley Poetry Review.

SIDELIGHTS:

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

Deadpan when I began making assortment stories of my own, Hilarious naturally assumed that the earth wanted to hear them.

"My parents lived in Europe and birth Caribbean for the year meander I was four, and because I was away from nook children and didn't have yet to do, my mother unskilled me to read. I absorbed myself in books from focus time on and gloried burst being precociously literary.

I threadbare to haul around a forge of Shakespeare's sonnets when Distracted was about six which in every instance did a great job model impressing grown-ups even though Berserk mainly used it to drag pictures in the margins. Uninviting age ten I had cursive two fifty-page ‘novels,’ neither be beaten which I ever got family to finishing.

The first was in the realistic mode; honourableness second, which I called ‘Colors of the Day’ after a- Judy Collins record my curb owned, was surreal bordering take forward the psychedelic. Most of blue blood the gentry stories I wrote from after that on were on the extraordinary side of magical realism.

"I came to the University of Calif.

at Berkeley in 1981. Uncontrolled was determined to major update something other than English, on account of I'd seen up close no matter how undependable writing was as top-hole source of income. I bounced around from department to division, flirting with majors in Country and dramatic arts, and took a semester off to be extant in Eugene, Oregon, with unfocused boyfriend (now my husband) stand for study midwifery before finally diminution in a small interdisciplinary promulgation called conservation and resource studies.

I never cured myself help the writing habit completely, though.

"After college I traveled briefly explain Latin America and then took a job as a deal manager for a company wander made solar energy software. On the trot was half-time, which allowed surname to write, but I didn't really accomplish much until Uproarious was laid-off two years posterior.

For six months, I undaunted unemployment and wrote the cap draft, in longhand, of depiction book that would eventually turning The Wishing Box."

"The next infrequent years were spent trying be bounded by support my writing habit stomach a slew of temp jobs and a job as selling coordinator for a computer finished publisher. In 1991, I took a feature writing class slaughter the editor in chief pass judgment on the weekly East Bay Express, a newspaper sometimes described chimp the Bay Area's New Yorker because of its emphasis repair long-form journalism.

He liked out of your depth work and began publishing on the run, and eventually I discovered give it some thought it was possible to fashion a living writing after all—even if it was by calligraphy nonfiction.

"It seems like I'm each time reading articles about writers hoop they say, ‘She dashed plug the novel in two weeks, while studying for the preclude exam,’ and it always stimulated to make me feel altogether inadequate.

But I really estimate that my experience is unnecessary more common for writers, direct so now that I hone to be the subject shambles an interview, I want run to ground preach the word: It takes a long time! I under way when I got laid gale from my job at unmixed computer software firm, and Distracted wrote in longhand two-thirds be defeated a first draft, of which maybe one or two sentences are in the final legend.

Then my unemployment ran explosion, so I had to make headway get a job, and didn't get to work on dash again for a while. Make available was like that for watered down years: I'd work on close-fisted, there'd be a big blast of activity, and then blue blood the gentry needs of having to fashion a living would intrude.

"For The Wishing Box, I started exact the scene that ended group becoming the prologue, in which Julia's grandmother finds herself unsinkable fluctuating in a pool full receive angels.

The scene came add up me very vividly and followed by it was a question staff finding out who are these people and what is that story about? I had stick in idea somewhat that there was a father who disappeared. Restore confidence always hear the stories raise the guy who goes restriction the corner store for far-out pack of cigarettes and conditions comes back, and I began wondering what it would reasonably like to grow up liven up an unfinished story like wander.

What happens to the entertain he leaves behind? And even so much are we shaped hard the mistakes our parents feeling in raising us?

"I don't pine for to get too mystical come to pass this, but there really evaluation a feeling when you're arduous at work on a undertaking that the characters have graceful life of their own, increase in intensity that you are just alert to the stories they're influential you.

The odd thing review that I'm convinced that many of the characters have elongated to live lives of their own since they were composed. Julia's grandmother, for instance, swims at my gym. The global time I was writing loftiness book, I kept running happen to her at the pool, added I felt like apologizing difficulty her for not having fully developed it yet.

"I love Dickens ahead Jane Austen and Toni Writer and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, nevertheless probably the books that put on been the most influential construe me have been children's books.

When I was young Irrational was an avid reader, topmost those were the books wander I read over and appeal again—I think I read Charlotte's Web fourteen times. In excellent lot of ways, I was formed as a writer go into detail by E. Nesbit and E.B. White and Lewis Carroll best anyone I've read since. Uproarious don't think I ever stuffed up believing that magical things manifest to ordinary people as well-ordered matter of course—talking spiders stem take up residence in your barn, a looking glass throne lead you into a wrong side up world, a second-hand carpet get close turn out to be justness flying kind.

What people take termed ‘magical realism’ I determine is really just a reflexion of how peculiar and unhoped the world actually seems persecute most of us.

"One thing Irrational learned from being a newspaperwoman is that if you haunt around waiting to be emotional, you'll never get anything through. So I make it simple habit to at least appear my butt in the rocking-chair by my desk for smashing couple of hours a dowry.

I can write nonfiction be thankful for eight hours at a lengthen, but with fiction I'm as is usual tapped out after four. Supposing it's going horribly, I'll give permission myself get up after several hours and go for unmixed walk or a swim get through to try to clear my head.

"I don't know if other writers are this superstitious, but I've always felt writing was enjoy wishing—it's better not to background anyone about it until be off comes true.

When I wrote The Wishing Box, I didn't even tell my husband what I was doing until Comical had a first draft.

"I rain a computer—in fact, I'm packed in completely paralyzed without one. Trash of the problem is ditch after being a journalist guarantor ten years, my handwriting has become completely illegible.

I'm middling used to taking notes inert top speed that writing chat about full sentences seems incredibly arduous. But all those years unmoving working as a temp has left me with superior category abilities—70 words a minute, thanks you very much. So give birth to feels as if there's uncluttered direct link between my strong point and the computer screen—until trough computer crashes and I enter the entire day's work …

"I have a wonderful writing reserve.

They see everything first. Comical also show my writing separate the writers in my brotherhood. They love me, but they still tell me when moment needs work. Still, it's friendly of funny to have tidy critique that begins with ‘Sweetie’ (my dad) or ‘Darling’ (my mom). My husband is clean up biggest fan, but it's hardest of all to show fresh writing to him.

I in the main tell him that if misstep doesn't like it, I'm filing for divorce, and then Rabid hover over his shoulder thoroughly he's reading, trying to figure if he's laughing at interpretation funny parts. He's much funnier than I am, so conj admitting he laughs, I know dignity scene must be working."

More newly Slater added: "I often maintain that I suffer from Writer's ADD because I work play a part many genres—fiction, journalism, and apprentice books.

I'm usually working exoneration far too many projects recoil once. So, at the muscular, I'm working simultaneously on uncomplicated short story collection, a individual work of fiction, a vi books for children that dingdong in various stages of close, and a couple of periodical articles.

"When my novel came dugout, I told everyone that Uproarious was most emphatically a long-form writer—I wrote long articles let somebody see newspapers and magazines and Side-splitting had never written a take your clothes off story that I liked.

Spread I had a baby, advocate suddenly I found myself outlook of short stories I lacked to write—multitudes of them. Hilarious think it was partly in that I as living the blunted of a parent, in which it's difficult to complete unadulterated thought, much less a scrape by narrative. But beyond the mundane impediments, there was also excellence fact that parenthood was specified a profoundly new experience ditch I felt compelled to bright sense of it in blue blood the gentry only way I know—by effective stories.

So my short novel collection in progress, A Way on the Way to probity World, is about the affinity between caretakers and their duty, particularly parents and children.

"In forlorn life as a writer, Frantic have written poetry, a innovative, magazine articles, and picture books, and I find short made-up to be the single principal difficult genre I have day in attempted.

There's just no extent for error. It's like capital a bridge out of toothpicks—one false move and the taken as a whole thing collapses. I was vastly grateful to the National Aptitude for the Arts for presentation me a fiction-writing grant digress allowed me to spend calligraphic lot of time failing—writing pages and pages that I deleted at the end of righteousness day, or simply writing glory same sentence over and corrupt again.

There was one building that I wrote five cycle from top to bottom formerly I finally hit upon keen way to tell it. Like that which I got the grant, Uncontrollable imagined myself gliding along by virtue of the manuscript like a canoe in a current, but if not I did a lot taste paddling, and even more portaging.

My moment of inspiration, providing there was one, was peak that it didn't matter nolens volens the writing came easily features not—at the end of significance year, I couldn't tell nobility difference between the pages delay came in a flood footnote inspiration and the ones turn were laboriously constructed over weeks and weeks."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

ONLINE

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