to my twin brother Bruce
& his friend Stefanie for sending this one along!
This tee-shirt reminds me of an anecdote told by the author Alice Hoffman about how she decided to be a writer. One day in Junior High, she got in trouble passing notes at school, so to punish her, the teacher intercepted the note and read aloud everything that she had written to her friend.
But instead of feeling embarrassed, Hoffman thought, "Wow, this is pretty cool to have all these people listening to what I just wrote!" After that, she said, there was no stopping her!
from her lecture at "Wordstock" 2016
Portland (Oregon) Book Festival
My brother says it reminds him
of an experience with his two daughters:
My older, Anna Mary, was misbehaving.
I don't recall what she did that provoked my ire,
but I sent her to her room.
My younger, Sara Beth, was standing there.
She looked at me rolled her eyes in disgust.
"What?" I asked.
To which Sara Beth replied,
"You know she likes that, right?"
Reader's Paradise ~ Aimee Stewart
Alice Hoffman: "I don't have a daughter, and that's a big sorrow in my life."
ReplyDelete[She does have a son, author Wolfe Martin.]
Alice Hoffman: "I consider every woman to be a feminist, whether she knows it or not. "
ReplyDelete"There were so few woman in my earliest college anthologies, just one or two, including Grace Paley."
[Same here! In my first writing class, it was Grace Paley's "A Subject of Childhood" & Kay Boyle's "Winter Night," in "New Sounds in American Fiction," edited by Gordon Lish]
On creating fictional characters for a novel about 4 women: "Only 2 will survive, but I didn't know at the beginning of writing which 2 it would be."
"Is life more like a novel?
Or is life like a book of short stories?"
RE her novel "Faithful" (2016): "When we read a book that we love, we feel that we are ~known~."
Some of her favorites:
Toni Morrison's "Beloved"
Emily Bronte's "Wuthering Heights
Ray Bradbury:
"Illustrated Man"
"Farenheit 451"
"Something Wicked This Way Comes"
Advice: "Write fast!"
By Alice Hoffman:
White Horses
Blue Diary
Green Angel
Red Garden