So while I'm frantically revising picture book manuscripts to take to Highlights Summer Camp, Listen To Your Mother released the 2016 videos from shows in 41 cities. As promised, here's my piece in the San Francisco Show! It was a privilege and an honor to be on stage with such amazing women. Cheers! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2s145rabK20
It's official! I'll be performing at the Listen to Your Mother show in San Francisco on May 6th! I had submitted a humorous essay last year but was too ill to audition for the show after the piece was selected. Not content to submit the same piece this year, I wrote a new 800-word essay … Continue reading Listen to Your Mother – San Francisco
Here's my entry for Susanna Leonard Hill's Perfect Picture Book Friday! There is more tongue-in-cheek fact-stretching in Levi Strauss Gets a Bright Idea than you can shake a pair of Levis at, but it's sooo much fun, you just don't care. The author gives you the real low-down about the origins of Levi jeans … Continue reading Levi Strauss Gets a Bright Idea – Perfect Picture Book Friday
Fact: Everything that famous writers create is spellbinding literature. Fact: Famous writers would rather die than expose their not-so-award-winning moments. Socrates would point out that both assertions cannot be true. So a writer must be blamed for Socrates's death. Enter the fabulous writers from The Writers' Grotto in San Francisco, a collective of professional writers … Continue reading Drivel – and Proud of It at Litquake
As part of San Francisco's LitQuake Literary Festival, I attended a Word for Word staged reading of Dan Chaon's short story, "Stay Awake," last night at Z-Space. It was memorable for two reasons: 1) It was the first time I'd tasted Sofia, champagne in a can, a venture of the Coppola vineyard. A Blanc de Blancs, … Continue reading The Uncanny, Hope, and the Short Story
For years, I've admired the work of Maya Lin, the woman who designed the Vietnam Memorial. So much so that I bought a book called Boundaries filled with examples of her work, including "Reading A Garden:" In her proposal for "Reading a Garden" for the Cleveland Public Library, Lin collaborates with her brother, Tan Lin, … Continue reading Finding Words in Unusual Places
After Tweeting, I decided that the form was too ephemeral for the hope, the desire, the wish, the dream that this will last forever. So I make it a post that will live on into the ether: The sun shines across our nation today, turning domestic prisons into Rainbow prisms. May it last forever and … Continue reading Rainbow Dreams
Jilanne Hoffmann 