About Me

EARLIEST MEMORIES

• fireflies (in Kentucky, I'm told)
• the riot police outside our apartment near Ohio State (1970)
• camping on a stormy beach near Galveston, TX
• a condo on the waterfront of San Francisco Bay
• the red girders of Tokyo Tower
• the gardener working outside the sunroom in Kokubunji, Tokyo
• Hiroshima
• Peter and the Wolf on our children's record player
• flying cockroaches in Taichun, Taiwan
• walking the railroad tracks above Palouse Falls in Washington state

THE MEDIA BLURB

Sherri H. Hoffman is a working writer, social media nerd, and sports fanatic currently working on an MFA at Pacific University and a novel. Some of her stories appear in PANK Magazine, Etchings, the Salmon Creek Journal, Duck & Herring Magazine, and various online publications. When not writing, she's been spotted hiking in the forests of the Pacific Northwest and fishing from a canoe.

THERE AND BACK AGAIN

My earliest writing is a collection of poems gifted to my grandmother. I was five. I rhymed "bad" and "hat."

My grandmother taught me to read once my family moved back to the states from overseas (USAF). I was 9. Dyslexia wasn't a term I heard until I was in college. I was an average student, always did enough to deflect attention but not enough to do any good. Won a few essay contests here and there. Wrote unappreciated satire for the Shelley High School newspaper. Those teenage years, I also rode in the Idaho Falls Junior Posse, became a marginal barrel racer, saddle-broke a colt, moved pipe in the summer wheat and potato fields, worked on the combine during spud harvest, and spent as much time as possible on my Uncle John's dairy farm in Benson, Utah.

College was a craps shoot. Attended BYU for a year. U of U for a year. Got married and had some kids. Finished my B.A. in English at Weber State University, 1991. Loved WSU. I was assistant to the English, Economics and Honors department heads in the Writing Across the Curriculum program and the Student Assistant in the Writing Center. I'd found my people. Studied medieval lit and Thomas Hardy with Merlin Cheney, Whitman with John Schwiebert, and finally, Raymond Carver with Mikel Vause. My life would never be the same.

What most people didn't know at the time was that my private life was in shambles by then. Ah, but that's another story. In the meantime, I spent a year studying with Francois Camoin from the University of Utah. Also in workshop with Phyllis Barber, to whom I owe an enormous debt of gratitude for her personal kindness.

Then I stopped writing. Completely.

Ten years later on New Year's eve, two of my friends were killed by a drunk driver. The sudden deaths reached back and opened something older in me—loss long-forgotten or pushed away—and by the end of summer, I had to find a way out or submit to the depression that would not lift this time.

One day, a random class at the local community college caught my eye—a mediated writing group. I signed up. Well, hello, forgotten voice. I wrote the beginnings of "Road Dogs" and "Falling Away at the Edges" in this group. After a random discussion with my new writing friends about psychopaths, I went home to catch the second half of a NY Giants game on Monday Night Football and wrote "Black Bird." It was accepted for publication the next day.

The group's instructor, Christi Krug, referred me to the Pinewood Table, a local writing group run by Stevan Allred and Joanna Rose, and I continued to write. I met (and continue to meet) many amazing writers around that table, some of whom have become my dearest friends.

In January 2011, I started an MFA in Writing (fiction) program at Pacific University. Expected graduation date: January 2013. This is a low-residency program, and while I am in school, I continue to work a full-time job, raise a family, go to the gym sporadically, grab a cuppa coffee with my friends every so often, and watch NFL football religiously.

I remain amazed. Grateful.