30 November 2013

commencement essay

The combination of Thanksgiving holiday weekend and celebration of the Hanukkah Festival of Lights feels like just the right time for the publication release of my essay "Seemingly Unrelated Events" in the newest issue of December literary magazine, the Revival Issue (Vol 24) December 1, 2013. This is a version of the commencement speech I gave as the student speaker for the Pacific University MFA commencement ceremonies in June of this year.

I am honored to be included in this magazine alongside some terrific writers and friends from Pacific University, such as Marvin Bell, Peter Sears, Dawn Robinson, Jeanne Morel, Jaydn DeWald, and Karen Holman, among others. Another amazing and wonderful opportunity. 

My thanks to all who made this possible, my family, teachers, mentors and friends. And my husband who's talked me down from the metaphorical ledge more than once whenever I am faced with a writing or speaking challenge.

Subscribe to December for the current issue and much more. My opinion: literary works are always a good investment of the mind. 

~ sherri


"Exactly 444 years before the day of my birth, Hernando Cortes set fire to the
Aztec aviaries of the besieged city of Tenochtitlan, the story written in Crossing OpenGround by Barry Lopez. It is 1989. Lopez is already a renowned author and National Book Award recipient, writing about human culture in the context of the natural
world. I am a 23-year-old English undergrad at Weber State University with two small
children, living on welfare in a trailer park under the runway flight path of nearby Hill
Air Force Base, painfully aware that my marriage of three years is failing. I am instantly
connected to the images of the birds burning in their cages. Connected by my own
despair. By my birth date there on the page." [subscribe to read more]
                                                ~Sherri Hoffman, from "Seemingly Unrelated Events"

19 October 2013

reading in milwaukee

Outside of Tokyo, our family lived in a house with a sunroom that looked out over the garden, and that was our playroom. Maybe I was five. In that sunroom, my brother, sister, and I would listen to records, 33s or 45s, and one of our favorites was the 1946 Disney rendition of Sergei Prokofiev's Op. 67: Peter and the Wolf.  You know the one: Peter is represented by the strings; Sasha the bird by the flute; Sonja the duck by the oboe; and the wolf. . . . We must have listened to that record a hundred times, and every time the wolf first appears—all brass and drums—we'd leap, screaming, over the high, arched back of the green couch to hide.

Reading in public is sometimes like that for me. Not that I'll be leaping over any couches anytime soon, but the clench of fear in my chest as I approach the microphone is the same. Every time.

Nerves aside, I am privileged to be reading with some fine faculty and grad students from my new digs at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee: Creative Writing Professor Mauricio Kilwein Guevara, and graduate students Tobias Wray and Elisa Karbin.

Meet me there:
Friday, October 25
7:00pm
Boswell Book Company
2559 N Downer Ave
Milwaukee, WI
 
~ sherri




01 October 2013

new fiction: looking to land

Sometimes I tell stories from my real life—maybe even from those old, bad days—and people don't believe me. Some of my best rejection letters disclaim the believability of my personal stories.

It's fine, really. I'm grateful that my life manifests in a different space these days. Plus, I can't ever imagine running out of material, if that's all to be said for some of my past.

I've learned to mix it up, the real and the imagined. Bank back the fantastic real; expand the fabulist fiction. But every once in awhile, a kernel of raw truth might surface in one of my stories. I leave it up to the reader to guess, as I'm certain I  don't have to say which it is.

That's the beauty of writing fiction.

My short story, "Looking to Land," is published in the newest issue of Spilt Infinitive. My thanks to the editors for including me—I feel like I got to eat lunch at the cool kids' table today.

 ~ sherri