Dashka Slater's Blog
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Jun.01.2010
I write for a living. I write about the environment and I write books for children, and I’ve always figured I worked in a pretty green industry. I don’t drill for oil or mine for coal, and since I work at home I barely even drive a car.
But yesterday I got a copy of a new report by the Rainforest...
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Apr.05.2010
Back in February, The Guardian ran a piece on “Rules for Writing Fiction” that featured sage advice from famous writers on what to do and what not to do. In general, I hate that type of article, which always makes me feel like I’m doing it all wrong. In this compendium of advice, as in most such...
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Mar.26.2010
Ah, candlelight. It's so scented and flickery and romantic and 18th century and ... carcinogenic. Recent studies reveal that paraffin candles -- that's your generic, garden-variety hunk of wax-- are flaming sticks of burning poison, releasing a bouquet of aromatic toxins into your home every time...
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Mar.16.2010
This week I read that 2010 may be the tipping point year in which more U.S. children are born to families of color than to white. That means that in the very near future, the majority of American children’s book readers will fall into the category we now call “minority.” Are the majority of the...
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Mar.02.2010
A few minutes ago I received a rant by email from my friend Sharon Levin. She was infuriated because she'd just come back from a conference at which people kept talking about how boys wouldn't be interested in books with girl protagonists or even with a girl on the cover. One presenter even held...
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Dec.10.2009
It's December, the month when my list of "Things to Do" begins to divide into long trailing tentacles of "Things to Make" and "Things to Buy" and "Things to Mail" and "Things to Cook" and, somewhere stuffed in-between them all, somewhat...
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Dec.07.2009
Therese Walsh just interviewed me for her blog, Writer Unboxed, about the process of writing my novel The Wishing Box. The first half of the interview is up now; the second half of the interview will be posted on Friday and will cover children's books and other genres. I've published three books...
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Nov.10.2009
One of my favorite parts of being a children's book writer is going into schools to talk about what I do. Not only is it an opportunity for me to get to get away from the computer and hang out with real people, it's also a chance to unleash my Inner Hambone. My school presentations are usually...
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Oct.07.2009
It's a grim time in publishing -- every day I seem to hear about another threat to the very existence of books, magazines, newspapers and writers. And as if the news weren’t awful enough, on Sunday, I read an article in the New York Times business section about how e-readers are leading to the...
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Oct.05.2009
This week in my environmental blog, I've started blogging about all the ordinary things I run across as an environmental reporter that turn out to be bad for you, or bad for the planet. Like, salad.
How can salad be bad? Well, like just about everything, it depends on where it comes from. As I...
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Sep.30.2009
The title of this post is literally true. Children’s books are what taught me to love writing and reading, and I began my career as a writer somewhere around age 6 by imitating them as closely as I could. Children’s book writers are some of the wisest, most thoughtful people around, and all the...
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Sep.22.2009
I was reading an interview with Rebecca Stead the other day in which she talked about why she had set her new novel, When You Reach Me, in 1979.
“I wanted to show a world of kids with a great deal of autonomy,” she explains, “and I wasn’t sure that it would ring true in a modern New York setting...
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Sep.11.2009
There was an interesting article about Spike Jonze and the film adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are in this week’s New York Times Magazine. I’d seen a trailer for the film the week before while catching the latest Harry Potter movie, and wondered “What the ???” If any book seemed unsuited for...
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Sep.10.2009
There was an item in the San Francisco Chronicle this week about Make it Better, a bakery in the Castro that packs its goodies in a box that says “I f***ed up.” Cupcakes seem like a good way to signal repentance, and I’d like to suggest that Steve Wasik, the CEO of water-bottle manufacturer SIGG...
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Aug.24.2009
I ended last week's post by observing that genius finds a way. What makes me so certain? Children's books do. Sure there's plenty out there that's uninspired, or only marginally inspired. But there are also books that take your breath away -- books that make me certain that genius is still doing...
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Dashka Slater...has written a stunning, poetic first novel about appearances and disappearances, about family legacies, religious belief and cultural inheritances”
—The San Jose Mercury News
About Dashka
Dashka Slater is the recipient of a 2004 Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her novel, The Wishing Box (Chronicle, 2000), was named one of the best books of the year by the Los Angeles Times, which called it “an impish novel...