Noria Jablonski

Daedalus Howell interviewed Noria Jablonski, author of Human Oddities, for the San Francisco Chronicle. The resulting article opens:

Writers are drawn to their craft for a variety of reasons -- some have a story that must be told, others do it for a buck. For Petaluma's Noria Jablonski, it was a nagging feeling.

"I had been teaching high school English in San Francisco for three years and I realized that I was a hypocrite. I was helping these students find their voices and tell their stories, but I had never done that for myself," reflects Jablonski, whose first collection of short stories, "Human Oddities," ($15) was released in October by Shoemaker & Hoard Publishers, an imprint of Avalon Publishing Group in Emeryville.

"I really hadn't had a chance to live my own life yet," says Jablonski, 35. "I had no ambitions to be a writer. I just wanted to teach. I knew that when I was 15 years old. ... And I did, I'm very goal-oriented."

When her goal became to be a writer, a determined Jablonski set her sights on graduate programs in writing. In her estimation, however, there was one stumbling block.

Read on to learn more about that "stumbling block."

The Page 69 Test: Human Oddities.

--Marshal Zeringue