Welcome!
I'm Katherine E. Hoffman, PhD, MCLC, and the Founder and Director of The Story Shack LLC.
Check out my new lyrical collaboration with composer/musician/vocal artist Stephane Olmanst, aka Come Visit Us Sometime, on Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube!
Why the Story Shack? The Story Shack’s constellation of coaching, consulting, storytelling, and ghostwriting anchors in the conviction that our lives are shaped by stories: stories we tell ourselves, stories we tell others, stories others tell us, and the stories we forge collectively. Stories give meaning to our experiences and help us understand other people and the world. All storytelling and all writing start with individual experience and observation. We humans are all — without exception — storytellers.
Few stories come to us whole. Instead, we craft fragments into coherent, shareable wholes much as an archeologist pieces together glass shards from a dig. The end result is so much greater than the sum of its parts.
The Story Shack is a big umbrella and getting bigger. This past summer, we broke ground on the salon (gathering room) of The Story Barn retreat space in the Yonne region of Burgundy. Watch this space for updates! The Story Barn will support writers and aspiring writers through mini-workshops, distraction-free sessions, and targeted coaching to further your creative projects.
About Katherine. Trained as a linguistic anthropologist and field researcher, I’ve spent the last three decades identifying, analyzing, and celebrating the power of the stories people tell out loud and inside their own heads. I’m a published author and editor of non-fiction books, a crafter of creative memoir and fiction, and a lyricist. Read more below about two of my book projects: We Share Walls (Wiley-Blackwell 2008) and Mirror of the Soul (in progress).
I ghostwrite everything from pamphlets to website content to full-length books to fundraising appeals. If it needs words, I can write it. What links my anthropological, linguistic, and historical research with my coaching, ghostwriting, storytelling, and writing community leadership? It’s a commitment to encouraging and amplifying women’s voices. It’s an insistence that women should be at the proverbial table and that we are all responsible for confronting the patriarchy — everywhere, at all times, and in all forms.
In my creative writing practice, I’m experimenting with memoir and short story forms. There’s even a love story in the mix, with a twist: the beloved is not human. Join us at the Writing Community, especially if you are an educator or former educator looking for a guided creative outlet.
For my first ethnographic book, I used almost four years of “deep hanging out” (as anthropologist Clifford Geertz called it) to understand how individuals experience not only the world around them but their inner lives as well. My book We Share Walls (Wiley-Blackwell 2008) explains how it feels to be a native speaker of an indigenous language — Tashelhit Amazigh in Morocco in this case — largely dismissed and disdained in a society in which the state language is not your mother tongue. I listened most closely to women and girls for Walls. They trusted me to honor their dignity and respect their words even as I translated and analyzed their words for readers and listeners. The nitty-gritty of these women’s lives built a story about global processes like language shift and language extinction and in so doing, explain why we should care so many the world’s 7000 spoken languages are at risk of extinction. In my second single-authored non-fiction book, Mirror of the Soul, I excavate shards of women’s court claims from the first half of the 20th century in the Moroccan Anti-Atlas Mountains. These bold, unschooled women argued for land and inheritance rights, divorce, and child custody. This historical book also features women at the center of legal, social, and economic forces even though scholars and laypeople alike have long claimed that these were the exclusive domains of men in patriarchal societies. See here and here for more about my research specializations and publications (on international adoption, customary law and Islamic law, folk songs, popular religion, and cultural practices in North Africa and France, and much more).
Need an experienced public speaker or group trainer? For 30 years, I have trained young adults, educators, and laypeople both inside and outside the academy. I’ve been a country expert for National Geographic Expeditions to Morocco (where I’ve lectured from atop a camel and a mountain — no walls needed!), developed and led strategic thinking groups in documentary film projects, and renovated a three hundred year old Burgundian farm house with loving attention to each limestone.
Personally, I love collaborations, minimalist hygge, stand-up comedy, historical fiction, gardening, cooking, forest hikes, and any spot north, south, or smack dab in the Mediterranean. I’m an advanced practitioner of trauma parenting, special needs parenting, and positive parenting. Middle-school fisherfolk share my home shack and keep me on my toes.
Drop a note if you’d like to say hi, join our writing community, or see how I can help you or your organization tell your most engaging, authentic, persuasive story to your audience. Let me know if you’re interested in the writing retreat and what you’re looking to gain from it since we are still open to persuasion. However we connect, bring your shards and let’s make stories!