About Me

Hattie’s Web has been around for a while, so maybe it’s time for the author to come clean.
My real name is Marianna Scheffer. I have lived in Hilo, Hawaii for 14 years. That’s the longest I’ve ever lived in one place. I started out, many moons ago, in San Francisco. I did time in Madison, Wisconsin and Plainfield New Jersey, experiencing but not much caring for life in the 60’s. Well, Plainfield was cool, I guess. Oh, I was there: Chicago, Poor People’s Campaign, Marches on this and that: but I was no hippie. It was a guy time, the 60’s, with all the sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll as the boys liked it. I always was a tad serious and intellectual anyway, already married to the man I’m still married to, though with a juvenile sense of humor definitely of those times, strongly influenced by Mad Magazine, Underground Comix and so on.
Unable to tolerate life in these United States in the early 70’s, my husband and I moved to Germany with our two year old daughter and shortly thereafter to Switzerland, not returning to the States until the mid 80’s. During that time we brought up our two girls, the second one arriving in 1976. My husband worked for a Swiss firm as a scientist and I taught English and eventually got certified as a teacher of English as a foreign language.
Upon returning to the U.S. I got a B.A. in German and a TESL (Teaching English as a Second Language) certificate at Portland State University and an M.A. in liberal studies from Reed College. I was much influenced by the culture wars which were raging away in academia at the time, as the moldy old mossback New Critics tried to defend their territory from the postmodernist hordes. As an older feminist, I took (and gave!) a lot of lumps but wrested an excellent if belated education out of the mess. I also taught English as a second language at various campuses around the Portland Metro area, not my dream job by any means but mostly tolerable.
Since both girls were now grown up, we decided to move to Hilo, having fallen in love with the islands on a holiday in the early 90’s. My husband continues to work as a consultant in his scientific field. I taught ESL for a while at the University of Hawaii at Hilo and the Hilo Community School but ended up teaching basic reading, math, and high school equivalency for ten years at Kulani Correctional Facility, the prison on the Big Island. I loved this work, for reasons I have never really analyzed. I retired three years ago, and I’ve discovered that I just adore being retired! Blogging, yard work and gardening, orchid growing, cooking, traveling and now ceramics, a new activity, really interest me. I have time for my friends and family. And now I have so many friends I’ve met through the Internet!
My only regret is that our three grandkids live so far away, in Seattle, but we do get to see them fairly often. We were not thinking ahead and imagining grandkids when we came over here, and now we love Hawaii so much we feel that we couldn’t live anywhere else.
Our big future adventure will be a Caribbean cruise sponsored by The Nation magazine. I’m going to get to talk to Amy Goodman and Jim Hightower. I will be sure to report extensively on my experiences on Hattie’s Web!

More later.