June 09, 2004

Back to the table of Contents Page

Classifieds

Palo Alto Online

Mary Jane Moffat, acclaimed author, lecturer

She had a long career in the Bay Area and throughout the West Coast. She was co-editor of a seminal feminist book, "Revelations; Diaries of Women," first published in l974, which stimulated a literary trend in diary and memoir, and she edited "In the Midst of Winter, Selections from the Literature of Mourning." Both books are still in print.

She also published "The Times of Our Lives," about writing autobiographies. Her own memoir, "City of Roses," looked back upon her early childhood in Portland, Ore., where she was a well-known child actress, and her adolescence in Ashland, Ore., where she played Juliet at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and where she met her late husband, Jack Moffat.

She earned her bachelor's and master's degrees at Stanford University, where she taught Creative Writing in Wallace Stegner's department as a Merrilees Fellow. She also taught at San Francisco State University and the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

She was a favorite teacher for 20 years at the Foothill Writers' Conference, where she led workshops from its inception in the 1980s. More recently she had taught memoir workshops in San Francisco and lectured at many venues in the Bay Area.

She is survived by her companion, Tony Wood; two sons, Peter and his wife, Nicki, and Michael and his wife, Diane; and two granddaughters. In addition to her immediate family, she leaves a close extended family in Oregon and California.

The interment was private, but the family will announce a memorial at a later date. The Palo Alto Writers' Conference (formerly Foothill) will have an open reading of Moffat's work on Tuesday, June 15, at 7:15 p.m. at the Haymarket Theatre, Palo Alto High School, 50 Embarcadero Road, Palo Alto.

E-mail a friend a link to this story.