Click here to listen. © Jane Pollak 2026 The day after Professor Cavanaugh asked me to be the property mistress for the fall 1969 production of The Caucasian Chalk Circle, he called me into his office. I knew nothing about the plot line or magnitude of...
Click here to listen. © Jane Pollak 2026 I moved to New Jersey on March 11, leaving Manhattan after nearly fourteen years as a full-time resident. A team of organizers packed me up on the 10th. Movers hauled my belongings to my new home at Lantern Hill...
Click here to listen. © Jane Pollak 2026 January was a busy month, but not one that photographs well. Which is ironic, because I do have photos (and screenshots)—though mostly of exposed wires, threats of legal action for copyright infringement, and a hat...
Click here to listen. © Jane Pollak 2025 It all began with a single remark from my sister at a craft show. Meredith, my older sibling, once helped me work a fair back in those exhibiting days. My batik eggs drew large crowds, and as demand grew, I raised...
Click here to listen. © Jane Pollak 2025 Over five decades as an artist, I’ve experienced my share of milestones, surprises and reinventions. What has remained constant is the joy of creating and the deep satisfaction when someone connects with a piece...
Click here to listen. © Jane Pollak 2025 In June 2001, I mailed stamped invitations (pre-email) to a few dozen of my most creative friends and colleagues requesting them to join me for a dinner party at Bloodroot, a feminist vegetarian restaurant...
Click here to listen. © Jane Pollak 2025(illustrated with pieces of my art process along the way) Since my eldest child gave birth in 2011, I’ve kept an ongoing Notes section labeled Grandma Activities. Whenever newspaper articles or ads for family fun...
Click here to listen. I’m very suggestible. When a fiber arts colleague on Instagram shared her wisdom about material storage, I accepted and felt compelled to honor her methodology. “At what point do you throw out leftover pieces of wool?” I asked,...
Click here to listen. Talk about ink in one’s veins! This birth announcement, created by my dad, is prominently displayed in my baby book from 1948. My mother, too, had a way of making things newsworthy just by naming them. When a neighbor in the Midwest...
Click here to listen. Do you remember the staggering number of catalogs that used to weigh down our mailboxes day after day, particularly in the fall? LL Bean came weekly, if not more often, in various iterations: Women’s, Outdoors, Holiday, etc. But there were a...
As a kid in the 50’s, I played a game called 7-Up. All you needed was a Spalding ball and a wall. Our garage was the perfect arena for mastering the seven different challenges of throwing the pink sphere against a flat surface: allowing it to bounce, catch it...
A woman in her late 70's or 80's, from a highly regarded national publication, was seated to my left at the Women's Media Group lunch event this week. The topic of the hour was: The Future of Media is Podcasting. There was an exceptional panel of women qualified to...
The musicians on the #1 train were all business. Four well-dressed gentlemen, each with his own instrument, stood in my car near the closing doors. They waited politely until everyone found a seat at the 50th Street Station. They played one very lively and tuneful...
I was thumbing through a copy of Big Money Speaker magazine: The Ultimate Financial Freedom Guide for Speakers as I sipped my morning potion. I'm fascinated by how they market. The pages were filled with quotes like: "It's worth more than anything you will ever pay...
It was driven home again to me this week that customers niche our businesses in their minds with a single word or phrase. And we can help control what that word is. Witness the magnificent catalog I just received from Mitchells--a high end retail store where I have...
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