Shelby Hofer is a performer and writer based in Atlanta, where she and her husband have spent nearly three decades running PushPush Arts, an incubator for experimental work across disciplines. Her own practice has been pulling toward writing lately, and at Azule she came to finish something personal: a piece called On the Porch, the second chapter in a body of Southern stories she’s slowly building.
The work reaches back to her childhood, her 8-year-old self, and the kind of storytelling that starts on a porch before you know what you’re doing.
Watch the full conversation below.
“A lot of this stuff comes from me trying to tap into my child self.”
Shelby’s practice spans performance, writing, and what she calls observational cultural content. Her inspirations run toward musicians who are also poets, and she names Miranda July and Pee-wee Herman in the same breath, both of them feeding into her work without contradiction. Ideas come slowly. She spent over a decade thinking through a full-length comedy about infertility before it became a script. She’s comfortable with that kind of patience.
The piece she brought to Azule, On the Porch, is a roughly 40-minute presentation written for a return appearance at Circle Summit on the Circle in DeFuniak Springs, Florida. It follows last year’s piece, In Defense of Y’all, and continues a body of work rooted in growing up in a small town in South Atlanta. She’s a Southern writer who never fit the Southern belle mold, and these stories trace how storytelling begins on the porch as a child, and how that early practice becomes the courage you carry forward. The larger project will likely become a manuscript of essays, performable, though the form is still finding itself.
“It offers you the space and the time and the mindfulness to be able to listen to what yourself and what you’re making.”
At Azule, she moved around the property as she worked, following the light from corner to corner, the old car outside, the farm kitchen, wherever something caught her attention. She leaves with the piece finished and the sense of accomplishment she came hoping to find.
Shelby Hofer is a performer and writer based in Atlanta, where she co-runs PushPush Arts, an incubator for experimental work across disciplines. Her current piece, On the Porch, premieres at Circle Summit on the Circle in DeFuniak Springs, Florida.