Deborah Hollander (Author and Lyricist)

Deb’s vocations and avocations have always focused on two elements:  children and theater.  Between 1985 and 1998, she wrote a series of children’s musicals and chapter books while leading theater and creative writing initiatives at theaters and schools in Boulder, CO and then in Baltimore, MD.

 

She went back for a Master’s Degree in Counseling in her 50's and became a licensed clinical professional counselor in 2003.  She worked with youth and children at the Lighthouse Youth Service Bureau and the Hospice of the Chesapeake.  On the side, she founded a children-focused troupe of Playback Theatre  (Children’s Circle Playback Theatre)- an original form of improvisational theatre in which audience or group members tell stories from their lives and watch them enacted on the spot.

 

She continued her therapeutic work until 2012 and her creative work until 2014 when her illness would not allow her to continue.  When Three Little Pigs:  Up Close and Personal I (the original name for OINK!) was completed, she wrote the following description:

           

"In 1952 my mother read me Charlotte’s Web and I

was introduced to characters whose interior lives

deeply reflected my own.  Immediately I felt less lonely. 

My musical...comes out of the desire to give kids that

same sense of belonging while tickling their funny bones."