On the Art of Living

Steve Hoffman is a Minnesota tax preparer and food writer. His writing has won multiple national awards, including the 2019 James Beard M.F.K. Fisher Distinguished Writing Award. He was nominated for a second James Beard Award in 2025. His first book, A Season for That: Lost and Found in the Other Southern France, was named one of the best food and wine books of 2024 by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Food & Wine, and Saveur. He shares one acre on Turtle Lake, in Shoreview, Minnesota, with his wife, Mary Jo, roughly 80,000 honeybees, and a nesting pair of sandhill cranes.  

Mary Jo Hoffman is an artist-photographer renowned for her unique engagement with the natural world. Best known for her project, "STILL," where every day for over a decade, she made a photograph of found nature. This daily ritual cracked open profound revelations about connectedness, placefulness, and the creative life. Her new book, STILL: The Art of Noticing, already in its fifth printing, is the astonishing culmination of that multi-year project.

Steve and Mary Jo arrived at the point of each publishing their first book in the same year in late middle age. They will briefly cover the subject matter of the two books, and then talk about how their publication was the decade-long result of our decision to "practice for retirement" back in 2012 during that trip to France. Steve and Mary Jo worked intentionally on establishing creative careers--both individual and collaborative--over the decade following 2012, and hope that those careers will now form the heartbeat of Act 3 of their lives, which they are just about to embark on.