Community members are invited to Chaucer’s Bookstore, 7 p.m. Thursday, June 27, as the shop hosts authors, educators and colleagues, Barbara Greenleaf and Gary Delanoeye. Chaucer’s is at 3321 State St., Santa Barbara.

Greenleaf and Delanoeye will read from their new humorous works, correctly answer all questions regarding the meaning of life, laundering one’s shorts, and the quickest way to age.

Delanoeye’s Clean Shorts is a collection of 12 very different short stories. Each is drawn from the author’s experiences and/or his imagination. Some of the stories come from travel adventures … or misadventures. Some have a local flavor; things that happened closer to his home near Santa Barbara.

The stories are about people and their places, and sometimes, people who are out of place.

Clean Shorts breaks from the tradition of Delanoeye’s two earlier novels, Checking in at the Crowbar Hotel, and Letters from the Outs, that explore the culture of incarcerated youths.

Instead, his new collection covers different slices of life, and always with humor, insight and drama.

Delanoeye is a career educator. He currently supervises student teachers and teaches educational research courses in a master of arts degree program. He is a volunteer naturalist who leads interpretive hikes on the Channel Islands. He also does photo identification of whales as a volunteer on local whale watching boats.  

Greenleaf used to be (and still is) a serious writer with seven books, a blog, and numerous magazine articles, speeches, and corporate pieces to her credit.

As she got older, though, she got funnier, and she turned her adventures in aging into This Old Body, a collection of funny personal essays, poems and quick takes.

When she’s not blogging or kidding around about the everyday humiliations and aggravations of growing older, Greenleaf can be found creating mixed media art.

Greenleaf is a 20-year resident of the Santa Barbara community. She has mentored at Santa Barbara High School, helped save agricultural land in Goleta, founded the Santa Barbara Jewish Film Festival, and served as assistant vice chancellor at Antioch University.

— Mary Hershey for Chaucer’s Books.

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