Horror Stories, Island Stories, and the teachers who gave me everything

I was in Portland this week for my reading at Powell's, the world's most extraordinary bookstore, followed by a dizzying shopping spree in which I purchased enough books to get me through the fall, or at least October. I've been on a ghost story kick lately, so I picked up a hefty load of M.R. James, Sarah Waters, and more. I'm in the mood for haunted houses and wicked children.

Before my visit to Powell's, I stopped by KATU-TV's AM Northwest to talk with Helen Raptis about the path to God, to love, and my book, "Yoga Witch with a B."

Here's the link to that interview.

Now I'm at home, in bed, nursing a wee cold (a month of travel was bound to catch up with me eventually) and prepping for my reading tonight at Island Books.

I grew up on Mercer Island, and have always considered Island Books to be the spiritual center of the island. That lovely little bookstore holds a very special place in my heart. It was my first bookstore. I remember buying picture books there, Little House on the Prairie, Nancy Drew mysteries. All of those young adult novels I devoured, especially the ones that featured sexually-active teenagers. Those were the best. I went through my Anne of Green Gables kick at Island books, and eventually Roger, the owner there, suggested my mother give me Ursula Hegi's collection of linked stories, Floating in My Mother's Palm, which was the first book of short stories I read, and the first time I became aware that certain books are considered literature.

When I started this blog, I wrote about the experience reading Floating in My Mother's Palm here. This time of year, when the bright, sunny days turn grey, always reminds me of that book.

Tonight's reading was featured in the Mercer Island Reporter (lovingly nicknamed the Distorter by Island residents from the time I was little!) You can read that interview right here.

Naturally, returning to the place where I grew up in order to read from my first book has got me revisiting the past. All morning I've been thinking about the teachers who got me here: Frank Perry, my fourth grade writing teacher who singled me out to read in front of the class a story I had written called-- well, "It." I can't recall if I consciously chose to rip Stephen King's title off, or if this was just a coincidence. But I remember relishing the title either way. I also remember Mr. Perry telling me I should keep writing, that I had a knack for it. He told us that the most important thing was to grab the reader with a strong opening sentence. I remember thinking: I can do that, and then writing an opening that went something like The hands tightened around her neck, and Sarah knew she was about to die. (I was very into horror when I was a child. I also wrote a lot of stories about cannibalistic witches.)

Carol Muth, that same year, was my teacher for all other subjects, and she made us kids memorize a poem a week (or was it a month? felt like every week) so that we could internalize the rhythms of good writing. Or maybe it was just so we would learn to love poetry. I don't know. But I can still recite the Jabberwock by heart, and I think of Mrs. Muth every time I read Emily Dickinson. In my mind, Mrs. Muth was Emily Dickinson. I know she was married and had children, but somehow I always think of her with a bun in her hair and a beautiful, tragic love story in her heart.

Then there were the teachers who came along later: Cece Caley, Ruthie Newman, Chip Wall, who introduced me to books and ideas, who challenged me to think for myself. My theater directors, who taught me how to craft a narrative: Peter Donaldson, Sue Clement. And through it all, my piano teacher, Lois Jacobsen, who taught me one of the most important requirements of art-making: discipline. (Not that I was a terrifically disciplined piano student. But when I sit down to improve a story, I know how to work paragraph by paragraph, just as she taught me to perfect a piece measure by measure.)

Art really doesn't pay, but I am rich with the gifts these teachers gave me. They'll all be with me tonight; they always are.

Yoga Bitch is in Bookstores Today!

In a few hours I am going to walk up the hill to my favorite bookstore on the planet, Elliott Bay Book Company, where I will buy a copy of my book. Not that I need another copy-- I've got colorful little Yoga Bitches tucked into every corner of my house and two giant boxes of books downstairs. But I've been dreaming of seeing a book with my name on it at Elliott Bay Books since I was a sixteen-year-old. So I'm buying one for her.

Le temps perdu

I've been in the cave. Caught up in building the foundation for my new book, and the idea of breaking away to write something for actual human consumption has felt tantamount to being ripped out of the womb four months early. But today, I'm ready. The first chapter's about launched, and I think I know where it needs to go, and now it's time to rub my eyes and look out at the world again.

Ah, but I'd rather think about the new book. I've spent the last month holed up in my room reading old journals, listening to old music, looking at old pictures. My friend Erin gave me some letters I wrote her from the time I'm writing about, and I've spent much of this morning reading them.

There is something oddly moving about peering into the past like this. I'm revisiting my eighteenth to twentieth years of life, when I left my parents' house in order to work and travel around Europe before I came home to start college at twenty-one. It's moving-- and it's mortifying. Absolutely excruciating to revisit my obsessions over boys and friends, my pagan-feminist revisionist histories. There was a lot of talk of goddesses. Erin called me a goddess, I called her a goddess, we had long conversations with our girlfriends about whether we were an Athena or a Hera, a Hestia or an Artemis. (I considered myself to be a rich and easily misunderstood stew of all four, natch.)

Then there's the confusion. God, I was confused. And frustrated. It's easy to forget, in my advancing thirties, how frustrating it is to be a teenager, to forever be told you know nothing, that you must follow the leader to college, to work, and back to the suburbs where you belong. To be treated like a child when you feel like an autonomous adult, ready to live on your own terms. It was awful to know so little and sense so much.

I wanted to write so badly. I wrote poems (more of that feminist-pagan thing, ouch). I wrote stories (based on myths and fairy tales and bible stories turned on their heads, like the one about an "immaculate" conception between a girl and her contortionist boyfriend) but I rarely finished them. When I was living in Munich I worked on a novel inspired by Hermann Hesse. But I still thought that writing was supposed to be an operatic act of inspiration, all orgasms and jelly beans. I thought that if I wasn't feeling inspired to write, I couldn't write. It wasn't until shortly before I left Europe that I began to understand that writing was work.

I used to wander around Munich's central plaza, Marienplatz, watching the tourists, waiting for inspiration to strike so that I could find my way to my favorite cafe in Heidhausen and finally write. If inspiration didn't hit, I just wandered, a spirit in limbo.

Last year, I was back in Munich for the first time in thirteen years. On my third day in town I took the train to Marienplatz with my friend Cathy, and we parted ways. I had about fifteen minutes to collect my thoughts before meeting my German agent for the first time. Yoga Bitch had recently been sold to a German publisher.

Thinking of writing as my job, as work, has gotten me through many years of setbacks. It takes a long time, and a lot of suffering, to get launched as a writer. I'm still in the thick of that launch, and so I rarely allow myself to sit back and enjoy the small successes along the way. It feels like bad luck to do so; also, I'm trying to stay busy actually working. But walking around Marienplatz in those fifteen minutes before my meeting, I felt so buoyant, so lucky. The only thing that could have made it better would have been to bump into my nineteen-year-old self. I know she would be confused and frustrated and unsure of what to do next. And I would tell her not to worry. Just get working.

End of an Era

I'm happy that Elliott Bay Book Company is moving to my neighborhood, but it still makes me sad to see them leave their original Pioneer Square location. I worked in Pioneer Square off and on for seven years, and Elliott Bay was where I spent my lunch hours. It was there, at age eighteen, that I fell in love with Walt Whitman and Nikos Kazantzakis, where, at twenty-one, I developed crushes on Jeanette Winterson and Mary Oliver and also a literary trustaffarian named Devon, who was a great conversationalist and a bad kisser. Till I was twenty five, I went there bleary from break-ups, dizzy with inspiration or infatuation; I went there when I was looking for research materials for plays I was acting in, then plays I was doing dramaturgy for, and then eventually for books that would help me to write: John Gardner, Anne Lamott, Vivian Gornick. I would take their books with me to New York as I started to write my first solo show and first book, Yoga Bitch. My bookshelves at home are the result of so many lunch hours spent in that treehouse of a bookstore, wondering if I could buy all the books I desperately needed and still pay my rent.

Oh, deep sigh.

(I can't resist-- that 'Oh deep sigh' is a line stolen from a Ginsberg poem. I bought the book containing that poem, "Elegy for Neal Cassady," at Elliott Bay.)

So, yeah, deep sigh. But also . . . hello, old friend! Welcome to my neighborhood! I can feel myself getting poorer with every day that brings you closer to my house!

More details about the move here, on the Slog.