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.

Kirkus Review Interview, Yoga Dork review & more!

Here's an interview I did with Molly Brown over at Kirkus, a review from Yoga Dork, and an interview with Nancy Alder over at elephant journal. And my piece over at recovering yogi has been reposted to elephant journal here and every time I look at it another thousand people have read it. 4500 so far. The yogis have been coming out for this book! An ongoing twitter discussion of Yoga Bitch has been going on as part of the twitter yoga book club (#YOBC). I'm taking part in the discussion even though I am somewhat clueless about the way twitter works. But I'm trying! Anyway, it's all a great deal of fun.

Yoga Cynic reviews Yoga Bitch

I like this elephant journal review very much.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that Yoga Bitch remains far too smart a book for either formulaic extreme. while Morrison admits to wanting to write a classic spiritual memoir about finding the God she desperately wants to believe in, she finds she can’t, honestly, and doesn’t. And, while she ends up with a sort of dueling duo of disillusionments—with both the painfully earnest-yet-hypocritical uber-new agey side of yoga culture and the ultra-commercialized even-more-hypocritical big city variety—she’s not willing to throw it all out the window, either (not permanently, at least). Like no other yoga/travel memoir I’ve read, she critically examines the condescension of affluent westerner yogis who can afford to romanticize poverty and think they’re giving dark-skinned third world people a compliment in calling them innocent. To anyone who finds the previous sentence confusing, I couldn’t recommend Yoga Bitch more highly.

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.

Behold, a new website is born.

My new website is up! You can read the first chapter of my book (my heart stopped beating for a second there, imagining actual humans reading my book), you can watch the trailers, you can even buy the book! It's like, a real website.

Yoga Bitch will be in bookstores in less than three weeks now. Gulp. This shit just got real.

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.

Reading, Writing, Rehearsing, or: The Post-Book Blues

1. I turned Yoga Bitch in to the publisher nearly three weeks ago. Final draft. No more changes. It's done.

2. Since then, a publisher in the Netherlands has decided they would like a Dutch Bitch. I am very happy about this.

3. I have been writing, sort of. Notes and notes and notes for the new book. These notes are staring at me right now. Notes that read: "The burden of history," and "Failure as a noble pursuit," and "Sex should be funny." (Still trying to remember what I meant by that last one.)

4. I have been reading, sort of. Here's what:
A. C.S. Lewis: what a man!
B. Colette: what a voice!
C. Christopher Isherwood: God, I love him. I was thinking about him the other day, and it occurred to me that I finally had an answer to that question: If you could have dinner with anyone famous, alive or dead, who would it be? I've never been able to answer that question-- too much pressure. I mean, it would be fascinating and all to meet Cleopatra, or Jefferson, or Tolstoy or Shakespeare, but over dinner? I don't know. I think I would get heartburn from the stress of thinking up intelligent questions to ask them, and then I wouldn't enjoy my dinner. Plus, what would we eat? Drink? Who would do the cooking? Certainly not me, so would we have to hire caterers? And what if Tolstoy has disgusting table manners? Would that ruin Anna Karenina for me? Couldn't we have a coffee or a drink first, and then see if we want to progress to dinner? But dinner with Christopher Isherwood would be like meeting an old, dear friend. We could talk books, or not. But I think we'd enjoy ourselves. I'd start smoking again just for the occasion.

5. I've started preparing for meetings in New York in a few weeks. Now that the writing of Yoga Bitch is done, it's time to start thinking about the selling of Yoga Bitch. August 23rd, my book will be on the shelves. That thought is exhilarating and terrifying and, for the moment, ever-so-slightly paralyzing. New York will be just the shot in the arm I need: I must journey to the land of shameless self-promotion and drink of its waters. When I come back, I'll be slicker'n cat shit.

6. I've been staring at the cover of my book! I must say, I have a bit of a crush on it.

7. You know, turning in a book must be rather like sending your child off to school for kindergarten. On the one hand, I wonder how my child will do in the big mean world, where I can't protect it from the bullies, and on the other, I wonder how I will ever fill the hours that have been devoted to its care. I'm a bit adrift. This book has taken up room in my head and heart for a long time, and I long to be engrossed again.

8. Ah, but here's a final note-to-self staring at me, written at some point in the last two weeks, perhaps on my first day back at the desk:

"Guess what else was hard?" it reads. "Writing and revising and rewriting and revising again until YB was done. You didn't always know where you were going or what you were doing. If new stories feel hard, it's because ALL WRITING IS HARD. Keep working."

On that note, I will try.

Yoga Bitch at Re-bar!

Hey lovelies!

Thanks to everyone who came out to see Yoga Bitch at Bumbershoot this past weekend. We sold out both performances and had to turn away over 200 people. We packed the audience so full there were two rows spilling onto the stage, which gave the performances a fun, informal vibe I thoroughly enjoyed.

Thanks in particular to the grand folks at TPS who sponsored my show. They put on an entire season's worth of shows in one weekend and made it seem easy. I can't wait to work with them again.

For those of you who waited in line and missed it, I'll be performing Friday and Saturday nights at Seattle's Re-bar from September 19-October 11. I've been in meetings all week to prepare, and I must say, I can't wait to begin.

You can purchase tickets here.

One highlight from the first Bumbershoot performance: After most of the audience had cleared out, I walked back onstage to clear my yoga mat, meditation cushion, and a discreetly stashed urine sample container. The mat and cushion were exactly where I'd left them, but the urine sample was not. It was in the hands of a male audience member, who was in the act of unscrewing the lid and smelling its contents. 

I won't reveal our conversation here, as portions of it will give away crucial plot points in the show. But allow me to present the image of a man sniffing a stranger's urine sample to you here, because he represents everything I look for in an audience member: a strong-enough stomach, a dash of moxy, and a compulsive urge to sniff out the truth. If that sounds like you-- see you at Re-bar.