We're back home from the coast. Mario is out mowing the lawn. I'm cooking and watching TV. I've given myself an hour to watch junky TV. Yeah! We just got back from a two hour hike in the forest. It was our first time on the Falling Creek trail this season. Long time readers of Furious Spinner know it's our favorite place to hike. We usually go the first day it opens for the season, but there was so much snow that we haven't been able to go until today, six weeks from opening. It felt like coming home. Ahhhh
Do you remember from Counting on Wildflowers that we usually have seen hundreds of deer's head orchids by now. Today we saw fifteen deer's head orchids on the trail. Gorgeous, all fifteen of them.
We were on the trail alone for the most part. Lots of elk fumets along the trail. Squirrel midden piles everywhere, too. Don't know if that means there were more squirrels this past winter or they just ate more.
Saw some trilliums. A few blue anemones. Yellow violets. So many downed Douglas firs. Two hundred years old and more. Now they'll become nurse logs. The thing with trees in the forest is that even when they are dead, they are alive. I've seen trees that have been downed for years that sprout leaves and new branches.
I had fun on the coast. I walked on the beach for hours. Saw a bald eagle hanging out next to a group of harbor seals on the beach of an island across the canal. The bald eagle was so still that I thought s/he was a piece of drift wood. A great blue heron was on the other side of the harbor seals. I watched the tide come in, watched it flow into the harbor like a living thing. Sensual, sinuous. Of course the Old Sea is living. Alive.
Anyway, it was marvelous. I could see how people mistook seals for mermaids. Those eyes look so human—or something. And now when I see their tails, they remind me so much of mermaids. I lived with seals for four years; never noticed these things before.
I sat and hung out with the seals for a long while. They stayed around me as I sat on the sand. Whenever anyone else came by, they disappeared. Funny. Perhaps I had become Invisible. Or they just saw me for the Old Mermaid I truly am.
Last night was the first time Mario and I had been home together in ten days.
Tomorrow I go to the surgeon for my check-up. It's been two years now since the surgery. Knock on wood everything will be fine. I'm a little concerned because my sense of smell has been off for so many weeks—really since my mom died.
Mario had a grand time at his writing workshop. It wasn't so much about writing as getting published and learning how to do outlines and proposals. All of that is very different from what it used to be, so it's good to know what works now.
I am hoping he writes lots of books and gets them published and makes a good living. I am slowly letting it all go, the writing stuff. I haven't stopped writing, as I told you, but I have no interest in trying to get published any more or in writing novels. At least right now. If I could figure out how to put pdfs up on blogger, I would do that for all my unpublished novels, right now. They would be imperfect (just as my published novels are), but at least they would be available to people.
I got the ARC of Ruby's Imagine today. It is quite lovely. I hope lots of people read Ruby's story. It is very dear to me, especially since I wrote it for Linda.
People keep asking me how I did on Mother's Day. I'm sad pretty much all the time, so yesterday wasn't any different. It's a process, I suppose. I'll walk through it. I'm resting and reading. I'm reading Candace Pert's Molecules of Emotion. It's fascinating to me, especially since at one time I wanted to be a research biologist. I'm also reading Feeding Your Demons by Tsultrim Allione and rereading Medicine for the Earth by Sandra Ingerman. Sandy talks about not feeding those parts of us that are toxic (although she says it much better, by using a metaphor which I can't recall well enough to repeat) whereas Tsultrim Allione encourages us to feed our demons. All very confusing sometimes. I have been fascinated with the Chöd practice for years, which is essentially what this book is about. I've seen Chöd described as a form of self-sacrifice, but I don't see it that way; I think of Chöd as the Dakini blade cutting off the head of the ego.
Christianity, much of Buddhism, and even the Celtic shamanism I've studied has too much focus on self-sacrifice. That's not really my thing. In fact, I think we've got too many people running around with martyr complexes. To make ourselves sacred and to make what we do sacred is grand and wonderful. The literal meaning of "sacrifice" is to "make holy." But I believe that it is better for us if we live fully in this world and as fully in joy as possible. Sacrifice for the sake of suffering, for the sake of some whacked view that suffering makes one holier or better than others, is, to my mind, ridiculous. And if I believed in sin, I would say that was sinful.
Anyway, I'm reading those books. Also just got Thousand Mile Song: Whale Music in a Sea of Sound by David Rothenberg. I listened to his CD (which came with the book) where he made music to accompany whale songs last night. I was not impressed. I like just listening to the whales without the human stuff. I almost bought Pagan Visions For a Sustainable Future, but it's an antho, and I never ever read anthos when I buy them. Sometimes if I check them out from the library I'll actually read them, but not if I buy it. I tend to like to read books written by one person, with one vision. I am much more comfortable with pagan witchy philosophy and pagan spirituality than anything else. We revel in this world, in the sensuous. We want to celebrate life, not try and figure out a way to get dead to go onto another world. (How could anything be as cool as this planet?)
All right, time for a bath. I'll float in my part of the Old Sea. Mario is finished with the grass. I hope to spend the rest of the week working on my garden and getting my yard into shape. Won't that be fun? And catching up on my library work. Cooking.
I'm in the strange little place on the Oregon coast. I can hear them doing dishes downstairs in the restaurant kitchen. Every once in a while I hear something from the writing group down the hall. That's where Mario is. I'm sitting cross-legged on this tiny little bed. It'll be interesting to see how Mario and I manage to sleep on it together.
I will be with the Old Sea and the Old Mermaids this weekend, so I may not be posting much. After I hugged my sweetheart, I went down to the beach. Ahhhhh. I took a few pics.
Breathe, breathe, breathe...
Foam on the beach—I'd never seen so many colors in it before.
I can't believe she said this. Clinton says she should be the candidate because white people will vote for her. Pardon me? And she's got Harvey Weinstein twisting Nancy Pelosi's arm, threatening to stop donations to the Democratic party if she doesn't get them to do a revote in Michigan and Florida. (Another reason we need some kind of campaign finance legislation.) This is dirty stuff. It seems it's about winning at all costs.
If Clinton keeps bad-mouthing Obama, I'm afraid the Republicans will win, and then we'll have eight more years of Bush. I don't have to tell you what that means. So if you support Clinton, please call her and tell her you don't agree with her tactics. This is raw ambition at its worst. And even if it isn't raw ambition, even if they believe she would be the best candidate, is this how you think the campaign should go?
Here's another reason you don't want Clinton or McCain to be president. McCain believes in the president as monarch. I believe Clinton does as well. Since Reagan on (and in other cases before then), the executive branch has gotten stronger and stronger, helped along by a weak Congress. The three branches of government are supposed to be equal. Right now, all branches are failing.
Have you seen this writer, Glenn Greenwald? I'm interested in his book Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics. Mike Malloy was talking about him last night. Greenwald says that the Republicans figured out some elections back that they could never win on the real issues, so they decided that personal attacks and wedge issues paved the way to the White House and the Congress. And the media went right along with this.
They will try to do it again this election. We have to unite to make certain that doesn't happen, which means we all have to be truthtellers with our friends and relatives until the election. We don't have to demonize John McCain. Just give them the facts about what he's done and what he says he believes. Essentially, if McCain is elected it will be four (or eight) more years of Bush. Is this what anyone wants?
As most of you know, Cyclone Nargis dealt a devasting blow to Myanmar/Burma. They now estimate that 100,000 people may have died. In part because of military junta, relief agencies are having trouble getting in. I searched for good places to make donations, but I'm having trouble finding them—at least ones I know and trust. At the bottom of the Wikipedia page on this is a list of places where you can send a targeted donation. If anyone hears of other good places where we can send donations—places which can actually get help to the people, let me know and I'll add links. So send your moula, prayers, enchantments—whatever you got—and help these people out.
Perhaps it should be "mourning" becomes electric. It is cold, cloudy, foggy. And I am spacey. I'm supposed to be on the Oregon coast, but I'm still not there. When Mario arrived at the motel, he discovered they had recently shellacked the walls. I can't believe people still use that poisonous stuff. Man. They only had one room left, a kind of closet they don't normally rent out. So that's where Mario moved. I'm not sure I'm in the mood to sleep in a closet. Or not sleep in a closet since I almost always have trouble sleeping away from home for the first night or two.
So I'm still here. Feeding the hummingbirds. Watching the ants.
Last night I curled up on the couch and watched the election returns. It was kind of like watching a baseball game. To watch the lead narrow between them was something. Clinton won Indiana by about 20,000 votes. That ain't much. When I watch Hillary Clinton, I feel sad. I really want a woman as president. I see every day how misogyny is alive and well (or alive and sick) in this country. The snide remarks commentors make about her and other women are sickening. I've read articles about how feminists just don't get it, in relation to this election. Why don't "they" just back Obama. Give me a break. I'm a feminist. If you believe in equal rights for women, you're a feminist. Those people who say feminisit don't get it, don't get it if they don't see how Clinton has been talked about—if they don't see the scorn that has been heaped upon her because she's a woman. (I apologize for that tortured sentence.) You don't think it's time for a woman to be president? How about it's two hundred years past time. 2,000 years past time.
However, Clinton's mistake was that she voted for the war. Man or woman, she shouldn't have done that. Yes, Obama has voted to fund the war every chance he's gotten. He probably would have voted for the war, too, had he been in the Senate then. Also I do not like the way Clinton has campaigned. I talked with our Washington insider, and he said he doesn't care about negative campaigning. And I think that's indicative of Washington insiders. I don't think they understand that most of America is disgusted with politics as usual; we want a change. I want a revolution: A revolution of ideas which can transform our country and bring back our ideals and make them work for everyone. I think all this nonsense about Rev. Wright is just that: nonsense. When all of that started happening, Clinton should have said, "This is crap. Let's talk about the issues." Instead, she said, "I would have left that church." That showed such a lack of integrity, I thought.
Anyway, it's easier to think about politics than other things, isn't it?
I'm not looking forward to Sunday. Mom's Day. My first Mom's Day without my mom. *sigh* I need to cut my nails. Some are long, some are broken, some are short. My mom had beautiful, hard nails. Long. After my mom died, I didn't recognize her in that coffin. Just her hands. Momma's hands.
I'm no longer having reassuring dreams about Mom. I had a nightmare the other night.
I suppose it's part of the process.
Better eat something. Then maybe the morning will actually become electric.
Broken Moon has gone into its third printing! Yeah! Thanks to everyone who bought a copy. I appreciate it. And you can now order Ruby's Imagine. Yeah! (There's no cover on the page yet, but you can go here to order it.) You won't get it for another four months, give or take, but you can order it! These things make me very happy.
It’s the middle of the night. I’m away from home. I was in bed for two hours trying to sleep. Sleep with a headache and an aching back. I just got up and got dressed and was going to drive home. It’s a Saturday night. The road home is long and windy. And dark. And I’ve gotten lost several times on this road in the daylight. Some sane part of me told the crazy part of me to get my ass back in bed. So here I am, ass and all, in bed. Annie Lennox is singing. The hepa fan is fanning. People are asleep all around me.
I feel all...furled.
I’m in a strange place. Strange as in not home. Sometimes I am such a nester. Sometimes I am such a homebody. I wanted so much to drive home to take a bath, get into my bed, sleep, sleep, get up, fix breakfast in my kitchen. Even though Mario isn’t there. He’s gone to a workshop for eight days. I’m supposed to meet him, but if the weather doesn’t get better, I ain’t going. In fact, if the weather doesn’t get better, I may scrape some coin together and drive south.
I’ve got so much to do. Library stuff. Writing stuff. Don’t want to do any of it. Want to drive and drive, she said. Curl into a ball. Sleep. Watch hummingbirds. Lay on the ground. Watch the clouds.
I’m at a workshop. Part of this two year training I’m doing with Tom Cowan. Not sure I belong here. They are great people. I love being with them. Trust them. But most of them, maybe all of them, believe. In something. In a Divine Source. In an after life—or more life. Not in a religious dogmatic way. Just because. Because of their experience. Because of their studies. Because they just do.
I believe the world is made up of more than I can ever know. And sometimes it seems impossible for me to see anything beyond my nose.
Now Annie Lennox is singing, “Big Sky, I’m gonna hurt you.”
Makes me think of New Mexico. Driving. Driving. Driving. The sky so big. So blue. Huge mother ship clouds hovering above mesas that we try to drive to for...ever. And then we’re there, all at once. Just us. Mario and me. The sand is blond. White blond. I am so small compared with the bigness all around. I still ache. I am still lost. I am still tangled up in the thread of my life, the thread that should keep me connected. But I don’t care about any of that when I am there because I am home, where the red road meets the blue sky.
Strange. I ache for place now the way I used to ache for people when I was younger.
If I had money, I would move to New Mexico in a heartbeat. Tomorrow. I’d buy a place, make it sustainable. And that’s where I’d live.
Just realized that.
Or maybe that’s just middle of the night dark of the night soul thinking.
Monday
I’m home now. I never did drive home in the middle of the night, thank goodness. Yesterday as I was leaving the place, I was lost for about thirty minutes, driving along those winding roads not having a clue as to where I was. Once I got clear of the trees and could see the mountain, then I knew where to go. Of course, in the dark of the night, I wouldn’t have seen any mountains.
Anyway.
I’m home. It’s a beautiful day and I’m inside. In about two minutes, I’m going to put on some walking clothes and I’m gonna...walk.
The hummingbird feeder was empty when I got home late yesterday afternoon. I’ve filled it again, but the hummingbirds are snubbing me.
I’ll try not to take it personally.
Mario is attending a writing workshop—on the business of writing. He’s learning lots of good stuff. Publishing has changed so much in the last five to seven years, and it’s a good thing to keep up. I’ll go meet him soonish.
I got home to an empty house yesterday. Very strange. I went around trying to put things right. But my back and head hurt. Ended up on the couch watching TV. Still have the headache. Mario reminded me that I always get a headache when I go to these workshops. It’s very intense work. Love made visible...with a headache.
Aren’t I funny?
I miss my sweetheart. I want to sit in silence. On the steps. In the sun. Watch the ants make compelling shapes on the old cement. Wonder if they are trying to communicate with me using ant semaphore. Listen to the wind in the trees. Watch the first poppy unfurl its blossom.
Is there anything more beautiful than a poppy?
No secret in what the poppy is signalling to us. To the birds. Bees. World.
Love, baby. It’s all about love.
Everyone is an island is to themselves Annie sings.
I think she’s wrong.
Many things going on in my brain now. None of it is coming out very coherently. I will talk soon about my weekend.
If you haven't read Michael Pollan's piece Why Bother, please bother. Global climate change should be our number one concern. I had the same reaction Pollan did when I saw Al Gore's movie: Where are the solutions? Michael Pollan's solution is to plant gardens. A form of multiplying smallness. What's your solution?
Thousands of dockworkers have shut down ports up and down the coast to protest the Iraq War. I haven't seen it covered on the major media markets, but maybe it has been. It doesn't matter. This is part of multiplying smallness. I commend the dockworkers for their courage and their action. We support you!
Don't forget to check out the Old Mermaid Journal. I am planning on posting on it three or four times a week, knock wood. I posted something today. Since I will be posting there regularly, I won't always announce it here. Just thought I would today...
By the way, Happy Beltane, May Day, and everything else day. May your creations bear fruit. May you know love & happiness.
Dance around the maypole today—or at least around your backyard.
No, I'm not talking about going overseas. I'm talking about broads. I got a kick out of Meta Wagner's piece reposted on Alternet. She says there aren't any good broads left. Here's her list of broad qualities:
•Would never be caught speaking the words "that's hot." •Doesn't own any pairs of Manolo Blahniks. •Uses salty language, especially around men. •Developed her brain and talents and flirtiness, in part because she couldn't coast on her looks alone. •Doesn't watch her cholesterol or have her body mass index measured. •Can probably be found right now in a back room somewhere playing poker and smoking cigars with the boys. •Can kick your ass, and mine. •Is not the librarian with glasses and her hair in a bun who then tosses her glasses and shakes out her hair to lure a man. She's the librarian. Period. •She's not the superhero/martial arts heroine who beats the guy at his own game and then lets him "take" her. She's the one who beats the guy at his own game. Period. •Knows who she is, and so no one would think of asking her to be something she's not.
I think I'm a broad. I fit most of these, except the bit about smoking a cigar with the boys. Of course, I can't hold a light to the likes of Molly Ivins or Mae West. Now they was some broads!
Mmmm. It’s an almost perfect Columbia River Gorge day today. We had rain showers. And periods of sunshine. The air is clear and crisp, with mist rising above the dark green sides of the gorge, rising until it is indistinguishable from the clouds, becoming clouds, I suppose. Does mist have ambition to be a cloud? Rain? Snow? The snow dusts the higher elevations of the gorge like powdered sugar on top of a conifer cake. Still feels like winter. Yet the cottonwood trees are all leafing out. Their leaves are lime-colored and tender-looking. The osprey are sitting in their huge nests alongside the river, slow-cooking embryos into bird babies.
Yesterday we had to go to town. It was beautiful then, too. Storming one minute, sunny with rainbows the next. Kind of like life, babies. As I was coming out of the library in the Hollywood District, a man came in the same door I was leaving from. I stepped out of his way. He looked at me and yelled, “Fuck you, too, for letting them rape my neighborhood.” It was hailing and raining outside, and Mario had gone to get the car because I had forgotten my hat and scarf and it was cold. A few seconds before my encounter with the man, I had been standing by the window watching the downpour and talking with another woman. We talked about the winter that never seems to end. Wondering when the locusts were coming. Then I saw our car and I started outside. Met the man. “Fuck you, too, for letting them rape my neighborhood!”
I thought he was probably schizophrenic and wasn’t actually talking to me. I looked back at the woman I had been speaking with and I shrugged and said, “Okay.” And I laughed. The woman looked afraid. So did another woman, younger, who sat on a bench near her. I started outside again. I could feel the warmth from the library entranceway and the fresh coolness from the rocky rain blending for a moment. And I heard the man say, “Don’t laugh.” So he had been talking to me, he was noticing me. I had my back to him and it flashed through my brain that this was how people got killed. In a moment like this. By a crazy person. An angry person. I didn’t like having my back to him. I sensed he was coming after me. I knew he was going to try to hurt me.
I ran. I ran into the hail and rain and I got into the car. Safe. Safe. Safe. Locked the door. Then I looked to see if the man had followed me. He hadn’t. He hadn’t followed. Mario drove away.
I was all right. Nothing had happened.
It made me wonder though: What had I done to allow the "rape of my neighborhood." Or what hadn't I done. How had I acted or not acted? How responsible was I—were all of us—for the state of the world.
Mario and I drove through the storm toward home. Huge blue-black storm clouds hung over us like magnificent paintings in a sky gallery. Ahhhhh. We had the radio on. Someone recited Kahlil Gibran's quote "Work is love made visible.” I’d heard that quote before, but it hadn’t really resonated with me. This time, this day, it did.
I said to Mario, “Wow. I think maybe that’s what I do with my writing: try to make love visible.”
“I know it’s what you do,” he said. “That’s why I was so sad when you said you were quitting.”
We drove through a tunnel just then. Into a kind of golden darkness. A noisy silence. Rumble. Then into the stormy light again.
Love made visible. As I thought about it, I knew that was what I did with my writing. It was what I did when I was a community librarian. All the work I did was an expression of my love. I remembered when I first heard that quote years ago, I imagined people slaving over widgets, cotton fields, office computers. How was that love made visible? I had wondered. I associated the word “work” with drudgery, unhappiness, this thing we had to do to stay alive. I’ve always been aware of how lucky and privileged I am to have the choice to try to make a living doing something I love. We should all be so lucky. So when I heard that quote before, I thought Kahlil Gibran must not understand what work is.
Yet now I wondered if maybe I should adopt a more catholic definition of the word "work."
My writing is work. I love my work. I love the creation process.
Some of my writer friends think it’s silly that I consider my writing to be my art, that I think of it as something that is sacred to me. Writing is something that sustains me, it is one of the ways that I communicate with the world. For these friends, we put words on paper. That's what writers do. Period. That’s all right. They can do that. I think that’s wonderful for them! Me? I’ll be the story shaman. It is my work.
Love made visible.
I’d like my entire life to be love made visible.
When I got home yesterday, I read an interview in Alternatives with Gary Holthaus, a sustainable agriculture activist. It was Part 2 and I hadn’t read the first part, but the person conducting the interview summed up some of the things Holthaus had said previously.
“Are you saying that the best course may be to leave that which is unsustainable to its inevitable fate? In other words, not spend a lot of energy fighting the giant institutions and corporations because they are, by definition, unsustainable and will collapse anyway, of their own weight? I’m thinking of Cargill, Monsanto, ADM, and the others. They buy the politicians, and they’ll write the Farm Bill as they please. But never mind them, let’s get to our work, which is about sustainable local and organic food, building up the soils, and teaching people about urban agriculture that works. Is that what you’re getting at?”
Holthaus answers, “Absolutely. It’s about finding out how to feed ourselves healthy food, and to heck with those other guys. I’d say to heck with Congress, we can ignore them, too. We can ignore the Farm Bill, we can do fine without Monsanto—in fact we’re going to have to learn to do that.”
I thought, yes, yes, yes! I’ve been an activist almost all my life, starting back in elementary school when I tried to protect the killdeer from the insane boys who crushed the birds eggs with hysterical delight. Most of the time, I’ve been fighting corporations, big businesses, big governments. I end up defeated; these entities end up energized by my defeat; and nothing is accomplished. The problem remains unsolved.
Holthaus goes on to say, “We’ve got to change our world-view. The difference between a sustainable agriculture—or sustainable culture—and one that’s commodity-driven and short-term is a difference in world-view. Only when we change the story we’ve been telling ourselves about how the world works can we transform the culture. That’s what we have to do.”
Of course he’s right. So much of our efforts have been based on bringing down the big guy or becoming part of the big guy so we can transform him. That ain’t working. It ain’t gonna work. We have to go on without them, almost as if they didn’t exist. And we can’t feed them, of course: We can’t buy their chemicals; we can’t buy their crap. We can’t use it. We must change our world-view and change how we act.
The root of the word “work” means “to act.” If work is love made visible, then isn't any act, any action, love made visible, too? Is it love to spray chemicals into the air and on our lawns? Is it love to create warfare in our homes, communities, and nation? Is it love to support businesses that aren’t sustainable? Is it love not to act?
I’ve talked many times about how we each have a responsibility. We each have some ability to respond: responsibility. Only you know what that means for you. But we can’t sit around wringing our hands. Step up to the plate, man, and swing, batter, batter, swing! No excuses.
Holthaus says that information will not save us.
“For instance, we’ve known about global warming for the last three decades,” he says, “and it hasn’t changed our behavior a bit. We’ve had all the information about the end of oil for three or four decades: hasn’t changed our driving. We aren’t going to win this with arguments—arguments just create defensiveness or aggression.
“No, the most powerful tool we’ve got is to change the story we’ve been telling ourselves. That old story is as toxic as it comes—‘bigger is better’, and ‘if you can’t get big, you’d better get out’. That’s the story of agriculture in the last fifty years. ‘Chemicals can fix anything’—they obviously can’t....The story we’ve been telling ourselves is about speed, growth and chemicals. It’s destroying us.
“The new story is about compassion instead of condescension or indifference. We are in this together, and we are going to take care of each other—not competition, but cooperation. Somehow or another we’ve got to find ways to spread that story, and we’ve got to spread it fast. “One of my optimisms is that, we’re gonna multiply smallnesses, instead of encouraging bigness. Think about how rural America would look now if over the past fifty years we’d been encouraging smallness instead of ending it. We’d have lots of small farms, which inevitably give us prosperous small communities. And those prosperous small communities would be feeding us, and we wouldn’t be dealing with the urban sprawl, and all the problems that brings. That’s the story we need to tell and get out there.”
Multiply-smallness. Ain’t that a grand idea?
Love made visible.
Holthaus says we’ve got to change our story. Do you understand what that means? We must all be story shamans. You, me, him, her, us. Us. It has to be about what we teach our children and what stories we continue to tell ourselves.
This is the long way of saying that I've decided I am not going to quit writing. I’m not going to quit telling my stories. I'll keep doing it, keep writing it my way.
Hello! So some of you have been having trouble with the website if you use Internet Explorer. Sorry about that. I don't use IE, so I didn't see it and when I checked it on the old IE, which is the only one you can use on a Mac, it looked fine. But we went someplace and looked at it with the latest Internet Explorer and saw what you were seeing, so we're hoping it's fixed. We don't see the things on Jane's post that some of you are seeing even when we get into the HTML, so we're confused.
By the way, I would suggest you try other browsers than IE if you can stand it. I like Camino, Firefox, or Safari much better than Internet Explorer. But if you do keep IE and you see problems with the website, let me know, because otherwise I won't know. Hope that makes sense. That was always true with Furious Spinner, too.
Yeah!!! The free book giveaway has come to an end. Thanks to everyone for reading the interviews and to everyone who commented. I've decided to give everyone who commented one of my books. I have most of your email addresses, but Gypsy, Vancouver Gal, Robert, and Melissa need to email me because I don't have yours.
By the way, someone said that in one of the browsers, Jane's interview has some squares in them. I don't see them, so I can't take them out. Sorry about that. Macs don't have access to updated Internet Explorer, so I have no idea what it looks like on that. I looked at an old IE, and everything was in caps. I hope it's not like that on the newer versions.
Anyway, I did check the blog on three browsers and it looked good on all three, although the font was smaller on one of them. Did you know that in most browsers you can go up to "view" and increase the font size of any page from there? Very convenient for readers.
Okay! I'll start getting those books out to everyone.
Here is the interview with me, Kim Marie Ann Antieau! About sixty writers, editors, family members, and friends asked these questions. I didn’t think about the questions much before answering them. I just went down the list and wrote my answers. Even so, this took me days! It was a lot of fun.
By the way, if you asked me a question and I didn’t link to your correct website, just write to me and I can fix it. And if you asked me a question and it isn’t here, that doesn’t mean I don’t love you! It means I either never got it or I lost it. I lost about six questions (that I know about) but I was able to find them again. So just send the question along again and I’ll add it with my answer. All of this is probably far more than you ever wanted to know. I hope you have fun! Thanks to everyone for the fabulous questions.
Don't forget that I'm giving away books to thirteen people who leave comments anywhere on the blog through Tuesday night. On Wednesday I'll put all the names in a hat and pull out thirteen.
Happy reading!
Michael Bourret (my agent): When did you know you were a writer?
Kim Antieau (KA): Before I could write, I drew pictures to tell a story. Then for a few years, I wrote stories and drew. I won an art contest when I was in first grade. I remember thinking that I could be an artist or a writer when I grew up, but I figured I could make a living as a writer. Why would such a young child be thinking in those terms? I have no idea, especially since as an adult I’ve never made big decisions based on high-paying jobs. I have been a professional writer for a little over half my life, and I still have never made a living at it. Perhaps I should rethink all this and become an artist instead?
Julia Richardson (my editor): What's your favorite swear sword?
KA: The ef word is definitely my favorite swear word. No other word in the English language feels as good to say when I am frustrated or amazed. I do often recall my third grade teacher, Miss Root, however, who said that it displayed more imagination, creativity, and class to swear in style without using curse words. So when she was frustrated, she would say something like, “Ooooh blueberry fudgesickles!” Or “blueberry muffins!” (She used other combinations, but I remember she liked them blueberries.) I appreciate her sentiment, and I do try to vary my swear word repertoire.
Robin Wasserman: If you could spend the day with a fictional character, who would it be and what would you do together?
KA: That’s a tough one. There are so many cool fictional characters. I’d love to hang out with Jane Eyre and find out where she got her backbone. I wouldn’t mind following Sissy around from Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. She had herself some adventures. The Count of Monte Cristo. I’d like to find out how he survived. Oh and the Scarlet Pimpernel. I don’t like looking foolish, and he reveled in that and used it to his advantage. And Ripley from Alien. I’d definitely like to learn a thing or two from her on surviving. But I'd only like to meet her on Earth, where there aren't any of those lovely creatures she was always fighting with. And I’d love to meet Gloria, from my novel The Gaia Websters because she can heal people.
Alyson Noël: You are going to a desert island—for the next ten years—you can only bring one book—which one do you choose?
KA: One book? Oh geez. Probably if there was a book about all the flora on the island and their medicinal uses. That’s what I’d take.
Lara M. Zeises: If you could live inside any television show (past or present), what would it be or why?
KA: Hmmm. I really liked the sense of community in Northern Exposure, although I don’t like cold weather. I’d love to visit the world in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Although I wouldn't want to stay too long. I like my feet planted on Mother Earth. I liked the town in Gilmore Girls, but I wouldn’t be the star, so would it really be that much fun?
Terri Clark: From one librarian to another, what's your favorite thing about working in a library and what's your least favorite thing?
KA: I now select books, so I’m not in the branches much. My absolute favorite thing about being a librarian is being with the public. I loved it! I loved helping people, finding what they needed. I loved working with teenagers especially. I loved the energy teenagers brought to a library. My least favorite thing was dealing with administration. I see myself as one of the true librarians! (How pompous is that?) I became a librarian to stand up for our intellectual freedom and to protect the civil rights of the people in my community. I have no patience for whimpy library administrations or boards who pander to the few people who complain about materials.
Judy Gregerson: How many Pulitzer Prize winning books you have read?
KA: I had no idea! I don’t usually notice when a book wins a prize, although I love the idea you have of reading X amount of Pulitzer Prize winning books in a year. I got my Masters in American Literature and before that I was an English Language major; I got weary of some of the standard “great” book lists. So many of these novels were written by men, about men. (Back in the day.) Plus many of them were boring! After college, I started reading as much popular fiction as I could, like science fiction and mystery and fiction from other countries, especially Latin American novels. Anyway, I just went and looked up the list of Pulitzer Prize winners. Here are my totals. Fiction: I’ve read 6. Dramas: I’ve seen or read 17. History winners: 2. Bios: zero. Poetry: 5. General non-fiction: 1.
Nancy Viau: Of all your characters, which one shares most of your personal traits?
KA: Mario says Gloria from The Gaia Websters is the most like me. That’s funny to me because I admire her the most of all my characters. (Although it’s difficult to pick which I admire most; I really admire Mercy, Nadira, and Ruby so much!) Gloria is very strong. She doesn’t suffer fools, and she doesn’t understand or really care about some of the social niceties. She’s a problem-solver. She’s also not very in touch with her feelings. She’s not mushy. But she’s extremely loyal and competent. I am a problem-solver. I am very loyal. I used to be very competent, not sure I am quite that way any more. And I have trouble with personal relationships. I go away and do my work for long periods of time and then when I put my head out the door again, I wonder where everyone has gone.
KA: I’m not sure it’s so secret, but I watch TV. It feels like a vice because I don’t think it’s that good for me. I love stories. I hate commercials. We turn off our TV service several times a year for months at a time. But when I’m stressed, that’s how I zone out.
KA: Not that I know of. I’ve had creepy feelings in places although I don't see anything that's strange. Also when I was in college, a my closet door fell off of its hinges when I was resting on my bed one afternoon. My roommate and I joked that we had a ghost or poltergeist in the place. That day I heard a “boom.” I got out of bed and saw immediately that the door was off its hinges. The weird thing is that for it to be off its hinges someone would have had to lift it up so that the acorn pin came up out of the hinge knuckles—it couldn’t have just slipped off; it wasn’t physically possible. That is the weirdest thing that has happened to me, and we were never able to explain it. I was alone in the apartment, by the way, which was the top floor/attic of an old house in Ypsilanti, Michigan.
Cynthia Leitch-Smith: If you could change one thing about your apprenticeship (pre-publication, craft-building time as a beginning writer), what would it be and why?
KA: I don’t think I’d change anything I did. I wrote and I tried to get it published. Maybe I wouldn’t have concentrated so much on genre fiction because my work didn’t really fit in genre, so publishers often didn’t know what to do with it or how to categorize it. My writing is what Charles de Lint and Terri Windling call “mythic fiction.” When I was starting out it was too weird for mainstream but it wasn’t really straight science fiction or fantasy. I wish I could change how publishing is now. When I started out, once you got a book published, the first one, publishers stuck with you and helped you build an audience. But that has not happened with me and it doesn’t happen with many writers now. We’re expected to “go big” right away.
Melissa Walker: What songs would you definitely put on the soundtrack for Ruby's Imagine or what song would Ruby want on there?
KA: This was so much fun, Melissa! Thanks for asking. I'm not sure I can post these—I mean I hope I'm not violating anybody's rights. I bought all the albums and I'm linking to them. But if the artist doesn't want them here, I will take them down. I actually think the whole album Adieu False Heart could just be the soundtrack. But here's a playlist/soundtrack of songs I think Ruby liked. (These MP3's are a little hinky and sometimes take a bit too load. I'll put them on the Ruby's Imagine page, too.
Lisa McMann:Who is your best friend in the world and will you tell us a little about why you like that person? Also, does he/she have great hair?
KA: My best friend in the world is my husband, Mario Milosevic. What I liked about him when I first met him and what I still like about him is his sense of humor. He is the funniest person I know. And he thinks I’m the funniest person he knows. He’s also very eclectic in his interests. He isn’t macho. He is supremely comfortable in the company of women, and women and men are comfortable with him. My best girlfriend was Linda Ford. She died a year and a half ago. She was funny, too. She knew everything (and I mean everything). She would walk in the woods with me almost anytime, and like me, she hugged trees. I miss her very much. Ruby’s Imagine is dedicated to her.
April Lurie: What do you love about publishing? What do you hate about publishing?
KA: I love the process of getting a book published. I like when a book is first accepted for publication. Knock on wood, my editors usually ask for very little changes. I love looking at the copyedited pages with the little red marks. Although the red marks were a little stressful on Ruby’s Imagine. Ruby has her own way of speaking and the copyeditor wanted her to be consistent in how she spoke and Ruby just wasn’t. I love getting the galleys and seeing the almost-book. I usually love seeing the cover, although covers can be so problematic and I’ve hated a couple of mine (from way back). And then I like seeing the book itself. After it’s published, it’s out of my hands, so I don’t like that part. I just cross my fingers and hope people buy the book.
What do I hate about publishing? First, publishing is not very green, to put it mildly. It is not sustainable. I mean, they still use this archaic bizarre returns system in publishing. And nearly everyone just seems to accept this. Are you kidding me? What other industry does this? “Excuse me, but this shirt didn’t sell; cut off the sleeve and send it back to the manufacturing and throw the rest of the shirt out.” (If any readers are not familiar with returns, it's when the retailer strips the paperbacks of their covers and ships the covers back for credit. Then the stripped books are thrown out. Let’s hope most places at least recycle them.
I also hate how much writers are paid. Most fiction writers in this industry cannot make a living at writing. This is something hardly anyone will talk about! Every time I mention it, I can hear, see, smell the hackles rising. Think about it. Publishing is about these words writers put on paper. It is our art and/or our labor. Yet most of us don’t make a living! The editors make a living, the agents, the publishers, the printer, the cover artists, the people in marketing and sales. Not the writer. So everyone else is able to feed their families and pay their bills except the person who is doing the creating, the person who is doing the work. This is exploitive. It’s not that I don’t want the agents, editors, publishers, etc. to make a living at doing their work. No, that’s not the point. I honor and appreciate all the work they do, and I want them to have happy, fulfilling lives. I want the same for myself and my fellow writers.
Yes, some writers make a living. Reporters can make a living. Some nonfiction writers make a living. Screenwriters often can make a living and this is in no small part due to their union. I know some fiction writers who do make a living. These are people who usually write multiple books under various names—although not always. I got $7,500 for each of my first two novels, $10,000 for my third novel, Coyote Cowgirl. How does anyone live on $10,000 a year—and most writers don’t sell a book a year. No publisher is going to do any publicity or marketing for a novel they pay $10,000 for, even when the author ellicits a promise that the publisher won’t let the novel fall through the cracks. (Well, maybe some publishers, but I don't know any.) Nearly everyone in the industry seems to accept this standard of authorial poverty. Some will wax on about the free market and if you sell more widgets you’ll get more money next time. First, the free market is crap. Secondly, if the publishers paid more money for a book, they’d be forced to pay attention to it and actually do some planning and marketing on each and every title they buy and then the so-called widgets would sell. Yes, less books probably would be bought by publishers, but then the writers who did sell books could actually make a living.
Many writers have a spouse who supports them so that they can take the time to write. What this essentially means is that rich people, or at least well-off middle-class people, are the ones who are publishing much of the fiction. So we’re getting a pretty skewed look at our world. Pay writers decently, and different classes and type of people will be able to write their stories and get them out to the public.
There needs to be a revolution in publishing. The present mode is not sustainable for the environment and it’s not sustainable for the writers—at least not those of us who need to eat, pay our rent and electricity bills. And yes, writers need to stand up and demand more. We are definitely part of the problem.
Debbie Reed Fischer: Do you have a personal experience that made it into your books? If so, what was it?
KA: Hmmm. I try not to fictionalize my life. I like to write to get away from parts of my life, plus I have the blog to write about myself! Like most writers, bits and pieces of my life do get into my books. There were eating issues in my family and some of those made their way into Mercy, Unbound. In The Blue Tail, a YA novel I just finished, Serena Blue gets beaten up by her boyfriend one night at a party. That happened to me at the end of my senior year. Not a high point of my life, and I still remember what I heard and felt thata night. Her experience parallels my own pretty closely.
Eric Luper:You have 30 days to squander $1 million. You cannot pay off debt, give it to anyone or sock it away in a rainy day fund. All the money has to be gone in a month. How do you spend it?
KA: I’d buy land and a house. Or some land and two houses. Live in the Southwest part of the year and live part of the year in the Pacific Northwest.
Linda Joy Singleton:What's the strangest thing you ever did for research on a story?
KA: Hmmm. I’ve done lots of things for research. Maybe the strangest was when I went to a Fish and Wildlife animal forensics lab in Ashland, Oregon, when I was doing research on eagle deaths in Oregon. I got a tour. Interviewed the guy in charge. Watched them start a necropsy on a gold eagle. I saw a whole room filled with items confiscated from people coming into the country. Boots made out of leather from endangered animals, things like that.
Teri Brown: Who is your favorite fictional crush and why?
KA: I do like Darcy in Pride and Prejudice. I love honorable men. Never been attracted to "bad boys." And Sarah Connor from the Terminator movies is pretty cool. I would have run off with Benjamin from The Gaia Websters. And any of the Benjamins in The Jigsaw Woman. (I usually have someone named Benjamin in my novels. No reason. I just started doing it and now I keep doing it. I think I’ve only known one Benjamin in “real” life and he was a jerk.)
D. Anne:If you could interview one fictional character, or one writer who is no longer alive, who would it be and what would you ask them?
KA: Just one? Emily Dickinson. And then Walt Whitman. I think I’d just like to spend time with Emily. I want to walk through the fields of tall grass and wildflowers with her and her dog, her wild red hair flowing behind her. I’d like to sit with her and watch her write. And then maybe, maybe, I'd pick one poem and ask her if she could tell me what it meant to her.
Michelle Antieau: If you could only keep or have one of your five senses (sight, hearing, smell, touch or taste)—which would you choose and why?
KA: As you know, I lost my sense of smell for almost fifteen years, and now I only have it part of the time. I LOVE being able to smell. It makes life much more sensuous. My sense of taste is still pretty poor. But I think I would probably keep my sight.
KA: I’m probably the most like Sister Lyra Musica Mermaid because she struggles with her fears. I’m also a bit like Sister Ursula Divine Mermaid because she likes to wander around the wilderness a lot, and she can be a bit cranky.
Alice Hoffman: What was your favorite book when you were twelve?
KA: Probably The Black Stallion and The Island Stallion Races. Although my horse phase was fading about that time. But I loved all the Walter Farley books.
Jo Knowles: How did you learn about your first book sale? Can you describe "the call"?
KA: Guess what, Jo? I have no specific memory of it! My agent must have called me, but I don’t remember. I do remember the call when Coyote Cowgirl sold, but that’s probably because it was Winter Solstice and I was making cookies. But other than that, I don’t remember specifically any calls.
Stephanie Hale: If you could be any fictional character for a day, who would it be?
KA: God.
John McNally: What fictional character would you like to bring to life to meet? Explain.
KA: Since this question is asked more than once in this interview, I can answer it more than once, right? I’d like to meet some of my own characters. I’d like to meet all the Old Mermaids and spend time with them, maybe for the rest of my life—as long as Mario could come, too. The Old Mermaids welcome all travellers. They are more than survivors, they are thrivers. They are magical, mystical, earthy, wild, and homey. Yep, I’d love to hang out with them.
KA: Well, I already mentioned how much I admire Gloria from The Gaia Websters and the Old Mermaids. I also think Nadira from Broken Moon is amazing. She lives in a patriarchal culture where she isn’t “worth” much. She’s been mutilated and raped. But she survives and when her brother is kidnapped, she does everything she can do to find him. I admire action even in the face of fear. Same with Ruby in Ruby’s Imagine. She is a beautiful person. She hears the voices of the world, the visible and the invisible. She gets little encouragement from her family—to put it mildly—yet she doesn’t curl up and die: She becomes more and more herself. I think that’s the challenge of all of us. We need to fill up with ourselves, to be full of ourselves, not full of what big business is trying to sell us or what the culture says we should be. We need to figure out who we are and then we need to be that! Gloria, Nadira, and Ruby are full of themselves!
Tera Lynn Childs: If you could only read one book (over and over) for the rest of your life, what would it be?
KA: That’s a really tough one. I guess if I could only read one, I’d write it. And it would be really long, ongoing, and full of stories. Probably about the Old Mermaids. How’s that for a dodge? If I couldn’t do that, I guess I’d find the biggest fairy tale book in the world and read that.
Lisa Yee:What's the oldest thing in your refrigerator, and why?
KA: I read this question in the middle of the night, and I laughed outloud. When I told my husband your question, he said, “If the answer is that celery, we better throw it out.” So I just got up and looked. The oldest thing in the fridge is a jar of sesame seeds I bought from a friend of mine last summer when she was moving from Washington state to Santa Fe, New Mexico. I keep thinking I’m going to make tahini or something with them and I never have. Probably time to toss them.
KA: I have had an agent and I haven’t had an agent. When I didn’t have an agent, I spent so much of my time looking for markets for my books, and I didn’t like doing that. I like writing. I want someone else to do the marketing for me! I’ve had agents I really liked and I’ve had problems with agents. (I've had five.) My biggest problem with agents is that they nearly always tell me to stop writing so much. Also, I don’t understand why an agent has to like a book before s/he sends it out. I see agents as the key to get the publisher’s door open so we can slip my book through and have the editor read it; then when I get a contract, agents are extra eyes to look the contract over. Whether they like a book or not seems superfluous to the process.
Also, agents work for the writers, not the other way around. We’re paying them 15% for their expertise. But writers often kiss up to their agents and/or are afraid of them. They’ve got the relationship half-ass backwards. I really like my current agent, Michael Bourret. I see our relationship as collaborative, but I’ve got the final say. It’s my work and my life. We do not agree on everything, and I get impatient with how long things take, but he understands that. Michael gets my writing and loves it and that is different from some of the other experiences I have had with agents. He understands my world view and appreciates it. He's a great guy; I am fortunate.
I do know that privately, most writers complain about their agents. The biggest complaint I hear is that agents act as editors now and that feels like one more hurdle to jump over before the person with the contract and the check gets to see the manuscript. Our ultimate goal is to get the books out to the readers, and sometimes it just seems to take forever for that to happen. The other complaint I hear is the same one I have, that I mentioned above. Why does the agent have to like the book in order to send it out? Reading it, understanding it, knowing what it's about is one thing; but why do they have to like it?
Lisa Schroeder:How do you decide which books to order for your library?
KA: I read reviews. I look at pre-pub reports. I love hearing from patrons about what they want, but I try very hard to get what the people who aren’t speaking up want, too; in other words, most people don’t tell the library what they want, so I try to figure it out by looking at community trends, circulation stats on particular books, etc. I have a particular budget, depending upon what area I’m selecting, and that determines how many titles I can get, really. I’ve been doing selection for about twenty years, and I’ve never figured out a science to it.
Mario Milosevic:If you were asked to send a message to aliens on another planet, what would you say?
KA: Barada nikto.
Melissa Senate:Ruby's Imagine takes place in New Orleans, where a fortune teller on the streets of the French Quarter once told me something that totally changed my life (for the much better and for only five bucks)! That city will always be a place of magic and mystery for me. What does New Orleans mean for the characters of Ruby's Imagine (and for you) before, during and after Hurricane Katrina?
KA: I was born in Louisiana. My folks were from Michigan, but my dad was in the service at the time, stationed at Barksdale Air Force Base. Although we left when I was very young and I don’t remember anything about it, I have a soft spot in my heart for Louisiana. And New Orleans seems to be a place where the Puritans never found a foothold like they did in the rest of the country. In many ways, New Orleans was like the soul of this country. For Ruby, it’s where she lives because her parents were killed in a car crash, so she has to live there with her grandmother. She has fond memories of the bayous, but she loves New Orleans, too. She loves the natural parts of it, when she can find those parts, and she loves the people. It is home to her. Ruby discovers her true strength during Hurricane Katrina. After Katrina, Ruby wants to help put it all back together. For me, I see Hurricane Katrina as an example of what can happen when people think of Nature as a commodity, as something they can constantly strip, pave under, suck the life out of. Everything failed in New Orleans because the government and people ignored the environment, tried to bend it to their will, instead of figuring out to go with the flow of Nature and be a part of the environment. I was ashamed of our government and how the poor people in New Orleans were treated before, during, and after Hurricane Katrina. I also think it is just an example of things to come if global warming is not slowed.
Tara Altebrandoe:Rollercoasters. Yay or nay? And what does your answer say about you?
KA: Nay. It says I’m chicken, that’s what it says!
Karen Shinsky: What one person has influenced you the most or whom you have admired?
KA: I really admired my best friend Linda. She was comfortable in the world, for the most part, especially the natural world, and she knew so much about it. Same with Dad. He knows so much about so many things, especially Nature. Mom and Dad both influenced my writing. Dad read to us at night. Mom encouraged me to keep writing when I was very young, and she told me to save what I wrote for future generations! I am a pretty independent thinker, but my family, friends, and my experiences have no doubt shaped who I am now. It's difficult to pick one person! For the last 27 years, Mario has had the most influence on my life. So I'd probably have to pick him as the one, and as the one person I admire the most. He is my sweetheart, and he's just a great person. A good man.
Mary E. Pearson:What was the most embarrassing thing that ever happened to you in high school?
KA: I don’t know if it was so much embarrassing as humiliating. I broke up with my high school sweetheart my last year of school, in the last semester. He was co-captain of the football team (no big deal; it wasn’t a very good football team). I broke up with him to go out with his friend, the other co-captain. And then I broke up with that guy, too. My HS sweetheart was well-loved, so I was considered the bad guy by the rest of the school. (It was a small school.) And the boys were the worst. I’d go in the cafeteria and walk by boys sitting on the stage and they’d whisper things like “bitch.” You know, high school juvenile crap. Then I went to a party one night. The second boy I’d broken up with was there with some of his friends. They were mumbling stuff about me. I walked up to them to talk to them, trying to be the “bigger” person, and they poured a glass of beer over my head. I ran crying from the garage where the party was and into the night. The host of the party, a really sweet girl, went into the night and found me, brought me back to the house, and washed me up. She was so kind and gentle. (I had had a crush on her when we were very young. I think her house was the first place I had a sleepover.) Anyway, she was very kind and the boys were jerks. After graduation, some of them apologized to me.
Niki Burnham:Who's your favorite fictional character?
KA: Oooh. I get to answer this again. Right this second my favorite fictional character is Frank Pembleton, from Homicide: Life on the Streets. What I liked about Pembleton was the he was great in his job, and he always did the right thing. And let’s face it, he was gorgeous.
Sara Zarr: What's the first thing you do most mornings and the last thing you do most nights?
KA: I get up and pee. What can I say? I try to meditate. Sometimes that means I stay in bed and close my eyes and try not to fall back to sleep. Sometimes I get up and sit on the couch and meditate. Oh wait, before all that, though, I look outside to see what the day is like. Then I check the weather on my dash on the computer and check for messages. Last thing I do at night is kiss my husband and tell him I love him.
Jordan Sonnenblick: You seem to have a huge sense of adventure. Why do you write—as opposed to, say, being a cowgirl or a cliff-diver?
KA: I’m not sure why I write instead of doing something else. I was good at it, and I didn’t want to be stuck in an office all day. I was going to be a Vista volunteer. A lawyer. A biologist. I had always been a writer, so I just kept doing it! I love stories. I love people who write and read stories. I make stuff up and I don't get in trouble for it. Most of the time.That’s pretty cool.
Marissa Doyle: If you could choose anywhere in the world to live for a year and then write a book set in that place, where would you choose to live? Why?
KA: I love the Southwest. I’d love to live in New Mexico for a year. I’ve already written several books about the Southwest, so I could write even more! It might be fun to live in Nova Scotia or Prince Edward Island for a year. Although I suppose fun is the wrong word. New Zealand. Tahiti. Okay, I can’t decide.
Annabel and Elisabeth:We were wondering if you have ever used positive thinking or visualization to help achieve a goal, whether it is in writing, or maybe doing something completely outside the realm of work.
KA: I use positive thinking all the time. And I visualize, especially for healing purposes. I don’t generally use it for my work. However, I’m not one of these people who thinks I have to think good thoughts all the time. That’s just crazy. In a real sense, actually. At least for someone like me. I don’t pretend that things are all good because lots of times they aren’t. I try to find the truth, see the truth, and then chose the action. Wallowing in horror isn’t helpful either. We don’t have the ability to respond (responsibility) if we’re too depressed to do anything. What I try to do is be in the now, whatever that now is. I’m not always successful at doing that.
Rachel Cohn: Turn to page 86 of your novel and read through it. Do you remember what you were doing the day you wrote that section, and did anything about that day influence what you wrote?
KA: So, Rachel, I went to my box of books and I pulled out Coyote Cowgirl. I turned to page 86. It was blank. I thought that was very Zen! So I don't remember what I was thinking or doing then, but I LOVED writing Coyote Cowgirl. I didn't have one minute of angst with that book. It was a blast! And I still miss Crane, the talking crystal skull.
Julia Moberg:How does being a Librarian influence your writing life? And vice versa.
KA: Being a librarian helps me buy groceries so I can be a writer! I love libraries. I love public service. I love working for the public good. Generally speaking, good librarians and good writers understand the issues of Intellectual freedom, so I suppose I’m a double-advocate for intellectual freedom.
Blake Nelson:When you were 16 what did you think you'd be when you grew up and how did you think you would dress?
KA: I think when I was sixteen I was planning to be a lawyer. I don’t think I thought about how I’d dress! I was probably wearing mini-skirts then because we couldn’t wear slacks in school. As soon as they changed the dress code, I was in jeans and sweaters.
Samantha Schutz: What is the first piece of creative writing that you remember doing? How old were you? What was it about? What sort of reaction did it get it (if you showed anyone)?
KA: My first creative writing was in the form of pictures. I drew a story. It was about a rabbit, I think. As soon as I could write, I started writing. The first story I really remember writing is Lily Goes to Fairyland. I still have it. I wrote it in pencil. My mom told me I should write in pen so that it would last longer. So I wrote over the pencil in pen. I
