Book Talk

Hatred keeps on increasing to a point where both you and I burn ourselves in mutual hatred, and to the Buddha, the only way to solve it is that one party must stop…

– Ananda W. P. Guruge
Awakenings: Asian Wisdom for Every Day

April 2001, I was on a solo road trip researching Nevada light, indigo mountains and small-town casinos for my novel Going Through Ghosts. I had stopped in a convenience store for coffee and yakked with the clerk. She told me there was a warm spring in a nearby cottonwood grove. “Don't tell anybody where it is. It's for locals only. We take care of it.”

“I should be scared,” she [Sarah] said. “I'm dead. I've never been dead before. And I'm not scared.”
Mary Sojourner's new novel, Going Through Ghosts, is a storytelling triumph. This should come as no surprise from this seasoned author, who is also a popular writing workshop facilitator and former commentator for NPR. Published by University of Nevada Press, Going Through Ghosts is a novel about transformation, both in a physical and a spiritual sense.
It's hard not to fall in love with such expertly fleshed-out characters like Maggie Foltz, a veteran cocktail waitress earning her unrewarding living in the Mojave Desert in Southern Nevada, her new friend Sarah, a Native American who works at the same casino and Jesse, a disturbed three-tour Vietnam vet.

Nun: Do you ever wake up scared in the early hours of the morning?
Me (the cop): Almost every night.
Nun: And does this fear originate somewhere in the area of the navel.
Me: Above the navel, somewhere between the navel and the solar plexus.
Nun: And what do you do about it?
Me: My mind finds specific things to worry about, and the fear gets absorbed.
Nun: These things you worry about, are they to do with recent acts, statements, events you have set in motion?
Me: Always.
Nun: Good. You're not going to understand immediately, but this vulnerable area around your navel is the only thing about you that is fully human.
– John Burdett

“When Hemos Johnson (hereditary Hahwannis chief of Kingcome) was an old man visiting his daughter at Comox she took him to Elk Falls, a place he had heard much about but had never seen. He stood where he could behold the raging torrent in all its splendour, gazing in silent wonder at the majestic sight and when he came away he announced, “It gave me a new song.”
It had all come to him there, the words and music straight from the Master of all harmony – a song that would always be his alone.”
– Mildred Valley Thornton
Potlatch People: Indian Lives and Legends of British Columbia

In the past much of the Yakama tribe's history was passed down from generation to generation by the women of the tribe using an oral tradition known as the time ball. New brides used hemp twine to record their life history starting with courtship. They tied different knots into the twine for days and weeks and added special beads for significant events. They then rolled the twine into a ball known as the “ititamat,” which means “counting the days” or “counting calendar.” The ball of twine grew in size as time passed and as events occurred…
When the women were very old, they could use the knots and beads of their time balls to recall not only what happened in their lives but when the events occurred…When a woman died, her “ititamat” or time ball was buried with her.
– Bonnie M. Fountain

“It's going to be a total bummer,” Saenz said. “It made me wish I had shopped there more.”
– A Quarter-million People Without One Bookstore
The Associated Press, December 19, 2009

“It's the life you live, not what you say/”
– Bishop Grace C. Osborne

My friend, Fisher, his buddy Dave and I moved me into a little gray house on Bend's West Side on June 1. I ate my first meal in Bend at Jackson's, came home, set up my computer on the old roll-top desk I'd faithfully lugged from Rochester, N.Y. to Flagstaff, Ariz. to Twentynine Palms, Calif. to Luna Mesa in the ravaged and glorious Mojave Desert to here. I looked out my west window to the top of a little fir and sky the exact blue of lapis.

Nightlight
By The Harvard Lampoon Vintage Books

Nightlight, The Harvard Lampoon's parody of the Twilight series, opens when Belle Goose first meets her dad at the airport when arriving in Switchblade, Oregon. She trips over a toddler, runs into a keychain rack, falls down the escalator and somersaults over her rolling luggage. “I get my lack of coordination from my dad, who always used to push me down when I was learning how to walk,” explains Belle.
This is just a sample of the ridiculousness the writers of one of the country's oldest humor magazines employ as they mock both the writing style and the plot twists of Stephanie Meyer's best-selling four-part saga.

West Coasters might not be drawn to a novel that takes place exclusively on Manhattan, well actually a specific part of the island, but what if this Manhattan isn't the real Manhattan? That's essentially what Jonathan Lethem has done with Chronic City.
The book is strangely fantastical, taking place in Lethem's custom-crafted Manhattan – a city where an escaped tiger demolishes city blocks, the New York Times publishes a “War-Free” edition, snow falls in August and Marlon Brandon just might be alive. Chase Insteadman, a child actor turned B-list celebrity, serves as our narrator, leading us through his chance friendship with Perkus Tooth, a lazy-eyed former gonzo artist and rock critic who now spends his time battling cluster headaches, pontificating about old films and smoking marijuana… incredible amounts of marijuana.

In the US recycling is a cool thing & communities brag about 40-50 % involvement. Here nothing makes it to the dump (if there is one) exceptstuff that can be composted. Forget things like metal, glass or wood, even plastic is picked up before the city trash collectors get to it. The city trash collectors don't even realize that they have a shitty job (in American minds),
– Eddie H. writing from Viet Nam

X-miss in America is bi-polar. On one hand, there are tens of thousands of articles on the perfect gifts, the perfect decorations, the perfect tree, the perfect turkey and punch and cookies and antacid. On the other hand, there are pious calls to give to others, to cut back, make gifts, give green, buy a live tree, teach the kids not to be greedy, to not grow into adults who wander the streets of “charming” towns with that vapid and irritated look of “Done it, seen it all, how tedious” on their faces.

This is Eskimo Nell's story. I barely know her. We met at a gem and mineral show in the Little America hotel in Flagstaff, Arizona at least fifteen years ago. I have not seen her since then.
I bought a raw opal from her. She gave me two more for free – a brown opal and a sun fire. She had dug them from her little claim in Australia.
The brown opal was the size of the nail on my fourth finger. It was a tiny puddle of glint, green and pale blue against the rough brown of its matrix.
The sun fire opal was a rough blue cylinder no bigger than the first joint of my little finger. The surface was matte. She had chipped off a sliver so the gleaming interior was visible. “Put it in water,” she said, “and set it in a window in natural light. That way you'll see the fire.”

I've witnessed two close friends give their all to creating book festivals. When new friends here raved about the huge gift of The Nature of Words, I asked Ellen Waterston for her story: