We celebrated the official release of Miss Experience White last month on May 10th. Thanks to guest readers Kim Shuck, Kimi Sugioka, and Deborah C. Segal, and to Richard Loranger for planning and hosting the event. Thanks to the Clarion Performing Arts Center for having us. Thanks to everyone who chose to spend a beautiful spring afternoon celebrating the end of this seven-year creative project, sipping wine and nibbling on cookies.
I should’ve posted here a few weeks ago, but with my mother passing away in late April and her memorial the day after the book launch, I’ve been totally preoccupied dealing with everything that happens when a parent departs.
Thanks to my mother’s younger sister, Eddy Ancinas, for taking so many great videos at the book launch. I’ve shared a few on Facebook as well as here. My aunt has been primarily a travel writer for decades. I recommend her travel memoir, Tracing Inca Trails: An Adventure in the Andes, for summer reading. She too has won awards and written about our ancestors, although very differently than I have. And actually, I wrote about my Aunt Eddy and her husband, my Uncle Osvaldo, in Miss Experience White. This passage near the end of Part III, The Other Feast, was inspired by them:
Cut back to Feast, another guest
Osvaldo Lucero
Olympic skier born and raised
Down Argentina Way
He marries an American
and takes his bride back home
but they decide the States are best
for work and family
As cultural ambassador
this uncle changes things
and cousins play, the brown with white
They run, they laugh, they climb
And when he’s called a Mexican
Osvaldo tells them off
He says, “I taught the fools about
some countries they forgot”
Thanks to John Seabury for bringing some prints of the illustrations to sell, and for taking part in the Q & A, which was a terrific idea of Richard Loranger’s. I hope we can do more interviews in the future. Overall, John and I had a mutually satisfying creative collaboration. We understood each other very well most of the time.
But we did have a few disagreements. In one case I’d asked him to do an illustration of a vision an indigenous shaman might’ve had looking out over the Atlantic at night. It would show kind, hopeful faces in the waves to suggest a radical, alternative unfolding of American history and appear near the end of the book. The illustration (on the wall in dark blue between us) never felt positive enough to me, but successful collaborations require flexibility, and the solution turned out better than the original idea.
The seven-year phase of writing and book creation has ended: The courtship and wedding are over and the marriage begins! It’s time to sell books. Miss Experience White is available to purchase here on my site. And, thanks to my distribution company, you can ask any bookstore anywhere (except maybe Australia) to order it.
In these challenging times—which often shock but don’t completely surprise me—I’ve found getting out and about to be a crucial part of self-care. So next month’s blogpost will be a guide to Bay Area bookstores interested in carrying Miss Experience White along with recommendations for nearby cafes, bars, and eateries. Until then, to borrow from Walt Whitman as I did in the Prologue, remember that each of us really does contain multitudes. And if that’s not enough, there’s always that line from The Handmaid’s Tale which has gotten me through many a hard time: “Don’t Let the Bastards Grind You Down.”
Milo