I had a really enjoyable interview with PJ Nutting of the Boulder Weekly on Sunday, and it hit the stands yesterday. If you want to read the whole very nice thing, you can find it here:
http://www.boulderweekly.com/20090528/artsculture.html

But the part that made me happiest to read was this, because I’ve never written this:

“Really embedded in (the economic and physical difficulties of life on the reservation) is a spirit of surrender, and we don’t have it. I always thought I did. I thought I was easy-going and nice, but up there I realized what an absolute control freak I am. I was constantly knocked off balance. They live in an unpredictable world…(they) can’t just throw money at a problem and make it go away. They didn’t have a sense of entitlement to a certain outcome. They just have to go with the flow in a really constant way, and it makes you develop some faith. The car broke, the dog died, there’s no dinner — it didn’t take much for me to go into a total tailspin. I’m so used to having my needs met like that.

But here’s a man who’s a quadriplegic and who just keeps giving. His health is always in flux, and violence always happens or is about to happen. But he’s so surrendered to his own fate, and in that surrender, he gives every calorie of energy toward helping people in a place where so much help is needed. The man is amazing. I don’t want to say Christ consciousness, but I’ll say it. I’ve never met anyone remotely like him.”

My office chair, kindly holding a few things for me

Okay, so I’ve had four readings, and all of them were wonderful. The Tattered Cover/Colfax one was extremely well-attended, which i attribute to the fact that my sister and mother collectively know every living being in East Denver, and they were all there. But, gosh. My senior prom date was there (that’d be you, Steve Epstein), the parents of all three of my high school best girlfriends were there, my very own dear sister Greta flew in from San Francisco. It was fantastic! It was pretty much standing-room only, and I found to my extreme happiness that I LIKED answering questions about race, power, class — all things I thought I’d sprint away from as fast as my little pink feet could carry me.

After this incredible high came the days after — my sister flew back to SFO, the house looked like its been hit by a bomb (see picture), our beloved cat of 15 years died. God. That was so hard. He’s still laid out in state on our (secondary) kitchen table, on dry ice, surrounded by candles and flowers. This is what happens when you’re married to a Tibetan Buddhist, who believe it takes three days for the soul to get its bearings, pack up, and actually leave the body. It’s actually really nice to have Sandy around for a few more days. He was a sweet, courtly, adorable cat — definitely the most mellow member of our household — and I cry about him pretty much every other hour.

Then, two days ago, Stanford’s sister Arilda called to tell me Stan’s back in the hospital. He went on Tuesday, in an ambulance, with bad stomach pain. This dealt a death blow to any lingering exuberance I might have had about the early readings, and the fact that our book is being carried by COSTCO! and all the great feedback we’ve both gotten…

Gain and loss, the Buddhists say. The wheel never stops turning. And, as Stan so gently told the mare in his corral the first day I knew him: “I can’t save you.”

So I’m balanced, if walking around the house between my getting-all-gorgeous garden and exploded office and dead cat is balance, if hearing good news about the book and bad news about Stanford’s pain level is balance.

Thanks Paonia! And Hotchkiss! and all my old pals and neighbors…

What's not to love? I never don't love this place.

My baby book, after a mere seven years of gestation, was born today, May 12. My first reading will be in less than two hours!!! It’ll happen in Hotchkiss, Colorado, just down the road from Paonia, where I spent 12 of the happiest years of my life. I wanted my first reading to be here

o, paonia!

 because in many ways this still feels like home. Stanford really wanted to come, too,  because he’s met at least a dozen of my friends from these parts, some of who traveled up to Wyoming several times to help out around the ranch, sweat, and generally hang out. But last week he had to go in for surgery to keep up the fight against the bedsores that are the bane of every quadriplegic. I just hung up a bunch of photos from his place and we’re about to start setting out chairs. Okay, it’s almost rock n roll time. Toodles for now.

I’m told I shouldn’t only mutter what’s new to myself as I shuffle around the house. I’m told I should put what’s new on THIS BLOG. So, lots of new and nice things are happening around the book, whose formal birthday is just two days away. Check ’em out!

Interview with the Author: “Broken” by Lisa Jones

by Sharon Glassman, Huffington Post (this includes an audio interview)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sharon-glassman/interview-with-the-author_b_199426.html

“Healing the broken spurs new live, love” from The Denver Post

http://www.denverpost.com/headlines/ci_12320531

“Got Warriors?”
from High Country News

http://www.hcn.org/issues/41.7/got-warriors

“The Gentler” from Spirit magazine

http://www.spiritmag.com/features/article/the_gentler/

excerpt from Broken, from New West
http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/an_excerpt_from_lisa_jones_broken/C39/L39/

THE UNBEARABLE CROWDEDNESS OF BEING LISA JONES
Number of US women named Lisa Jones: 4,262.
Number named Ann Smith: 2,991
(source: Whitepages.com)

My name is Lisa Jones. Not Lisa Jones the adjunct professor of nutrition at LaSalle University. Not the college basketball player. I run neither a home for the needy in Florida nor a Pilates studio in New York City. I’m not a realtor, anchor woman or a porn star.

Even among authors, a certain amount of individuation from other Lisa Joneses is in order: I did not write Bulletproof Diva (whose author, Lisa Jones, was hailed by the Boston Globe back in 1997 for writing “so vibrant and dynamic, her words create a kind of fierce music… a fabulous book.”) Damn! I wish I DID write that book. Its publisher called it chock full of “fierce black girl humor.” Lisa lives in New York City and even worked with Spike Lee.

Me, I’m of Swedish/Irish stock and am pretty much white as snow. I was raised mostly in Denver, went to college up the road in Boulder, worked briefly on used car lots, started practicing Buddhist meditation, and wrote a book. But so did ANOTHER Lisa Jones, whose book, Up: A novel (about car sales and love) won her a 2003 “Best Novel About a Car Saleswoman” citation from Westword magazine, Denver’s weekly newspaper. I got an e-mail from that Lisa Jones a few years back when I wrote a column about my boyfriend that appeared in the Denver Post. The by-line had caused some confusion among her friends, since she was, in her own words, “a big ole queer.”

So I’m the white, straight, married, suburban Lisa Jones. In the spectrum of things, I may be showing as the boring Lisa Jones.  But listen:  I have a fascination and love for the Northern Arapahos of Wyoming, in particular with a member of that tribe named Stanford Addison (whose name sounds like it belongs to some guy who graduated from boarding school with John Kerry and is now a  stockbroker, but actually belongs to a quadriplegic native healer and horse gentler.) He — and his extraordinary family — are the heros of the book I took six years to write and which is formally hitting the shelves on May 12 —  Broken: A Love Story.

Last winter I drove six and a half hours to central Wyoming, to my friend Stanford’s place on the Wind River Indian Reservation. I did the usual – hung around the kitchen table, chatting and drinking Folgers, then entered the sweat lodge for an evening-long ceremony. There were several breaks, which just about everyone spent lying on the floor of the lodge, gossiping and making jokes. During one of these, one of the men I knew best, a guy who happened to be white, said he was under investigation for stealing a woman’s $800 in winnings at the tribal casino.

“I probably should never have told the casino guys that I was living in their parking lot,” he said, letting loose a hail of laughter and installing himself as the evening’s entertainment. He had lived on the reservation for more than a decade, after burning his face and torso in a truck fire. His disfigurement made life in the white world unbearable. The white world tends to punish that kind of misfortune, while on the reservation people were more likely to laugh at it until he learned to laugh along. (Soon after he arrived on the reservation, a woman was having a hard time lighting the pilot light on the stove. “You try it,” she told him. “You’re already also burned up.”)

Anyway, that night in the sweat lodge, the conversation kept coming back to him and the details of his story, to the fact he was so broke (ha!) and out of friends willing to take him in (hahaha!) that despite the subzero winter temperatures he had parked his car in the parking lot a couple of weeks before, to the fact that after the robbery a security guard told the local paper the guy took the money and took off running. “He’s probably still running,” the security guard reported. In the sweat lodge, my friend’s story segued into another guy’s story about being kicked out of church because his friend brought a gun to mass. A gun.

Stanford once told me that on the Wind River Indian Reservation, people laugh so much because if they didn’t, they’d cry. Well. I hadn’t laughed that much in weeks.