ANNA ODESSA LINZER
Anna Odessa Linzer has always lived along the Salish Sea. Her deep connection with the Pacific Northwest is reflected in both her poems and her fiction. Her novel Ghost Dancing (Picador/St. Martin’s Press) received an American Book Award in 1999. Her novels Blind Virgil, Dancing on Water, and A River Story were produced as the handbound, limited-edition Home Waters by fine-arts publisher Marquand Books. A River Story was adapted and performed as a two-person play, and her poems have been featured in gallery and museum installations as well as on wine bottles.
As a bookbinder and designer, Linzer received a Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award for Excellence in 1975. One of her sculptural handbound books received an award at the Bellevue Arts Museum Arts Fair in 1976. Her nonfiction work received a Terry McAdams Award in 2000. She has been a copyeditor for PARIS, LA; a fiction editor of Raven Chronicles; and a chair of the PEN West Literary Awards. She has often worked on environmental protection and restoration issues, including founding one of the first land trusts in Washington State.
WRITING HOME
Writing Home is a mediation on place: place, architecture, family, and wilderness on an isolated bay on the Salish Sea. Anna gives us her heart’s measure of pain and also the hard-earned pleasures of creating life in the aftermath of betrayal. She finds herself in the Treehouse, built in an old forest teeming with life on a deep, isolated bay in the Salish Sea. In this rich and lyric memoir, Linzer slowly, and with a poet’s eye for detail, charts her journey to discover and reveal the essence of home.
“ . . . just as two black brushstrokes across the cream of handmade paper evoke a mountain in the moonlight, they also join other nights, other mountains, other moonlight. These brushstrokes join to other days. Other words. Sometimes the simple black brushstrokes are enough. All we need.
The Treehouse became a gift of a dream. Time folded in on itself, expanded, and sometimes fell away altogether. Leaving us there, perfectly. We might have been there lifetimes, years, seconds. Who is to know.
Maybe we are still there.”
#seasonunleashed
