Thank you to Hidden Timber Books and all who came to this reading. I am deeply grateful for your support and deeply appreciate how your comments on Amazon and Goodreads raise the visibility of White Snake Diary to contribute to Ohlone sovereignty through Sogorea Te Land Trust. I received an additional gift, hearing after the reading that my Mother showed herself to our family minister: “Your Mother had, in her right hand, a bunch of white field daisies tied with a medium-dark blue ribbon – about 1/2 to 3/4 inch wide and trailing for a foot or so – that she was extending to you… The sensation I had as she did so was sorta pride but also delight… It was as if she were both acknowledging your work and refreshing you…And, perhaps, hinting at something more to soon emerge from you…”
We remember our ancestors and that we are the answer to their prayers. We will be humble and grateful to know the work we have been called upon to do in this time of awareness, healing and transformation.
Excerpted transcript of Christi Craig. From Hidden Timber Book’s Small Press Author Reading Series, Christi Craig, Publisher of Hidden Timber Books and Host, featuring Jane P. Perry, WHITE SNAKE DIARY: EXPLORING SELF-INSCRIBERS (Atmosphere Press) September 8, 2020.
“Hi everybody. My name is Christi Craig. I am the publisher here at Hidden Timber Books and I have the great honor of hosting this Small Press Author Reading Series, that I have been doing since COVID hit. I find I am really enjoying it. It has turned into much more than a quarantine kind of event. It is a way to bring people together. I am honored to see you all here. It has been fun to hang out and listen to you all say hello to Jane and give her so many congratulations. . .
“I am excited to have Jane Perry here to talk about her book. I love what I read from her website: “The diary’s documentary and reflective functions.” I think it is a cool way of explaining what journals and diaries do for us, as a society but also as an individual. . .
“A powerful opening! I was nervous and then I was laughing. A perfect opening. . . . What I appreciate is the idea you bring up again and again of documentation: that diary writers use anything – paper, collage, anything, to record. There is a great desire to record. Part of how Hidden Timber Books came to fruition was because of Lisa Rivero, the Founder of Hidden Timber Books. Her great-aunt Hattie was a homesteader in South Dakota and she kept a daily diary from 1920 to 1957. She wrote on spiral notebooks. She wrote on accounting books. She wrote on steno paper. She wrote on anything. Lisa collected these. She had stacks and stacks of daily entries. It is a beautiful, beautiful treasure to have. Diary writing helps you pay greater attention to the things around you, and in that way I think it naturally opens up your mind, loosens your mind to, as you say, memory, that can come to the surface. Memories that you did not anticipate. . .
“It is fascinating to hear the history of other self-inscribers. How they kept a diary, the kinds of things they reported. The things that stand out to me this hour that you’ve been talking about is that “the diary is a way to surrender. It is free from restrictions.” It makes you feel important and especially in a time like right now, when we are so isolated, it is a way to feel seen, which is so important in our human existence. What you read about “daily details bring the past alive” reiterates the importance of keeping a diary no matter, as someone said, if we think it is silly to write down the menu we had for the evening. . . .
“Finally, and I am thinking of that huge aluminum ball of Kit Kat wrappers included in one of your book’s entries. It is the same idea! Tiny bits build up to this great purpose. Tiny little entries build this purpose, either a stack of diaries, journals, or a whole book.
“Your book leaves a lot for the reader to contemplate, which is the great purpose of the diary, whether you are the one writing it or reading it later. WHITE SNAKE DIARY is thought-provoking. It loosens up the mind and allows thinking in a new way. Amy has a note in the chat box; “Just one word: Inspiring.” I would agree.”
“Jane P. Perry’s White Snake Diary creates a collage that proves the enduring power of a diary to illuminate, educate, and amaze. Prepare yourself to be immersed and enchanted.”
“An enjoyable, thought-provoking blend of the personal and the academic.”
“Reading Jane’s fearless observations, from the mundane to the sacred, keeps us very much in the present of our own lives.”
“I strongly recommend this book to anyone who seeks encouragement to live life with both sensitivity and wild abandon!”