This time around, my post is mostly pictures from bookstore stops on our summer vacation in the Pacific Northwest.
The past few years, we’ve been more consciously immersing in nature in our travels, and I’ve been reading and writing about nature, too. Along the way, I’ve become fascinated by watercolor painting and nature journaling, though I can’t say I actually do much painting or journaling.
Very early on, I let a teacher convince me I had no talent for art, and so I’ve avoided these artistic pleasures and pursuits. I’ve since seen the light, and now I have all sorts of intentions and anticipations when it comes to making art. We’ll see.
In the meantime, my desires and my love for beautiful things are reflected in my bookstore adventures.
Browsers Bookshop in Olympia has become a good friend, a favorite stop in my travels since I happened upon it last year. A warm, welcoming staff and an exceptional selection of books.
Browsers Bookshop has many book categories and collections, sprinkled with staff picks. All in all, an outstanding selection of books, with many hidden gems, like the one I found below….
A Trail Through Leaves is extraordinary. Part memoir and part instruction in the daily act of keeping a nature journal, Hannah Hinchman’s writing and illustrations are outstanding. “The journal is a place to decant the stuff of life; reassuringly, none of it is wasted. It remains fresh, still tasting of its source. Transferring experience from the vat of life into the vessel of the journal is a distillation: it sieves, concentrates, and ferments. If after many seasons we develop some mastery of the process, the stuff can become as clear and fiery as brandy.”
A page from Hannah Hinchman’sA Trail Through Leaves: The Journal as a Path to Place. “Everyone should learn to draw competently, with a sense of play and invention, if only to honor the fact that it’s one of the first instinctive gestures we make to appease the appetite for beauty. If everyone acknowledged that hunger, and gained a whole selection of ways to satisfy it, a different culture would emerge.”
Personally recommended by Browsers Bookshop owner Andrea Griffith. What a meaningful gesture, to press a book into someone’s hands. “I never put up a barber pole or a sign or even gave my shop a name.” – Jayber Crow My journey with Wendell Berry continues. Recently, I finished Hannah Coulter.
I couldn’t decide…and I could have spent another hour or two in Book ‘N’ Brush.
Chinese brush painting display at Book ‘N’ Brush. These intriguing and beautifully made tools were so enticing I was tempted to try this specialty, and I was led to another hidden gem….
“Absorbing and calming, spiritual and steeped in history, the tradition offers something for everyone….Most satisfyingly, the pictures you paint will be in your own ‘handwriting,’ unique to you. ‘Writing a picture’ is the usual way of describing the painting process in China.”
Each page contains simple instructions for making a flower, a fruit, a vegetable, an animal, an insect, a fish….Who knew with just a few strokes I could make a snail, a fuchsia, a chili pepper, a peacock, a relaxing woman, a couple in conversation….
Plenty of staff recommendations at Book ‘N’ Brush too, the mark of a good bookstore. I spy a few familiar faces…
On my to-read shelf, an urban writer observes birds outside her window for a year: “The artist peered at me thoughtfully for a moment. Her blue eyes were clear and perfectly lined with kohl. Finally she spoke, with a hint of bemusement. She said the students who came to her were always full of hunger. They were seventeen-year-old aspiring artists and eighty-five-year-old retired businessmen. People of mourned, mislaid, or unmined creativity. Their yearning was like the white puff of a dandelion. All she had to do was blow gently and watch their creative spores lift, scatter, and take seed.”
We were in Portland, too. At the Woodstock Public Library I found a life-sized etching of a poem written by Kim Stafford. (Earlier this year, I took one of Kim’s online classes, Daily Writing in the Spirit of William Stafford.) You have the power to open centuries that trees hold/silent in their rings. This palace of the possible needs you,/your hand on the door. Enchant this place awake.
Many thanks to Browers Bookshop and Book ‘N’ Brush for much browsing pleasure, for great books I wouldn’t have discovered anywhere else, and for giving so much to their communities. What would we do without independent bookstores?
Here’s one more quote by Hannah Hinchman, from A Trail Through Leaves; it occurs to me that I must have been not that far away from this scene as it happened – I was in college in Appalachian Ohio in 1976:
“The girls wore plain long dresses with a sort of blazer coat, equally plain. They led me to the barn with no concern for the mud. They showed me the milk vat, half full of milk. Startling to see a whole lake of milk like that, with cat tracks on the lid of the vessel. Such an austere cold and windy gray day, spitting pellets of snow. Arriving at this farm in the deepest of Ohio agricultural land, far from the mainstream of the world, and meeting these youngsters, plain as the winter landscape, but with faces like young peaches, smooth as fresh-shelled beans, like sprouts in winter.”Hannah Hinchman’s journal, Volume 19, Ohio, 1976.
(Since I wrote this post, I found out Hannah Hinchman has another classic book, A Life in Hand: Creating the Illuminated Journal.It’s available as an e-book, but the print versions are now quite expensive. It would be great if a publisher would re-issue a print edition. Print books such as this one disappearing from the world are a loss.)
What are you reading this summer? If you’ve been traveling, where to, and have you found any bookstores to recommend?
Writer, blogger at Books Can Save a Life, about the healing and enriching power of books. At work on a memoir about growing up with a mother who is mentally ill. A former book editor and medical librarian, my work has been published in Great Lakes Review, Library Journal, and other publications.
View all posts by Valorie Grace Hallinan
12 thoughts on “Gone fishin’ (for books)”
This is a beautiful, beautiful post, Val. Thank you for sharing with us. I hope you will share your artwork as well, soon. 🙂
Deepika, I don’t think I’m brave enough to share, ha ha…..
What beautiful pictures, and also what lovely books and shops! I’m the same with art – would love to do more but lack the confidence, so I do crafty stuff instead. One day maybe…
Yeah, I don’t have the confidence. I’m trying to teach myself to just have fun, that way I’m more likely to do it in the first place – I’m always glad when I manage to do that….
Oh for another life-tiime and all the time in the world to read all the books you show us, and savour the bookshops like the two you wrote about…I’m a book a day woman, but there are always more books to read …( except when I’m catching up on blogs!! )
Valerie, wow, a book a day…I’ve never been that fast, but another lifetime of reading sounds wonderful. The blogging world has added so much to reading for me, so many fellow readers across the globe I’ve been able to meet virtually….and all the books (and lives of other bloggers) we wouldn’t have known about
Such a delight to see you again. I love our layers of connection! Thank you for the kind words about the store…
You’re very welcome Andrea!
What a lovely stroll with you through a world of books. I too can spend hours in a book store and not get enough. When we are out shopping together my family will always steer me away from book stores because they know when a get into one they can’t get me out. My painting buddy has the Chinese Brush Bible which I borrowed for a awhile and loved, practicing some of the motifs and one-stroke-two colors brush technique which I’d never heard of before. The book you feature called “Art Forms in Nature” I’d be eager to browse through. I just discovered Maxine Masterfield’s books on using nature in painting abstracts. Fascinating stuff.
Deborah I really enjoy your painting and what you write about it. Hopefully I’ll get down to some actual drawing and painting this summer…
On Wed, Jul 19, 2017 at 4:11 PM Books Can Save A Life wrote:
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Such beautiful books, what a lovely selection. I like the frogs especially. Lovely post Valerie.
Books Can Save A Life 
This is a beautiful, beautiful post, Val. Thank you for sharing with us. I hope you will share your artwork as well, soon. 🙂
Deepika, I don’t think I’m brave enough to share, ha ha…..
What beautiful pictures, and also what lovely books and shops! I’m the same with art – would love to do more but lack the confidence, so I do crafty stuff instead. One day maybe…
Yeah, I don’t have the confidence. I’m trying to teach myself to just have fun, that way I’m more likely to do it in the first place – I’m always glad when I manage to do that….
Oh for another life-tiime and all the time in the world to read all the books you show us, and savour the bookshops like the two you wrote about…I’m a book a day woman, but there are always more books to read …( except when I’m catching up on blogs!! )
Valerie, wow, a book a day…I’ve never been that fast, but another lifetime of reading sounds wonderful. The blogging world has added so much to reading for me, so many fellow readers across the globe I’ve been able to meet virtually….and all the books (and lives of other bloggers) we wouldn’t have known about
Such a delight to see you again. I love our layers of connection! Thank you for the kind words about the store…
You’re very welcome Andrea!
What a lovely stroll with you through a world of books. I too can spend hours in a book store and not get enough. When we are out shopping together my family will always steer me away from book stores because they know when a get into one they can’t get me out. My painting buddy has the Chinese Brush Bible which I borrowed for a awhile and loved, practicing some of the motifs and one-stroke-two colors brush technique which I’d never heard of before. The book you feature called “Art Forms in Nature” I’d be eager to browse through. I just discovered Maxine Masterfield’s books on using nature in painting abstracts. Fascinating stuff.
Deborah I really enjoy your painting and what you write about it. Hopefully I’ll get down to some actual drawing and painting this summer…
On Wed, Jul 19, 2017 at 4:11 PM Books Can Save A Life wrote:
>
Such beautiful books, what a lovely selection. I like the frogs especially. Lovely post Valerie.
Thank you and thank you for stopping by!