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Thisbe Nissen: Tour Diary

Preliminaries - Day 1 - Day 2 - Day 3 - Day 4 - Day 5 - Day 6 -
Day 7 - Day 8 - Day 9 - Day 10 - Day 11 -Day 12 - Day 13 - Day 14 - Day 15 -
Day 16 - Day 17 - Day 18 - Day 19 - Day 20 - Day 21 - Day 22 -
Day 23 - Day 24 - Day 25 - Day 26 - Day 27 - Day 28 - Day 29 - Home Diary - July 25 - July 26


Sweet peas at Pike Place Market, Seattle


Bounty at Pike Place


Delphiniums at Pike Place


Fish heads

Day 19: Seattle

Morning at the Pike Place Market amid overflowing flowering tubs of sweet pea and delphinium, Rainier cherries and red-ripe strawberries, walking with Chris and Krista, my college roommate who's here in Seattle in school, doing a masters in the fisheries department. We eat breakfast overlooking the water, catching up -- Chris and Krista haven't met before, so we're telling stories since we last saw each other (when I was here reading from "Girls' Room" the first time around, so fall of '99, and so much has happened since then...)


Me and Krista, Pike Place Market, Seattle


Chris and Krista, Seattle

Katie and Kimberly come to get us at noon and we drive up to Bellingham, a couple hours north. Chris says the landscape here is a lot more like what he grew up with in southern Germany: the evergreen, the lakes. Our hotel is right on the water and there's a jacuzzi in the bathtub. When I asked the folks at Knopf if Chris could come along on part of my book tour with me, I said if they paid for his airfare we'd stay at Motel 6 and eat at diners and do a total low budget tour. But somehow here we are with a jacuzzi in the bathtub. I don't quite understand but I'm not complaining...

The reading with Myla Goldberg goes well -- an amazing turnout! I'm really bad at judging numbers but I'd say there are fifty people there. I read a new chapter --5, "The Incipience of Their Discontent -- and feel good about it. Myla is incredibly dynamic. The audience adores her. They politely direct a few questions toward me at the end, but really everybody wants to talk to Myla. They stand in line to ask her questions like "How did you pick the last word for her to spell at the National Bee?" She bears up remarkably well. She signs eight million books. I sign three, not including the three I sign for good old friend of my parents who've driven down from Vancouver for the reading. Somehow, tonight, this is fine with me. I feel really good. I feel proud of the reading. I seem to like myself ok again tonight. I wish there were some logic to these tides. But when I'm on the upswing, logic doesn't seem to matter so much to me. Of course. For now, I feel good, and that's all I ask.