New Focus for holybasil

Now back in Bangkok, I’m thinking that this blog needs a new focus and new author for a while. Jip wrote some wonderful short pieces about her grandmother and her mom that deserve a wider audience. They were parts of a book she was writing that intended to tell the recent history of Thailand through the stories of three women. I’ll post a dozen or so of the stories over the next few weeks.

The book project gave her great pleasure at a time in Jip’s life, I think it was about 2001, when she decided to cut her research coordinator job to part-time in response to the fatigue that sometimes accompanies MS. She took a trip home from Seattle to see her family, taped several interviews, and transformed what she heard into accounts of grandma and mom’s worldviews. Jip’s own philosophy about things evolved along the way, which you can see in a few of the stories if you’re looking for it.

Later Jip shared the book pieces with my sister Murph, who is a fine writer and editor. By then Jip’s eyesight was giving her lots of trouble. Murph read aloud with Jip, then stitched together a few of the sketches in an order that made sense to both of them. The next several posts will be the result of that team effort from 2004.

The original interview tapes and Jip’s notebooks await my attention. With help from a few people who have expressed interest, and a little luck, maybe in the next couple years I can finish the book she began.