When I left South America the gates to the world were opened to a post-pandemic United States. I stepped off the plane with the intention of rediscovering my country. People were still socially distanced, an after-shock we all went through as we continued to engage in six feet of space between us. Whereas when I left in 2019 I remember being scrunched up at the grocery story check out as people tried to hurry things with closing proximity.

So, I found myself a little bereft on my re-entry to California and what I noticed was that I tended to find much of my “discussion” between the covers of a book. I read like I talk. I listen containing my curiosity and then ask questions about what I heard. It’s actually easiest when I’m “reading” a book in audio format. (see my post about whether listening to a book counts as reading)

As a little girl I read all summer during the break from school and then when I got back to school in the Fall I checked out as many books as the library at school would allow. Later when I was more independent I used our small town’s library which, while limited in quantity included a lot of quality in its classics section, paralleled in size only by the romance collection.

While I loved books as innocuous as the faintly sterile Anne of Green Gables from the Elementary school shelves, by the time I was in Middle School I’d discovered our pubic library was in walking distance from the school so after the last bell rang I would make my way down the vine covered hill to the intersection, cross over The Pyramid, a dive named for its shape, have a milk shake if I could afford it, and then heat my shivering body with a jog up the hill to the stacks.

On one particularly humid day I escaped the humidity of our Tennessee summer and plopped down at the back table of the public library. I found myself drawn to an area between the classics and the romantic fiction where I found an odd book choice for a small Southern town with a limited book buying budget: The Happy Hooker. I couldn’t believe my eyes. The author page had a picture of the author, a Dutch woman named Xaviera Hollander, an ex call girl and madam. I had never seen anything like it and I feel fortunate the book somehow made onto bookshelves within reach.

Since then, libraries have been sacred to me in the sense that they give me a variety of choices at a price a young person can afford. They’re a bit old school now with the digital world crowding our head space more and more, but walking into a good library on a rainy day and sitting down for a cozy hour without screens feels like an instant way to access terra firma to me.

Of course, my friends’ older brothers had porn magazines but that was not very interesting to me but this, this was a real book with a story. Over the next week I read voraciously and then snuck the book into my school classroom where I shared it with some of the staff of the school newspaper for which I was a reporter/gossip columnist. This may be where my interest in publishing literature began.

Of course, the content of Hollander’s memoir wasn’t the point when it came to broadening my life view as a pre-teen. What really shifted for me as a 14 year old growing up in a cloistering environment familially, religiously, and institutionally was that I had the opportunity to peek into an alternative perspective on sexuality and libidinal identity.

Next I got a subscription to Rolling Stone and Mad Magazine, both publications raucous doors into urban complexity. They prepared me for my move to Los Angeles years later in a way that my school certainly had no intention of doing. Freedom finds you if you are a free spirit and finding reading material that explores the human world both inner and outer is a powerful part of the individuation process.

So, now as life has moved on through the decades I find myself returning to my reporter/writer/curator mode as editor of Limit Experience Media. We started out with a literary journal that shared profoundly transparent evocations of transgression in a multitude of ways. Now we have a new addition that approaches the creative impetus behind the work with conversations in blog, podcast, and film form: Limit Experience Magazine. Take a look and Check out the Membership for a deeper Limit-Experience.