I was born in Brooklyn but am currently living on the island of Oahu, part of a group of nine Hawaiian islands located in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, farthest away from any landmass on Earth. Some days I wake up and wonder how I got transported from one of the fastest-moving cities on the planet to find myself in Lotusland. Truth to tell, I never did adjust to the slow pace, never developed the uniquely Hawaiian skill of "hangin' loose." As they say, you can take the girl out of New York, but you can't take New York out of the girl. Or the writer. . . I come from a family of book lovers, writers, readers, storytellers, poets, translators, and professors of literature. So, in a sense, my entire life, from as far back as I can remember, has been one continuous narrative. Stories accompanied me everywhere — starting at breakfast and ending at bedtime — Dickens or Jack London, or Walter Scott, Joseph Conrad, or Herman Melville (my father’s favorites) or something Dad would make up himself or a chapter from Mom’s ongoing Siberian memoir. My father taught me to read, in a fashion, when I was two. I wrote my first published story when I was nine and haven't stopped writing since. Originally trained as an actor, singer, and dancer, I still bring my performance skills and lifelong love of the theater to everything I write. As a kid, I spent so much time “making up stories” — living them, actually — that, in order to keep me from continuously jabbering in class, an extremely perceptive elementary school teacher appointed me “class narrator” — entitling me to summarize (and embellish) the daily events in our classroom. So, oral storytelling, or, as we in Hawaii call it, “talking story,” was the start of my writing career. Eventually, my English teachers encouraged me on the path to becoming a writer. This is not to say my childhood was without its bumps in the road. As you can imagine, finding and projecting my voice in a family of such articulate, emotional, strong-minded, dramatic, and highly opinionated individuals took some effort. In my case, childhood wasn’t so much an effort to “survive” as a willingness to “perform” the role of “heroine in my own novel” — as my father put it. I think that’s why, to this very day, I prize my “sovereignty” above everything else.
What I love most about writing is being visited by characters who invite themselves onto the stage of my mind (or heart, or imagination, or dream life, or whatever you choose to call that place that is no actual "place," but is more real than the desk or sidewalk or traffic light in front of you) to enact their life dramas in their own words for me to write down. Sometimes, like my favorite poet, William Butler Yeats, I'm a medium at a séance, channeling people out of the akashic ether, people neither alive nor dead, past nor present, factual nor fictional—but oh so palpable—moving, breathing, gossiping, fighting, laughing, crying; storying forth, each in his or her own inimitable voice—tugging at my sleeve, Ancient Mariner-like, desperately spilling over with stories that I've been honored with telling.
Recipient of the Theodore Hoepfner Fiction Award and past writer-in-residence at the Mishkenot Sha’ananim Artists’ Colony in Jerusalem, Pushcart Prize-nominee Perle Besserman was praised by Isaac Bashevis Singer for the “clarity and feeling for mystic lore” of her writing and by Publisher’s Weekly for its “wisdom [that] points to a universal practice of the heart.” Her autobiographical novel Pilgrimage was published by Houghton Mifflin, and her latest novels, Kabuki Boy, and Widow Zion, and Yeshiva Girl, a story collection, are available from Aqueous Books, Pinyon Publishing, and Homebound Publishing, respectively. Her short fiction has appeared in The Southern Humanities Review, Agni, Transatlantic Review, Nebraska Review, Southerly, North American Review, Bamboo Ridge, and in many other publications, both online and in print. Besserman’s most recent books of creative nonfiction are A New Zen for Women (Palgrave Macmillan) and Zen Radicals, Rebels, and Reformers, coauthored with Manfred Steger (Wisdom Books).
Perle holds a doctorate in Comparative Literature from Columbia University and has lectured, toured, taught, and appeared on television, radio, and in two documentary films about her work in the US, Europe, Canada, Australia, Japan, China, and the Middle East. Her books have been recorded and released in both audio and e-book versions and translated into over ten languages. Her forthcoming stories will appeared in the Fall 2015 issues of Imitation Fruit and Red Savina Review, and in JewishFiction.net in 2016. Also, in 2016, Perle will be interviewed by Stephanie Johnson in Prick-of-the-Spindle.
Visit Perle on the Web at: www.perlebesserman.net
Illustration by Mary Ann Smith, a book cover designer for print and e-books and she has art directing experience. Her clients include both major publishers and independent publishers as well as university presses. She illustrates for the web, magazines and newspapers as well as book covers, e-newsletters and various other collateral. Please view her online portfolio: www.maryannsmithwork.com.