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Celebrate Older Americans Month
Northwest Prime Time
FREE Celebrating Life After 50
Tom Robbins SERVING THE PUGET SOUND REGION SINCE 1986
www.NorthwestPrimeTime.com
VOL. 16 NO. 4 MAY 2016
The Northwest’s own internationally bestselling author
La Conner resident and internationally-known author Tom Robbins conjures up memories from his past in his memoir, “Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life.” He reads from the book on May 18 at Town Hall Seattle.
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n 1970, Tom Robbins moved to La Conner, Washington and it was at his home there on Second Street that he authored nine bestselling books. But his taste for literature started at a very young age. In his 2014 memoir, Tibetan Peach Pie, Tom writes, “It was almost as if some mad literary fairy, hatched perhaps in a poppy in Oscar Wilde’s garden, had tapped me with her wand as I lay in my cradle, because I fell totally in love with books as soon as I knew what books were…I hadn’t been talking in complete sentences for many months before I announced to my parents that I intended to be a writer. Too impatient to wait until I could spell words and scrawl them on paper, I turned my mother into my private secretary.” In 1975, Tom related to his editor that he would throw tantrums if his mother altered even a single word of his childhood stories. The editor exclaimed, “My God, Robbins, you haven’t changed in forty years!” Tom Robbins was born in North Carolina in 1932 during the Great Depression. He calls his young self a
“hillbilly.” Both of his grandfathers He then resettled to the were Southern Baptist preachers, Northwest. “Ever since my troop but that didn’t stop Tom from ship sailed out of Yokohama Harbor developing a reputation for reckless in late 1955 I’d longed to return to behavior and mischief from the Japan,” writes Tom. In 1962, Tom time he could walk. His mother’s moved to Seattle to seek an M.A. affectionate at the University nickname for little of Washington’s Tom Robbins was Far East Institute. Tommy Rotten. During the next The Robbins five years (minus family later moved a year spent in to Virginia where New York City Tom graduated researching a book from Virginia on the painter Commonwealth Jackson Pollock) University. he worked for the Tom’s great Seattle Times as an success as an art critic. author started in In his memoir, 1971 with the Tom writes: publication of “Throughout all Another Roadside those diversions – Attraction, but the art columns, Tom Robbins' memoir delivers the he’d had a widely tale of his wild life and times, both at the happenings, home and around the globe varied life before the radio show, settling down to rock concerts, the business of writing bestselling protest marches, pot parties, etc. – books. the old literary pulse continued to In 1953, Tom enlisted in throb in my blood…A novel had the Air Force after receiving his announced itself.” But he needed draft notice, spent a year as a to pry himself from Seattle’s art meteorologist in Korea followed by community to tackle the book. He two years in the Special Weather moved to the tiny hamlet of South Intelligence unit of the Strategic Bend, Washington with its cheap Air Command in Nebraska. He was living quarters and few distractions. discharged in 1957 and returned Another Roadside Attraction was the to Richmond, Virginia, where his result. poetry readings at the Rhinoceros Tom has described South Bend Coffee House led to a reputation as a waterfront village physically among the local bohemian scene. not unlike La Conner. During his
time in Seattle, he had discovered La Conner through a mushroomhunting friend. When he finally found a place in La Conner he could afford, he moved there. He lives there still. Tom Robbin’s other internationally bestselling works include Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Still Life With Woodpecker, Jitterbug Perfume, Skinny Legs and All,Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas, Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates, Villa Incognito, Wild Ducks Flying Backward and B Is for Beer. Even Cowgirls Get the Blues was made into a movie by Gus Van Sant in 1993, starring Uma Thurman and Keanu Reeves. Jason Sheehan wrote a review of Tom Robbins’ memoir, Tibetan Peach Pie (2014), for NPR. It concluded: “So, going in, you gotta love Tom. You gotta be itching to know about his first acid trip, his feelings on tomato-and-mayonnaise sandwiches and his long list of exwives. You gotta imagine yourself washed up on a barstool in La Conner, Washington, trapped by a typhoon or a toad-rain or worse, and fortunate enough to find yourself sitting next to the now aged cosmic fool as he starts to talk and tell you the tales of how he got from Blowing Rock, North Carolina to here, consorted with artists and idiots, drank some beer, ran away with the circus, predicted the continued on page 15