14 minute read

BORROWING FROM HER PAST

from Inlander 12/22/2022

by The Inlander

from Inlander 12/22/2022, page 40

SANDPOINT SPIRITS

Multimedia artist Diane Sherman in her studio.

YOUNG KWAK PHOTO

LITERATURE SOMEONE ELSE’S SHOES

In her new memoir, Spokane writer and artist Diane Sherman captures the essence of human experience

In her art studio, Diane Sherman is surrounded by a vibrant, eclectic collection of hanging canvas paintings and stacks of art journals. She sits in her “Catholic Schoolgirl Chair,” which she nicknamed because of its cracking, aged wood and the maneuverable desk attached to its side. It reminds Sherman of Catholic school and her younger self.

This snapshot is emblematic of Sherman’s lifelong journey to shed inner criticism, grief and shame, and to blossom into the most authentic, unapologetic version of herself.

For her latest project, In Borrowed Shoes, Sherman shares over 100 personal stories threaded together to form a vulnerable and cohesive narrative of her path to self-acceptance. She hopes the collection resonates with others, and that they process moments from their own lives while reading it.

“With this book, I wrote it so that people don’t feel so alone,” she says. “I’ve pulled back the curtain on how so many of us feel in different moments.”

Sherman specifically shares 108 individual short stories in In Borrowed Shoes to mirror the practice of counting mala beads. A mala is a sacred necklace from Buddhist and Hindu tradition, held during meditation to promote focus, and while chanting mantras to keep count.

Sherman has used the mala for over 25 years throughout her own spiritual journey, so integrating it into her book felt fitting and even more personal.

“I wanted this book to be 108 moments of a life strung together that could be contemplated and reflected upon,” she says. “It’s the layperson’s reality of a spiritual journey.”

In one of her favorite stories from the memoir, called “Becoming the Priest,” Sherman recounts a time when her 10-year-old self led a Catholic Mass for her parents in the backyard of their San Francisco Bay Area home.

“As a young person, I was always very spiritual,” she says. “I tried Catholicism, but it didn’t make sense to me.”

She goes on to elaborate that her spiritual roots stemmed from losing her father when she was 7.

“Something cracked in me,” she says. “The grief and loss of losing my father was so intense. I really felt the pain of that loss… I had no way to process it.”

In Borrowed Shoes recounts this experience and distills other heavy subjects, but it also details life’s triumphs. It tells the stories of Sherman beginning her yogic journey, trekking mountains in Tibet, and swaying her hips to salsa music in Costa Rica. It also joins her in the quiet moments of life, the ones that we don’t often pay attention to unless we’re incredibly mindful.

In another of her favorite stories, “Potato Chips,” Sherman describes her love of the delicious salty treat and the sensory experience of eating them.

“Any moment, if we pay really close attention, has so much for you — like your tea, your chocolate [and] your dog,” she says.

In Borrowed Shoes is written in a unique style for a memoir. Along with its segmentation into 108 stories, Sherman’s writing implements the creative wordplay of poetry and yet maintains the same frankness and descriptiveness as her prose vignettes.

Even as a writer for over 40 years, Sherman admits, “I don’t have a word for what these are.”

At a young age, Sherman wrote stories and lost herself in fantasy worlds. As a youngster, her dream was to be a journalist, just like both of her parents were. Her father wrote for the Los Angeles Times, and her mother wrote for Time Life Magazine.

Sherman attended Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism for a brief time and discovered she hated news writing and its more rigid format. She wanted to infuse her sense of self and personal experiences into the pieces she wrote. After receiving a bachelor’s degree in art history from UCLA and, later, a master’s in arts and consciousness from John F. Kennedy University, Sherman gradually grew into the interdisciplinary artist she is now.

“I’m a journalist of the inner world,” she says.

In addition to being a writer, Sherman is a yoga instructor and creativity coach. She offers classes to help students release their inner critics and complete their creative projects, including a yearlong creative process immersion, with the next session beginning in February 2023.

“I feel like my mission on the planet is just to help us all become ourselves,” she says.

In Borrowed Shoes is simply an extension of that mission. Find In Borrowed Shoes lo-

“I think ‘in borrowed cally at Auntie’s Bookstore; shoes’ usually has the online from Amazon (Kinconnotation of ‘you can’t dle and print) and Balboa really know what someone Press. Learn more about else’s life is like unless you Diane Sherman, including walk in their shoes,’” she her upcoming creative prosays. “I liked that it has cess immersion workshops that sort of metaphoric and an East Coast book meaning, but I also felt tour, at dianesherman.net. that we borrow the ‘shoes,’ [or] other paradigms of thought, until we get to our own ‘shoes’.”

Sherman’s memoir is an opportunity to slip into a pair of borrowed shoes and take a few steps alongside her until you arrive to find your very own “shoes.” n

BY SAMANTHA HOLM

They’re rich and pretty, and they know it. DELICATE WHITE FLOWERS

Do shows about terrible rich people need to be subversive and smart?

BY NATE SANFORD

When HBO’s The White Lotus debuted last year, it felt like yet another show about the airheaded elite behaving badly and mostly getting away with it.

We already have Succession, Big Little Lies, The Undoing and so many other shows that walk a fine line between condemning and glamorizing extreme wealth. So when a boat full of very White, rich tourists pulled up to a sparkling Hawaiian resort in the first season of Lotus, it felt like more of the same.

And it was. But it also kind of worked.

Watching the comfortably elite have a shitty time on vacation is fun, but the show’s first season felt hesitant to let the viewer have too much fun. To keep things from straying too far into soap opera territory, the first season couched its drama in themes of colonialism and class. It was hit-or-miss. At times, it felt like show creator Mike White’s own self-consciousness was creeping onto the screen: Yes, we’re rich and White and eating calamari on stolen land, the characters said to themselves, but we feel kinda bad about it, too.

The second season is stronger because it strays away from the moralizing and leans harder on the gorgeous scenery, petty drama and spectacle.

There’s an almost entirely new cast of characters, and instead of Hawaii, the setting is sun-drenched Sicily. While the resort staff were well-defined key characters in the first season, they’re almost entirely absent in the second. In doing this, the show loses some of the biting social commentary that made its first season feel important, but it gains some of the mindless drama that made it addictive.

Instead of colonialism and class, the main theme is sex. Soap opera stuff. The murder mystery that gave the first season a semblance of plot movement is back in the second season, but it’s also more muted and takes a back seat to infidelity and steamy Italian rendezvous.

But that’s what the show does best.

The first season of Lotus felt like it was reaching for something greater than itself — a social commentary and class satire on the scale of Succession. It came close but never quite figured out what it wanted to say. The show is still smart, but its ambitions are quieter in its second season, and it’s somehow stronger because of it.

While the new season explores some interesting themes involving gender politics — two of the most interesting characters are sex workers — it’s overshadowed by the scenes that went viral on Twitter. Like in episode one, when actor Theo James, who plays a finance ghoul one NDA away from a #MeToo moment, briefly exposes his penis. (It was a prosthetic, according to dozens of articles dissecting the scene that went online immediately after the episode aired.)

The class, race and colonial politics that Lotus tried to eschew in its first season are important to talk about, but maybe this show isn’t the best vehicle for that. At it’s core, Lotus is a soapy murder mystery about rich people at beautiful resorts behaving badly and struggling with their own self-destruction.

The acting, cinematography, music and writing are all brilliant — even when there’s nothing deeper beneath the surface. That’s fun to gawk at, and maybe it doesn’t need anything more. n

THE BUZZ BIN

MARVEL CHRISTMATIC UNIVERSE Beloved sci-fi movies getting Christmas specials don’t have the best track record (see: The Star Wars Holiday Special, and Happy Life Day to my Wookie pals!). That didn’t stop the powers that be from churning out THE GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY HOLIDAY SPECIAL for Disney+. While it certainly won’t be a classic revisited for generations, it’s also not a disaster. Writer/director James Gunn centered the Guardians universe on jokes as much as action, so it gives itself more naturally over to silly seasonal cheer. When Mantis and Drax set out to kidnap a Hollywood celeb to cheer up Quill, it’s absurd, but still kinda fits. Throw in some family sentimentality and alien Christmas songs from made-up band the Old 97s, and it’s alright as a one-off viewing. (SETH SOMMERFELD)

A MUSICAL PUPPY CHRISTMAS! There are only two pieces of entertainment I must consume every year: A Claymation Christmas Celebration and the “O Little Town of Doggywood” podcast episode (#23) of OFF BOOK: THE IMPROVISED MUSICAL. The latter of which is now finally free from paywall, so all can find it in their podcast feeds. The show’s absurdly talented hosts Jessica McKenna and Zach Reino are joined by comedians Paul F. Tompkins and Nicole Parker and proceed to concoct an entire musical out of thin air about a doggy universe where pups are preparing for a big Christmas concert. You won’t find funnier holiday entertainment than this wild audio journey featuring singing and songwriting beagle best friend brothers, a diva chihuahua and her (evil?) goldendoodle manager, geese in a dumbwaiter, and the chaos of the 12 days of Christmas characters attempting to rehearse. (SETH SOMMERFELD)

KARDONG BRIDGE IS BACK! A well-used pedestrian and cycling bridge over the Spokane River in the University District reopened last Friday after being closed during a seven-month renovation. The DON KARDONG BRIDGE — named after Bloomsday’s founder — crosses the river near Gonzaga University’s baseball fields, and now sports a new concrete deck, accessible viewing platforms, a fresh coat of paint and new lighting, among other upgrades. Steel trusses that crossed the bridge were also removed. The $3.36 million project, completed months ahead of schedule and overseen by Spokane Parks & Recreation, was paid for with money from donors, public and private funds, and the federal American Rescue Plan. (CHEY SCOTT)

CULTURE | RADIO The Beat Goes On

KYRS Thin Air Community Radio moves to Spokane’s Central Library after almost two decades in the Community Building

BY MADISON PEARSON

tionships with listeners, we received an outpour of support in the form of donations. It says a lot about [the listeners].”

Once adequate money was raised, Matthews and long-time volunteer-turned-station-engineer Dale Sanderson began picking out state-of-the-art equipment to furnish the new space.

“We owe it all to Dale,” Matthews says. “Even down to the needles on our turntables, Dale thought of every single detail. He even handmade the desk that everything sits on in his home workshop.”

For the past 19 years, KYRS Thin Air Community Radio has called the third floor of Main Avenue’s Community Building home, but the radio station is now sending out signals from the third floor of the Central Library branch in downtown Spokane.

In 2018, voters approved a $77 million bond, setting in motion plans to renovate four existing Spokane Public Library branches and build three new branches. Shortly after announcing that its downtown branch was one of those locations getting a major facelift, KYRS was contacted by Jason Johnson, the Central Library’s community engagement manager.

“A lightbulb went off in his mind,” says Dana Matthews, the radio station’s programming director. “Jason asked if we’d like a permanent location within the new library. It was like serendipity. We’d been searching for a new location for years. We just never found one that felt right.”

The downtown branch began its transformation in March 2020, and was unveiled to the public in July 2022, but KYRS couldn’t move into its new space right away.

The hardest part was yet to come: raising funds for new equipment.

“Between then and now that was our biggest struggle,” Matthews says. “I made our case to the state first and applied for a grant. I said that we need this money in order to continue doing what we’re passionate about and what the community loves. The state agreed and we received the grant. The ability for us to move was really hinging on that.”

The grant required KYRS to buy equipment for the new studio space and then show proof of purchase in order to be reimbursed. But as a nonprofit, KYRS doesn’t have a ton of cash lying in wait. Once listeners caught wind of the need to fundraise, however, all of the station’s worries vanished.

“We truly have the best listeners in the world,” Matthews says. “All of us here cherish our relationships with our listeners, and because our staff and volunteers foster such good rela-

The radio station and Central Library have a mutual agreement that KYRS provide certain services to library users in exchange for free use of the space. Matthews says station staff have plans to hold workshops to teach interested parties how to run their own radio show. After completing the workshop, participants are invited to broadcast their completed show on the air. “We’re able to open our doors to so many more people now because of this location,” Matthews says. “We’re so much more visible and able to get involved more easily.” Since October, the station has been operating full-time out of the Central Library. Station Manager Michael Moon Bear in the new KYRS studio ERICK DOXEY PHOTO For a grand opening celebration in early December, KYRS staff, music programmers, board members and, of course, listeners filled the Central Library’s nxʷyxʷyetkʷ Hall, showing just how many community members are involved in making KYRS what it is: A radio station for the people, by the people. “A library is probably the epitome of a community institution,” Matthews says “We’re literally right within the community here. It’s like a radio station’s dream come true. Like, if you were to write a movie script about a radio station, this scenario would be going overboard because it’s too unbelievable.” In the station’s old home on the third floor of the Community Building, visitors pass by a poster that reads “How to Build Community.” Near the top, the list recommends “use your library” and near the bottom, it urges community members to “turn up the music.” Though KYRS has since departed that space, these tenets of its mission remain the same, and are now perhaps even better amplified — literally and figuratively — from its new operating base. n