Author's Persistence Pays Off When Novel Published

By Alan Brewer

Twenty-five years after the first draft, local writer Charlene Anderson has published her first novel, "Berkeley's Best Buddhist Bookstore" (Creative Arts Book Company, November 2000).

The bookstore of the title is fictional, but the novel brings back to life some of the light and shadows of the '60s generation in San Francisco and Berkeley.

Local novelist Donna Levin commented, "Charlene Anderson makes a strong debut - a fast-paced yet complex novel of love, loss and family."

Set in 1993, teenager Alice runs away from home and her father, a bank vice president, charges out to track her down. He enlists the help of Tom, a lapsed Buddhist monk trying to readjust to the outside world. Alice's older sister, Judy, married and living in the suburbs, acts as a mediator among the other parties.

During the search through Berkeley and San Francisco, John flashes back to the Korean War, Tom revisits the haunts of his hippie days, and through him Judy experiences the spirit of the '60s counterculture. Together, they discover truth that lies in each other's different worlds.

Anderson has spent most of her adult life in San Francisco and for the last 20 years has lived in a cottage in the Inner Richmond District. The '60s, she says, "was in some ways a period of renaissance - music, the human spirit, people started seeing things differently, all together, in tune together. People also fell away from the spirit, but some of it stayed there, the psychological change and growth."

Anderson started writing poetry in high school and in her early '20s wrote an autobiographical novel. A friend began to type the manuscript until he begged off, saying it was too "avant garde," perhaps meaning "it didn't have much of a plot."

Next she wrote the first version of her current book, then titled "The Changer." The various characters in the novel illustrate the dichotomy between the rational and intuition/creative side, and the possibilities of change. She next wrote "After the Fire," a novel about rape and reconciliation; but after five versions realized it wouldn't work.

Anderson grew up on a farm in Wisconsin and attended a one-room schoolhouse.

After attending Wisconsin State University, she received a M.A. in English Literature from Purdue. Her friend Curt McDowell, the late underground filmmaker, invited her to stay in San Francisco. She later spent time in Boston, Madison, Wisconsin and Tucson, Arizona, but kept returning to San Francisco, finally to stay. She later received a M.A. in Research Psychology from San Francisco State University. She has worked for most of the past 20 years at UCSF as an administrative assistant.

It has been a "long, hard struggle" to publication. "I really don't think anybody should try it unless they're completely dedicated," she says. "It's tough."

Following advice, she shopped her novel around to agents and was finally offered representation by an agent in Los Angeles.

But she was suspicious of the contract and the agent's unwillingness to give references of books placed, so she declined to sign.

Later she learned that the agent had been exposed as a fraud. Giving up on agents, she sent her book package directly to publishers, mostly small presses, and was accepted at Creative Arts Book Company, based in Berkeley.

Promoting her book has also been a struggle, since she does not consider herself a salesperson. So far she has given readings at two branch libraries and several bookstores in San Francisco, as well as making a radio appearance on the PBS station KWMR at Point Reyes Station.

She has nearly finished a new novel, titled "On a Fault with No Name." This is a "modern urban fantasy," in the tradition of Charles de Lint, which starts out in the real world and then veers off into a world of strange and changing realities. Her favorite science fiction writer is Philip K. Dick, who dealt in shifting perceptions of reality. William Faulkner, perhaps her favorite novelist, also spent much time submerged beneath the surface of ordinary reality.

Anderson writes at least an hour or two every day, drafts in longhand and then typing on a computer and later revising.

Writing is a "creative stream," she says, leading into "some world of the imagination, a place where you dip in and find a story." You also become different characters, and at times reach a kind of "revelation."

She remains most interested in the possibilities of growth and change. After so many years, the act of writing is a practice as natural and necessary as breathing.

Charlene Anderson's "Berkeley's Best Buddhist Bookstore" (Creative Arts Book Company, November 2000), $14.95 is available at Green Apple Books on Clement Street at Sixth Avenue. Upcoming readings are April 7, at noon, at Waldenbooks at El Cerrito Plaza in El Cerrito and May 3, 7:30 p.m., at Barnes & Noble, 2352 Shattuck Ave., Berkeley.