Vagabond: Venice Beach, Slab City and Points in Between
Trade Paperback
From the publisher's website:
At twenty-one, Ceilidh Michelle was homeless, drifting through
counter cultural communities along California’s coast, from Venice Beach
to Slab City to Big Sur. This restless and turbulent time began when she
was sleeping on her sister’s couch in Vancouver and decided to become a
yoga disciple in California. Denied entry at the US border in
Washington state, and stuck overnight in the Greyhound station, her
already shaky pilgrimage began to take another direction, away from the
inward sanctuary of an ashram and toward the sea and light and noise of
Venice Beach, and eventually up Highway 1 to the desert.
Having spent much of her youth outrunning family turmoil, the peripatetic lifestyle once key to Michelle’s survival is now a habit she can’t or won’t break—unless it breaks her first. Sleeping in parking lots, camping out in abandoned beach cottages and mansions, she finds community, easy and fraught, with fellow travellers: musicians, veterans, ex-cons, addicts, drug dealers, artists and con artists. Still, dreams and fleeting notions of home fuel and shadow every encounter, haunting the places she stays, offering moments of both grace and violence.
Told with deadpan humor and insightful lyricism, Vagabond is an observant and at times shimmering narrative suspended between a traumatic past and an as yet unimagined future. Coursing through it is the story of an emergent writer just beginning to find sanctuary in her own creative instincts.
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