Why another book of bus stories, and why now? For me, it felt essential in ways I didn’t have words for until after completing the project. It simply had to happen, for two reasons:
Firstly, a second book was always part of the plan. The Lines That Make Us is a very quick read. With only 30 stories, it feels like more of an introduction to the world of the street as I see it. I put my all into it at the time, but… the stories just keep on coming! The street is so dense and rich with incident, so bursting with the multitudinous cacophonies of existence, that sharing another volume from a well that’s so richly supplied was an obvious afterthought.
But through what lens?
Lines came out in 2018. Much has transpired for us Seattleites since then, as you know. It hasn’t been easy. The disillusionment we thought we felt way back during Amazon’s arrival plus the housing crash seems quaint now. Have you found the hardship of post-2020 existence to possess a seeping quality, a sort of insidious creep, where anxiety has found you not just via the news, on the national and world stage (hardly new), but also in your personal life, new challenges and losses presenting themselves in areas we thought would always be stable? Trauma and its slowpoke sibling, Grief (who has a way of sticking around!), have become so hard to hide from. Even time moves differently: “four years ago” doesn’t feel like four years ago.
What is the way forward through all this morass?
What if instead of hiding from the above, we lean into the challenge of our times, rising to the occasion, looking out for one another not because it is easy, but precisely because it is hard? Because it’s what our best, toughest, tenderest self would seek to accomplish?
This is what my new book, Deciding To See, is about. Finding hope in the context of community, of strangers. Connecting the dots of the hard times we’ve endured, and realizing they’ve made us stronger, more adept at patience, insight, forgiveness. Love.
Everyone’s currently Working Through Something, because no matter where we are on the ladders of existence we choose to measure ourselves by, we’re all a few rungs lower down than we were before COVID. We’re disillusioned, divided, bewildered by a world larger and more terrifying than we imagined possible. There are many problems today, but I’m most concerned with the problem of being confronted with this many problems. How are we supposed to think, in this environment?
Conundrums are best met with a solution cut from similar cloth – that is, an emotional problem is best addressed not with logic but with another emotion; an idea is best fought by another idea; and so on. And the problem we face today is not a problem of logic, or emotion, or ideas. It is a problem of perspective. And it is best met with another perspective.
I avoid being didactic or instructional about this in the book; I don’t have answers, but I have woven the stories in a certain pattern to suggest something that will play slightly differently for every reader, because you’re bringing your own insight to the table too, prismatically adding your unique ray of perception, completing the book, a slightly different experience every time you read it. All my favorite art pieces do this; they don’t tell you what to believe. They just dump a bunch of interesting stuff in your lap and let you decide.
Paul Currington, he of the great Fresh Ground Stories, says that stories come out best when we ‘tell from our scars, not our wounds.’ Sometimes it’s too soon to tell a story. While I don’t feel qualified to write about the traumas most immediately on our minds, I can write about an earlier trauma I went through (being in the 2015 Paris terrorist attacks) that I have had time to process, and offer it to the reader as a sort of proxy for reflecting on their own experiences. No one has ever understood something better when they were going through it, as opposed to afterward, with hindsight. I have no hindsight about today’s issues and neither does anyone else. I wanted to write not something that will date quickly (that’s what articles are for, including my own political pieces of the past), but a book that will remain interesting for (we hope!) a long time.
Speaking of politics: there aren’t any, not in this book. This is 300+ pages with no donkeys or elephants. As Paul Currington also says: opinions divide us, but stories bring us together. Life is too rich to reduce into teams. I know people say everything is political, but this book is only that if you want it to be. The stories unavoidably engage various contemporary hot-button topics, but in a way that’s not issue-driven. Storytelling helps us find what we have in common, which will only help when we’re reminded of our differences.
The short version of all this is that the new book is more personal, and more centered around finding hope during hard times. It’s still true stories from the bus (mostly the nighttime Route 7, as ever my favorite), still a celebration of the goodness that lurks within all of us, involving recurring characters and others who are hilarious, heartbreaking, and everything in between; but there’s more of myself this time around. With the themes above, it had to be. We explore moments off the bus, moments before I became a driver, street encounters in other countries, and most of all the interior life of processing tough times while trying to make the best of things, and finding things to celebrate.
So that’s the new book. It’s large. It has almost three times as many stories as Lines. It has heft. Because working out all the above is no joke, especially if you’re an optimist like me! And because I want to give you your money’s worth!
Join for my book event and signing at Elliott Bay Books on Friday May 30th, at 7:00pm. RSVP here. More with me about the book: Seattle Times interview here; NPR interview here.
Nathan Vass is an artist, filmmaker, photographer, and author by day, and a Metro bus driver by night, where his community-building work has been showcased on TED, NPR, The Seattle Times, KING 5 and landed him a spot on Seattle Magazine’s 2018 list of the 35 Most Influential People in Seattle. He has shown in over forty photography shows is also the director of nine films, six of which have shown at festivals, and one of which premiered at Henry Art Gallery. His book, The Lines That Make Us, is a Seattle bestseller and 2019 WA State Book Awards finalist.
