BOOK LAUNCH PARTY

An Island Called Bainbridge: People, Places, Conversations:                                               

If you ride the ferry over from Seattle, you can watch the city become smaller and smaller; feel the pull of urban complication yielding, the noise lessening, and before you know it, it becomes clear that Washington is much more about its small towns and villages than its only big city. As soon as you disembark, gone is the big city feel. In this collection of writings, Sanelli introduces readers to places, people, and intimacies between “this island of us,” capturing how islands are their own versions of time, routines, genuine wisdoms, petty grievances, greed, and selfless generosities; surrounded by water—in this case, a sound, a bay, a passage, and a pass.

Sanelli has a perceptive way of balancing the personal with the universal, secured by an open mind, an irreverent-leaning wit, and a steadfast curiosity. That is one way of describing her. There is another: Sanelli displays an ability to portray the complicated mix of human emotions with equal measures of generosity and compassion, but with a refusal to sentimentalize or sensationalize, as she skillfully manages to bring life to the rhythm of the words as much as their meaning. Beautifully observed, An Island Called Bainbridge rolls seamlessly from thoughts about a friendship to politics (“there is fear under the surface of a lot of us”) to a description of a container garden, her attentiveness revealing the close connection between us and the land that nurtures us. This is how she finds equilibrium. Within herself. And with the world around her.

“Sanelli’s writing is a fine mixture of literary nonfiction and memoir that often, and honestly,                                                                                                                                                                                                  examines the act of writing itself.” —the Stranger, Seattle