August 2018
Celebrity Photo Of The Month

Sallie Tisdale with Kim McKimmie

Kim met Sallie Tisdale after her popular (standing room only) book reading recently at Powells Books in Portland. She read from her latest work, Advice for Future Corpses (and Those Who Love Them): A Practical Perspective on Death and Dying.

Sallie is a nurse, a teacher, and an end-of-life educator who leads workshops. She is an amazing person - and an amazing writer. Her bio mentions her nine books and they all are fascinating in both subject matter and the thought-provoking ideas the author so artfully expresses.

She has written: Violation: Collected Essays (2016), Women of the Way (2006), The Best Thing I Ever Tasted (2000), Talk Dirty to Me (1994), Stepping Westward (1992), Lot’s Wife (1988), Harvest Moon (1987), The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (1986).

Her work has appeared in Harper’s, Antioch Review, Conjunctions, Threepenny Review, The New Yorker, and Tricycle, among other journals. Tisdale is the 2013 recipient of the Regional Arts and Culture Council Literary Fellowship. She has received a Pushcart Prize, an NEA Fellowship, the James Phelan Literary Award, and was a Dorothy and Arthur Shoenfeldt Distinguished Writer of the Year. Tisdale is a long-time member of PEN and was a judge for the National Book Award in 2010. She teaches part-time in the writing program at Portland State University.

Tisdale says about her Advice for Future Corpses, “I had a lot of fun writing this book. I feel a lot of joy in the face of the preciousness of life—a kind of silly joy at times. Not only are there these rituals of crying and role change that every culture has around the deathbed, there’s also a deep worldwide culture of laughing at death, making fun of it, joking about it. I think it’s because it puts us face-to-face with the deep love that we feel for each other.”

She says, “If you are spending time with a person who is dying, you be­come a protector. You are the defender of modesty, privacy, silence, laughter, and many other things that can be lost in the daily tasks. You are the guardian of that person’s desires.”

Her book is full of wisdom, practical advice and answers many questions about a subject that most of us find fearful and taboo.

“In its loving, fierce specificity, this book on how to die is also a blessedly saccharine-free guide for how to live.” —The New York Times