My Off Grid Living Memoir Published!

During the pandemic lockdown I lived in my tiny house full time which allowed me to explore more options in tiny house living such as doing laundry, showering or more to the point not showering, gardening and cooking in my one burner kitchen. I was surprised at how self-sufficient I could be. I even had entertainment using my laptop to play DVDs onto a larger external monitor that I could view while lying in my hammock. But most of all the lockdown year was an opportunity to finish my book. 

I hadn’t intended to write another memoir, my first, Diamonds In My Pocket having been well received by friends and colleagues if not fully appreciated by family (except for my mother who was very proud of the book). I was thinking to write a pamphlet about how to make your own composting toilet and manage the composting part of it, but YouTube was best for such DIY projects. I didn’t want to give up entirely on writing a book and it occurred to me that a more interesting story could be written about why a woman would want to design a life around living with a composting toilet. When a favorite teacher announced she was going to give a memoir writing class, I signed up and thus had the help of a supportive group of women who let me know if my topics were compelling enough to merit a book.

Once I got started I found that the desire to go off-grid was an incremental journey that brought forth stories going back to my first consciousness of my own thoughts as a largely free range child growing up in Thailand when it was not quite a fully industrialized country. The influences of a culture that sustained itself on so much less consumption than the one I would immigrate to, helped me retain this knowledge of how things could be done much more simply well into my adult life. The journey also offered a chance to investigate parts of my life I had refused to touch until now as society itself nudged me off the mainstream and into the American gay subculture. So much did my sexuality inform my life along with my spiritual quests and my thirst to understand how the world worked, that eventually every aspect of my life had veered off the conventional way of doing things. Moving into a tiny house tipped it over the edge completely and provided more details and practical aspects of my unconventional life.

It took me until the middle of 2022 to finish the book and publish it independently which was an off-grid project in itself and required that I learn how to use book publishing software. This took months and prompted a computer upgrade. I still had my graphic design skills to help me design the book and get a dynamic cover on it. I didn’t fuss with it too much. It didn’t have to be the best designed book. It just had to look professional. I also had a great deal of help proofreading the book which will spare the reader the distraction of my negligent punctuation. I was very pleased that I had come so far and having accomplished such a feat, I could envision many more books I wanted to produce just to leave a legacy of all that I had learned. It made me quite proud, too, that having witnessed so much history of the Bay Area, the emerging gay culture and the technological changes that took place I had captured a piece of local history. My love of film and movie theaters, in particular, as I worked as a projectionist during the transitional years when home video impacted this industry was also a significant part of my story.

The tiny house thus became the perfect writing retreat, sheltering me from the demands of the outside world. I named my publishing company after this blog, Tiny Red Desk Publishing. There are, now many accounts of people going off-grid mostly about logistics and the build, but rather short on character development. I often felt short changed; I was sure that there must be particular traits that would lead someone to seek such a life. My book is a long view with a deep dive into questioning how we live. It is also a woman’s journey, indirect, serendipitous and non-linear, with lots of tangents influenced by the people I met and loved. My early readers have found it to be a satisfying read and some have been quite moved by it. I am confident it will find its audience. You can buy the book in both hard copy and digital at https://www.amazon.com/dp/1093980893?ref_=pe_3052080_397514860

Talking Tiny In Thailand

The first thing I realized about giving a talk about tiny houses in Thai was that there is no word for trailer. They are simply not widely used in Thailand. If you want to haul something you have an array of trucks to choose from, but none of them are equipped to pull a trailer. An expat living in Thailand told me that if you want one say for a boat you have to have it custom built.

The occasion of this talk was a presentation I offered to give at the women's adobe building workshop I attend annually in Northern Thailand. And as the building instruction was given in both Thai and English to accommodate the Thai women attending as well as our mud hut sisters from Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, Japan, Europe, Australia and North America I opted to give my talk in both Thai and English rather than have it translated by one of the instructors. This also served to keep my talk short I explained since my Thai was not as proficient as my English. Luckily I had plenty of pictures to use in my power point to show what I couldn't manage to describe. But no picture of a trailer so in the end I called the tiny house a car house. A house built with wheels like a vehicle.

To give my story context I opened the talk by showing pictures of houses in the Bay Area and talking about how very expensive they were, all of them a million dollars or more. And how much rents were. So post divorce I knew I could not find housing in my budget so had opted to buy a tiny house on wheels. The picture of said tiny house evoked a round of "aww" at how cute it was. Then I explained how I needed a place to build the interior and had had to ask my stepmother, who was living in the house of my deceased father, if I could bring it to what was now her house to work on it. In my Thai translation this part of the story took up a lot of space and I later realized I was telling my story of how a high born Thai person such as I was managed to become nearly homeless, but by virtue of my building skills had averted such an outcome. The fee for the other Thai women for the course was half what it was for foreigners. (Some had their fee waived altogether.) This allowed for women of all classes to attend including a woman from a hilltribe village and a lesbian couple from Northeastern Thailand. Two cousins living in Bangkok had family land they wanted to turn into a permaculture food forest and a third had been offered land to farm that belonged to a friend. They were curious as to why I kept repeating this course. The concept of finding one's tribe was not a quest for them as it was for me. Thai people are much more rooted in family and childhood friends.

They were also accustomed to living in small houses or living communally so the experience of moving into a tiny house was not nearly as compelling a story as it is for Americans. In fact I didn't even call it a "tiny" house. But to show the size of it I arranged the tables in the hall to outline the floor space. This also gave the presentation a special stage set. Nor was the off-grid aspect of it unusual. Because of the many street food vendors Thai people are very familiar with using chest freezers for keeping food cool as I do.

But most of the country now has flush toilets and septic systems so everybody was interested in the off grid composting toilet aspect of tiny house living. And as builders of houses made from mud and straw they were interested in the details. We were after all staying on a farm commune that was off grid where the flush toilets drained into a pit where the contents sat composting. And the toilet we used at the building site was just a board laid across a pit. So no one was squeamish about a homemade system. Nor was the concept of Bokashi composting new to them. In fact one of the families that lived on the farm was so enamored of the technique that they had named their daughter Bokashi. Still not even the instructors of the workshop had used Bokashi composting to dispose of poop. And this had prompted me to offer to make my presentation in the first place.

I also wanted them to know how hard it was to find a place to park the "car house" and how draconian the laws are in the states about housing size. I gave lots of information about how much things cost too since that is a universal measurement especially in Asia. Best of all my presentation made them all laugh throughout because I used a lot of pantomime to make up for my lack of words. And there are some words in Thai that really convey a sense of comfort and ease that resonated with my Thai audience, while my Western audience marveled at the minimalist aspects of it. It was one of the most fun presentations I've given.

(This post has been backdated to keep a record of the timeline. Actual date of writing is 12/23/18).