Customer Reviews

Pink Harvest: Tales of Happenstance

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You must buy this book. I'd pre-ordered it here at Amazon, and when it arrived, I tore into it greedily and was done in a matter of hours. Toni's writing is like that for me. On occasion, I'll stumble across her work in San Francisco Chronicle Magazine--and I recognized some of the pieces in this book as having been originally published there--and I can count on having the same basic response to whatever yarn she may be spinning: towards the end of the piece, there'll be a sudden flash of insight. (Call it an epiphany if you must.) Sometimes it's pleasant; sometimes it's disturbing. Regardless, whatever it was that struck me will stay with me all day, and I'll keep coming back to it, turning the idea over in my head, no matter how whimsical the insight may've been.

Pink Harvest is a series of short creative nonfiction pieces, linked together either thematically or chronologically, or even loosely linked by a word that reverberates into the next story. Toni Mirosevich's brush reaches fairly broad--to Italy, Croatia, the Pacific Northwest, San Francisco, to home just south of the city along the Pacific Coast. Yet the book feels remarkably close; that's how brilliantly Toni is able to paint her world and bring you right into the very foreground. She writes about encounters with people: friends who grow apart, friends who come back together, friends who reveal a secret kept hidden for years. She writes about family: a political discussion with mom, or dad, who ekes out a living from the sea, yet recognizes how wealthy they are when he can show his daughter a small herd of white deer. Largely unsuccessful at prying out of her mother her Nana's stories of the Old Country, Toni seeks out the past in returning to Croatia (meanwhile cringing after the break-up of the Soviet Union that her name, Mirosevich, is so close to Milosevic, which leads to ruminations on violence and guns.) There's also the old man who dies in her neighborhood, leaving behind a home no one knew harbored a million-dollar view. Then there's the spat with his daughter over a writing table she originally hadn't wanted. Toni's partner, Shotsy, a nurse, always hovers on the edges, entering and exiting the narratives, but some of the stories must have come from conversations over dinner, after work: There's the story of the broken, alcoholic ex-Marine who torments his family. The unexpected, underlying message is simply to cherish them, to love them more. But lest that sound schmaltzy, elsewhere in Mirosevich's world, upside-down paintbrushes in a jar can become a heart-stopping insult.

Toni's prose is straightforward yet beautiful, never precious but dead-on descriptive. The book never sags or loses momentum. Every single story holds a surprise. These tales of happenstance capture, I think, what Virginia Woolf meant by "moments of being."

As I said, you must buy this book. Or buy two. Keep one and pass the other along. I also highly recommend another book of Toni's, Queer Street.

I love the way Toni Mirosevich's mind works-- her leaps and associations, her amazing metaphors, her wit and her honesty. Some essays are narratives with unforgettable characters, such as the homeless man with a hole in his chest. Other pieces meander, dip and dive into material rich in images, ideas, feelings. I particularly enjoyed Mirosevich's essay about an unusual acquisition of a Victorian dining table which explores everything from aging and loneliness to gentrification and greed. And her essays about her visit to Croatia, where her grandmother was born, are very powerful. Toni Mirosevich is wise and compassionate and very very funny. Read this book; it's a treasure.

What I like about this book is how the author lays out the details of both remembered events and current situations in which she finds herself and then allows perspective to transform them. The short narratives act like prisms reflecting rays of thinking into unexpected places. Like all good writers she makes this seem easy. She will take you from a place next to her at the childhood table sharing fish stew and the vicissitudes of family life to a more perspicacious realm where the grown-up voice has a tale to tell. Good book to pick up and start anywhere!

Toni Mirosevich writes, "All we have is what we can conjure." And in the hands of this writer, she conjures far beyond expectation. In each essay, she lets herself linger, ponder, to ask questions and suddenly you are far from where you thought she was going to take you. But you are exactly where you want to be-- surprised, delighted by a narrative that is quick with humor and wit and heart.

Pink Harvest is a wonderful collection of short stories by Toni Mirosevich, San Franciscan poet and writer. In narratives that describe her search for cultural roots, growing up in the Croatian community in the Pacific Northwest, exploration of family relationships, spirituality and superstition, the growing pains of adolescence, and the stresses of everyday adult life, Mirosevich provides readers with a view of the human condition that is poignant and all too recognizable.