Writer Bears Witness

For three summers in a row, Southern California native Laura Carpini spent a week alone in a tent in the Montana wilderness as part of a yoga retreat. During that solitude, she channeled her fear of grizzly bears into journal entries, finding relief in writing down her thoughts. 

"Each day something would come to me," Carpini said. "The first day I realized that all my needs were met. The next day it was the thought of time being an illusion. The third day I knew not to be afraid. At the time, I just thought I would keep these things in my journal for my own purpose."

Instead the journal entries became part of her shamanistic book, Bear Speaks: The Story of 7 Sacred Lessons Learned from a Montana Grizzly, published this month by Weiser Books. In the book, a young professional woman from Los Angeles goes on a spiritual quest alone in Montana and finds the truths she is seeking in the wilderness around her. 

Capini will be at Mystic Journey Bookstore, 1319 Abbot Kinney Blvd. on Saturday, Nov. 6 at 7 p.m.

"I told my friend I was scared of the grizzly bears and my friend growled at me," she said. "It hit me that I could write the things that I wrote in my journal in a story about a woman befriending a bear. I made the woman younger, at a different point in her life than I was. The woman in the book is a fictional character, but it was based on experiences I had."

Carpini's stop in Venice is part of a book tour that will hit Chicago, New York City, New Orleans, Atlanta, and Sedona, AZ. She is currently on a leave of absence from Adams Middle School, in Redondo beach, where she teaches seventh grade language arts.

Teaching and being an author has been a careful balancing act, which is something that carries over into Carpini's travels, as well.

"The weather is awesome and people are positive and friendly," she said about Southern California. "But I think everybody needs a spot to go to for a retreat. Montana is my spot where I go into nature and escape the goings-on of my normal life. It's my sanctuary, a place where I go to be inundated by nature and not have any distractions."