Seattle yoga instructor/mystery author coming to Edmonds

Longtime Seattle yoga therapist and cozy mystery writer Tracy Weber will be signing copies of her newest book, “A Killer Retreat,” at January’s Third Thursday Artwalk in Edmonds.

EVENT DETAILS
Jan. 15, 5 p.m. to 8 p.m.
Third Thursday Artwalk book signing featuring author Tracy Weber (“A Killer Retreat”)
Edmonds Bookshop, 111 5th Ave. South, Edmonds
http://edmondsbookshop.com/

Weber’s second installment of her award-winning Downward Dog Mystery series again has vegetarian yoga teacher Kate and her feisty German Shepherd solving an intriguing murder mystery.

In Weber’s A Killer Retreat (January 8, 2015, Midnight Ink Books), Kate is teaching yoga at a vegan retreat center when a wedding guest at the center is found dead only shortly after a loud and public fight with Kate. She takes on trying to solve the murder before the police put her behind bars as their number one suspect.

“Weber’s vegan yoga teacher is a bright, curious sleuth with a passion for dogs,” said Krista Davis, New York Times bestselling author of the Domestic Diva and Paws and Claws mysteries. “A well-crafted whodunit with an intriguing mystery and a zinger of a twist at the end!”

Weber’s first book of the series, Murder Strikes a Pose, won the Chanticleer Book Reviews INDIE Manuscript Awards for the Cozy Mystery Category and the Mystery and Mayhem Awards 2013 for the Animal Mystery category.

The series combines Weber’s three loves: yoga, dogs and murder mysteries. Weber has enjoyed mysteries since her earliest reading years as a child, has a rambunctious special-needs German shepherd very similar to the one in her books and has owned her own yoga studio for 13 years.

“My primary intention is always to entertain,” Weber said. “And I’m also trying to convince people that yoga is for everyone, even imperfect, non-bendy people like Kate!”

Weber is a member of the Pacific Northwest Writers Association, Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, and the Dog Writers Association of America. Outside of writing, she is a certified yoga teacher and the founder of Whole Life Yoga. She and her husband live in Seattle with their German shepherd and a cat.

Q&A WITH TRACY WEBER

Your Downward Dog Mystery series combines your three loves of yoga, dogs and mysteries. How much do you draw on your own life in writing the series, and is Kate’s character based on you?

I’d like to say that my work is 100% fiction—and for the most part, it is—but I paint my fictional worlds on the canvas of my real life. Kate Davidson, the protagonist in my book, is a yoga studio owner who lives in Seattle and lives with a crazy German shepherd named Bella. I am also a yoga studio owner in Seattle, and I own a crazy German shepherd named Tasha. How could there not be some overlap?

My yoga students often say that they see me in Kate and hear my voice in her narration. Even my own mother called when she read my first book and said, “I just got to the part where you found the body.”

Let me assure you, I have never stumbled across a body near my yoga studio, or anywhere else for that matter. And although the series takes place in my Greenwood neighborhood, I try not to write about people I know. In fact, I go out of my way not to write about my friends, family, or yoga students. Including them in the series just seems mean, since I will inevitably kill them off or make them a murder suspect. My dog can’t read and no one cares if I make fun of myself, so I do write about Tasha’s and my sillier exploits from time to time.

A part of me exists in every character. To be honest, personality-wise, I think I’m closer to Rene, Kate’s best friend: a plotter, jokester and conniver. Unlike Kate, I don’t have a cute pet store owner in my life, I don’t get nauseated when I see a man with a beard, and I almost never lose my temper, at least not publicly.

To read more comparisons of my real life to my fictional world, check out Will the Real Kate Davidson Please Stand Up? and Yoga Studios Fact and Fiction and the guest post on Brooke Blogs about how my dog compares to Bella, the dog in the book,

You’ve had a varied career. How did you get started in writing and why did you pick this subject matter?

I never intended to be a writer. But then again, I never intended to be a yoga teacher. If you’d asked me in my early thirties, I’d have told you that yoga was for woo woo Gumby wannabes, and writing was for people who had more talent in their left pinky toe than I possessed in my entire five-foot-two-inch body.

I blame a fender-bender for my yoga career. In the early 1990s I was in a car accident that left me in severe chronic pain for over seven years. That pain was eventually mitigated—though not completely cured—by consistent yoga. My life was so transformed by yoga that I quit my corporate job and opened Whole Life Yoga.

My writing career has more complex origins. For that, I blame a grueling workout, my temperamental German shepherd, Tasha, and mystery author Susan Conant.

The ingredients for my series were already inside me, I just didn’t know it. I love dogs. I adore my own crazy, special-needs dog to a fault. I’ve read cozy mysteries since long before I knew there was a genre by that name. And my lifework is yoga.

One day, while trying to distract myself from a grueling workout, a passage in Susan Conant’s Black Ribbon made me burst into laughter. I knew I’d found my author soul mate. I jumped off the exercise bike, ran home, got online, and proceeded to buy every book she had ever written. That same night, I began to wonder: what would happen if a yoga teacher with a crazy dog like mine got mixed up in murder? And if she did, could I write about it? The whole idea seemed crazy. After all, I hadn’t written fiction since I was eighteen—which was way too long ago for me to admit—and I had no writing training. I laughed the whole idea off until a feisty yoga teacher named Kate Davidson popped into my head a few days later. She refused to leave, no matter how much I begged her to.

How do you find the time to write while also managing a business, teaching, and caring for a special needs dog?

I’m fortunate. I own my own business, so I’m able to work whatever 100-hour-a-week schedule that I want. Seriously, sometimes it feels that way. If I ever find the answer to life-work balance, I’ll let you know.Luckily, I’m happiest when I’m busy.I’ve been highly influenced by a quote from Gloria Steinem. Paraphrased, it’s that women (and men!) can have everything. Just not all at the same time.For me, the key to satisfaction is being flexible, knowing my priorities, and making tradeoffs. My dog comes first. Tasha has many medical needs, she depends on me, and I’ll only have her for a few years. Of course, my husband is even more important to me, but generally speaking, he knows how to take care of himself.;-)

My writing time ebbs and flows based on my other competing priorities, including my friends, my business, and my students. Sometimes several weeks will go by without my having had time to write a word. Other times I write nonstop. I’m most creative late at night, so I often write in bed until very early in the morning, which drives my husband crazy. I’m also the world’s worst housewife.I never cook and my husband does most of the cleaning. Poor guy!

How do you reconcile writing both about yoga (which advocates nonviolence) and murder?

This is such an interesting question, and one that I’ve only been asked a handful of times. First, I’ll say my genre, cozy mysteries, helps. By convention, gore and on-the-page violence are minimized. There are definitely some tense and challenging scenes, however. I try to balance them with humor.

But even if I wrote horror, I could still combine murder and yoga in the same work. The yoga teachings never promise that yogis will live in a world without violence. In fact, they say that suffering is inevitable. What they do promise is that people who practice yoga—which is so much more than doing poses—will be able to survive life’s traumas with less emotional suffering. They also ask that yogis personally practice compassion, honesty, and nonviolence in actions, words, and thoughts. Yogis are exposed to the same triggers and conflicts and traumas. Yoga doesn’t stop what happens around us; it simply gives us choices in how we react to it.

But the truth is Kate—my yoga sleuth—doesn’t live in an ideal world, and she doesn’t always react like the perfect yogi. She has a terrible temper and often acts impulsively. When Kate’s at her best, she responds to the tension and heartache in her world with self-deprecating humor and compassion.

Overall, Kate tries to be compassionate and generous. She helps others when it would be much easier not to. When she screws up, which is often, she tries to learn from her mistakes and to do better in the future.

To me, that is yoga.