 Hi everybody, friends, book lovers, newspaper readers. Thank you so much for being here today, both live and in person, and our friends on Zoom. How is everybody? Good to see you. I'm Michelle Jeffers. I'm the Chief of Community Programs and Partnerships for San Francisco Public Library. The Total SF Book Club is one of our favorite partnerships. Before we begin, I'd like to give a land acknowledgement. The San Francisco Public Library acknowledges that we occupy the unceded ancestral homeland of the Ramitush Aloni people, who are the original inhabitants of the San Francisco Peninsula. We recognize that we benefit from living and working on their traditional homeland. As uninvited guests, we affirm their sovereign rights as First Peoples and wish to pay our respects to the ancestors, elders, and relatives of the Ramitush community. Thank you. Now, let me introduce you to our featured guest to kick off this amazing book club. We will bring to the stage shortly Heather Knight, a San Francisco Chronicle columnist who covers everything from politics to homelessness to family flight, and the quirks of living in one of the most fascinating cities in the world. She believes in holding politicians accountable for their decisions, or often lack thereof, and telling the stories of real people and their struggles. Heather's co-host Peter Hartlob is a former paper boy who has worked at the Chronicle since 2000. I don't think that includes his paper boy time. He covers Bay Area Culture, hosts the Total SF podcast, and writes the archive-based Our San Francisco Local History column. Together, they host the Chronicles Total SF podcast and co-founded its Total SF program to celebrate the wonder and whimsy of San Francisco. We're so delighted to have them here for this program, and I just want to remind everyone that they'll be back here in this room in February when the library Heather and Peter will host the terrific San Francisco author, Charlie Jane Anders, talking about her newest young adult sci-fi novel, Victory's Greater Than Death. If you haven't read it, it's an amazing romp. For tonight's event, we'll be taking questions from our Zoom audience and our in-person audience, so there are no cards and pencils in the back of the room if you think you're going to have a question later on. Grab one now. Now welcome Heather and Peter to the stage. Thank you so much for having us. We are so excited for our first in-person Total SF Book Club meeting, and before we introduce our, yay, that's worth applause. Before we meet our author, talk about why we swim. We'd like to invite city librarian Michael Lambert to join us up on stage. Thank you, Heather. Good to see you again. Oh, it's so wonderful to see you. I last saw you on Page Street, on the slow street, you were skateboarding. It's true. Well, welcome to our library edition of This Is Your Life. We have some video clips for you. We have a special clip for you from May, the very first library patrons returning to the main library on opening day. Oh, wow. Nice. So the camera was shaking because I was sobbing as I'm taking that video. There was so much emotion on that day. People lined up to get in the library, and I also think about the library staff redeployed, a lot of people doing different things. Can you talk about how the library staff was redeployed during the pandemic, and what it meant opening that first branch, the main branch? Thank you for the question, Peter. Just watching that video again choked me up and brought tears to my eyes because that was such an emotional day after everything this library staff has been through. It was so important for us to reopen the library, and that's why it feels so good to be with all of you and community tonight in this space. Many of you know that two thirds of our workforce was deployed on the front lines to support the public health emergency response. So we're talking 590 staff out of 900, and our staff were doing contact tracing investigations. They were staffing testing sites, COVID vaccination sites, 61 of our staff, myself included, were staffing hotels, sheltering people experiencing homelessness. So that's why I'm so choked up after watching that video. It's been a long, hard road, and it just makes this moment that much more special. Well, thank you to the librarians and all the city workers who kept us safe. So did you guys plan that standing ovation or was it spontaneous? It was relatively spontaneous. The staff that day said, we should all line the atrium and clap for the patrons, and it was so powerful, and I remember getting off work that evening and watching the nightly news with David Muir, and that video went viral. It was on the nightly news that evening, and people were celebrating San Francisco. Well, speaking of celebrating San Francisco, we have a few water-themed San Francisco trivia questions for you guys, and if you know the right answer, raise your hand, and you could win an archive photo from the Chronicle Basement. Yeah, these are from our archive. I'm gonna hold them up as we go here. I think we'll start with, we've got the Transamerica Pyramid, and Michael, will you help us? Sure, I'd be happy to. Don't blurt it out, because we only have so many questions, and we have to go to the next question if you blurt it out, so. You wanna go ahead, Heather? Sure. This is a Transamerica Pyramid being built. This is shot by Joe Rosenthal, who also shot the Iwo Jima shot that's very famous. Okay, the longest bridge in California spans the San Francisco Bay. What is its name? Oh, don't. Bay Bridge? Nope. Nope. How about right here, the front row? No. So close. Yep, you've got it, San Mateo Bridge. Can I, this is probably breaking some rule, but congratulations. The San Mateo Bridge is seven miles long and the 25th longest bridge in the world. This is the Golden Gate Bridge, and it was, this was shot by Gary Fong, who shot this, just had a minute to shoot this photo, and it's one of the most incredible photos in our archive. Pier 39 once had 1,701 of what? The peak for Sea Lions at Pier 39 was in 2009. Hope this is going to a Giants fan. We have Willie McCovey. This is one of his retirement games. At Candlestick Park. So for islands in the Bay, Treasure Island is different from Alcatraz, Angel Island, and Yerba Buena Island in what way? You're right. Man made. What is the average water temperature of the water in the San Francisco Bay? Okay, your hand went up really fast. 61. A little bit lower. That's right, it's right. I looked it up. That's right. Do you want Harvey milk, or do you want the Golden Gate Bridge with biplanes? There you go. Excellent choice. 55 degrees. It's 56, but I mean, she was only one off. I'm sure of it. Then Mayor Diane Feinstein promised to wear a bikini to the opening of Pier 39 if it opened on time, but she only partially followed through. Who can tell me what she wore? From where? What famous San Francisco location? You're on the right track. Anybody else know? This is hurting me because I wrote a column about it. Basically, no one read it. It's okay, we can move to the next one. She wore one of those famous sutro baths, one pieces. Speaking of sutro baths, how long did it take the Pacific Ocean at High Tide to fill all the pools there? Little bit less, little bit more. You got it. I'm gonna leave this right here, okay? There you go. Thank you. Good job, everybody. And we have a gift for you for joining us. Thank you. Before you go, as you're receiving your gift here. This is Michael's skateboarding on Page Street. There is a total SF podcast interview. If you don't subscribe or follow the total SF podcast, please do. We have an interview with Michael Lambert, which I was profoundly disappointed to miss. Heather did the interview because it included a skateboarding talk and demonstration. And I love that subject. Can we play the next clip? How close did you come to having a skateboarding career that derailed your library dreams? Yeah, I was close. I actually visited San Francisco for the first time between my eighth and ninth grade years, and I was a competitive skateboarder. I grew up in South Carolina, and I came out here just to skateboard because San Francisco is renowned for its skateboarding spots. I've skateboarded down Lombard Street. I grew up reading all the magazines and looking at the pictures of San Francisco and just always had a West Coast spirit. Well, have you been down Lombard Street again as an adult? Because you told me that if you do, I get to videotape it. I have not skateboarded down Lombard Street as an adult, and we might have to have Kaiser ready. Well, thank you so much for this gift. I will cherish this. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for joining us. Thank you. And now, our featured guest, Bonnie Soy, the author of our book club selection, Why We Swim. Hello, friends. Hi, Bonnie. Hi, Peter. Hi, Heather. I'm glad that we're not freezing after having just swum in the bay this time. I was gonna say, have you thought out? Yeah, we're fully clipped. This is that we look, we clean up real nice. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Well, your writing is so lovely. We'd love to start our talk with you reading a passage from your book of your choice. I would love to. So I thought that I would start, I don't often get to read this passage, but it is about the first known record of swimming. And I do love it. The first known record of swimming lies in the middle of a desert, somewhere in Egypt near the Libyan border on the Sahara's remote and mountainous Guilfkeber Plateau, there are swimmers breast-docking up the walls of a cave. The Cave of Swimmers, discovered by the Hungarian explorer, Lazul Almacy in 1933, contains a trove of neolithic paintings that depict people in a range of underwater poses. Archeologists have dated the creation of the artwork as far back as 10,000 years ago. At the time of Almacy's discovery, the notion that the Sahara had not always been a desert was a radical idea. Theories of climate change that could account for the shift from temperate environs to barren hyperarid desert were so new that the editor of Almacy's 1934 book, The Unknown Sahara, reportedly felt compelled to insert footnotes stating disagreement. But the paintings convinced Almacy himself that water might have been a natural feature in the immediate vicinity of the cave, that the swimmers themselves were the painters, that a lake lapped their very toes as they worked. Where there is now a sea of sand, there was water flowing. Where one medium is liquid life, the other may seem to be its parched granular antithesis, he thought, but the two were indeed connected. It turns out, of course, that Almacy was right. Decades later, archeologists would find dried lake beds not far from the cave from a time when the Sahara was green. His answer to the riddle of swimmers in the desert would eventually be confirmed with a remarkable abundance of geological evidence showing a landscape once dotted with ancient lakes, as well as a startling discovery of hippobones and the remains of many other water-dwelling animals, including giant tortoises, fish, and clams. This wet period became known as the Green Sahara. Not long ago, in an old issue of National Geographic, I read about a paleontologist named Paul Sereno, who further confirmed Almacy's hunch. In the fall of 2000, Sereno was hunting for dinosaur bones in a different part of the Sahara. In the open desert, some 125 miles from Niger's largest city, Agades, one of his expedition photographers scrambled up a remote group of dunes and stumbled across a massive trove of skeletons. This time, the bones weren't from dinosaurs or hippos. These eroding, windswept sand dunes revealed what turned out to be hundreds of human remains interspersed with prehistoric fragments of pottery that were up to 10,000 years old. The burial place, which a scientist called Goboro, the Torag tribal name for the area, was the largest and earliest Stone Age cemetery found to date. It turns out that the Green Sahara was exactly the sort of place where prehistoric human swimmers might exist. Great. Well, this seems like it's been more than just a book club selection. It's kind of been a journey because you actually convinced us to swim in the bay, which we did not want to do, but. I think we have some photos of that. I wimped out and wore a wetsuit. God, I didn't think it was gonna be that big. Sorry. You were a champ. Thank you. Look how happy you look. There's another one here. Daniel Handler. Yeah. I'm gonna snick it. Daniel Handler was just, we're like cruising in the bay doing our swim and he just starts going by backstroke, I believe. Yeah, yeah, and he has this wonderful swim cap whole setup, get up, and our friend Pete Mulvihill, who's a Green Apple Books founder, he said that's Daniel right there. He has a very distinctive stroke, but he was kind enough to hang out with us. Yeah. I think we have one more. There you are. So we did a podcast after. We did not go in a sauna. We were not allowed in the dolphin club. So second podcast pitch of the day, we have an interview with Bonnie and if you want to hear more, wonderful interview. Up at Aquatic Park with the waves slapping in the background. That's it, or is there one more? That's for the next one. That is not the day. That's for later, thank you. So as part of your motivation for writing this book to get people into the water? You know, it was never, I never expected that. You know, I think that was a wish. You know, I wanted to write about extraordinary swimmers, but also every person swimmers and I'm an every person swimmer. But the thing that I really found so extraordinary about reporting this book is when I was doing that and I would tell people, you know, I'm writing a book about swimming. Everyone would have some reaction that was extremely powerful. Either I love swimming, I have memories of this, you know, this lake, my summer camp, or I always wanted to be a better swimmer. I'm so scared because I have this terrible memory of almost drowning when I was five. Like just things are very visceral and primal. And so that just kept recurring and I thought there's something there about this push pull, this tension, this liminal space, and that, you know, the difference between swimming and drowning is not so much as we know every time we enter the open water, you know, especially. And I just, I knew that that sort of, that, you know, swimming is a constant state of not drowning. It was something that I wanted to run through because that's something that everyone understands. Now you didn't emphasize that before. But I probably wouldn't have gotten it. I was very confident. I can't think of a better motivation than one of the characters, and I say character, it's a very real person who lives near here, Kim Chambers. And that was the point, I had picked up the book and thought, I can't, I can't swim like Bonnie. And then you have Kim Chambers, a marathon swimmer with San Francisco ties overcame incredible obstacles to become a pioneer in swimming. How'd you get in touch with her and when did you know she'd be one of the central characters of your book? That's a really great question. For those of you who don't know, Kim Chambers is the first woman to swim from Alcatraz, San Francisco. And she was a sixth person to complete the Ocean Seven, which is basically the seven summits of swimming. And she only started doing that after she almost lost her leg in an accident. And was recovering. She took up swimming because she was rehabbing and learning how to walk again. And I actually, a friend of mine, a mutual friend introduced us. And as soon as I started talking to her, and as soon as we went swimming in the Bay together, I just thought, you just know. I mean, you start talking and you understand that this person is so special and she has this really ambilient energy. And also she is also one of those people who is so infectiously happy and communicates this love of the water and wants you to have that too. And yeah, I just knew that she was gonna be someone who had overcome so much, basically was reborn through the water very much so. She rehabbed her life through water and had this whole new calling as a marathon swimmer became a world record, holding marathon swimmer, and also was an ambassador really for how we are connected globally by water. So how did you get in touch with her and convince her to do all these interviews? We had a mutual friend in common who said, you have to meet her. And when someone says that to me, I say absolutely, I'm always open to it. And she was gay. And she was gay, yeah. Another central figure in the book is the man from Iceland. Can you say his name from there? I want you to try and pronounce it Heather. Good looking Fred Dorset. Oh my goodness, okay. Who rescued himself from a cap sizing boat by swimming for six hours in freezing cold ice water. And you told us earlier that he's incredibly private and didn't really like his sudden fame and has kind of almost gone into hiding in Iceland. And how did you convince him to be another central figure in your book? I honestly was not sure how that was gonna work, but I did write him a letter and I wrote him a letter and then ran it through Google Translate. And then I sent it, I printed it in Icelandic and English and then mailed it to him. And because that we had, I think my husband had a friend who lived in Iceland and he said, you know, I'll just look him up in the phone book. I mean, there's like 330,000 people in Iceland. It's very small. So he said, oh, here's his address. And so I sent him this letter and I kind of watched it, like I tracked it over the Atlantic and then I knew when it got there. And then the next day he emailed me, but he emailed me to tell me, thank you, but I'm not gonna talk to you. And I thought, oh, that's so sad because I just, I knew, I wanted to respect his privacy, but I also wanted to, I really wanted to hear from him. You know, I heard so much about him and of course you wanna hear what someone who goes through this crazy experience is actually thinking and feeling inside and what his life has been like. And we just became pen pals for a year. We wrote to each other for a year and I just thought, you know, sometimes it would be about swimming, but sometimes it would be about what, you know, that here's a postcard from Japan. You know, here's a, he's thinking about going to the Isle of Man with his wife, you know, and looking up ancestors. I mean, it was just like this friendship that developed. And I think I just tried to trust the process. And I say this, I preface this by saying, I'm super impatient. It's very hard for me to wait. But I just thought, if I just show him who I am, maybe we will meet one day. And so I told him that I was gonna, every year there's a swim in his honor in Iceland. And it is a swim that is the distance that he swam to safety, which is six kilometers. And it's held in his honor. And I said, I'm gonna come and I'm gonna swim in your swim. It's called good looks in, which means good looking swim. And then I would, and to the day that I met him, that I saw him leaning against his truck, I just was never sure it was gonna happen until he was right in front of me. But I think that when you invest yourself into it, and our patient with establishing a relationship that is based on trust, you know, that's, that really taught me a lot. It taught me a lot about patients and what it really means to be someone who's, as a storyteller, listens to what someone else has to say. I think it's also a clinic on being a journalist. Yeah, for sure. Setting up the next question with some history. We have a few photos, most are from the San Francisco Chronicle Archive. This is the Crystal Plunge, I'm sorry, Crystal Plunge. It's Crystal Palace Baths, but the Crystal Plunge down there is where people would swim. This was in the, you know, even the 30s, 40s and 50s, there was a network of pipes bringing saltwater to multiple plunges in the city, including the Olympic Club, which the Olympic Club now has a pool, but it's, you know, a chlorinated regular pool. This kind of like almost underground system. And Crystal Plunge was one of the legendary ones. We have photos of it being torn down and it makes me wanna cry because it's such a beautiful place. And then next slide. On the top two from the right there, that's Ann Curtis. She was a swimmer at the Crystal Plunge, legendary San Francisco swimmer, coached by Charlie Sava, who they've named a pool after him in the Sunset District, I believe. And she ended up winning a gold medal after this, but we had, we were a hardcore good swimming town, nationally known for our good swimmers, especially female swimmers. That is, I believe that's Sutro Baths. This is from the Marilyn Blaisdell Collection. Marilyn has a wonderful collection of photos from the western end of the city mostly. And then we have another one. I believe this is another Joe Rosenthal photo of Sutro Baths, which for those of you who don't know the history, it's an engineering marvel, Adolf Sutro, you know, created this place where each of the Baths was 10 degrees off of the other one, and just everybody went there and wore those scratchy wool uniforms, which we'll see one in a little bit. Next slide. That's Sutro Baths burning down. At that point, everybody thought the fire was kind of a fix because Sutro Baths had gone downhill, and, but this was a contributor who sent this photo to the Chronicle. Jack Lelaine in Bonnie's book, he's getting handcuffed here, and I believe this is 55, maybe later, Bonnie, you may know differently, and about to do a handcuffed swim from Alcatraz to San Francisco. I got to meet him for a story before he passed, and it was so wonderful. He was so upbeat, I was, I'm still high from it. To this day, my husband thinks that manacled handcuffed swim is a hoax, and I said, it's documented, it's in the Chronicle. I hope it's documented, it happened. Dolphin Club, this is the Hike and Dip, or there's an annual thing, that might be Olympic Club, this is an annual swim. This is from 1959, just a group of people swimming in the Bay like we did, no wetsuits. Next one, and here's another one. I believe this one's from 57. Next one, I think there's one more. Oh, two more, Fly Shaker Pool. This blows my mind. If I get my time machine working, I'm not gonna go in Fly Shaker Pool because it sounds horrible. If any of you swam there, come tell me about it later. It was so big, it was over on the other side of the zoo. This is basically the zoo parking lot now. It was so big, they had rowboats in the center, and their lifeguards were in rowboats. And there were a couple big platforms, Johnny Weissmueller jumped off this platform, and one of our photographers got here and just took a bunch of photos, and it's one of my favorite photos from our archive. And I think we have one more. There she is. There she is. Senator Feinstein in her Sutro Baths uniform. The background is that Pier 39 was being built. They thought it was gonna be late. The guy who was building it said, if it's on time, you have to show up in a bikini. And this was the compromise. So from Heather's trivia question in my article. And there's a question here for you somewhere, Bonnie. Is San Francisco, you've seen all these photos, is San Francisco underrated and actually the best swimming town ever? That's my question. Not like this is a leading question, Ernie. Yeah, not at all. I think the answer has to be yes. Okay, yes. Thank you. Yes. That's what I was going for, thank you. For some reason, I don't know why. I was surprised towards the end of the book to learn that you're a member of a swim team yourself because you just seem like you have so much else going on. The Albany Armada, are you still swimming with them? I am, but it has been, my coach has been on me to swim in the next meet and I haven't quite, sorry, Coach Carroll. I haven't quite said, I haven't quite committed, but I think I might have to do that. Yes, yes. They're, you know, we were so tight as a club and we swam together, you know, multiple times a week in the community through so many hard things. And then when the pools closed right at the beginning of COVID, I just, people were, it was a loss. It was a real loss. I think not only for the community of the master swimmers, but like all of the people we would see every morning. Like there was like the 8 a.m. aqua-robics. Like all of those ladies I saw in the locker room would just, I feel that I really mourned that dailiness, that everyday routine that you, you know, people talked about how they missed their baristas. You know, they missed their like the people who they saw not that they were so close, such good friends, but that they, you may have these contact points with people every day. You know, the library is one of those places. And I think that we underestimate how much those are scaffolding for our lives. And I think that the pool, the community pool really is that. Yeah. So you're swimming again with the team? I'm swimming again. How often do you do it? Well, I've been surfing a lot. So I have to, now it's sort of like fitting in with my surf schedule. My next, my next, my next book. Yeah. So rank in order of enjoyment surfing, swimming in open water and swimming in a pool. You know, I have to, I'm going to hedge by saying that that has changed in the course of my life. And it used to be swimming in a pool, swimming in open water, and then I didn't surf. And then it was swimming in open water, then a pool, wasn't a good surfer. And now that I'm a better surfer, I think just that I'm, I found that in the pandemic to be when all the pools closed, it was between surfing and open water swimming. And now pool is last, which is so, I don't know, it's so funny because I was always a pool swimmer. And then, yeah. So I'm going to say at one point, all of those surfaced to the top. Yeah, pen intended. Well, sadly, when we swam in the bay with you, the Dolphin Club and South End rowing club were both close to visitors. We weren't able to take a peek inside or get in that awesome sauna. I know you're not a member of either, but you've spent time at both and know a lot of the members. What are they really like? How are their vibes different? And on the spot, if you had to join one, which would you join? I can't, I can't, I can't. Okay, then the two questions before that. What are they really like? How are their vibes different? Okay, so I just was at an event at the South End rowing club in person. And they also brought up this question of how to be characterized. And they did say that they liked being described as the kind of renegades, don't follow the rules as much, and then the Dolphin Club was like their parents. So that's, I'll stick with that because I'm quoting, it's a direct quote. All right, well, we'll take that. Looking forward to getting to the sauna in either one. Love for you to read another passage now if you've got one. And I'm going to read from the passage, from the beginning of the section about Kim Chambers because we've been talking about her so much and how special she is. One of the best marathon swimmers in the world today began swimming as an adult in 2009 to rehab a leg she almost lost to amputation. A high-heeled shoe was the culprit, Kim Chambers tells me. It led to a nasty fall down the stairs outside her San Francisco apartment. She remembers the doctors telling her this, we saved your leg, but we don't know what, if any functionality you'll ever have. It took her two years to learn how to walk again. It took much less time to discover that she is freakishly gifted at long distance swimming. You could say that Kim is the best swimmer in the world whom you don't know. Seven months after she first got into a pool after her accident, she swam from Alcatraz to San Francisco cutting across the choppy waters and fierce currents of San Francisco Bay. She now holds multiple world records for distance swimming, including one she set in 2015 by becoming the first woman to swim solo from the Farallon Islands to the Golden Gate Bridge, a 30-mile journey that began with her slipping into pitch-dark waters just before midnight in the notorious red triangle of great white sharks. It took her just over 17 hours. Under the watchful eye of her boat crew, she faced nausea, high winds, and the perpetual menace of sharks. Ever thoughtful, Kim did her laundry and folded it neatly the night before. She didn't want to leave a mess in case she didn't make it back. She was only the sixth person in history to complete the Ocean Seven, the open-watersome equivalent of the Seven summits. This consists of the English Channel, the Strait of Gibraltar, the Molokai or Kaivi Channel, the Catalina Channel, the Cook Strait in New Zealand, the Sugaro Strait in Japan, and the North Channel from Ireland to Scotland after which she went into toxic shock from hundreds of jellyfish stings. One gray, drizzly December morning, I joined Kim for a swim in San Francisco Bay. I want to get a sense of the way that swimming is a daily practice for her and how it got that way. The water temperature is a brisk 53 degrees, the air 48. The days I don't get in are the days I don't feel right, she tells me as we contemplate the bay from Aquatic Park. The Sandy Beach behind the Dolphin Club, one of the premier open-water swimming and rowing clubs in the world. It was founded in 1877. Its neighbor, the South End Rowing Club, is even older, it was founded in 1873. Both are institutions with numerous Olympians on their century and a half old membership roles. They are fierce yet friendly rivals and Kim is a member of both clubs. I'm a middle child, she says sheepishly by way of explanation. I thought that'd be a good way to answer that question. So this is a non-fiction research book but it reads just as quickly and enjoyably for me as a novel and I was wondering how you did that because it could seem like I'm just gonna dive into this one topic could be kind of boring but it's definitely not in the way it turned out. So how did you pull that off? First of all, thank you so much because that means so much to me. I am not a fiction writer but I read a ton of fiction. I think that that's sort of how I appreciate novelistic qualities to stories and any story even if it's fiction or non-fiction, it shares the same quality. It shares the pacing, it has to grab you from the beginning. There are interesting characters and I wanted to write, I did wanna write a book that had scenes and had people who you cared about and you pulled for them because you got to know them well enough that you understood their journey and what they were after. And so even though this is a book ostensibly about swimming, swimming is not a book, it's a topic and this book really is I think stories of people who have found their way through life in some way with the water supporting them. You quote Australian surfer Dave Rastovich calling being in the ocean a meaningful play. What does that mean to you? Do you take on deeper meaning during the pandemic when people, they have to figure out how to entertain themselves and enjoy life being removed from other people. Everything changes. How did you feel about that? I always think about play how it is so essential to you no matter how old you are and I think about anytime you're at a beach or a public pool and you see like kids and all the way up to grandparents like frolicking in the water, like doing flips, jumps, like diving underwater and kind of twirling around for no other reason than that it's fun and that's why I think water is so essential to our wellbeing because it reminds us to play. And I think that there's so much freedom in it and especially in the pandemic when we were so when all of the pools close and in the darkest months when we just really were so confined that the water, the ocean, the bay around here was the one place that you could really feel free and forget because you could interact and be buoyed by the water and you could dive down and you could have the worst day but the ocean would just hold you in its embrace and I think that that sensory feedback is so important. We wanna be held by something and especially in a time when we couldn't do that with so many people we cared about, I think that that feeling of being held was part of it. That's beautiful and it applies to so many things that you were talking earlier about what you missed and it's like your tribe, you get back again and that warm embrace is something I think everybody out here is probably feeling in part of their lives right now so thank you. Well we'd love to open it up to questions from the audience now so you wanna just raise hands or? So we're gonna pick up cards from the audience and we'll ask them in the microphone so it carries forward to the Zoom audience and we have one that really touches on what Bonnie just said really but while we're collecting cards is there something about swimming that emulates the embryonic stage and is that a reason why we're so drawn to it? I often think about this because when you're in the water all of your senses are muffled you can't really hear or clearly and then again like we just talked about that feeling of the water on your skin and that pressure which is so distinct. We exist on land and this is our normal lives but think about when we first began life it was in that water embrace and also hearing like your people who you knew in utero talking, like your parents. I think about that that is so evolutionarily primal. I think that there's gotta be something in that that is familiar to us in some way and so I don't know if the answer is a question but I do think about that and I do think about on some level we understand that as organisms that there's something that is comforting from that. Thank you. Okay, here's a question from the audience here. Do you ever swim anywhere else in the bay in open water? Other than aquatic park? So sometimes, so I go surfing either Ocean Beach or Pacifica usually. I swim, I have swum in an aquatic park, I have swum a lot in the pandemic. I was just talking earlier at Keller Cove, Keller Beach in Richmond, which is a wonderful place to swim in that was where our Albany Armada crew kind of relocated to that Cove for many months. So those are the places that I have most regularly swum but there are also people like the Albany Bulb or Berkeley Marina like you can really get in anywhere. You just have to check the water quality, which is a great, there's a, I was gonna ask, where will you never swim? Where should we avoid? The Gowanus? That's not here though. I can't get over that because I'm a New Yorker. Okay, here's a few more questions. I'm gonna, there are three on this one card so I really appreciate the overachievers. What is your favorite time to swim and why? What is the coldest temperature you have swum in and do your sons like swimming in the Bay too? Those are such great questions. Wait, was the first one again? Your favorite time? Favorite time is the morning for sure. First thing, cause I like to settle myself and calm myself and settle the chatter in my mind and my body and then I'm good. 45 degrees, but very briefly, like so brief, like, yeah. 45 that I know and then I, there was also the year that my husband and I did the polar bear swim of two at Lake George of St. New York, New Year's Day. There was snow on the ground and I feel like we walked on water because we were in and out of there so fast, but there's photo evidence of that actually happened and my boys love the water. They're on swim team. They're actually on the Albany Armada now except that they complain about it. We are teammates, but they don't like being told what to do which is so weird, but they love being in the water. So if they see, they love body surfing, they love swimming in the ocean and that's enough for me. As long as they know how to do it safely and happily, I'm just, my work is done. Is there a team cheer? What do you do to get fired up before you go? Sorry, I play basketball. We do a cheer before we. Three, two, one, Armada! All right, good, I like it, good. I'm fired up. And any tips for parents trying to encourage their children to swim, I think. Not to raise water babies, but also be safe. Bring them there, get in there with them, play with them. I mean, these are all the things that we talked about, right? These two here are doing it right. Sophie, do you like, are you in? Are you fully in the water? 100% swimmer? Yeah. I think just get in there with your kids and show them by doing that how fun it is. I think that's the best way to do it. All right, here's a question coming in from Zoom. What do you think is the difference between people who almost drowned as children and thus still fear the water and people who went right back in? This person said, I almost drowned three times as a child and you couldn't keep me out. Wow. Oh, this seems to be a constitutional kind of question. I don't know, I mean, that is a really good question because it does seem to be that there's like the separation between those two groups. And I do think, partly, it's was that something that was encouraged to, like at the time that it happened, was there enough of support because it's so scary? It's so, so scary because I can still remember when that happened to me. And I was a person who was afraid and terrified but also was sort of embarrassed that it happened to me. And so that was the part that won out. I was like, I'm gonna keep doing it. But I think about that moment all the time because sometimes I'm in the ocean and it feels like it's never far from my mind even though I got past it. And so I think I just, I feel that so potently. And I think that the difference is that some of us have like a shorter term memory for it. Like there's an amnesia that you force yourself to have to get through a hard thing, a traumatic thing. It is traumatic. So I wouldn't say that it's that there's any, you know, that you're any less strong or any less like, you know, having grit to get through. I think it's just that you realize that that was a hard thing. And at some point you do process that. And I know a lot of adults who've gone back to swim to learn how to swim after something like that. And eventually you will face it, whether you're, you know, you face it earlier, closer to the event as a kid or as a grown up. I mean, it's amazing how it's wrapped up so much in something that's bigger than just swimming. Okay, I'm gonna combine two questions here. One is, is there one suggestion or recommendation that a swim mentor may have told you that changed your swim technique and resulted in a major improvement? And then kind of related, is the gentleman, did the gentleman in Iceland have a genetic disposition that helped you become such an incredible swimmer? I'm gonna answer the genetic component question about the gentleman in Iceland first, because he did. He had a, not only was he a great swimmer, he had a biological cork that his fat layer was two to three times normal human thickness and more solid. So he was dubbed the human seal because he really was like a marine mammal, more like a marine mammal than a terrestrial mammal. And that was why his core temperature was able to be stable so that he could keep swimming for that long. And he was the first person who was documented in medical literature as having that body type. If you, biological cork, I like to say. And I forgot the other question. A mentor, oh my gosh, so many. I, my, like freestyle is my worst stroke, it always has been. And so, because I enter like here, like here, you should enter up here. So reach, reach further. And I think just like going long, that's always like a real, it changes, you think you feel like an Olympian after that. Okay, ready for another one? Okay, in Kathy Park Hong's book, Minor Feelings, she talks of racism she experienced as an Asian American at a pool in California. You touch upon this in chapter eight. Curious your thoughts on this divide here in the Bay Area and how do we expand access? I don't know about the divide in the Bay Area specific. I'm not sure what the question, the person who posed the question means by that specifically, but I will say that, and I write about this in the book, my experience as a swimmer, I was really lucky. I found a community pool that was extremely diverse. And that was where I first started to feel at home because I grew up in a town that was predominantly white and we were among the only kids of color in my school. And so my whole sort of everyday life and going to school, it was bifurcated because then on Sundays I would go visit my relatives in Queens and in Chinatown and that was one other experience. But the first place where I felt a community that was welcoming in its diversity and all bodies, like all colors were welcomed. And I wasn't like the kid who was being made fun of. And, you know, or like my last name was made fun of or like, you know, someone was like doing something to their eyes because they thought that was funny. Like, you know, I think to feel comfortable in your body at a young age as a kid is so important, especially for girls. And my team was that. And so I think about swimming education. I think about teams. I think about those experiences being so important for kids. And the only way to have that is to expand access to places where there is no pool access. There's no water access. And to be able to bring, you know, if you can't bring the pool, build the pools there, you bring the kids to the water. And I know a lot of organizations are working on that all across the country. And I've been talking about them and with them and supporting their work. And I think that because when you bring those kids, you know, some kids may live like 10 miles from the ocean and never been there. And they have no experience of the joy in the water that we all know is so, is such an amazing part of life. So I think that there are so many organizations doing that work. And then of course, the caveat to that is, I know that in the pandemic so many municipal pools closed and still have very limited hours and access. And that has only kind of compounded the problem because most municipal pools run at a deficit anyway, even in non-COVID times. So I don't know. I would love to see swimming as part of like the public school education, and you know, in this country, the way it is in other countries. I'm just gonna keep singing that tune for the rest of my life till I die. Because I think it's so important. Great, bravo. Okay, another question from Zoom. What drove you to deep dive, I don't think the pun was intended, into this subject from the historical, green Sahara and scientific dinosaurs, I can't read the other word, perspective. What, I think the question is why get into the history and the science as well? Right. I mean, because don't we all wonder when humans first started to swim? I mean, it was not possible to answer that question. So I tried to answer it sideways by talking to like a dinosaur scientist who discovered early paleo lakes and people who lived among them. And it was crazy because he discovered this burial that was like of a mother and two children. And the thesis is that they drowned because they were otherwise just perfectly, like there was no signs of disease or injury, and that they were laid lovingly in this embrace. And they thought, okay, that this mother and children drowned. And it was so, such a powerful image because all of us, like at the time I was teaching my kids to swim and they were joining the swim team. And it was like, okay, we all have that memory of like standing at the beach, standing at the shore, like where there were the kids or where the parents, like watching this happen and like being like, all right, you go. But I'm so terrified for you, like just that it's very, it's an ancient story. And I loved that I found someone who told me the story of this family because that was a way to tell the story of the past and how long our relationship with Gloucester has been. Thank you. I'll ask you- How do you come up with these answers so fast? You're so eloquent. Well, thanks, thanks, Heather. I'll ask you a couple of short ones. Does your last name mean water in Cantonese and they love your book? Thank you. My last name does not mean water. It just means toy. Ha ha ha ha. Someone else enjoyed your picture book and wanted to know if there's any possibilities you might write another. Yes, I would love to. In fact, I'm thinking about it right now. Thank you. And someone asked, because he's also a Bay Area author, do you hang out with James Nestor, the author of Breathe in Deep, and jam out about the synchronicities of breath and being in the water? And if so, can they hang out with you? Absolutely. James is a buddy of mine. I haven't seen him since pre-COVID, but yeah, we jam on water and you can jam with us sometime. I think that covers most of what has been sent to me unless there's some other's panding. I don't know about the negative ions part. I'm gonna have to look into that, but I can absolutely speak to when you plunge into the water. Could you repeat, actually, could you repeat your understanding of the question? Because I think on Zoom people are like, what is she responding to? Oh, so the negative ions. That negative ions, there might be something about that that has to do, that's beneficial with the ocean and jumping in the ocean and sort of affecting your mental state. Is that what, did I understand that correctly? Something like that. And I think the second you plunge into the water, because you're so taken out of where we are right now, that you just can't help but you're just completely reset. Your body's like, ah! And the temperature when your face is submerged in water, we have the mammalian dive reflex. There are certain things that happen to us physiologically and I can't help, but we all know that and there are physiological things that happen to explain that feeling of just alertness and being out of, taken out of the state you were in before you plunged in, for sure. And then the first question was about how do I feel about being a New Yorker here in San Francisco? I will confess that when I first moved here, I thought I was always and forever gonna be a New Yorker and then when I moved here, it took two years to kind of feel like this was a place that could be for me and I've been here now like 18 years almost. So it worked out. It's a wonderful place to be. First I wanna say how much I have enjoyed your book and all the topics you covered in it. And I also started swimming at a quiet park during COVID. I'm one of the bleacher creatures. So we're a whole other group of people, mostly internationals. But my question is I was fascinated when you talked about the samurai swimming style. I am a Tai Chi artist and I use that to keep me alive after a serious accident near death myself. So I'd like to have you speak more about what is so specific about the samurai swimmers? That's such a great question. And I often think- You're gonna say the question. Oh sorry, I didn't know if the mic went to the zoom. Did that pick up? I hope so. The question was about samurai swimming and what, I guess, how that's different from so many of the other practices and the way we understand swimming. And the reason when I discovered samurai swimming, which is basically the Japanese swimming martial art. If there's so many like judo or kendo, it is the swimming version. And so it's called Nihonejo. And it is basically dates back to the feudal period in Japan when all of the different samurai clans had different protected, different parcels of land. And whether or not you were on the coast and the ocean or on a lake or a river, like you had different techniques for managing yourself in the water to defend that land from invaders. And there would be techniques of like bringing your arm through a breaking wave to enter the ocean or treading water. And you think about synchronized swimming with the egg beater technique or water polo, but that was described in samurai scrolls going dating back hundreds of years. And that you could raise yourself so far out of the water that you could shoot an arrow dry so that it, you know, cause you can't, the arrow doesn't fly true unless the feathers are dry. So, or that you could be dueling while treading water. Like it was a martial art. And so it was something that prized, you know, there were, it was a different way of thinking about swimming. It was, it was a martial art. And so then over time that evolved to, you know, this kind of, it is how can you do things more efficiently? How can you be more beautiful in your movements like Tai Chi? And also it's like about your breath. And about moving in synchronicity also with others. And it's about, it's not about speed. It's not about how long you get, you know, it's like a completely different way of thinking about competitive swimming or what you're trying to achieve in swimming than we have been so accustomed to in the West. And also in a international competition setting, right? And there are competitions for actually samurai swimming, but it is, well, it's all written, you know, maybe there's one of those disciplines where it is a race, it's about speed, but the rest is like, can you get across a pool wearing like a 30 pound suit of armor? And how, how elegantly can you do that? Or can you, or you end up at the bottom of the pool? Like what are the things that, you know, can you swim, how far, can you jump out of the water into a boat? That's the flying mullet. It's an incredible, you can Google this, this is amazing. You know, so there are so many other, I loved learning about samurai swimming and going to Japan and talking with masters who practice it because you didn't start to understand that swimming can be so much more than what we have been taught that it is. All right, I think that's a wrap here. You got, Heather, Peter, do you wanna close it out? Thank you so much to our total SF fall author, Bonnie Soy, to city librarian Michael Lambert, to the rest of the library staff, including Anissa Malady and Michelle Jeffers. Also thanks to our partners at Green Apple Books. And we don't have the cocktails here tonight, but you should all know that Nick Petru-Lakas of Drinks with Nick makes a special cocktail for each book so you can pair them. And he made one for why we swim called the after drop and the recipe is at sfcronical.com. It looks like the bay, it's blue with white frothy top and it's kind of like an Irish coffee. So thank you to everybody. Yeah, and the only downside to being here live is when we were doing it virtually I was drinking because we have a cocktail for each total SF book club and we post the recipe on the Chronicle. Check out our podcast too. We have passed authors who we've interviewed. We interviewed a lot of authors as a independent bookstore tribute during the pandemic and we're just having authors come on and talk about their favorite bookstores. We love bookstores and libraries, Heather and I with our total SF project. Very excited for our total SF winter selection, victories greater than death by Charlie Jane Anders, a wonderful author prolific. She has three books out this year and also spends a lot of time lifting up other authors and bookstores. We love Charlie and are looking forward to working with her and mark your calendars, February 24th, the event. I believe it'll be right here. And above all, thank you to the library. Thank you to all of you for coming. We're so excited to have a live event to live in a community where people love their libraries, love their independent bookstores and support their newspapers too. And I had to throw that in and just thank you so much for coming and thank you to the library staff. This has been a wonderful partnership and we appreciate everybody, AV crew, everybody who put this together tonight. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.