 So my name's Karen Samuelson and I live in Arlington, Massachusetts with my husband and my 24-year-old son and my dog. And I'm an author, I'm a writer, I have written a couple of screenplays, I wrote a play that was staged produced by Arlington Friends of the Drama and I recently, this past May published a book called Weaving Dreams in Oaxaca. So the backstory to Weaving Dreams in Oaxaca, at least some of the background is, when I was, I think about 23, I spent a couple of months living in Guatemala and learning Spanish with a friend of mine and then we spent two more months traveling through Central America into Columbia and Ecuador and that sort of began my love with Latin America. So in 2005 we decided to go live in Oaxaca for about eight months and we drove down which was a challenge, it took ten days and we had, Nick was about six then and we had a big 65 pound lab in our Honda Odyssey and we stopped in different places and we were in New Orleans just like two days before Katrina and we kind of escaped the city just in time and Nick ended up, I think he was in first grade at the time so he went to school in Oaxaca, we enrolled him in a school, we found housing. So we couldn't find a bilingual school so he was promised that some kids would help him that spoke English but they didn't so much so at first he had a hard time and then he became very good friends and here he is with his friends really hugging him in like this beautiful embrace and he learned playground Spanish very well and he even had his friends sleep over a couple of nights and it was a wonderful experience. That was in 2005 and at the time my mom was I think 86 and could no longer read because of diabetic retinopathy, she couldn't see well enough so every two weeks I would send her back tapes that I would talk about the church we're in or the street we're on or the memorandum band we were listening to and so every two weeks she got these really fun tapes to listen to and when I came home and decided to write this book I transcribed the tapes and it was about 23 pages of very detailed description and it really helped me with the with being able to describe Oaxaca in the most colorful terms because it is a wonderful amazing vibrant city. Weaving Dreams in Oaxaca as I said was kind of inspired by living there and there's three main characters one is a professional dancer in New York City and she's struggling with should she keep dancing you know staying on the stage and as a professional or is it time for her to she's thinking about motherhood is it time for her to quit that position and figure out how she's going to get family in her life but she's had some past issues in relationships so she decides to take a leave from the dance troupe and goes to Oaxaca to figure things out and she has some regrets but I don't want to spoil the book and another character ends up in Oaxaca he's a professor of Colombian art and architecture and so he's visited to Cal in Guatemala and he's coming to Oaxaca to solve kind of unravel a family mystery and he ends up connecting quite closely with a an older woman who's a curandera she's a cures with herbs and in natural natural methods that's very common in Oaxaca and then there's a third character Enrique who is he's a DJ and he's a mechanic and he is a gay man who is having a hard time coming out because his father is homophobic and he's very he's an evangelical so the three cross paths and as Frankie the the dancers trying to figure out her issues she also becomes friends with Mack and ends up being his interpreter as he explores this Pueblo in Oaxaca where he he becomes close with this curandera and he also has a need to go to Mexico City there was some things that I naturally ended up incorporating into the novel I think partly from my own life I had struggled with you know how to become a mother how to involve motherhood in my life and I wasn't a mother until my mid 40s and the idea of adoption our son is adopted that that has a place a very strong place in the book and my oldest brother was gay and I experienced his struggles coming out and his successes coming out I self-published it and in doing in that process I reconnected with some women writer friends of mine and that's been really wonderful they've been very helpful they are you know published also authors themselves and also I'm part of a group called kitchen table writers and that was very supportive I'm really happy that with my book weaving dreams in Oaxaca that the book rack in Arlington Center carries it Porter Square books carries it I have some things that we brought back that are really indicative of how magical and full of art and life and light Oaxaca is so here's a son that is you know made of clay it's something that you know we had up in our dining room for years it's kept everybody smiling I'm here's a kind of a vase that is has little beautiful flowers you know very intricate clay flowers on it and then here's a frame which and it has on paintings of a liberty haze which are the you know the fanciful animals I told you about I think these are all bunnies and so I put a mirror in it when I came home and then here here's here's another other be here I really like the cat because you can stick it on a counter and then this is a like it just a very typical terracotta container and you can put anything in it I often put dried flowers in it which it's just quite beautiful and and also this is a we peel or covering from the Hoochitan area this is from the Zapotec culture and these are things like Frida Kahlo took this on her mom was Zapotec so this is something that she wore and she made kind of famous in her paintings but of course it's famous on the Isthmus the women wear these for special occasions and sometimes just if they feel like it and the mouches often the two spirited people will often wear one of these beautiful beautiful tops that's got gorgeous embroidery in it and the colors are just sort of the colors of Oaxaca