I understood that: playa dust is hard on your feet. Also, the man holding the balloon was naked. I turned around slowly to get a panorama and saw that the man walking past me was holding the string for a gigantic helium balloon a hundred yards overhead, from which dangled a digital video camera. Everything was ruggedized for the fine, blowing dust, mostly through the simple expedient of sticking it in a zip-lock bag, which is what I'd done with my phone. Pretty much everyone was holding a camera of some kind - mostly phones, of course, but also big SLRs and even old-fashioned film cameras, including a genuine antique plate camera whose operator hid out from the dust under a huge black cloth that made me hot just to look at it. But the wind had just kicked up, and there was a lot of playa dust - fine gypsum sand, deceptively soft and powdery, but alkali enough to make your eyes burn and your skin crack - and after two days in the desert, I had learned that it was better to be hot than to choke. The sun was high, the temperature well over a hundred degrees, and breathing through the embroidered cotton scarf made it even more stifling. I adjusted my burnoose, covering up my nose and mouth and tucking its edge into place under the lower rim of my big, scratched goggles. I think every writer should work at a bookstore (and plenty of writers have worked at Bakka over the years! For the 30th anniversary of the store, they put together an anthology of stories by Bakka writers that included work by Michelle Sagara (AKA Michelle West), Tanya Huff, Nalo Hopkinson, Tara Tallan -and me!)īakkaPhoenix Books: 84 Harbord Street, Toronto, Canada M5S 1G5, +1 4Īttending Burning Man made me simultaneously one of the most photographed people on the planet and one of the least surveilled humans in the modern world.

By the time I was 18, I was working at Bakka - I took over from Tanya when she retired to write full time - and I learned life-long lessons about how and why people buy books.

Beam Piper's 'Little Fuzzy' into my hands, and changed my life forever. Tanya Huff (yes, the Tanya Huff, but she wasn't a famous writer back then!) took me back into the used section and pressed a copy of H. I wandered in for the first time around the age of 10 and asked for some recommendations.

Bakka is the oldest science fiction bookstore in the world, and it made me the mutant I am today. This chapter is dedicated to BakkaPhoenix Books in Toronto, Canada.

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