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Laos Essential Artistry Posting Page
Monday, August 25, 2008
Here at Laos Essential Artistry we have printed out and placed in our office the following quote by Oprah Winfrey, when she said in her commencement address to Stanford graduates (June 2008) "Life is a reciprocal exchange. To move forward you have to give back."
 It's so true, and this theme of giving back we see reflected in a recent article in the Christian Science Monitor titled "A Pen, a Passport, a Mission for Laos," published on August 21, 2008. The article is about Colin Cotterill, the author of the Dr. Siri Paiboun series. The covers of the four books published so far; Coroner's Lunch, Thirty-Three Teeth, Anarchy and Old Dogs and Disco for the Departed are shown above. It's a great article and you can read it here. In the article the reporter, Tibor Krausz, writes that "...the London-born author is putting Laos on the literary map as a backdrop for his mystery novels featuring an all-Lao cast of characters. He's also lending a hand in a campaign to distribute children's books to Lao kids... and he's donating royalties from his mystery-novel sales to a parallel book-distribution initiative, Big Brother Mouse."  Well, as we write in our introduction to Laos Essential Artistry 5% of our profits also go to Big Brother Mouse and we're tremendously excited to see their good work getting acknowledged in this article. In the photo above are children who have just received their free books from a book party we sponsored through Big Brother Mouse in December 2007. You can see more photos from the book party on our Flickr site. Literacy is so important and again as Krausz writes in the article, "Laos is a country where books are curiosities: Homegrown literature is almost nonexistent in Laos, and publishing is mostly limited to textbooks." The success of Colin's books and Big Brother Mouse give us hope that literacy gap is slowly getting bridged. We write more about our literacy work in Laos here. We love Colin's books and they really are great reads. Even if one's not interested in Laos, they're great mysteries and I look forward to a weekend when I can immerse myself in the world that Colin creates. True bliss. Knowing Laos, he really does capture an essence of Laos that is remarkable. Whether Buddhist or animist, the belief in spirits, nagas and ngeuaks, etc. is embedded in the psyche of all Lao, and in that way, Colin's books and our textiles are similar in that they both honor this spiritual and religious world. And in later blogs we will include photos of motifs and symbols used in Lao textiles that we find a mystery and hope that as a community we can have fun trying to solve the meaning of some of these obscure and magical motifs that can also provide insight into the Lao soul. by: Laos Essential Artistry 
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