Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

Boots!

Where would we be without books?

Where would we be without good?

No, Zintuberg.

It's a rhetorical question, sir, but where would we be without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt.

This is Bookworm, and I'm very pleased today to have a writer that I've been reading for a while, but I've never spoken to before.

Her name is Matilda Bernstein-Sikamore.

Her newest book is The Freezer Door,

and it's published by the wonderful press semeotects, which has published so many of the books that have been crucial

to our culture during the last 20 years. Now, Matilda, this book seems to be in many ways,

the freezer door built upon improvisations. Is improvisation a manner by which

you construct a book? Absolutely. Whenever I start a new book, I start with no intention at all of where I'm going. So I just write and

write and write. I put everything in one document. I put things that seem to be totally

disparate thoughts, different experiences. With this book in particular, I probably wrote like that

for about two years before I looked at it as a whole at all.

Like I wanted to wait until I felt that there was some kind of narrative flow coming from the text itself,

not something that I was imposing from the outside, but something that was coming internally until I looked at it as a whole. And maybe another

year after that or even more, before I really started to think of it as a book that I could

recognize. I've never been in Seattle. Why do they call it the freeze?

Well, the Seattle freeze, as I say in the book, to me it's that white picket fence in the eyes.

...