Trisha Ready w/ Christopher Frizzelle, NOBUKO

Psychologist, essayist, poet and writer Trisha Ready celebrates the release of her debut novel Nobuko, alongside Christopher Frizzelle. This is the first book from FrizzLit Editions, a new indie publishing venture founded by Frizelle. With Nobuko, Ready explores subplots involving the yakuza, the Japanese organized crime syndicate — as well as food, art, adventure, samurai swords, and various kinds of love, combining fiction, memoir, and prose poetry.

Nobuko tells the story of a young American English teacher in the 1980s who travels to Japan. There she falls in love with a woman named Nobuko, who lives in a rustic cabin and makes teeth.

There are subplots involving the yakuza, the Japanese organized crime syndicate — as well as food, art, adventure, samurai swords, and various kinds of love.

With Nobuko, Ready has invented a hybrid form of writing — a structure that blends fiction with memoir and prose poetry. “I call it a Ready Sequence,” says FrizzLit Editions editor Christopher Frizzelle. A Ready Sequence has 108 chapters, and each chapter is no more than 150 words. “Other writers may want to experiment with creating their own Ready Sequence,” Frizzelle suggests. “I’m working on one myself.”

Trisha Ready was born in 1959 and grew up in San Luis Obispo, California. She has a bachelor’s degree in English literature from UCSB. She was the programs and education manager in the early years of Hugo House, where she started a writing program for homeless youth. She won the 2001 Language of Hope Award from the Starbucks Foundation. She has also been a truck driver, a flower broker, a governess in Paris, France, and a manager of a temp agency that supplied Danielle Steel with workers. For many years she contributed features to The Stranger on subjects ranging from plate tectonics to Susan Sontag. In 2015, Longreads named an essay of hers one of the 10 best of the year. She has a doctorate in psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara, and worked for years as a psychologist managing a psychiatric outpatient program. In 2016 she published an academic book, Music in Therapeutic Practice: Using Rhythm to Bridge Communication Barriers (Roman & Littlefield). It discusses how “music is capable of facilitating the expression of affect and the scaffolding of complex, otherwise ineffable emotions.” She has journeyed to Japan twice—in 1985, when she lived there for a year, and in 2023, when she returned as a tourist. She has lived in the Seattle area since 1987. She publishes essays and poetry on Medium and Substack. Her Substack is @trishar. Nobuko is her first novel.

Christopher Frizzelle is the editor and publisher of FrizzLit Editions. He began his career as a book critic at Seattle Weekly in 2001, then worked at The Stranger from 2003 to 2020, with 9 years as editor-in-chief. Under his leadership, The Stranger won a Pulitzer Prize in 2012 and was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in 2014. In 2009, he invented the Silent Reading Party in the hundred-year-old Hotel Sorrento, launching a worldwide trend. His work has been featured in the New York Times and on Good Morning America, and his writing has appeared in the Washington Post. He lives in Seattle.

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