About Me, Lorin Piper

I was born and grew up in San Pedro, California, the Los Angeles harbor. My mother, whose family has lived in California since before the first California census, before it was American or Mexican, worked as a secretary and my father was a working musician.

As a child I read early and voraciously—a habit that has never gone away—speeding through everything I could get my hands on, whether I understood it or not. Dickens, not at all understood at seven, became and remained a favorite author. Despite loving books I was a bad student and a classic underachiever, who didn’t quite fit in anywhere until the sixties let us all be misfits, and that’s when I left the country for Europe, with the savings from my job as an information operator. It was my first time in Greece, my first time outside of the country, and for two glorious, adventurous years, living on pennies, I hitchhiked through Europe and then overland across Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan to India and Nepal, returning to Europe and working as a cocktail waitress for some months in Rome when the money ran out.

I didn’t really want to ever go back to the United States. But I didn’t really want to stay anywhere and be an expatriate either. When I finally did go back, thin and raggedy, I moved to Berkeley and found out I fit in there just fine. For the next decade I would settle, work until I had some money, go back to Europe, mainly Greece, for as long as the money lasted and then come back and start again.

In the late 1970s, involved in dance and the alternative health movement in California, I co-authored two successful books, The Holistic Health Handbook and The Holistic Health Lifebook, which gave me enough money to live for two years in southern Spain, dancing flamenco, and from there I moved to Paris for a few more years. Since that time I’ve mainly lived in Northern California, leaving for some months at a time, spending another year in southern Spain, a winter in Devon, England, but mostly returning to Greece.

I’ve always supported myself with a strange hodgepodge of jobs. Most recently those have included professional cooking, managing acupuncture offices, and teaching movement. I recently began teaching yoga.

Two of my pieces written for the Holistic Health books were widely republished, both in this country and internationally. Some of my short essays have been published by San Luis Obispo’s Information Press, and a piece about flamenco appears on-line in Steve Kahn's Flamenco Project.

Anoíxi Means Open, a memoir about my friends and experiences in Greece, is my first solo book.