A collection of nineteen true stories by Dani Burlison, which first appeared in a McSweeney’s column of the same title, Dendrophilia and Other Social Taboos renders a hilarious, strange and personal portrait of modern life in the New Age.

In the essays, primarily set in the Bay Area counterculture, Burlison shares her experiences with readers as a kind of intermediary between normal reality and the plethora of bizarre and fantastic realms of Northern California’s alt-lifestyles.

Burlison narrates as a sardonic, yet down-to-earth tour guide. Thus, as the title implies, the book takes readers on a safari ride through a taboo-riddled landscape from a cuddle party where adults crawl around a room “like magical cows in a mystical forest” to a community center for old men celebrating the traditions of their Nordic Viking bloodline.

Several essays offer comic ‘how-to’ insight in the vein of a New Age advice columnist. In the piece, “Spiritually Cleansing Naked Places”, Burlison opines on nudist Hot Springs resorts:

It is easy to notice a lot of unsuppressed and even aggressive moaning and sighing when everyone around you is naked. People are fucking STOKED to walk around naked while pretty girls lounge and feed each other organic mangoes and comb their long golden locks… so lots of old dudes moan. And sigh. Loudly… Don’t be alarmed. Don’t make eye contact. They’re just stoked. No need to moan back.

Other stories read as intimate, deeply human moments from a memoir. In “House Help”, Burlison reveals memories of a housekeeping job she worked for a filthy spiritual clinic:

It wasn’t my dabbling into the world of Eastern spirituality and its non-attachment… that led me into the world of tossing strangers’ silk panties into the delicate cycle. Nor was it a curiosity of how the other half (the half that can afford housecleaners) lived. It was sheer desperation. The threat of ending up homeless again. The fear of never having enough to feed my children. Cleaning the homes of strangers always put cash in my pocket, even if that cash only amounted to an extra fifty bucks a week.

click to watch Dani read “One Settled Comfortably In the Cuckoo’s Nest”

Whether Burlison writes as a memoirist or as a New Age anthropologist, she never shies away from being a critic of herself, others, or the world around her. For a book largely about a subculture stereotyped as an airy, all-embracing, positive-vibes lifestyle, Burlison’s frank and often accusatory tone may be the biggest laid out taboo she covers. In one passage she writes, “I believe that Nonviolent Communicator wannabes are the foulest creatures to walk amongst us.”

Grounded in such lines, a deep sense of irony underlies the bulk of these stories, whether humorous or humanizing. In her essay, “The Geography of Uncool: Public Transportation”, she denounces most of her fellow bus passengers only to conclude, “Who am I to judge? I ride the bus, after all.” This baffling ironic nature of life lives at the heart of Burlison’s voice. One can find it in her smallest phrases such as “so god damn spiritual” as well as her biggest narratives — as when she falls in love with a sycamore.

Presented in two separate parts (These Kinds of Things & Other Kinds of Things) the book shifts from an increasingly communal to a personal sense of landscape in the author’s world. While not quite this black-and-white, the first section offers readers a gutful of laughter and exposes them to the shocking, outlandish kinds of things that happen among Burlison’s folk, as when she casually relates a story about cooking and spicing a placenta for her post-pregnant friend to eat:

She asked me to take her afterbirth into my kitchen and do all sorts of things to it in hopes of preventing postpartum depression. And I said yes. Not because processing her afterbirth was the best invitation I was offered at the time, but because I live in Sonoma County and that’s the kind of thing we do up here.

In the second section of the book, Burlison tunnels deeper into these places and themes, revealing in the process a great deal more about her own past and her present vision. She bleeds her soul onto the page, opening up to readers about her dreams, fears, desires and struggles as a working writer, feminist, single mother and as a lone human being.

click to follow Dani on Twitter

Through this deepening, Burlison becomes more like an intimate friend than an estranged author. With each successive story, readers set out on a new adventure with an interesting, honest person they know and trust to a strange and unexpected place. In accomplishing this feat, she further enables readers to believe in the absurdity of her encounters. Thus, when she goes head-over-heels for a tree in her yard, readers are moved by the power of her feelings instead of joining her staring neighbors, who as she says were “surely convinced that I had lost my shit.”

Burlison also employs a wide range of narrative forms and points-of-view throughout the essays, in effect deepening the relationships between the narrator and the reader. She writes in the forms of a letter, a script, a short story, and dream analysis, among others, continuously re-imagining how readers will enter her story-world. While she narrates many stories in first-person, she often blurs the reader’s point-of-view through entering the second-person. In turn, we, the readers, become emotionally invested characters in the stories.

In “One Settled Comfortably In the Cuckoo’s Nest”, an essay exploring mental illness, Burlison renders the experience of universal suffering through the first-person plural:

And aside from the situational depression or anxiety we’re all plagued with when relationships end, loved ones die, or our homes foreclose, some of us are just wired differently. We have stunted nervous systems. Miswired synapses. Surges of imbalanced chemicals. Physical and emotional trauma that we never really get over. Even when the sun shines its glorious brightness on our faces, the bills are paid and the people in our lives really, really love us, some of us can’t help it. It’s not that we are ungrateful. We just hurt. A lot.

These narrative techniques, combined with Burlison’s ability to continuously deepen her narrative, make Dendrophilia and Other Social Taboos transcend a beginner’s guide to New Age culture and instead provide readers with a grade-A transformative experience á la literature.

Burlison makes the strange taboo nature of her world relatable to a broad audience, and illuminates the taboo nature hidden in our ordinary, mundane lives. And that must be one of the key messages in this book: That it’s OK, natural even, to feel and be strange; that we are all squelched by social taboos and by silence until no matter how bizarre our thoughts, feelings and encounters are, we let them out and share our stories.

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Michael Shufro is a journalist, poet, storyteller, and playwright. Michael is also the host of the Parnassus Revue, a SF literary arts radio program and live show. Michael has worked as the Santa Rosa Correspondent for The Press Democrat, a then New York Times company. His writing has also appeared in the North Bay Bohemian among other publications. He is currently at work onBlunderboar, a play about a depression-era family of circus performers struggling to recover their memories lost in Time. Michael resides in San Francisco. Send Michael an email.