The first time I read the award-winning November 2007 release "Pink Harvest" by Pacifican Toni Mirosevich was by flashlight. The great January Pacifica storm had knocked out the power but not my desire for a good read, for this read. And in this quiet discovery book, 25 personnel narratives flow; some which walk among the pages of Pacifica.

Each Mirosevich story is a memory postcard. She has the uncanny ability of pulling you into another life, her life, with a vivid remembrance that seems your own to recall. From the first story's first words, the reader is invited into a community of lives where the ordinary is quite extraordinary — a feeling which lasts long after the last page is done. Within the stories you will find: a

TONI MIROSEVICH
weary airport security guard unintentionally squeezing "eternal blessings" out of Tibetan prayer flags, a difficult wound that heals the healthy, a teacher who slowly spells the word "truant" aloud to a mother who does not speak English. Reading "Pink Harvest" is like finding the best parts of the day.

On Friday night, May 9, Sharp Park Library welcomes author and 16-year Pacifica resident Toni Mirosevich. The author will read several selections from her "tales of happenstance." Discussion and book signing to follow.

"Pink Harvest," a 2007 Lambda Literary Award Finalist and the recipient of the First Series Award in Creative Nonfiction from Mid-List Press, has sent its author on readings all over the Bay Area and up through the Pacific Northwest. It has also sent Mirosevich — a tenured professor of creative writing at San Francisco State University, a multi-award winning poet and the daughter of a fisherman — back to her Croatian family roots in Everett, Wash.

"I grew up in a very tight Croatian community," said Mirosevich. "And all the old Yugoslavs, old fishermen and their wives who had grown up with my mother and father and who had known my grandparents, they came to my recent reading in Everett. It was held at the same library I used to go as a kid. The library was two blocks from my grandmother's house, close to the railroad tracks. For many of them, going to an author reading was a new experience and I was different, older than the little girl they remembered. In one of the stories I read, I used a 'Slav' swear word and later one old guy came up to me and said I didn't say it right. I read from the stories that were about that life and it was a huge experience for me, very meaningful."

The title "Pink Harvest" came from the photo Mirosevich used for the cover of her book: a 1958 news photograph from the archives of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer Collection, Museum of History and Industry in Seattle. The photo shows two fishermen, on the dock of Westport, Wash., sorting through loaded conveyor belts of shrimp — a pink harvest.

"My father made his living primarily as a salmon fisherman from the waters off Alaska," said Mirosevich. "But there was that thought, among fishermen, that shrimp was a more lucrative crop. Because you always think that there on the horizon lies the next big catch. To me this photograph of a pink harvest is very symbolic that life has to do with gamble and belief and a desire for good fortune."

"My stories in "Pink Harvest" aren't huge apocalyptic blade-runner stories. They don't have that kind of dramatic trajectory. I wanted to bring to life in these stories, the significance of what we are given in terms of family stories, daily experiences. To me, that is where the 'charge' is. For instance, a light hits a couple crossing a crosswalk and suddenly there is a memory of people in the old country. Within the smallest encounter there can be this timeless wonderful connection: a connection with memory, so that the present beckons to the past and the past beckons to the present. These stories are about leaving oneself open to the possibilities of simultaneity. Part of the book and part of the way the stories are written is really slowing down to look in your daily life."

Stories come to Mirosevich both as sudden triggered memories and during the course of everyday living. One of the stories "The Nickel" is based on the magic of a memory Mirosevich understood as an adult but did not register as a child. "On the way to school one day, with my father, we suddenly encountered white deer — six or seven, moving together against the dark green. You experience an event and that kind of percolates in your imagination for a while and then later something happens that puts it back in your imagination; and you write it." Mirosevich also realizes a story when she is walking it — a recent outing along the Pacifica promenade with her partner and their dogs found its way in San Francisco Chronicle Magazine under the title: "The Diplomatic Corps."

Though she casts her net for words it has been a long time since Mirosevich fished and she misses it. "I long to fish," said the author. "Sometimes I walk out on the Pacifica Pier and I stand there to be around the people that are fishing. It's a very, very vibrant pier and like Pacifica as a whole, loaded with a richness of great characters. I love Pacifica."

If you go:

What: Local author visit with Toni Mirosevich

Where: Pacifica Sharp Park Library, Community Room, 104 Hilton Way

When: Friday, May 9 at 7 p.m.

Contact: call 650-355-5196 or visit http://www.smcl.org/events/index.html