PORT ANGELES — In her books, Bonnie Louise Kuchler shines a light on all kinds of love.
This weekend, as it happens, she is surrounded by romantic revelers, thanks to her latest enterprise.
Kuchler has lived lots of lives. She has a thirst for new endeavors, which she embarks on with steely energy and a set of core values. Kuchler, 52, and her husband Phillip are innkeepers at the Sea Cliff Gardens bed and breakfast, a waterfront estate filled right now with couples on Valentine’s Day getaways. So Kuchler cooks breakfast for the 10 guests in five suites, moderates the table conversations to make sure everyone has a peaceful stay and takes great satisfaction when her couples tell her their time here was bliss.
And in Sea Cliff Gardens’ light-filled front room, guests can thumb through a sampling of Kuchler’s books: Just Girlfriends, Flowers for Mom, Just Sweethearts, and her most popular, Just Sisters: You Mess with Her, You Mess with Me. They will discover that Kuchler, whose 17th and 18th books will be published this fall, is a kind of gift-book matchmaker.
By combing through other books of quotations and photo sites — and sprinkling in her own thoughts — she binds together the funny and the inspirational, and strives to stay away from the sticky-sweet.
“My publisher does not want syrup,” Kuchler says. And this reporter finds her books not cloying, but refreshing.
A sample from inside Just Girlfriends, a celebration of women’s friendships:
“A friend tells you she saw your old boyfriend — and he’s a priest.”
“The friend who holds your hand and says the wrong thing is made of dearer stuff than the one who stays away.”
“So long as you can sweeten another’s pain, life is not in vain.”
Those come from Erma Bombeck, Barbara Kingsolver and Helen Keller, respectively.
Then there are Kuchler’s own musings.
“Revealing an embarrassing moment to a girlfriend — and then laughing about it with her — is like removing the stinger from a stalker bee.”
“Girlfriends share two ageless elixirs. We laugh until we cry. We cry until we laugh. Either one heals us from the inside out.”
Healing was on Kuchler’s mind after Sept. 11, 2001, when it seemed to her that when it came to religion, Americans were fixated on extremism and differences.
Common values important
“In this upcoming generation, there are a lot of atheists; a lot of agnostics,” she says.
“But the common values,” taught by the world’s major religions, “are really important to teach kids — and they don’t have to be learned in Sunday school.”
Those values — such as forgiveness, gentleness and honesty — are taught in all of the holy books, whichever continent you find yourself on, says Kuchler.
And so she persuaded an agent to make her the editor of a far more complicated book.
One Heart: Universal Wisdom from the World’s Scriptures, is a paperback compendium of quotations and essays illustrating what the world’s people of faith share in common.
In her editor’s note, Kuchler writes of how she learned spiritual values in church. But she struggled with the idea that anyone who doesn’t embrace Christian doctrine “would ultimately be separated from God and everything good.”
Why would the Creator, Kuchler asks, “demand that every person follow one rigid path?”
Her belief is that there are spiritual concepts that transcend historical and cultural boundaries. They’re guideposts, Kuchler writes, “to help us along our own unique path.”
One Heart is filled more than 800 quotations from the sacred texts: the Old Testament, Buddhism’s Noble Eightfold Path, the Tao Te Ching, Hinduism’s Bhagavad Gita, the Quran, the New Testament. In eight chapters, One Heart explores each religion’s take on living a good life, on being gentle with others, being honest and dealing with anger in constructive ways.
The overarching, common value Kuchler found through it all is compassion. It’s feeling what others feel, helping those who need help, and looking for opportunities to give.
Andrew Harvey, whose essays serve as a thread through One Heart’s chapters, writes about an act of compassion he experienced when he was a “lost, miserable 25-year-old,” traveling around South India.
One day he went to the Tanjore museum, and finding its doors closed, sat down on the steps and put his head in his hands.
A rail-thin man was sweeping the courtyard. In silence, he placed a cup of tea and two biscuits beside Harvey, and then left. It was a simple act that probably cost the old man a not-insignificant portion of his salary.
The man had “seen that I needed help,” Harvey writes, “and sacrificed to give, without claiming any recognition for himself.
“His perfect act has perfumed my whole life.”
Kuchler, for her part, hopes One Heart promotes in its readers both the tolerance of differences and an understanding of the commonalities among faiths.
“It was a peacemaking effort,” she says.
Kuchler’s next two books promise still more inspirational ideas, paired with images. Hope Is the Thing with Feathers is a collection of quotations meant to impart hope to those who are running short of it; the title comes from an Emily Dickinson poem.
That book is coming out this fall, along with a sequel to her Just Sisters book, which was by far her best-selling title with more than 85,000 copies sold, compared with 35,000 or so for others such as Just Girlfriends.
Just Moms, Kuchler’s first book, sprang from a more modest idea.
A dozen years ago Kuchler owned a calendar shop in a mall near her home on Oahu, Hawaii. One slow night, she was looking through her stock and thinking there ought to be a calendar of photos showing animal mothers and babies.
Calendar for moms
She set a goal of creating such a calendar — and ultimately signed a contract with Willow Creek Press for a book instead. Just Moms was published in 2001, and was followed by a spin-off calendar. Other gift book-and-calendar releases came later, and include the popular Retirement Is a Full-Time Job — and You’re the Boss!
Kuchler sold her calendar business, and has since published 14 more gift books, as well as One Heart. She’s also at work on a novel for preteens — one she said is well-written, but not as gripping as she wants it to be.
“I’m too nice to my characters,” Kuchler says. She knows that in good fiction, “you chase your people up a tree and throw rocks at them,” but so far, she’s let her characters come down out of the tree unscathed. So she knows this novel isn’t ready yet.
Writing fires Kuchler up, endlessly. Yet it doesn’t fill her need to be around people. So, a little over two years ago, she and Phillip decided they wanted to try running a bed and breakfast, preferably near mountains and water and a national park.
Kuchler was ready to leave Hawaii. She had lived there most of her adult life, and for her, it’s a beautiful place to visit, but too much of the same thing after she’d spent decades there.
‘Plant a seed’
She remembered a little bit of time in Oregon, back when she was 3 and 4 years old, and her parents, both professional photographers, took the family camping. That was “just enough to plant a seed,” Kuchler remembers. She dreamed of returning to the Pacific Northwest — and then she and Phillip found an inn for sale, near water and mountains and Olympic National Park.
The couple arrived here at the start of the busy season in May 2009.
Kuchler got busy with another of her passions: gardening. During her first summer, local master gardener Cindy Ericksen taught the former Hawaiian about the Northwest’s climate, as well as its flowers, from tulips to snowdrops to heather. Kuchler now flies solo in her gardens, with occasional calls for Ericksen’s advice.
Winter, except for Valentine’s Day, is the slow time for an innkeeper, so Kuchler settles down to write. In addition to her books, she also pens greeting-card messages, something she says pays better per word than anything else.
Family time
This is also a good time for family visits, so last month, Kuchler’s children came to Sea Cliff Gardens. She and Phillip have four between them: Nate and Jill were hers from her first marriage, and Vanessa and Laura his. All were teenagers when their parents got married; now Kuchler smiles as she reports they have all completed college and are doing well.
The writer-innkeeper, too, is flourishing in her chosen environment.
“I love the misty woods,” she says. “Last week, my daughter and I went to Marymere Falls,” near Lake Crescent in Olympic National Park. “I was just giddy.”
“My heart was always in the Northwest. When I’m here, I’m home.”