Susie Bright: If you want to live in a van or be a stripper, then she's got some tips for you.

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Tara the Hobo Stripper is a van-living, traveling striptease dancer and self-taught herbal medicine guru who's recently settled into a remote cabin in her native home of Alaska.

Even if Tara weren't expert in so many trades, it would be hard to put down her diary:

It's winter. I'm reading a lot. I'm drawing and figuring out how to make recycled sock monkeys. I keep an eternal pot of tea (a sort of infusion, really) on the stove with a big jelly straining bag as the tea bag. It's ginger oatstraw right now, and I drink it with honey.

Another pot on the stove is a perpetual snow melter. A full pot of snow makes two inches of water in the bottom of the pot. Yesterday I balanced one of the candles on top of a water bucket, which, piled on top of other water buckets, made the light just right for sitting in this chair and reading. Then I got a phone sex call and decided to make dinner and forgot about the candle until my water bucket caught on fire!

Now I have a water bucket with a hole in it and a dead candle that probably would have lasted another week if I'd blown it out and let it re-harden before it burned all the way through.

Other essential HoboStripper writings:

(Almost) everything you need to know about living in a van.

The Stripper Audition

The Joy of Nettles, One and Two

(Susie Bright is a guest blogger)