Many people in southeastern Michigan will be excited to know that after being closed since February 15, 2022, Crazy Wisdom Bookstore reopened on December 1, 2023 under the same ownership of Bill Zirinsky and Ruth Schekter, the couple who have shepherded the store forward over the last 30+ years.
New store manager Chandra Mitchel was brought on board in late August 2023 to prepare the store for its new phase. Operations have been streamlined: the store is open Wednesday through Saturday, the former Tea Room is not re-opening, and some products are no longer being carried. The upstairs (second floor) area is being remodeled, and all of the book and retail sales will be on the first floor. Crazy Wisdom will host events and talks and book-signings and gatherings in a redecorated space that was once the Tea Room. The Community Room is being refurbished, and will continue to be rented out for classes, workshops, drum circles, meditation groups, and book discussion groups. The second floor spaces, she said, should be ready in late March of 2024. Events will be announced later, but she anticipates that signature Crazy Wisdom events like Witches Night Out, Poetry Nights, and Salon nights will be returning, as well as author talks, storytelling nights, the Death Café, occasional live music or chant nights, and more. People will be able to rent the space for private events, and a small caterer’s kitchen will be available. Though the Tea Room will not be returning, Mitchel said, some events may offer grab-and-go drinks and packaged snacks.
The store still offers many of its familiar products: jewelry, crystals, tarot decks, candles and incense, art, statues, calendars, cards, journals, gift items, and of course, books. Mitchel said that the store will feel like home to returning customers. The books have been somewhat re-organized, but all of the core topics are represented: spirituality and the world’s wisdom traditions; transpersonal and body/mind psychotherapies; integrative, holistic and herbal medicine and healing; conscious living and sustainability; magic and esoteric and indigenous traditions; altered states of consciousness; and mindfulness and meditation. The bookstore will continue to give special focus to Buddhism, wicca and paganism, and women’s spirituality, as it has done for its entire 40+ year history. There will also be books of topical interest and general non-fiction, including books on culture and society, as well as on politics and world affairs. The store will continue to carry quality fiction, and also thematically aligned kids’ books.
Prior to joining the Crazy Wisdom team, Mitchel was General Manager at Bloom City Club for several years; prior to this she had been a book buyer at Whole Foods. She has been making jewelry for a long time and is interested in crystals and their metaphysical properties, as well as spirituality, and natural and herbal medicine. She called the opportunity “right up my alley,” and said she’s very excited to be back in a retail environment talking to people and helping them find what they are looking for. Crazy Wisdom carries a lot of books that people can only find online, she said, and even though book buying has changed a lot in the last couple of decades, “book buyers still want to browse and flip through the pages; they still want to hold the book, look at the cover, read a few paragraphs, and touch the book before they buy it.” She feels that the desire for this experience will never really go away even though electronic books are so widely available. “We still want to see the books on our bookshelves; there’s just something about them,” she said.
Bookstore assistant Julia Rhodes is also interested in and knowledgeable about the books on Crazy Wisdom’s shelves, said Mitchel. Rhodes has a degree in comparative religions and “reads like crazy,” she said. Mitchel said she feels very grateful to be helping usher in Crazy Wisdom’s newest iteration and looks forward to working with the community.
Crazy Wisdom was founded in 1982, by Aura Glaser, a practicing Tibetan Buddhist, who was also instrumental in founding Jewel Heart Tibetan Buddhist Center, which is based in Ann Arbor. In 1989, she sold the bookstore to Bill Zirinsky and Jonathan Ellis, with Zirinsky putting in the capital, and Ellis overseeing the bookstore management. Ellis had been the program director at Canterbury House, the Episcopal Campus Ministry at U-M, and he had also worked for the Edgar Cayce Foundation. Even earlier, he had been involved in the presidential campaigns of Robert F. Kennedy, George McGovern, and Ted Kennedy. Zirinsky had come of age as a U-M student, in Ann Arbor’s countercultural scene of the 1970’s; and after graduating, he co-founded and co-edited the Alchemist of Ann Arbor, a progressive, alternative monthly which was published in town starting in 1978. He’d also been trained as a Gestalt therapist at the Pellin Institute and studied Tibetan Buddhism at the Buddhist-oriented Naropa College in Boulder. Later on, he worked at the New York Times Book Company as an Assistant Editor.
Ellis, who had always worked with non-profits, was surprised by the stresses of running a “for-profit” bookstore, and departed after a few months, though he continued on as a sage adviser for many years, and helped to administer various “special projects” the store engaged in.
Zirinsky cajoled his then-girlfriend, Ruth Schekter, to move from Little Italy’s Mulberry Street in Manhattan to Ann Arbor. Right away, she found a place for herself at Crazy Wisdom, when it was located in a small retail space on North Fourth Avenue. Schekter, herself, was also a U-M graduate (some years later than Zirinsky), having majored in European History. Schekter, with an aesthetic eye and good taste and a love for crafts, oversaw all the store’s lovely jewelry and art and other “sidelines” while Zirinsky handled the book inventory.
The bookstore slowly deepened its range of books, adding well-curated book sections in the areas of psychology, sustainability, integrative medicine and healing, shamanism, and many other areas. The owners bought a building on South Main Street in 1997, and then gutted and renovated that building. They made a big move to that space (its current space) in the spring of 1999, They added a Tea Room on the second floor, which hosted live music every Friday and Saturday night for more than 20 years. The staff size went from six to eighteen, and the inventory increased dramatically in their larger space. Its downtown location became a destination for like-minded souls from all over southeastern Michigan. Over the years, they also relied greatly on longtime managers such as Carol Karr, Rachel Pastiva, Jerri Dodge, and Sarah Newland to run the store and tea room, and to order and display and sell the merchandise and tea products. Carol Karr, multi-talented and creative, remains deeply involved, after 27 years, and she is the Production and Design Editor for the Crazy Wisdom Journal.
When they closed the bookstore and tea room in 2022, they were imagining they would sell the bookstore/tearoom, but they also noted at the time that the closing might just turn out to be a sabbatical. Soon after the closing, Zirinsky and former CW bookstore manager, Rachel Pastiva, began meeting with potential buyers. All in all, they spoke to 21 different potential buyers —individuals and couples—including one appealing younger couple they met with seven times, and a few other seemingly good prospects. But they did not find the right match. At the same time, they had been having numerous conversations about what a new incarnation of Crazy Wisdom might look like. Zirinsky wanted a smaller store, simpler to operate, no food service, smaller staff, open many fewer hours. Pastiva wanted a more focused and leaner book inventory, and streamlined operations.
Zirinsky, with Pastiva mapping the route, decided to reopen the bookstore, but have it be open only four days a week, and have the store closed six weeks each year, so “the motor wouldn’t be running all the time, and so the manager would get a chance to breathe.” Still, the essential focus would remain the same: to be a “bookstore about consciousness” and an oasis for people searching in their lives—spiritually, psychologically, and in terms of health, healing and conscious living.
For Zirinsky, the alignment of the brick-and-mortar bookstore with its publishing “arm” – the Crazy Wisdom Journal and the Crazy Wisdom Biweekly – had been a natural fit and aggregator for decades, and he missed the store’s brick-and-mortar presence downtown. Pastiva, currently the Director of the Friends of the Ann Arbor District Library, and the Founder and President of the Ann Arbor Book Society, had been Crazy Wisdom’s bookstore manager for 11 years. According to Zirinsky, Pastiva was vital to the planning of the latest incarnation of the bookstore and has been pivotal in overseeing the restocking and reconceptualizing of the bookstore. She will stay involved as the store’s Operations Partner. Co-owner Ruth Schekter has preferred to stay focused on family life at this stage. Zirinsky and Schekter have had four children, and their youngest, Grace, is a sophomore at Pioneer High School in Ann Arbor.
Crazy Wisdom Bookstore is located at 114 South Main Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48104 and more information is online at crazywisdom.net. The store can be reached by phone at (734) 665-2757 and Chandra Mitchel can be reached by email at Chandra@crazywisdom.net. Bill Zirinsky can be reached at: billz@crazywisdom.net. Rachel Pastiva can be reached at: rachel@crazywisdom.net.
