I will be making several public presentations in the coming months. Below is the short list of events:

April 22, 1pm to 4:30pm
Mentorship for Youth
Richmond City Hall

In this workshop, participants will learn how and why mentorship is the key to healthy development for youth. Good mentorship promotes resilience, reduces interpersonal conflict, enhances well-being (for everyone) and diminishes the developmental susceptibility of youth to challenges such as addiction, obesity, and isolation.

April 30, 7pm to 9pm
BCACC Counsellor’s Cafe

I will read from the new book on addictions and will discuss the themes surrounding the rise and persistence of addictions in our society. Particular focus will be on the root causes of addiction, the surprising links between early childhood and later addictive behaviour, and the ways in which adult addiction is a mirror of the inner life. Also, I will explore the types of support and care (from parents, spouses, siblings, friends) that are most likely to assist the addicted in discovering a path of healing.

May 28, 1pm to 2:30pm
David Berman Conference
Coast Plaza Hotel

More from the new book, with emphasis on mental health, mentorship, wellness, and professional interventions.

May 30, 9am to 11am
David Thompson High School

A workshop for teachers on technology addictions: their cause, effects, and resolution. The emphasis will be on interventions for teens, and developmental themes for kids of all ages.

July 3, 6:30pm to 9:30pm
(10 Tue/Thurs evenings, plus Saturday July 12)
VCC City Centre campus

Basic Counselling Skills course for those interested in personal and professional development and/or a career in the social services.

November 12, 1pm to 5pm
Jack Hirose conference

A workshop on mentorship for youth, with particular emphasis on creativity and interdisciplinary approaches.
 …

If you are interested in any of the above, drop me a line.

Sometime in the spring of 1974 — another year of persistent underachievement in my elementary academic life — I wrote a poem about a penny. It was called “Richard Penny.” My teacher liked it. Later, the principal congratulated me. It was the only time I spoke to that man without the shadow of discipline between us.

It was during this time, or soon after, that I began to imagine the various ways in which writing might be a part of my future life. It took quite a while for my imagination to promote me from writer to author; but once that was done — perhaps by the fall of grade eight — the trajectory of my creative life was pretty much set.

Twenty years later, when my first book was published, many of those early dreams took final shape and were fulfilled. I have many fond memories of that period, during which I reached back, in my mind, to that young and struggling kid and told him that yeah, it had worked out. One way or another, it had worked out.

Now, as I approach the publication of my third book, I’m starting to think more and more about what this writing gig is all about. I’ve received that confirmation I sought for so long; I’ve had more praise than I deserve; I’ve met and heard from many kind readers and supportive friends of my work. It has been a wondrous ride.

Though not without hurdles. And increasingly, those hurdles have to do with what writers (ahem, authors) are required to do in order to keep their work in front of the reading public. These days, writing books seems to be as much about business as about the call of creativity. Likely it has always been this way, and I’m just slow in figuring that out. At any rate, what I’m returning to — what I’m finally coming around to, what I discovered with that penny poem — has more to do with the joys of creativity than with the business of publishing.

And so, with my upcoming book on addictions, I’ve decided to move beyond the machinery of the publishing industry. I’d like to craft a small and interesting book, something I can design and produce and share with others. It has taken me quite some time to arrive here, and I apologize to the many people to whom I’ve given provisional answers about when the book will be coming out. It has been more difficult than I thought it would be to decide, finally, that I would like to carry this book within the circle of my own care.

As my wife reminds me whenever I need reminding, no one will ever care about my creative work as much as I do. If I want to cherish that work, to usher it into the world with an integrity that matches my vision, I must be the architect of that process. No deal, no contract, no royalty will replace the sacredness of the trust that my creativity asks of me.

Thankfully, I don’t earn my living through writing. If I did, the situation would perhaps be different. I have the luxury — perhaps that’s the wrong word, but it’s the word I have — of treating my creative work as a devotion, and of investing time and energy (and money, too, after all) without profit at the top of my list of priorities. I have the luxury — and here it’s the right word — of responding to my work with the authentic joy of that boy who loved writing poetry. For the joy of the adventure, and of what it brings.

And here is where the adventure lies now: the text is almost complete, the editing is almost done, the design is beginning to take shape. I’m thinking about a fall release, a small event with friends and interested readers. If you want to be a part of this event, just drop me a line.

The journey of the new book starts here, in this moment in which I decide to return to what I glimpsed so long ago: the work, always the work and its promises. My work.

I've been reading quite a bit of non-fiction science lately -- mathematics, history, the philosophy of science -- and for a small break from the density of that material (quick: why do the non-trivial Riemann zeros lie across the critical line whose real part is one half?) I decided to re-read a book that I retrieved from the bookshelves a few months ago, for some now-forgotten purpose, and which has since been migrating across the piles of stuff on my bedside table: Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle.

One of the first surprising items I discovered was the original price sticker, from when I purchased this book, in 1985, from the UBC bookstore: $2.95. My, how times have changed.

The Man in the High Castle is one of the first alternative histories. Though Dick is considered a writer of sci-fi (and films of his work, such as Blade Runner and Minority Report are certainly within that eclectic genre), TMITHC is not science fiction in the strict sense: it's not about the future, there is no advanced technology to speak of, and no extraterrestrial aspects come into play. No, TMITHC is about a world -- our world, but not quite -- in which the Nazis won the second world war. This is a theme that has recently been taken up by Philip Roth as well, in his The Plot Against America; but Dick was among the first to explore such alternate universes.

It was refreshing to revisit TMITHC after more than twenty years. The story is simply told, without the postmodern tropes and adornments that one finds in almost all literature today. Dick does not trick the reader with overlapping perspectives, or knots of fancy language, or strategies of symbolism cobbled together from simple psychologies. He does not try to untangle the mystery of the story: which is that our world and the alternative world both exist, somehow, and are connected by means of various bridges: the arts, spirituality, philosophy.

The language of the book is interesting: Dick uses a pidgin-ish narrative both for his descriptions of scenes and for the internal dialogue of most of the characters (except those who seem to understand the nature of their interpenetrating realities). It's as though he's asking the reader to narrow down modes of thought, to restrict imagination and creativity in the manner demanded of the society inhabited by the characters. It's an interesting approach; subtle, and quite effective.

In many ways, TMITHC is an abstract book. Its generous use of the I Ching -- or, perhaps, its dependence on the flow of energies within the I Ching -- will be off-putting to some readers, as will the generally Jungian approach to self-psychology. But for those with a philosophic frame of mind, TMITHC is a great book. The story is clear, and strong, and an unbiased reader will be carried by its momentum. And within this trajectory, the reader is asked to consider profound questions about the nature of reality, the nature of character, and the manner in which human societies grow. TMITHC is a traditional narrative, a narrative of the old school, in which the asking of big questions was not yet considered quaint.

One scene of the book is of particular interest to me as a counsellor. It involves a character who comes into possession of a small pendant, upon which he meditates, and which leads him, momentarily, across the bridge between his world and ours. He crosses over, returns again to his own reality, and is changed. In his own life, Philip K. Dick underwent a number of altered state experiences -- what might be called psychotic breaks, in fact -- over several years following dental surgery in 1974. These may have been provoked by his frequent use of stimulants or by his own underlying temperament, which seemed prone to the types of internal splits seen often in artists and writers. At any rate, here is how Dick described one of those experiences:

My novel Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said was released by Doubleday in February of 1974. The week after it was released, I had two impacted wisdom teeth removed, under sodium pentathol. Later that day I found myself in intense pain. My wife phoned the oral surgeon and he phoned a pharmacy. Half an hour later there was a knock at my door: the delivery person from the pharmacy with the pain medication. Although I was bleeding and sick and weak, I felt the need to answer the knock on the door myself. When I opened the door, I found myself facing a young woman -- who wore a shining gold necklace in the center of which was a gleaming gold fish. For some reason I was hypnotized by the gleaming golden fish; I forgot my pain, forgot the medication, forgot why the girl was there. I just kept staring at the fish sign.

"What does that mean?" I asked her.

The girl touched the glimmering golden fish with her hand and said, "This is a sign worn by the early Christians." She then gave me the package of medication.

In that instant, as I stared at the gleaming fish sign and heard her words, I suddenly experienced what I later learned is called anamnesis—a Greek word meaning, literally, "loss of forgetfulness." I remembered who I was and where I was. In an instant, in the twinkling of an eye, it all came back to me. And not only could I remember it but I could see it. The girl was a secret Christian and so was I. We lived in fear of detection by the Romans. We had to communicate with cryptic signs. She had just told me all this, and it was true.

TMITHC was published in the early sixties. Dick's encounter with the woman above took place in 1974. The scene in TMITHC is essentially identical to what happened to him almost fifteen years later. I wonder about this; it intrigues me. It's as though an underground stream ran through the narrative of his life, weaving in and out of his books, following him into the reality of his own life, prompting questions from him about his own identity, his reality, his consciousness.

Today, Dick would have trouble getting TMITHC published. There's no hook to it, it's too abstract for most readers, it requires a contemplative approach to reading. Where's the market for such a book? Perhaps I'm being cynical -- but it is my belief that many of the classic books would not make it onto the shelves today. Now that publishing is an appendage of the entertainment industry, books are no longer the culture bearers they once were. Movies now occupy that position. At least they do for the most part. Yet sometimes, great books still exert their own power, beyond marketing and franchises and the mercurial public. There's no question in my mind that The Man in the High Castle is such a book.

On Tuesday November 27, from 12:30 to 5:00 pm, I will be presenting a workshop on technology addictions. The main goal of the workshop is to offer participants an opportunity to learn how video games, mobile technologies and the Internet (gambling, pornography, online communities, etc.) entrain and control the nervous system and personal psychology. We will also examine what makes certain technologies addictive and what role social service providers can play in preventing and treating problem use.

The workshop is sponsored by Richmond Addictions Services, is open (and free!) to all Richmond social services providers, and will be held at the Ralph Fischer Auditorium in Richmond General Hospital.

If you work in Richmond, contact George Passmore (george@richmondaddictions.ca) to register. If you are interested in this workshop for your own organization, get in touch with me.

In my creative writing classes I note a common theme among beginning writers: often their prose is what I call loose, or speech-ified. It’s as though their familiarity with forms of speech has come to define their approach to prose. Typically, I spend a great deal of time in such classes on the general subject of how to tighten sentences — how to make them spare, clean, and clear.

Here are my various tips and strategies for how to achieve the tight sentence:

Tips on Tightening

Myths of the Primordial Waters:
Ancient Mariners, Human Migration, and the Sea

Plato wrote that the past is like the wake behind a boat; it spreads, and diminishes behind us, and merges with the surrounding sea. The past rolls under and is gone.

We stand upon the foredeck of Plato’s boat, gazing forward, cleaving our path toward the future. Along the track of our traveling many things are lost — because we are always searching ahead, because the wake is jostling and turbulent, because our craft is small and the ocean is vast.

It is by means of this manner of journeying into the future that our knowledge of ancient peoples is vanishingly small. We know a fair amount about the last thousand years of our history, we surmise a sketch of the thousand years before that — and of the remote ages before that, we know very little. Snatches, really, vignettes gathered from scattered documents and fragmentary tales. For the great majority of the history of modern humans — a hundred thousand years, two hundred thousand, no one knows — we understand almost nothing. Along our own coasts, which once were at lower altitude than they are now, ancient villages lie hidden beneath the wake of passing boats above.

And yet, old stories have been handed down from that long, invisible stretch of years: fables, epics, mythologies of archaic and unknown origin. Among those ancient tales is a set of related motifs, from many cultures, that tell of seafarers who found their way to distant shores. In China, Polynesia, Japan, Egypt, Africa, Scandinavia — in most places bordered by the sea — we find fantastic tales of oceanic travel. On our own coasts — in Haida Gwaii, and along the sheltered eastern shore of Vancouver Island, and inland all the way to the Kootenays — similar stories are told of those who came long ago, and lived upon the land, and vanished.

more…

My fall teaching schedule is off to its usual eclectic, disorganized start. Here’s the short list:

Kwantlen University College
Creative Writing: Creative non-fiction II (third year)
Creative Writing: Advanced Creative non-fiction (fourth year)
Basic Composition (first year)

Vancouver Community College
Group Counselling (two sections, both full)
Counselling practicum

I will also be facilitating a few workshops (on vicarious trauma, Internet addiction, and other related topics) and doing my regular group work with organizations. If you are interested in anything above, drop me a line.

Last week, at the conference of the Writers’ Union of Canada, I was a member of a panel discussing the topic of creativity (as “All in Your Head”). Here are the notes from which I spoke:

I’d like to talk about the creative process as a psychological journey. And I’d like to begin with the title of our conversation today: It’s All in Your Head. In a sense, I agree that it’s all in your head. The entire universe is in our heads — at least, it is if you believe in quantum physics, or if you subscribe to ideas from various philosophical traditions.

But consciousness and creativity are about more than the head. To my way of thinking, the psyche is the whole body. All out stories live there, and the themes and narratives to which we are drawn have as much to do with deep bodily instincts as they do with artistic or intellectual impulses.

The roller coaster (as the description of our panel discussion calls the creative process) might be the convolutions of the digestive system, the labyrinths of veins and arteries spiraling to and from the heart, the tracks of our bones.

In my view, the creative process is an inward journey that is also a mode of healing, or of philosophical inquiry, or of self-awareness. And the reliable guide of this journey, perhaps the only guide we have, is the body.

In my own work, I often sense my body as a map stories: tales of my childhood lie along my back, my travels occupy the spaces between my ribs, my dreams and visions are gathered up inside the bones of my arms. I think of these maps as geographies of the sacred.

I have written about illness and injury and the spiritualities to be found in those experiences. I have written about my hands, my joints, my belly, my skin, my bones. I try not to conclude that this is simple narcissism. Instead, I imagine that I am like those ancient Taoists who perceived the universe to be within themselves. For them, the body was a replica, in miniature, of all of creation.

I like this view. It’s an old view, and unfashionable in these days of external influences and global forces. But I don’t believe, really, in external forces. Instead I believe that we are the world, each of us, and to understand ourselves is to understand that world. In turn, to heal ourselves is to heal the world also.

For me, one of the troubling aspects of the arts cultures today involves the tendency to dismiss, or to be cynical about, self-awareness and personal development. The idea persists, among many artists and writers, that the creative edge derives from psychological turbulence — that a chaotic mind and fractured heart are resources instead of impediments. Personal growth, so goes this argument, will dull the intensity of creative expression.

My work as a writer is almost entirely devoted to the themes of self-awareness, so I am naturally biased toward a view that endorses the usefulness of psychological health. I do not believe that a troubled mind sees clearly; and for me, clarity of vision is the essence of creative work.

But the corrosive mythology of the unstable artist persists, and it has wrought more damage to the arts of our time than any other single force. The arts have always been instruments of the healing impulses in human society. To divorce the creative process from imperatives of personal and social healing is to break the covenant that society offers in trust to the arts.

We could be doing more, I think, to encourage values of self-awareness and self-inquiry among artists of all stripes — and particularly for writers, who historically have been strong advocates of the psychological quest: Shakespeare, Hildegard of Bingen, William Blake, Friedrich Nietzsche, Joseph Conrad, Ursula LeGuin, Jorge Luis Borges, Chinua Achebe, and many others.

The inward journey is archetypal, and is the home territory of the writer. Until recently, we claimed this territory more than we do so now. And especially now, in a world increasingly terrified of introspection, the contributions of writers — of a particular character of writing, what might be called the mode of the artist/philosopher — is more relevant than ever.

As practitioners of that high art, one thing only is required of us: to look inward, to listen to the bodymind with its many messages. And I suspect that for most of us the messages are of an urgent nature. They compel us to recognize that we are the world, that it’s all inside of us, that our inner life is a map of the cosmos. This correspondence — between the personal and the universal — is the reason that authentic writers and artists speak with a particular kind of authority. We have tried to recognize ourselves in everything.

Mostly we fail at this task. But once in a while, when we get out of our own way, when we circumvent both our insecurities and our arrogance, we get it right: the bodymind speaks through the veil of our scattered consciousness, the words flow onto the page, and we approach something akin to truthfulness.