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.

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…

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.

It’s done: two years, nine chapters, 70 thousand words. And, along the way, many dead-ends, reversals, and uncertainties (including, at one point, the chucking of close to a hundred pages).

But it’s done. And I’m happy with the result. Now I move on to editing, copy-editing and publishing. This process requires, among other things, preparing the document in a file format that is both accessible (to those who might work on the text in digital form) and flexible (for presentation purposes that will likely be part of my publishing negotiations). If you are a regular reader of my posts here, you will be familiar with my loathing of word processors (reminder here) and of my habit of writing in plain text (with vim or emacs). For this manuscript I am using plain text lightly marked-up with tags for the LaTeX typesetting engine.

LaTeX is remarkable. It offers the capability of typesetting plain text documents using design principles inherited from the long traditions of printing. The text remains in its native format, but is marked-up with — in my case, a small number — of formatting tags. These tags are read by the LaTeX engine, much like html is read by a web browser, and output to the page (or to pdf, or to whatever format you like) with a level of precision that is unmatched by any other typesetting system.

I have bookmarked a few LaTeX-related items on my del.icio.us page, for those who might be interested.

Typesetting is fun; just like writing, but with more flexibility to make global changes and test them out. Fun indeed. And now I have a small amount of time to tinker in this way, to learn and test and discover. Then, starting in January, on to the next book.

Dr. Janet Roseman, one of my colleagues from The Union Institute, has written a chapter for a new book from Oxford University Press entitled A Time for Listening and Caring: Spirituality and the Care of the Chronically Ill and Dying (with a foreward by The Dalai Lama). Dr. Roseman is a scholar of dance; her chapter in A Time for Listening is about the relationship between dance and healing. As part of her preparation for that chapter, Dr. Roseman spoke with me about the nature of healing and creativity. Subsequently I provided her with the following tidbit (which, I believe, is quoted in the new book):

Everything dances: leaves in the autumn wind, waves traversing the trackless sea, planets and stars in their languid orbits across the heavens. Those dances, ecstatic or tranquil or suffused with longing, are a way of taking a stand in the face of oblivion. In the spiraling and turning that lead ever toward a core of aliveness, the dancer affirms the spirit, calls forth its voice, pays attention to the patient instructions of the innermost self. Dance, and its handmaiden music, are spontaneous and authentic prayers of the soul.

Breath and bones and blood are the instruments of the soul's expression: frail, small things prone to the many sufferings of the world. All dances are therefore devotions of vulnerability. The dancer beseeches the soul, asks to be carried into solace, into comfort, into peace. The soul's answer is movement: thumping feet, an arm descending in a gentle arc, a shout emerging from the grieving heart. The sounds and movements of dance evoke all the secrets, reveal all the hidden places of refuge and sorrow. When you finally see that the lights and shadows of all creation are within you, the only reasonable response is to dance them awake.

This awakeness is the essence of healing. Life stretches us thin on our bones, makes us brittle and windswept, makes us yearn for something we can't quite reach. Dance delivers us into the knowledge of the vast being that hovers over our shoulder. Dance cracks us open, makes us light as gossamer, then knits together our dry bones into a kite whose string is pulled by the invisible.

I'm preparing a syllabus for a new creative writing course that I'll be teaching in the fall (more on that later; stay tuned). One aspect of that project is a reading list of essential works of creative non-fiction. These are works, both historical and contemporary, that represent the core qualities of creative non-fiction writing. Here are ten of my picks:

• Brodkey, Harold. This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death.
• Butala, Sharon. Wild Stone Heart.
• Calvo, Cesar. The Three Halves of Ino Moxo. Translated by Kenneth Symington.
  (Those fluent in Spanish may prefer to read Las tres mitades de Ino Moxo.
  Iquitos, Peru. Proceso Editores, 1981.)
• Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts.
• Lopate, Phillip. The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present.
• Merwin, W.S. The Mays of Ventadorn.
• Ondaatje, Michael. Running in the Family.
• Saint-Exupery, Antoine de. Wind, Sand and Stars. Translated by Lewis Galantiere.
  (Those fluent in French may prefer to read Terre Des Hommes.
  Cambridge, MA. Schoenhof Foreign Books, 1999.)
• Sanders, Scott Russell. Writing from the Center.
• Terpstra, John. The Boys: Or, Waiting for the Electrician's Daughter.