Wow

Publications by students and colleagues:

Click here to read essays about Village Medicine by Deena Metzger, Sharon Simone, Karen Mutter and Lawrie Hartt. See the sidebar under “Village Medicine.”

line

From Deena’s review of Ariel Dorfman’s novel, Darwin’s Ghost in Tikkun.

After many years, Ariel Dorfman, who has been writing essays, memoir, stories, plays, poetry and countless articles for news agencies and journals, has returned to the novel. For those of us who met him through his fiction, Widows, for example, this is most welcome for it allows him to engage the full range of his incisive imagination. A Chilean-American author, agile in two languages, writing alternately in one and then translating into the other as a way of honing his prose precisely, Dorfman has taken it on himself to speak truth to power, both to Chile, through, for example, Death and the Maiden and Feeding on Dreams – and to the U.S. with his latest Homeland Security Ate My Speech: Messages From the End of the World.  In doing so, Dorfman speaks to the world.

line

An Address in Amsterdam by Mary Fillmore.  Mary Fillmore was ahead of her time when she realized that this story is hers and everyone’s story.  She has given thirteen years to writing An Address in Amsterdam, and she has also given her life.  This act of witnessing and great courage offers us sanctuary. We will never forget these characters because there is no curtain between them and us in the tiny room where we hide together.  Skillfully drawn, complex, unique, true, we know these people as we know ourselves as we search for all the possible ways to survive the rising blood tide of brutality, violence and death.  These times demand ethical scrutiny; and the question that Fillmore asked herself, that her characters asked, that the Dutch asked, is the question we must each ask ourselves: collude, collaborate or resist?  Fillmore challenges us and sustains us simultaneously.  She is unflinching in her writing but also helps us bear what we must by being true to the insistent life force, to love, beauty, snowdrops and herons that accompany the most extreme ordeals.

line

Not From Here by Allan G. Johnson.  This is not only an exquisitely crafted memoir of a son seeking a place for his father’s ashes.  This is not only an exploration of the right relationship between the living and the dead, the ethical and emotional responsibilities we have to each other.  This is also a heartbreaking and exact investigation of the ways our ancestors call us into the vortex of history, demanding that we confront and respond to the deeds done, the harm wreaked on the land and the Native people who were here before us.  How we bury our dead requires us also to unearth the harm done and to bring healing to the line that must recognize and include all our relations.  A profound text from a beautiful soul.

[Allan G. Johnson and Nora Jamieson – Deranged – emerge as the literary couple of the year!  And I have the privilege of knowing and loving them both and celebrating their remarkable and distinct work.]

line

Kids in the Wind wryly challenges the pervading notion that adults are smarter, more complex and more interesting than kids.  Wethern’s characters, though young, are smart, original, audacious and complex.  Who knew childhood could be so true, so entirely engaging and so wise.  You gotta love these kids.  You gotta love this book. You won’t put the book down until you’ve lived it through from cover to cover.  Storyteller, Brad Wethern is a master.

line

Deranged, Nora Jamieson, Weeping Coyote Press

In this terrible, gleaming, penetrating work, we learn what it is to be animal again, and so to be fully human. Nora Jamieson¹s true and remarkable voice is so old and so aligned with the old, old ways, it is startlingly new… This IS the Literature of Restoration – Please buy this book and circulate it – so the new, old beauty and knowing can re-enter the world.

line

Communion: In Praise of the Sacred EarthCarolyn Brigit Flynn, White Cloud Press

These daring, luminous poems move from one moment into the dynamic of eternity.

line

Going to Water: The Journal of Beginning Rain, Stan Rushworth, Talking Leaves Press

I have never been so profoundly affected by a book. It is an essential text. This is a stunning book in all meanings of the word – its beauty, heartbreak, terrible truth telling and illumination. Read it. Treasure it. Live accordingly.

line

The Spirit Life of Birds, Maia’s remarkable book.

The work of a true poet who I have known for years. Please send $18 to Askew P.O. #559, Ventura CA 93002
to cover the cost of the book and postage.

line

Donny and Ursula Save the World, Sharon Weil, Passing 4 Normal Press

A most effective medicine for desperate times.

line

Book of Blue, Shirley Graham, Black Moss Press, Canada

This collection is brilliant as in shining, and lucid as in clear down to the soul.

line

The Book of Madness and Cures, Regina O’Melveny, Little Brown and Co.

True magic and enchantment in every line.

line

The Dream Matrix, by Nancy Myers

Speaks of what can happen at one of the Intensives Deena leads or in the Circles that have gathered here in Topanga. It reveals the great mystery of this life as it can be known through dreaming and attention to the ways Spirit moves in our lives, if we listen. If you are at all interested in crossing the edge into the consciousness that is calling us, read The Dream Matrix and then join us. Click here to purchase.

line

Meditating With Rhinos, by Helena Kriel, Melinda Ferguson Books

“Here’s an extraordinary book with an embrace that reaches from Hollywood to rhinoceros dung in South Africa, from what Earth was like 55 million years ago to contemporary wildfires, from an individual’s most defining and intimate emotional needs – to global crises. Meditating With Rhinos will caress the core of your being and illuminate the nature of bonding. Helena Kriel’s sheer originality of language offers fresh delight on every page.” – Sena Jester Naslund, author of Ahab’s Wide and Abundance.

line

Talking with Bears, Conversations with Charlie Russell, by G.A. Bradshaw, Rocky Mountain Books

Talking with Bears is a stunning, original, and mind-changing book.

line

The Art of Is, Improvising As A Way Of Life, by Stephen Nachmanovitch, New World Library

“Like musicians who improvise together, human beings can break barriers: teaching, playing, creating, and being present to one another. In clear prose, Nachmanovitch effortlessly shows how people discover – in themselves – the sheer power to relate and endlessly adapt.” – Jerry Brown, former governor of California.

line

Hour Of The Crab, by Patricia Robertson, Melinda Ferguson Books

Mesmerizing, particularly on all the inter-related stories and deep knowing of Spain, Mallorca, and tragedy. Remarkable.

line

Blaze Island, by Catherine Bush, Goose Lane Editions

What moves me so much about Blaze Island is the way it translates information and thinking into living, embodied experience. Bush writes as if her words are her hands in the soil or the body mind in the winds.  line

I Have Been Assigned The Single Bird: A Daughter’s Memoir, by Susan Cerulean, University of Georgia Press

Read Deena Metzger’s full review in Tikkun.

Any book by Susan Cerulean, writer, naturalist and activist, is a gift to all of us. Deeply trained by her heart, in exact observation of what she loves, Cerulean devotes herself to understanding the nature of what is before her in these times – the fragile nature of everything we love. She reminds us what intimate relationship is, whether the object is a bird or birds in Florida whose lives and futures are overwhelmed by humans overrunning the shore bird’s fragile territory, or her aging father, whose life is equally threatened by Alzheimer’s and his similar loss of his own territory and agency…

 

 

Top