Creative Nonfiction Quotes

Rejection is an opportunity for your selection.

Imagination is not bound by possibilities. The creative mind will always break the shackles—making the impossible, possible.

Inspiration ignites the spark of magic. Creativity is magic.

For many years Rembrandt basked in the limelight because of his dramatic style of chiaroscuro, while Caravaggio being the true pioneer of the style remained in the shadows, forgotten for centuries.


A city is a place where interesting always beats beautiful.

At a certain point I need to go wandering. My feet need to hit earth, again and again, that bone-filling drumbeat. I need the sky's colored threads to tangle inside me, pull me somewhere new.

I need the sky's colored threads to tangle inside me, pull me somewhere new.

I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you're going no matter how you live, cannot you part.

People who live with OCD drag a metal sea anchor around. Obsession is a break, a source of drag, not a badge of creativity, a mark of genius or an inconvenient side effect of some greater function.

We are all born as storytellers. Our inner voice tells the first story we ever hear.

The real enemy of independent thinking is not an external authority, but our own inertia. The ability to generate new ideas has more to do with breaking with old habits of thinking than with coming up with as many ideas as possible.

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something.” (Steve Jobs)

Books mimic adrenaline to the narratively restless: nests of worlds in which the mind takes predestined flights from time and place.

The states of birth, suffering, love, and death, are extreme states: extreme, universal, and inescapable. We all know this, but we would rather not know it. The artist is present to correct the delusions to which we are all prey in our attempts to avoid this knowledge." - James Baldwin, "The Creative Process

Sometimes a house wants to be your mother. Sometimes a house wants to hide the evidence. Some houses would smother you with good tastefulness, a claustrophobic need to impress. Some houses would like you to calm down already. Some houses want you to get the hell out. Some houses get silly with nostalgia. Some houses are destined for the aftermaths of true love. Some houses couldn’t care less: you might as well be living in generic anywhere. But no one ever is.

Think not of the fragility of life, but of the power of books, when mere words can change our lives simply by being next to each other.

She might not have read many books. But when she reads a book, she swallows the very words. If you open the books on her shelves, you will find that the front and back covers encase white pages.

I shut my ears, averted my eyes, turning instead to what I thought at the time was pain's antidote: silence. I was wrong... Silence feeds pain, allows it to fester and thrive. What starves pain, what forces it to release its grip, is speech, the voice upon which rides the story, this is what happened; this is what I have refused to let claim me.

Writing nonfiction means I tell people's stories for them, not because they're special but because we all are.

The essay is a modest genre. It doesn't mean to change the world. Instead it says: let me tell you what happened to me.

Why is it deemed justifiable and appropriate for cops/police officers to kill other cops (friendly–fire) and citizens? Why do cops kill? Are they not taught to maim or slow down someone running or reaching for a weapon? If not, why not? Why do cops kill first and ask questions last? Why are police officers being military trained? What can we as citizens, taxpayers, and voters do to stop these killings and beatings of unarmed people? Why do we let this continue? How many more must die or get beat up before we realize something is wrong and needs to be changed? Will you, a friend, or a family member have to be killed or beaten by a cop before we realize that things have to change? Who's here to protect us from the cops when they decide to use excessive force, shoot multiple shells, and/or murder us?

I am an author of the analytical critique. And because of that, a ton of research is done by me in order to bring an examination into comprehensive being. ("Interviews With Writers," 2018).

...my thoughts don't really bump along this way, but they do bump somehow, and it's more honest--more pedagogically useful, more truthful--to arrange them in a loose, disconnected, provisional way than to deliver only the conclusions.

Own the books you read. Also poems, stories, flash fiction, plays, memoirs, movies, creative nonfiction, and all the rest. ... take ownership of your reading. It's yours. It's special. It is exactly like nobody else's in the whole world.

They are suspicious of humanism, nervous about too much style, and wary of public celebrations of the personal.

And found there one of those huge comprehensive anthologies of literature, the sort of thing which, on a bad day, can induce an inferiority complex...

No doubt he is more than that, but we have no time to inquire.

People approach writers, assuming we pull a perfect text out of our nose each time (well spelled). Spelling is the least of it.

One makes discoveries about oneself but more often one makes up discoveries.

Those who think of themselves as being open-minded are often even more prone to stick to their first understanding as they believe themselves to be without natural prejudices and therefore don’t see the need to counter-balance them. If we think we can ‘hold back’ on interpretation, we are fooling ourselves.

We all share a biology and deep drives, and what we have created---civilization, courtesy, decency---is a mesh that comes from those drives and also contains and tames them. Whatever feels good is not necessarily good. But what I learn is whatever is bad is not necessarily alien to me. Or to you.

The extent of creativity to which I admire in an individual is his ability to be richly creative while still, in a way, telling the truth. It is the fool who creates only his own lies, and the bore who simply repeats what he is told.

The urge, starting out, is to copy. And that's not a bad thing. Most of us only find our own voices after we've sounded like a lot of other people. But the one thing that you have that nobody else has is YOU. Your voice, your mind your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can.

Writer David Foster Wallace said that he thought good nonfiction was a chance to “watch somebody reasonably bright but also reasonably average pay far closer attention and think at far more length about all sorts of different stuff than most of us have a chance to in our daily lives.” Amateurs fit the same bill: They’re just regular people who get obsessed by something and spend a ton of time thinking out loud about it.

I began to write because of love. I wrote to understand what I felt and what I knew.

Humans must be skeptics in order to find truth. Because there is always something that lies beneath…

We all share a biology and deep drives, and what we have created -- civilization, courtesy, decency -- is a mesh that comes from those drives and also contains and tames them. Whatever feels good is not necessarily good. But what I learn is whatever is bad is not necessarily alien to me. Or to you.

They have access to your brain, they have access to your body. They hack your brain, they hack your body to make you think certain things, to make you do certain things. To extract thoughts. Invisibly. But nothing is reliable.

The presence in a memoir or an essay of the truth speaker - the narrator that a writer pulls out of his or her own agitated and boring self to organize a piece of experience - it was about this alone that I felt I had something to say; and it was to those works in which such a narrator comes through strong and clear that I was invariably drawn.

Dedicate (donate, give all) your life to something larger than yourself and pleasure - to the largest thing you can: to God, to relieving suffering, to contributing to knowledge, to adding to literature, or something else. Happiness lies this way, and it beats pleasure hollow.

New freedoms surface old habits. I haven't left sin behind, only discovered a new medium for my treachery. My real trouble as a writer isn't trying to mean the words that I write. It's living into the words that I mean. Nonfiction writing can feel like the high art of hypocrisy.

She liked solitude and the thoughts of her own interesting and creative mind. She liked to be comfortable. She liked hotel rooms, thick towels, cashmere sweaters, silk dresses, oxfords, brunch, fine stationery, overpriced conditioner, bouquets of gerbera, hats, postage stamps, art monographs, maranta plants, PBS documentaries, challah, soy candles, and yoga. She liked receiving a canvas tote bag when she gave to a charitable cause. She was an avid reader (of fiction and nonfiction), but she never read the newspaper, other than the arts sections, and she felt guilty about this. Dov often said she was bourgeois. He meant it as an insult, but she knew that she probably was. Her parents were bourgeois, and she adored them, so, of course, she had turned out bourgeois, too. She wished she could get a dog, but Dov’s building didn’t allow them.

If you stay long enough in a city, it reverberates inside you as both a celebration and a mourning.

Strive to be beyond what others perceive you to be, by striving beyond the limits of yourself.

Thinking and creativity can flourish under restricted conditions and there are plenty of studies to back that claim

The more time an artist devotes to learning about an aesthetic “problem,” the more unexpected and creative his solution will be regarded later by art experts

The truth is the truth. It does not need proof. Only lies need proof. And fake one.

The biggest threat to creativity and scientific progress is therefore the opposite: a lack of structure and restrictions. Without structure, we cannot differentiate, compare or experiment with ideas.

For every work of fiction, the author inserts a bit of themself to make the story seem more real. For every work of nonfiction, the edges of reality must be blurred creatively to keep the reader's interest.

The unsurrogated narrator has the monumental task of transforming low-level self-interest into the kind of detached empathy required of a piece of writing that is to be of value to the disinterested reader.

They make you as they are because it’s the only thing they know and then they tell you it’s your fault because they are jealous you are better than them. But the truth is it’s never your fault. It’s their fault

You can write with clarity and with flair, too. And though the emphasis is on nonfiction, the explanations should be useful to fiction writers as well, because many principles of style apply whether the world being written about is real or imaginary. I like to think they might also be helpful to poets, orators, and other creative wordsmiths, who need to know the canons of pedestrian prose to flout them for rhetorical effect.

Why would I what?” Will asked, wanting another bite of his burger. “Why would you risk your job teaching some stupid fantasy book?” “Because alternative universe literature promotes critical thinking, imagination, empathy, and creative problem solving. Children who are fluent in fiction are more able to interpret nonfiction and are better at understanding things like basic cause and effect, sociology, politics, and the impact of historical events on current events. Many of our technological advances were imagined by science fiction writers before the tech became available to create them, and many of today’s inventors were inspired by science fiction and fantasy to make a world more like the world in the story. Many of today’s political conundrums were anticipated by science fiction writers like Orwell, Huxley, and Heinlein, and sci-fi and fantasy tackle ethical problems in a way that allows people to analyze the problem with some emotional remove, which is important because the high emotions are often what lead to violence. Works like Harry Potter tackle the idea of abuse of power and—” Will stopped himself and swallowed. Everybody at the table, including Kenny, was staring at him in openmouthed surprise. “Anyway,” he said before taking a monster bite of his cooling hamburger on a sudden attack of nerves, “iss goomfer umf.” “It’s good for us,” Kenny translated, sounding a little stunned

People oppose you when you uncomfort them… When you don't reciprocate their actions. Or when you point their guilt. They tell bad things about you exaggerating. You can tell more bad things about them but you don't do it… to be positive

A great physicist taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He published many important books and papers. Often he had an idea in the middle of the night. He rose from his bed, took a shower, washed his hair, and shaved. He dressed completely, in a clean shirt, in polished shoes, a jacket and tie. Then he sat at his desk and wrote down his idea. A friend of mine asked him why he put himself through all that rigmarole. 'Why,' he said, surprised at the question, 'in honor of physics!

Reality is secretly causing a fatal earthquake to your rival neighbor and then send help to them. Reality is declaring you destroyed a rival balloon that collects communication signals when it is actually yours. Reality is causing a pandemic and blame your rival for it.

It is more probable they will tell you bad or wrong things about me. For many reasons: inferiority or imperfection. They might tell you I am dead. They might tell you it is not me. Question everything they tell you about me. Verify who they are. Do not believe anything about me. Try to find me to ask me.

We made the choice, right there in our local coffee shop, that we were going to do things differently. We were going to put the story first, no matter where that led us. We’d open ourselves up to all genres, all forms. We’d publish works that stayed with us in an intangible way, long after that last page is turned.

The urge, starting out, is to copy. And that's not a bad thing. Most of us only find our own voices after we've sounded like a lot of other people. But the one thing that you have that nobody else has is YOU. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can.t

On one hand, those with wandering, defocused, childlike minds seem to be the most creative; on the other, it seems to be analysis and application that’s important. The answer to this conundrum is that creative people need both … The key to creativity is being able to switch between a wide-open, playful mind and a narrow analytical frame.

Even though consciousness doesn’t seem to be confined to the human brain within the skull, we do experience consciousness through our brain. The transformation of consciousness to attention is facilitated by your brain. Driving thoughts into action is also processed by your brain. Your brain is the seat of the creative observer inside you.

...I read the Bible steadily...Even the long, monotonous lists. Even the really weird stuff, most of it so unbelievable as to only be true. I have to say I found it the most compelling piece of creative non-fiction I had ever read. If I sat around for thousands of years, I could never come up with what it proposes, let alone with how intricately Genesis unfolds toward Revelation.

The controversy over resurrection, then, proved critical in shaping the Christian movement into an institutional religion. All Christians agreed in principle that only Christ himself—or God—can be the ultimate source of spiritual authority. But the immediate question, of course, was the practical one: Who, in the present, administers that authority? Valentinus and his followers answered: Whoever comes into direct, personal contact with the “living One.” They argued that only one’s own experience offers the ultimate criterion of truth, taking precedence over all secondhand testimony and all tradition—even gnostic tradition! They celebrated every form of creative invention as evidence that a person has become spiritually alive. On this theory, the structure of authority can never be fixed into an institutional framework: it must remain spontaneous, charismatic, and open.

In his book Real Presences, George Steiner asks us to "imagine a society in which all talk about the arts, music and literature is prohibited." In such a society there would be no more essays on whether Hamlet was mad or only pretending to be, no reviews of the latest exhibitions or novels, no profiles of writers or artists. There would be no secondary, or parasitic, discussion - let alone tertiary: commentary on commentary. We would have, instead, a "republic for writers and readers" with no cushion of professional opinion-makers to come between creators and audience. While the Sunday papers presently serve as a substitute for the experiencing of the actual exhibition or book, in Steiner's imagined republic the review pages would be turned into listings:catalogues and guides to what is about to open, be published, or be released. What would this republic be like? Would the arts suffer from the obliteration of this ozone of comment? Certainly not, says Steiner, for each performance of a Mahler symphony is also a critique of that symphony. Unlike the reviewer, however, the performer "invests his own being in the process of interpretation." Such interpretation is automatically responsible because the performer is answerable to the work in a way that even the most scrupulous reviewer is not. Although, most obviously, it is not only the case for drama and music; all art is also criticism. This is most clearly so when a writer or composer quotes or reworks material from another writer or composer. All literature, music, and art "embody an expository reflection which they pertain". In other words it is not only in their letters, essays, or conversation that writers like Henry James reveal themselves also to be the best critics; rather, The Portrait of a Lady is itself, among other things, a commentary on and a critique of Middlemarch. "The best readings of art are art." No sooner has Steiner summoned this imaginary republic into existence than he sighs, "The fantasy I have sketched is only that." Well, it is not. It is a real place and for much of the century it has provided a global home for millions of people. It is a republic with a simple name: jazz.

Read non-fiction. History, biology, entomology, mineralogy, paleontology. Get a bodyguard and do fieldwork. Find your inner fish. Don't publish too soon. Not before you have read Thomas Mann in any case. Learn by copying, sentence by sentence some of the masters. Copy Coetzee's or Sebald's sentences and see what happens to your story. Consider creative non-fiction if you want to stay in South Africa. It might be the way to go. Never neglect back and hamstring exercises, otherwise you won't be able to write your novel. One needs one's buttocks to think.

WRITING GUIDES AND REFERENCES: A SELECTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY The Artful Edit, by Susan Bell (Norton) The Art of Time in Memoir, by Sven Birkerts (Graywolf Press) The Writing Life, by Annie Dillard (Harper & Row) Writing with Power, by Peter Elbow (Oxford University Press) Writing Creative Nonfiction, edited by Carolyn Forché and Philip Gerard (Story Press) Tough, Sweet and Stuffy, by Walker Gibson (Indiana University Press) The Situation and the Story, by Vivian Gornick (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) Intimate Journalism: The Art and Craft of Reporting Everyday Life, by Walt Harrington (Sage) On Writing, by Stephen King (Scribner) Telling True Stories, edited by Mark Kramer and Wendy Call (Plume) Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, by Anne Lamott (Pantheon) The Forest for the Trees, by Betsy Lerner (Riverhead) Unless It Moves the Human Heart, by Roger Rosenblatt (Ecco) The Elements of Style, by William Strunk, Jr., and E. B. White (Macmillan) Clear and Simple as the Truth, by Francis-Noel Thomas and Mark Turner (Princeton University Press) Word Court, by Barbara Wallraff (Harcourt) Style, by Joseph M. Williams and Gregory G. Colomb (Longman) On Writing Well, by William Zinsser (Harper & Row) The Chicago Manual of Style, by University of Chicago Press staff (University of Chicago Press) Modern English Usage, by H. W. Fowler, revised edition by Sir Ernest Gowers (Oxford University Press) Modern American Usage, by Wilson Follett (Hill and Wang) Words into Type, by Marjorie E. Skillin and Robert M. Gay (Prentice-Hall) To CHRIS, SAMMY, NICK, AND MADDIE, AND TO TOMMY, JAMIE, THEODORE, AND PENNY

On the Craft of Writing:  The Story Grid: What Good Editors Know by Shawn Coyne The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White 2K to 10K: Writing Faster, Writing Better, and Writing More of What You Love by Rachel Aaron  On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King Take Off Your Pants! Outline Your Books for Faster, Better Writing by Libbie Hawker  You Are a Writer (So Start Acting Like One) by Jeff Goins Prosperity for Writers: A Writer's Guide to Creating Abundance by Honorée Corder  The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles by Steven Pressfield Business for Authors: How To Be An Author Entrepreneur by Joanna Penn  On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction by William Zinsser Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer by Roy Peter Clark On Mindset:  The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan The Art of Exceptional Living by Jim Rohn Vision to Reality: How Short Term Massive Action Equals Long Term Maximum Results by Honorée Corder The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change by Stephen R. Covey Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg Mckeown Mastery by Robert Greene The Success Principles: How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be by Jack Canfield and Janet Switzer The Game of Life and How to Play It by Florence Scovel Shinn The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy Taking Life Head On: How to Love the Life You Have While You Create the Life of Your Dreams by Hal Elrod Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill In

Other animals are exceptionally good at identifying and reacting to predators, rivals and friends. They never act as if they believe that rivers or trees are inhabited by spirits who are watching. In all these ways, other animals continually demonstrate their working knowledge that they live in a world brimming with other minds as well as their knowledge of those minds' boundaries. their understanding seems more acute, pragmatic, and frankly, better than ours at distinguishing real from fake. So, I wonder, do humans really have a better developed Theory of Mind than other animals? ...Children talk to dolls for years, half believing or firmly believing that the doll hears and feels and is a worthy confidante. Many adults pray to statues, fervently believing that they're listening. ...All of this indicates a common human inability to distinguish conscious minds from inanimate objects, and evidence from nonsense. Children often talk to a fully imaginary friends whom they believe listens and has thoughts. Monotheism might be the adult version. ...In the world's most technologically advanced, most informed societies, a majority people take it for granted that disembodied spirits are watching, judging, and acting on them. Most leaders of modern nations trust that a Sky-God can be asked to protect their nation during disasters and conflicts with other nations. All of this is theory of mind gone wild, like an unguided fire hose spraying the whole universe with presumed consciousness. Humans' "superior" Theory of Mind is in part pathology. The oft repeated line "humans are rational beings" is probably our most half-true assertion about ourselves. There is in nature an overriding sanity and often in humankind an undermining insanity. We, among all animals, are most frequently irrational, distortional, delusional, and worried. Yet, I also wonder, is our pathological ability to generate false beliefs...also the very root of human creativity?

Human beings innate complexities resist reduction into simple sentences and neat paragraphs. The stories that come nearest to expressing the ambivalent nature of people are textured and occasionally inconsistent and express waves of inner uncertainty. A simile and a metaphor are not literally true. A figure of speech, symbols, and allegories are mere expressions that when interlinked with other text assist explain facts, ideas, and emotions. Useful facts are elusive; we must look for them, and then express them using whatever mechanism proves most authoritative. We can never directly describe emotions; we resort to metaphors to describe emotions and other illusive thoughts. Ideas by virtue of their untested nature are often untrue or at best rough approximations of truth. Lyrical writing is equivocal; it is never exactly true or precisely false. Lyrical language attempts to express and connect sentiments through extrapolation and misdirection. The writer’s task is to melt away durable facts, breakdown the symbolic depictions of solid reality, and discover the liquidity of a passionate inner life that provides the hot breath to our steamy humanness.

The Positive Paradigm is: . . . a new, inclusive reality map, one people worldwide can easily comprehend and agree upon. It is equally compatible with scriptures and science, bridging the gap between them. It fulfills Einstein's intuited search for the Unified Field Theory, picturing how all parts of creation are related, interwoven and interdependent. Working with the Positive Paradigm empowers the "substantially new manner of thinking," which, Einstein said, is necessary "if mankind is to survive." For thousands of years, this genesis formula, the very heart of the creative process, was hidden as the secret treasure of initiates. Its knowledge was transmitted exclusively to qualified students in the inner circles of monastic schools. When Einstein intuited the theory of relativity and made it available to the general public, its long-foreseen abuse materialized. To Einstein's horror, it was misused to explode atomic bombs. This context justifies making the positive application of Einstein's inspired vision equally public now. For in its traditional context, this three-part formula is an essential piece of the knowledge puzzle. It has the powerful potential to offset earlier abuse with opposite and equally unifying results. A timely shift to the Positive Paradigm could tip the scales of history in favor of human survival. p. 11.

Nonfiction at its best is like fashioning a cabinet. It can be elegant and very beautiful but it can never be sculpture. Captive to facts—or predetermined forms—it cannot fly. Excepting those masters who transcend their craft—great medieval and Renaissance artisans, for example, or nameless artisans of traditional cultures as far back as the caves who were also spontaneous unselfconscious artists. As in fiction, the nonfiction writer is telling a story, and when that story is well-made, the placement of details and events is never random. The parts are not strung out in a line but come around full circle, like a necklace, to set off the others. They resonate, rekindle one another, stirring the reader with a cumulative effect. A good essay or article can and should have all the attributes of a good short story, including structure and design, pacing and effective placement of its parts—almost all the attributes of fiction except the creative imagination, which can never be permitted to enliven fact. The writer of nonfiction is stuck with objective reality, or should be; how his facts are arranged and presented is where his craft appears, and it can be dazzling when the writer is a good one. The best nonfiction has many, many virtues, among which simple truthfulness is perhaps foremost, yet its fidelity to the known facts is its fatal constraint.

Within that single fifteen-month period—perhaps the most creative in American literary history—Grant would not only write his Personal Memoirs, Twain would reach the peak of his career with the publication of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Those two books, perhaps the finest work of American nonfiction ever written and the greatest of all American novels, defined their legacy.

I know, but I don’t know because I know.

Unfortunately no one knows anything and everyone has to know something to live anything which makes all people irrational and illogical more or less if they are not able to doubt everything. Evil minds take advantage of it to deceive even when it seems impossible there is deceit. They turn anyone against anyone but themselves and in the end they are the only ones favored. Immorality should not reproduce.

Quantum computers are the future. And quantum reality should be the future. If truth is impossible to be found with hyper technology because there will always be anti hyper technology to cancel it out and deceive, all sides of the story. Let the billion humans decide for themselves who to believe.

I have been challenged, as a supervisor, to adjust my thinking about needing to be “all-knowing” to a position of “not knowing” and greater curiosity. Although I don’t see myself as a particularly intuitive or creative person, guidance while a supervisee has enabled me, as a supervisor, to implement interactive, creative, and sometimes evocative methods in supervision. The use of Satir’s sculpting and coping stances and other Gestalt techniques in group supervision has been very illustrative.

But then to make a home at the expense of others, to concoct a racist state, by God, for that’s exactly what Israel is, seems stranger than ever.

While our span of allotted time simply isn’t enough to devote ourselves to more than a handful of specific terrains in the measured and meticulous manner made possible by a long tenure, we can cultivate an openness that deepens our experience of wherever we are, for however brief a period, by fostering in each moment a constant and attentive awareness to what is there in the slanting light, within reach of our fingers, and near enough to taste. To be at home in the world is to let ourselves be drawn into it.

I feel an affinity with the limestone…the place has absorbed me into its pattern. I’m encircled by an expanse of dissolving land, an entrancing work of water worn away over ineffable ages beneath the same passing sun. And over the months, I’ve understood this landscape’s capacity to alter my perception. It has opened me to the unfathomable beauty of distance and deep time, but also proximity; the things revealed when we draw near.

The day suddenly stilled while I watched, held in place by the mesmeric sunlight; orchids in purple splashes across the pale slopes; the insistent insect drone; the scent of ancient junipers unfolding on the air. Eternity can be anytime, any day or night, seen in the closing of a nightjar bird’s eyes. While something as small as a worm’s home can house the infinite.

If I could give you any gift in the world, it would be the honey haze of a slow afternoon. I would cup the whole thing in my palms, if I could, and pour it into yours. And you could be warm, and content, and marvel at the way the moments dance by, infinite.

And for three rainy, afternoon hours, we lay skin to skin, waking every so often to get closer after drifting apart in slumber, always finding each other once more, lacing fingers, tracing constellations of freckle and scar.

I have been increasingly drawn to what is simple and close to hand, as well as farther afield. I’ve learned that if I’m looking carefully and openly, with all my attention focused on that moment, on the small things that might surface in a given space, that I don’t have to go very far.

At the heart of this book is a belief best articulated by the artist Alan Gussow: “The catalyst that converts any physical location- any environment- into a place, is the process of experiencing deeply. A place is a piece of a whole environment that has been claimed by feelings. Viewed simply as a life-support system, the earth is an environment. Viewed as a resource that sustains our humanity, the earth is a collection of places.

We are continually capable of deepening our acquaintance with an environment, of becoming intimate with more than one place, of being at home where we find ourselves. In an age when the ecological integrity of our planet is threatened on so many levels, anything that strengthens those connections, or makes meaningful our daily arrangement with the world around us, is a form of resistance, a kind of love forged with home that has the potential to be fiercely protective

Certain places follow us, like shadows. At times they lengthen and stretch implausibly tall until they tower over our lives, or slant decisively away, as if trying to flee. Occasionally they appear not to be there at all- so exact is the overlay of self and place, so precise the meridian sun. Whether seen or not they are undoubtedly close, tethered by subtle threads spooling us forever back. Either in memory or actuality, even dreams, to landscapes that articulate something of our selves.

Home is an idea, a complicated human construct often built over unstable foundations. It’s an idea informed by intricate cultural traditions, frequently contingent on coincidence and unforeseen circumstances…The instinct to home is widespread all the same, even when the response is to keep moving, to never stay in one place. While being at home suggests a settling-down, a physical presence in a given location, it also concerns being at home, settled and at ease with one’s ways and surroundings, even if that entails being continually on the move. The varieties of home are many, as profoundly unique as the beings that seek and create them. Its forms are a testament to diversity.

Some days the other shore seems far away. It rises in the blue distance like a mirage until it eventually untangles from the haze, only there if you look long enough, staring across the lake as though seeking land in an empty sea. But other days don’t ask patience of you, the kind of stillness to see things through. They open willingly, fortuitously, revealing unforeseen moments nested within.

As I followed the shoreline tracks of the bears, I became aware of a different way of thinking. Walking in the steps of the bears brought me closer to their world. Something of my own solidity was suspended and I opened, however imperfectly, to another way of being.

It reached me as an afterglow. We were walking on a cliff edge path when a faint light glimmered at the corner of my eye. I stopped and looked down at the sea for a while, reluctantly accepting that it must have been the sparkling roll of a wave that I’d seen, a crest of bright water. I’d taken a few more steps along the path when I saw it again, fleetingly, like a vague memory dredged from the depths…I was still holding my breath when the silver arch of a dolphin broke the surface and caught the sun on its flukes. About a dozen bottle-nosed dolphins made up the pod. I later realized how time had dissolved while we watched the dolphins. Past and future, and all the weight they carry, had folded into one clear, immeasurable moment. I was aware of feeling an ineffable joy, and lightness of being.

The afternoon circled toward dusk, its last light suspended in an amber glow. I walked out over the tough grasses and flinty stone of the steppe, needing a few moments to be alone. I wished to breathe deeply in that vast landscape awash in light and mystery. These days and places are affirmations; they approach the numinous. The beckoning steppe, and the creatures it harbored, was revealed as radiantly and assiduously as moon passing out of eclipse. It was as if the spirit of the place had become visible, had for a brief creak of time taken material form. I stood and watched how the light fell, flaring the flatlands in a copper-edged glow, sending silver sparks skimming across the endless sea.

Some days outlive others. They are lit differently in memory- as resplendently as the squacco heron at the edge of the pool or the dolphins glimmering at sea- and they are brushed with an intensity that seems to suspend the customary passage of time. I have come to see them as wrapped like a chrysalis in light; days that have left me feeling closer to the world, connected in some intangible way to its rhythms. Watching the dolphins had reminded me to be more generous in my seeing, to be aware of small things, the rustles and faint shadows that accompany possibility, the murmurs at every turn.

The stones sing as the sun begins to fall. There is a quality to the karst country light that is mesmeric, spilling over the grasslands, bathing the ridges and rolling hills in a deep and reflection radiance. It is as though it were a relic luminescence, a memory of when this plateau was still an ocean; that in the compacted shells of the marine creatures that have surfaced into stone there remains a trace of what was pelagic about them, an unalloyed and ethereal echo of sunlight striking sea.

I descend in a dream-which isn’t ideal when you’re meant to be paying close attention- but sometimes the land and the seasons, the weather and the light, can do that, burrowing down toward a still, reflective point, a heartwood more essential than a tree’s. Letting the wild world in until we’re tangled up together

Being born in Mumbai, I inherited the syntax of its distinct vocabulary. The undulant range of people as vibrant as the thrum of the Arabian Sea, smells of mogra, gulab, and champa from Dadar market, and songs of fisherman as Marine Drive gleams with the first light of dawning.

When I was a young girl, my parents often visited a temple from where the Arabian Sea was visible. I accompanied them only to look forward to the few moments where sea mist and a widening orb of space juxtaposed.

The city where I was first acquainted with divinity—where the refract of sky between its open-mouthed invitation had been slowly turning into a paradox of ecological dwindle.

When memory is a veil of exposure through which the fullness of tides is visible, I can still sometimes smell the radiance of flowers. I argued with friends that Mumbai does have seasons—if one bothers to watch closely. Now I trace the months on a calendar like a distant call, the sound of a train whistle or fog that engulfs before the onset of rain to participate in a collective mourning.

When memory is a veil of exposure through which the fullness of tides is visible, I can still sometimes smell the radiance of flowers. I have argued with friends that Mumbai does have seasons—if one bothers to watch closely. Now I trace the months on a calendar like a distant call, the sound of a train whistle or fog that engulfs before the onset of rain to participate in a collective mourning.

One of the main points of writing fiction, for me, has been to reach those who don’t read nonfiction and so aren’t availing themselves of the opportunity to learn the concepts of spiritual development. I sometimes think, with a little amusement, that writing fiction is a long, drawn-out, convoluted way of writing nonfiction. It takes much longer, more scene setting and conversations, and more jollying along to get to the same point, but the point is the point. 

It is instinctive and based on observations of real events and intuition and above all with clear mind. It has either happened or it is probable and possible to happen but cannot be proven. At least nowadays, but ways to be proven may be discovered in the future.

Her writing is beautiful yet shocking, has depths, layers, and twists for advanced thinkers, but is also easy to read and understand for average readers. ... powerful, dark, expect occasional foul language.

Like circles of artists today, gnostics considered original creative invention to be the mark of anyone who becomes spiritually alive. Each one, like students of a painter or writer, expected to express his own perceptions by revising and transforming what he was taught.

When I write any of the stories like the ones in this book, whatever you call them — microfiction or flash or gonzo fiction or whatever — the more of these I do, the more I realize I’m writing the same five or six stories over and over again. I think ten years ago, when I started thinking about the possibility of stealing Hunter Thompson’s gonzo journalism shtick and using it for fiction, it made total sense. Instead of writing autobiographical fiction or creative nonfiction and lamenting that I couldn’t write “weird” stuff, I’d use a first-person participatory story, and wrap it around a core piece of some observational opinion piece. Instead of writing about how Richard Nixon was a weirdo or publishing excruciating reviews of old Dokken records, I’d write a story about how I used to hang out with Richard Nixon and listen to Dokken records with him. And that worked, until it didn’t.

Catherine Ryan Hyde is the author of 20 published and forthcoming books. Her newer novels include When I Found You, Second Hand Heart, Don’t Let Me Go, and When You Were Older. New Kindle editions of her earlier titles Funerals for Horses, Earthquake Weather and Other Stories, Electric God, and Walter’s Purple Heart are now available. Her newest ebook title is The Long Steep Path: Everyday Inspiration from the Author of PAY IT FORWARD, her first book-length creative nonfiction. Forthcoming frontlist titles are Walk Me Home and Where We Belong.

Perfectionism is the enemy of creativity.

Getting married and trying to conform to societies standards did not work. No one can cut a part of who they are out completely and expect to be successful. It is when I found my creative voice refusing to be silenced that things started moving forward again.

Writers’ never-ending quest involves investigating genuineness while carving out narrative nonfiction. They must strive to reach great truths by recounting untold lies with acute enthusiasm. Culmination of a sprawling personal saga is an attempt to flesh out from the ichors of a person’s reptilian instincts and mammalian brain patterns the epicene embodiment of the originator’s dream works intermingled with their actual remembered sensory observations. One unleashes their cache of blood-tinged memories along with an X-ray beam of reminiscent enlightenment to forge a flowing stream of self-consciousness dedicated to the task of hunting out a new way of perceiving, thinking, and communicating.

At times we need to turn away from a place when it no longer suits or sustains us, when our ability to adapt to its vagaries has run its course.

How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success? Do you have a “favorite failure” of yours? Many, many moons ago, I used to be a corporate lawyer. I was an ambivalent corporate lawyer at best, and anyone could have told you that I was in the wrong profession, but still: I’d dedicated tons of time (three years of law school, one year of clerking for a federal judge, and six and a half years at a Wall Street firm, to be exact) and had lots of deep and treasured relationships with fellow attorneys. But the day came, when I was well along on partnership track, that the senior partner in my firm came to my office and told me that I wouldn’t be put up for partner on schedule. To this day, I don’t know whether he meant that I would never be put up for partner or just delayed for a good long while. All I know is that I embarrassingly burst into tears right in front of him—and then asked for a leave of absence. I left work that very afternoon and bicycled round and round Central Park in NYC, having no idea what to do next. I thought I’d travel. I thought I’d stare at the walls for a while. Instead—and it all happened so suddenly and cinematically that it might defy belief—I remembered that actually I had always wanted to be a writer. So I started writing that very evening. The next day I signed up for a class at NYU in creative nonfiction writing. And the next week, I attended the first session of class and knew that I was finally home. I had no expectation of ever making a living through writing, but it was crystal clear to me that from then on, writing would be my center, and that I would look for freelance work that would give me lots of free time to pursue it. If I had “succeeded” at making partner, right on schedule, I might still be miserably negotiating corporate transactions 16 hours a day. It’s not that I’d never thought about what else I might like to do other than law, but until I had the time and space to think about life outside the hermetic culture of a law practice, I couldn’t figure out what I really wanted to do.

Objective motives and subjective compulsions that incite a person to write is the decisive element in defining the writer’s unique voice. Anyone who does not understand oneself or is unwilling to ferret out their own buried, true identity and publicly unmask the hidden stranger that resides within us all will never be a person who can bridge a connection with other people who share similar thoughts, feelings, wants, and needs. Lacking critical discernment, this want-a-be writer will remain a cosseted imposter, playing a coldhearted game of charades. If a person is unwilling to peel back the craggy mask that we conceal ourselves behind and explore the seeds of inner awareness wrapped inside the enigma of doubt engulfing all people, one can still aim to be a writer of nonfiction or technical journals. Creative writing, in sharp contrast, is for the intrepid cliff dwellers, the recluses willing to mine the soft belly of their internal psychosis.

Write to make a difference. Write because you have something to say to us all. In dramatic writing, fiction, and nonfiction, this means knowing exactly what your work is about and being able to tell the publisher in ten words or less. The writing must demonstrate its premise in a convincing, persuasive way. Keep your audience in mind, their needs and their desires. Journalists do this by focusing on the 5 W’s (Who, What, When, Where, Why) because they know what their readers look for. Convey emotion, break out of your academic inhibitions and psychological barriers. William Faulkner hints at this when he says, “Writing is a craft consisting of pen, paper, and whiskey.” The purpose of the whiskey is to rid the author of inhibitions.

curriculum committee were not entirely wrong. Death is not a philosophical issue; it is a literary one. And yet, if philosophy

Stories, like people and butterflies and songbirds’ eggs and human hearts and dreams, are also fragile things, made up of nothing stronger or more lasting than twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks. Or they are words on the air, composed of sounds and ideas—abstract, invisible, gone once they’ve been spoken—and what could be more frail than that? But some stories, small, simple ones about setting out on adventures or people doing wonders, talks of miracles and monsters, have outlasted all the people who told them, and some of them have outlasted the lands in which they were created. —Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders

This is new territory; a bridge between the conservative and conventional lit mag tradition and those colourful speculation-driven pamphlets that you find in stacks by the coffee-shop door, full of zombies and vampires and crashing space ships. This is a serious journal with a wide aesthetic.

you are holding in your hands is a work of creative nonfiction. It is written like a thriller, but it’s factual.

Start believing in conspiracies, because those who have the power conspire, and they keep their power by having people not believing in conspiracies

Wrong assumptions occur from limited knowledge. A person should have a complete view before shaping an opinion about someone or something…

High profile lawyers shoot with invisible crime visualizer weapons the innocent victims of their guilty clients they protect. They know how inner systems work and… beforehand what'll happen. In such a way they promote… false accusations.

They code the human body remotely with electricity… To control fates… Cause sensations & thoughts otherwise non-existent… To trick the wrongfully considered as "valid" machines of truth that paradoxically no one knows about…

They shock victims… permanently installing electricity inside the body… They drain the thoughts from the eyes… They send radio waves to the ears… Silent criminals appearing as good & innocent… Secretly they abuse & frame.

The machines of truth… judges have access to are not valid. Only hold thoughts …caused themselves with radio waves & electricity …separate phrases/words/letters …from external sources… Biased filter from ill-willed people.

Pinocchio, a puppet that was control by a human, is not a random story just to say something to entertain the crowds. Pinocchio contains hidden meanings and messages. There are ways they can connect to your body and make it move.

Everyone is free to say whatever they want. Now believe the lies. The only fact reliable is that everyone is free to say whatever they want. Human beings are created in a way that the brain thinks silently.

People try to prevail their own truth. And they use evil means. They torture, they threaten. What they impose as truth keeps them in power, but it is fascistic. When the truth is a strategy or a pattern is not genuine truth.

Unless humanity invents a device that can expose all the information in the world, there can be no justice, because no human can be a reliable source. Every human can be manipulated trough money, deceit, threats.

Justice is a criminal circuit that rapes innocents with electricity framing them as guilty… Never take part in legal procedures! You do not need laws to be ethical! Only criminals need laws! To condemn innocents & break them invisibly!

Who gets to tell stories? Let me answer this quickly: for the most part—and the exceptions are relatively recent—the writers who are allowed to talk are those who prop up the dominant culture, who reflect it with a gilded mirror.

They use virtual reality of every day devices and things through hacking them and invisibly connecting them to your body and brain to create fake interactions between you and unknown people for deceit purposes.

They store your memories as proof of life lived, truth. But they erase true memories that render them guilty and plant false memories that render you guilty. An impossible proof that seems valid can never be valid this way.

It's always seemed odd to me that nonfiction is defined, not by what it is, but by what it is not. It is not fiction. But then again, it is also not poetry, or technical writing or libretto. It's like defining classical music as nonjazz.

Writing Creative or Narrative Non-Fiction requires the writer to clearly separate fact from fiction or otherwise lose faith in your reader.

…Impossible to find truth. Not because nothing can be found… There are advanced systems of deceit & self-deceit… Any impossible solution is inadequate. Call it time travel, teleportation, mind-body reading, AI detection.

Once I believed in reality. Now I don't know what to believe anymore. I even doubt the environment thing. Do they want to spread electricity to be able to sabotage & kill silently anyone posing "threat" to their "good" fame?

Justice through injustice is not genuine justice. It's injustice perpetuated.

They manipulate weather and send a lightning to a specific area or they shock electrically the target person. They enter the human body through electricity and they either cause illness or death or read the thoughts of the mind or alter the behavior.

Reality is a cover up method of pretending and in the backstage repeating all the faults of human history: torture, murders, inequality, injustice, unfairness. They make you hail them, condemn their opponents and then they kill you.

Professionals with in depth knowledge should be treated as highly suspects of crimes creating false realities. Doctors for "natural" deaths and false diagnoses. Lawyers and judges for deceit. Detectives for illegal and abusive means.

The justice system is corrupted and not reliable. It is exploited for hate, revenge with lies, deceit. It is method, pattern from the knowledgeable guilty against the unprotected innocents. Do not consider any claim or conviction as valid.

They remotely stimulate the private parts to make you look pervert. They talk in the head to make you seem mentally ill. They register thoughts as your own but they are from a program you watch on tv.

The key to creativity is being able to switch between a wide-open, playful mind and a narrow analytical frame.

I have always been suspicious of those who give advice without admitting their own misdeeds and missteps. To me, the most authentic insight comes from those who acknowledge their own shortcomings and readily admit they are still working on improving themselves each and every day.

So we position ourselves as "sons of the movement," to cite the title of Bobby Noble's 2006 book on the relation fo trans men to feminist and queer cultural landscapes. We interpellate ourselves as the queer kin of feminist foremothers. Or we shift our attention toward the examination and critique of violently toxic forms of masculinity, instead, as Thomas Page McBee has done in his creative nonfiction, including the books Man Alive and Amateur. Or we articulate and amplify a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between power, privilege, and masculinity, utilizing conceptual tools borrowed from intersectional feminisms to differentiate ourselves from cis men and to clarify the many stratifications of race, class, (dis)ability, and sexuality that differentiate transmasculinities from one another.

I never change. I just become more myself. ~Joyce Carol Oates

The truth is life should know and believe something to move forward. But isn't it dangerous to know and believe lies?

First there is fantasy. And then there is reality. And then again fantasy. And then again reality.

Lots of people want to be the noun without doing the verb.

Art and the artist both suffer most when the artist gets too heavy, too focused on the results.

Over the years I have written creative non-fiction related to the curricula I produced, first as an elementary school art instructor, then for nearly two decades as a museum education curator. While any curriculum I wrote was based on facts as well as best and accepted practices, to add imaginative interest and encourage my students’ engagement I put those facts in the context of stories, invented situations that brought to life the remote or unfamiliar

Who am I, and why? This is the question that writers of personal nonfiction must ask of themselves. Like other forms of art, the writing of memoirs and personal essays should be a journey of discovery. If we believe that we know the answer to the question before we sit down to write, we will learn nothing new about ourselves and, worse, our readers will be denied the opportunity to learn something new about themselves. Readers of your nonfiction should come away knowing more about themselves than they do about you.

Writing is a solitary act—but it's only the first act. What comes next is what really matters. However, personally, I have never been all that comfortable with the second act. I'm a solitary person by nature and not much of a joiner. Yet still I've come to see the nonfiction writer's solitary act as important to the greater cause—really the only cause—of decreasing cruelty and increasing sympathy. In that service, nonfiction writers can perform two fundamental tasks that are unavailable to the writers of fiction. Like Florence Reece, we can bear witness and we can call for change—for an end to injustices. It is precisely on this subject of bearing witness that I find John D'Agata's recent writing about the genre of nonfiction so malicious and inept. D'Agata argues that nonfiction must serve the greater good of art, and therefore reality can be altered in the name of art. But to elevate reality to the level of art is one of the fundamental tasks of the nonfiction writer, and to say it cannot be done honestly, as D'Agata claims, displays an astonishing lack of imagination as well as an equally unflattering amount of arrogance and pedantry. But let's put aside the either-or nature of this line of thinking. The real problem here is that such an attitude robs nonfiction of it greatest strength and virtue—its ability to bear witness and the veracity that comes from that act. To admit that one only has a passing interest in representing reality is to forfeit one's moral authority to call that reality into question. That is to say, I have no right to call mountaintop removal an injustice—one in need of a new reality—if I cannot be trusted to depict the travesty of strip mining as it now exists. To play D'Agata's game is to lose the reader's trust, and without that, it seems to me that the nonfiction writer has very little left. Writers of that persuasion can align themselves with Picasso's famous sentiment that art is the lie that tells the truth, but I have no truck with such pretentiousness. The work of the nonfiction writers I most admire is telling a truth that exposes a lie.

Another question to ask as you evaluate the story is, does it have a hook? In its simplest form, the hook is what got you interested in the subject in the first place. It’s that bit of information that reveals the essence of the story and its characters, encapsulating the drama that’s about to unfold. Sound and Fury, for example, is the story of a little girl who wants a cochlear implant. The hook is not that she wants this operation, nor that the implant is a major feat of medical technology. The hook is that the little girl’s parents, contrary to what many in the audience might expect, aren’t sure they want her to have the operation. It’s the part of the story that makes people want to know more. Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple, does not hook audiences with the horror of a mass suicide/murder that took place in 1978, even though the film opens with text on screen announcing the event. Instead, the film’s hook is that it promises viewers an insider’s look at what it means to join a community, only to be drawn inexorably into a terrifying, downward spiral. As discussed especially in Chapter 7, the hook is often the last piece of the film to come together, as the themes, characters, and story come more clearly into focus and are distilled into the promise you make to the viewers: This is what this movie is; this is why it’s worth your time; this is why this story needs to be told and demands your attention.

Airplanes were a novel sight on the island, and each time one flew low, the Sansegoti cowered and trembled. The whir of Spitfires circled above their heads like a swarm of killer bees. The Germans shot at them and the planes flew away, but they always came back—until they bombed the cannery.

subject

The essay becomes an exercise in the meaning and value of watching a writer conquer their own sense of threat to deliver themself of their wisdom.

In realtà, ogni momento della nostra vita è creazione; per un essere cosciente, "esistere" significa cambiare; cambiare nel maturarsi; e maturarsi nel creare se stesso all'infinito.

Writer David Foster Wallace said that he thought good nonfiction was a chance to “watch somebody reasonably bright but also reasonably average pay far closer attention and think at far more length about all sorts of different stuff than most of us have a chance to in our daily lives.

LONGER NONFICTION: RECOMMENDED READING Allison, Dorothy. Two or Three Things I Know for Sure. New York: Dutton, 1995. Bradbury, Ray. Dandelion Wine. Thorndike, ME: G.K. Hall, 1999. Burroughs, Augusten. Dry. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2003. Coetzee, J.M. Boyhood: Scenes From Provincial Life. New York: Viking, 1997. Eighner, Lars. Travels With Lizbeth. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993. Hamper, Ben. Rivethead: Tales From the Assembly Line. New York: Warner Books, 1991. Knipfel, Jim. Quitting the Nairobi Trio. New York: J.P. Tarcher/Putnam, 2000. Lewis, Mindy. Life Inside: A Memoir. New York: Atria Books, 2002. Millett, Kate. The Loony-Bin Trip. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000. Rose, Phyllis. The Year of Reading Proust: A Memoir in Real Time. New York: Scribner, 1997.

The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do

If the context is not known, it makes people mistaken something for something else completely different.

[...] For those who think (create), reality has no mysteries. The underlying notion of reality is a creative process attributable to the Absolute, going to transform the immutability characteristic of identity into a "dynamic" concept". For Bergson, "existence is the victory over nothing", while the non-being, according to logic, is not, by its very definition. Perhaps, the priority of humankind shall be understanding thoroughly the idea of nothing, in order to properly define the borders and limits of being.

the truth of art can be very different from the truth

She liked solitude and the thoughts of her own interesting and creative mind. She liked to be comfortable. She liked hotel rooms, thick towels, cashmere sweaters, silk dresses, oxfords, brunch, fine stationery, overpriced conditioner, bouquets of gerbera, hats, postage stamps, art monographs, maranta plants, PBS documentaries, challah, soy candles, and yoga. She liked receiving a canvas tote bag when she gave to a charitable cause. She was an avid reader (of fiction and nonfiction), but she never read the newspaper, other than the arts sections, and she felt guilty about this. Dov often said she was bourgeois. He meant it as an insult, but she knew that she probably was.

There are mechanisms that create false realities. Hacking machines causes fatal "accidents". Hacking human bodies causes behaviors that are viewed as mental illness. To blame people-targets with the real perpetrator invisible.

That summer, I dipped my toe into the gorgeous stream of Annie Dillard’s nonfiction. Her loving attention to the natural world showed me that I was not alone in the woods of Vermont—on my daily walks, the fallen logs, the fungi, the ferns became friends.

Be the Creatrix you were born to be ♡L

Yes,” she said, “I think a book should offer a direction. The world needs courage and love. Anybody can find fault. That doesn’t take much gumption. A little gall maybe, but not much gumption. Llewellyn’s

Don’s writing is inspired by his wide-ranging life experience. Growing up on the US west coast, he attends a multi-racial high school in Seattle. Later he joins the US Peace Corps, working with farmers in rural Colombia. Returning to the US in the late Sixties, he joins student protest movements against the war in Vietnam. Finishing his undergraduate degree, he works on cattle ranches in eastern Washington. Persisting in his opposition to Vietnam war and the draft, Gayton and his young family immigrate to Canada, to begin a new life in Saskatchewan. After finishing a Master's degree, Don works with small farmers on the Indian Reserves of central Saskatchewan. In 1990 Don and his family move to Nelson, BC, where he works as a range and grassland manager for the BC Forest Service. During this time he deepens his lifelong fascination with grasslands, and acquires a new interest in fire ecology. After retiring from the Forest Service, Don starts a new career as an independent consulting ecologist, based in Summerland, BC. Gayton maintains a lifelong interest in books and writing. His first book was published in 1990, and he continues an active writing career today. His work reflects his deep association to place, ecology and cultures other than his own. Don’s literary activity includes creative non-fiction and fiction, as well as scientific and technical writing. Gayton is a frequent speaker at local university, college and community events.

The truth has infinite paths. The lies only one.

You are losing it." A grave voice reaches my ear from my left shoulder. I pull down the visor and open the mirror. My shoulder critic sits there, his legs drooping over my collarbone, his face a mask of tears. "I am not," I retort. "She was here, clear as day! Well, maybe not 'clear as day' but real enough." My shoulder critic has been with me for as long as I can remember, born perhaps from only-child loneliness, or simply a part of me, like an arm or leg. He appears unbidden and then disappears again for long stretches of time, but when he is around, he is always dressed to express rather than impress.

All humans are criminals. They all deceive to prevent one from sth better. Make a wish of mass destructions.

She liked solitude and the thoughts of her own interesting and creative mind. She liked to be comfortable. She liked hotel rooms, thick towels, cashmere sweaters, silk dresses, oxfords, brunch, fine stationery, overpriced conditioner, bouquets of gerbera, hats, postage stamps, art monographs, maranta plants, PBS documentaries, challah, soy candles, and yoga. She liked receiving a canvas tote bag when she gave to a charitable cause. She was an avid reader (of fiction and nonfiction), but she never read the newspaper, other than the arts sections, and she felt guilty about this.