On the Trail of the Morning Star by Dorothea Buck Is Out!!!

I am sharing today the publication of a book that makes me happy, maybe happier than the publication of my own: Dorothea Buck’s On the Trail of the Morning Star: Psychosis as Self-Discovery. Buck was a German woman diagnosed schizophrenic and sterilized at nineteen under the Nazi hereditary health laws. Buck became an activist who fought psychiatric abuse and reductive biological psychiatry.

Buck also called on the German government to acknowledge Nazi crimes against the neuropsychiatric, both sterilization and euthanasia. And she became an artist. I own one of her sculptures, pictured.

I once heard a story about a writer I know, which my knowledge of him gave me every reason to believe: that one year, after the Pulitzer committee announced its winner, he declared that even if he won a Pulitzer, he couldn’t be happy about it because X got there first. His green-eyed relationship with X was long standing and mostly due to impersonal causes, like X’s age.

I bring this story up to say that while I’m never going to look a Pulitzer horse in the mouth, I’m far from immune to the disease that is writer envy. I can’t imagine not feeling like there’s a year-end list, wonderful review, literary award that should have come my way, rather than the way it went. It can do things to my stomach lining.

The only inoculant for me is getting out of the siloed place where I see myself as a writer surrounded by potential readers and try to see myself as a writer surrounded by writers who also deserve to be read. Some days I’m better at it than others. As editor of the Bellingham Review, I introduced authors—particularly international authors—to U.S. presses, advocated, and ultimately helped yenta several books.

My biggest joy, though, and the most personally important project has been Buck. Dorothea Buck came into my life when I read her obituary in 2019 and found a copy of her book in German. She helped me so much (a bit of this is in my introduction to the English Morning Star) that I wanted her words to be out there helping others. I got the book translated and finally placed with a press.

This brings me to the big news that the Dorothea Buck book is OUT. Out in English, with a beautiful cover photo taken on Buck’s home island of Wangerooge. It is Open Access so you can buy a physical copy of Morning Star for $24 or download it free.

Buck offered me a way to accept and appreciate my own mind, the beautiful and meaningful work of consciousness. So many need this now. And the price is so right.

I suppose I don’t have to worry about Buck’s book the way I do my own. The press does open access, which casts sales in a different light. I am soliciting reviews and such, but tend to feel that, as with me, Buck will find those who need her. But I think it’s easy to forget the power we have, even with a social media post, to amplify someone else.

More often than not, my yenta intros didn’t end up in books, but I think they at least gave the writers involved a sense of their own value. And when you do that, if that writer does get to the Pulitzer before you, you can feel secretly part of it. At least I do. Win.

Tips on Timeliness & a Research-y Request for You All

OK, it’s been fifty million years since I sent out a blog post. I’ve been sucked into a vortex of:

1) Getting the book that very appropriately has “devil” in its name, The Devil’s Castle, done and delivered. Still working on this one.

2) What I’m calling the Dorothea Buck project, recovering and presenting the work of Nazi sterilization victim and psychiatric activist Dorothea Buck. This has included finding a translator for her amazing book, On the Trail of the Morning Star: Psychosis as Self-Discovery, and placing the translation.

Then it turned into editing, footnotes, writing an introduction . . . It comes out this winter from Punctum Press.  I loved all of it. I love Buck. She’s playing a lead role in Devil’s Castle. But I think I’ve gone beyond good literary citizen to dual citizenship. Tiring travel sometimes!

3) Keeping up with all the other writing I need to do, like my Madwoman Out of the Attic column for Psychology Today.

The last of which leads me to one helpful writing tip I can think of today. And this tip has to do with media writing, opinion pieces, short-form journalism, i.e., not a long-form story such as you’d find in National Geographic. We’re talking more like the pieces that feed into Google News and similar platforms every day. On sites like the Huffington Post, the Hill, Vice, and oh so many more.

Obviously digital media varies widely: oriented toward different audiences and often specializing in different topics, like science, pop culture, politics, LGBTQ+ issues, etc.

The one thing MOST digital media has in common is timeliness. I get messages from friends and acquaintances with some version of, I have an interesting story about my experiences with x or y and I wonder if you could suggest an editor/publication. (Or occasionally, would you send it for me, which in case it isn’t screamingly obvious is a big don’t.) Sometimes I can suggest someone, but the editor or publication’s fit is often only half of what you need.

The other is timeliness. It is wonderful if you have something very specific to say about compulsive lying when, for example, a George Santos is found out. Or a story of some specific effects of abnormal heat when we’re baking through a summer like our last one. But topicality also has to do with times of the year. Not just terrible family stories before Christmas.

Every month and every day of the year has themes, if you look for them. There are some bigger themes like Pride Month and Mental Health Awareness Month. March is Women’s History Month, but within that, there’s an International Woman’s Day (March 8), Women’s Suffrage anniversaries, and so on.

This is one example of how to pitch your work as timely. Editors may not care that there’s a National Tater Tot Day (February 2). Or maybe if you have an amazing story about hiding from aliens who demanded your tater tots, they would. Who knows?

My point is that if you see yourself writing for the media—why not?—it’s a good idea to keep lists of important dates and tie-ins. Another way of achieving topicality is to look into birthdates, death dates, or other key dates in the lives of well-known people who are connected to what you’re writing about, even if the connection is conceptual. Or similar historical anniversaries.

I’ve said this here before, but it’s easy to think our particular positions in/knowledge of the world won’t be welcome. If they’re smart and interesting, you don’t have to be a “name.” Just relevant.

Finally, a request: For my book A Mind Apart I asked random people how they think. Not the what—the how. And the answers were fascinating. One person experienced cognition as an inner elevator that stopped at certain floors for particular topics, eg, family problems might be fifth floor. Another person had an inner government that actually debated. And yet another passed thoughts through differential equations.

Write me if you want to share how you think. I’m collecting answers for a book project. I’d love to know. Credit always given where wanted.

Research as Enabled Curiosity, or Monkeys on Planes

Recently I was flying across the country and my friendly seatmate told me she was a flight attendant. We chatted and then I asked her to tell me the weirdest thing she’d ever seen on her job.

            “I once delivered a dinner tray with grapes on it to a man in first class,” she said, “and a little hand reached out of his jacket and took a grape.”

It turned out the man had a monkey stowed away in his jacket, a small monkey I presume. But this is what she saw: a large hand attached to a man in first class reaching for a grape; a small hand emerging out of his chest also reaching for a grape.

 Did the man sneak through security clasping a monkey in his shirt? Did he bring it through in a carrier then tuck it away? So many questions! But the image of a little hand reaching out for the irresistible grape stays with me. And that this flight attendant thought at first it was a man harboring another, smaller, man.

 I tend to ask this what’s-the-weirdest-thing question of everyone I meet who seems game--cabbies, doctors, people who style hair. I have banks and banks of hidden-monkey type stories. Some make it into my writing; some just remind me of the fact that this strange experiment called life has more odd results than I could imagine on my own.

I do a lot of research, particularly interviewing, in my writing. In The Terrible Unlikelihood of Our Being Here I interviewed many scientists and much of what we talked about involved straightforward questions about theories of things like time. But I always try in my interviews—at the end, when I can’t mess things up—asking a curveball question. What obsesses you? What are you doing that’s exciting but maybe a little strange?

One scientist, Donald Hoffman, told me that he was trying to find a mathematical equation that would correlate in some way with the idea of God. Wow.

Researched nonfiction has become an important part of the genre, particularly the kind of personal yet fact-fueled work done by writers like Michael Pollan, Mary Roach, and Atul Gawande. When I teach research writing I teach it as cultivating and enabling curiosity before anything else. That means when you have a talkative seatmate on a plane, you try to figure out what they’ve seen and known that you haven’t. It also means being curious about those you know, like family members, and trying to draw out their stories. Maybe just cultivating the habit of believing that everyone who passes you by in this world has something interesting and unique to tell you.

The “I” of nonfiction is going to run out of steam sooner or later if it sticks too much to that pronoun. Sometimes that “I” needs to be not alpha and omega but conduit or channel.  

Looking things up is fine. I go online to find out facts many times a day. But information that’s on a website probably has been lifted from another website and that from another, etc. Sometimes you’re just tucking into a brew of common assumptions. Either way, individual human knowledge is different. It involves minds and perspectives that happen all of once in this world.

Ask five weird questions a day until you get in the habit of it. Write me and ask me a weird question, if you need some practice. Write an essay called “Five Weird Questions” with five different people and their answers. If other people do it too it can just be a thing, like writing about your thumbs. Which makes me wonder about the strangest thing you all have experienced while hitchhiking . . . I’ll stop now.