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.