Welcome to “The Blog at Bill Percy Books.” (In resort towns like ours, you find places with names like “The Seasons at Sandpoint” or “The Old Church in Hope.” Maybe I’m hoping, with that blog title, that you’ll find visiting here to be like heading off to a ski resort or a summer cabin on the lake. Who knows?)
Lake Pend Oreille Idaho on a hazy summer afternoon
By way of introduction, I’d like to share a bit about myself. In this blog, I’ll focus on writing in all its dimensions, but I’m organizing my thoughts around three key areas, which I’ve tagged as psyche, story, and spirit. More on them later. Fiction is my “home base” as a writer now, although for forty years I wrote as a psychologist, for teaching and scholarship, and a guy doesn’t leave forty years and walk away!
During those forty years practicing psychology, I developed a keen interest in brain science, especially the science of how emotional and physical trauma affects its sufferers. I keep up with developments in that field; so much of literature deals with people’s experiences of traumatic events. Not only the dramatic, big-news traumas such as war, natural disasters, rape, or auto accidents, but also the insidious cumulative traumas, like meaningless jobs and daily horror shows in the news, the small-change traumas that wear on our spirits like repetitive stress wears on our bodies. In fact, there’s an emerging field of literary theory that focuses exactly on trauma in literature. If you’re interested, here’s a good introduction to that emerging discipline. http://tinyurl.com/kxburxm.
My interests aren’t all bleak, though! I love Bach and Bobby Dylan and Arvo Pärt and Wolf Hall and James Ellroy and Neal Stephenson and good food and oaky Chardonnay (which reminds me a lot of fine writing) and A Game of Thrones. Oh, yeah: I love reading history when it shivers me into recognizing something about the present day. For instance, have you noticed that the political rhetoric leading to the French Revolution and to the American Civil War sound (and smell) a lot like the politics of 2015?
Baseball games on the radio stop me in my tracks, as does a well-played pipe organ or a beautifully designed church. Or a custom bicycle. So look for the occasional excursion into those cultural regions, especially when they link to good writing. And watch for resources and links to other blogs and sites that help writers write – and think – better; a guy can’t help but pass along the things that make him grow at what he does!
Now, what about those themes in the blog’s tag line: psyche, story, and spirit? Why did I chose them rather than, say, psychology, fiction, and spirituality? For me, these shorter words evoke a deeper and broader range of possibilities than their longer cousins.
- Psyche can be the mythical young woman turned into a goddess through her passion for self-investigation, or the word can evoke the soul, the self, the inner being, the personality, or four of the Buddhists’ six “aggregates” that make us human (perceptions, feelings, mental formations, and consciousness).
- Story, rather than fiction, widens the space for us to play with all kinds of writing, and it alerts us to a core purpose in all writing – to tell a story. More on that in another post.
- And why spirit? Try these for openers: Holy Spirit, school spirit, a spirited child, he spirited her away, to be in good spirits, team spirit, the spirit not the letter, the spirit of the times. That’s the spirit!
I hope my thoughts provoke your own, and if they do, please add yours to the conversation—or share mine with like-minded friends. I intend to post about writing — its explorations of psyché, the stories that embody it, and and the spirit of great communication, not to mention the spirit behind the spiritual dimensions of life — on a Fridays each week (as long as I can get to my laptop) and I look forward to getting to know you! I”d love to hear from you about the interests and loves that feed your writing . . . Any thoughts?
Bill
Tags: writing, fiction, psychology, psyche, story, spirit, spirituality
