Malcolm R. Campbell's Blog, page 249

Hero Path: damn the facts, full speed ahead

"Our Fortunes and Lives seem Chaotic when they are looked at as facts. There is order and meaning only in the great truths believed by everybody in that older wiser time of the world when things were less well known and better understood." -- Roderick MacLeish

Facts are those aspects of the overall illusion we have chosen to believe in and fold as rock-solid truths in the ever-shifting fog of reality.

We've been brainwashed to think this way.

Most of us--when we were young and not yet changed by...

Are we doing magic when we use words?

"Lifting a rush, a burin, a pen, or a stylus is like releasing a bite or lifting a claw." -- Gary Snyder

When you send an e-mail that says, "I love you," do you think the recipient shrugs it off as just so much talk, or does she feel a tingle up and down her spine?

Your words, that tingle, cause and effect?

On a dark and stormy night, you're reading a gruesome novel about a person all alone of a dark and stormy night who seems completely unaware of the fact that zombies are walking out of a near...

The Soul of the Night

I have old favorites on my book shelves that I turn to often, some for facts, others for inspiration. I'll bet you do, too. Some of these will be appearing on my web site's book review page along with my current reviews of self-published and small press books. The first old favorite is Chet Raymo's "The Soul of the Night."

To know is only half, as the naturalist John Burroughs said; to love is the other half. The pages that follow are an example of knowing and loving, a personal pilgrimage...

Yes, 'The Sun Singer' is on Cafe Press

This morning while the rooster on top of the house was announcing the dawn, a Greyline Tour bus arrived from Wall, South Dakota (home of that GIANT DRUG STORE) and people got out and started taking stuff out of my yard.

"Who are you people?"

"We're looking for souvenirs."

I gave them a SUN SINGER CLOCK and a TOTE bag before telling them that Briney Spears lives just around the block and made fresh scones for breakfast this morning.

I assured them this fine merchandise (Sun Singer logo wear, not t...

Tate's Hell

"Who was Tate, you wonder? In Sumatra they still tell his story: how he left the frontier village at dusk a century ago with his two hunting dogs and his puppy Spark, to kill a panther that had been raiding Sumatra livestock. He carried a Long Tom shotgun and a Barlow knife, and he thought he knew where the darkening waters ran." -- Gloria Jahoda, "The Other Florida" (1967)

Tate's Hell State Forest, between in the Apalachicola and Ochlockonee rivers in the Florida Panhandle stood at the farthe...

Writer raised by alligators, but so what?

If you're a writer on a blog tour, chances are you'll be asked for the day and time you decided to become a writer.

I decided to become a writer on a wet August afternoon when Papa Gator and I were swept across a sea of grass in our Everglades home into a hardwood hammock during a tropical storm. Papa Gator said he hoped I was taking notes so we could properly relate this experience to Mama Gator. My story "Gators and Flamingos in the Tree Tops" was a hit in the Chekika region of the national ...

'O wau ka moana

When the Goddess speaks to protagonist David Ward in my new novel "Garden of Heaven" in the warm waters at Kailua, she says " 'O wau ka moana" (I am the ocean.) and she says "E hele mai 'oe i o'u nei. E hele mai 'oe i o'u nei e 'ike ai, ua ho'okahi kaua" (Come to me. Come to me and you will see that we are one.)

Sad to say, I don't speak Hawaiian. But, with the kind help of Hiapo K. Perreira, Assistant Professor, Ka Haka 'Ula 0 Ke'elikOlani College of Hawaiian Language, University of Hawai'i a...

Authors - A few quotes I like

Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his works. --Virginia Woolf (This is my favorite quote here--from one of my favorite authors.)

If enough people think of a thing and work hard enough at it, I guess it's pretty nearly bound to happen, wind and weather permitting. - Laura Ingalls Wilder (Those of us who saw the TV program "Little House on the Prairie can't help but think of her as "Half Pint.")

I am as bad as the worst, ...

Few of the dad stereotypes fit my father

My father was a college professor. Considering the "town and gown" split in most cities with universities, this put my father into the "one of them" category.

To most people, that meant he didn't have a regular job like selling insurance or driving a backhoe.

He didn't use power tools or care about them.

He didn't go out drinking with his buddies or spend football weekends at tailgate parties.

While his sense of humor made everyone laugh and while he was an exceptionally popular teacher, he was ...

Hero's Journey: The Shadow Knows

"Everything about ourselves that we are not conscious of is shadow." -- Daryl Sharp in "Digesting Jung - Food for the Journey."

The heroes in many a Disney movie were good-natured, powerful, almost-perfect characters who ride into troubled lives and troubled worlds on white horses and save the day. While it's an appealing image, heroes are seldom good-natured, powerful or almost perfect before their journeys begin.

If they were, they would have no need for journeys intended to transform them, f...