Appearing at LitQuake's Off the Richter Scale: Life Stories

I will be part of a memoirist panel on Saturday, October 11th in San Francisco, Off the Richter Scale: Life Stories at the LitQuake festival. MC-ed by Tamim Ansary, other authors include Eileen Cronin, Karen Lynch, and Gordon Young.

"Every life is made up of millions of stories. In this hour we hear from four memoirists who have mined stories in their lives to explore deeper themes of nostalgia, home, family, loss, acceptance, and spirituality."

Reading at InsideStoryTime

I will be reading from my book at InsideStoryTime on August 19th, 2014.

MASKS AND MASQUES at La Movida Wine Bar & Community Kitchen, 3066 24th St., San Francisco, on Tuesday August 19th, 7.30-9.30 pm, will feature Richard Kadrey (The Getaway God), Novella Carpenter (Gone Feral), Lee Foust (Poison and Antidote), Makram Abu-Shakra (Interplay), and Melissa Dodd. MCd by James Warner (All Her Father's Guns).



InsideStoryTime.com

I will also be part of a Memoirist panel at the LitQuake 2014 festival. Stay tuned for more information.

Finalist at Indie Excellence Book Awards

This has been a positive month for my book Interplay: An Artist's Approach to Spirituality. In addition to receiving Honorable Mention at two book festivals, I was a Finalist at the 2014 National Indie Excellence Book Awards in the Spiritual category.

Interplay Received Honorable Mention at Two Book Festivals

Interplay: An Artist's Approach to Spirituality received Honorable Mention at the Paris Book Festival and San Francisco Book Festival this month.

I gave the following speech at San Francisco Book Festival on May 17th, given the request to speak briefly about why I wrote the book and the journey writing it:

"Before writing Interplay, I devoted much of my free time to making music, art, and fiction. What especially interested me in my creative endeavors was developing the art of poetic obscurity and enigma craftsmanship. Over the years, I accumulated experiences that were quite intense, and the insights harvested from these experiences came with an ever-increasing desire to share them with others, which became the primary impetus behind writing this book. And taking on this project was an excursion from my usual, mystery-seeking self because the nature of the book demanded explaining things in an accurate and straightforward fashion. This was contrary to my artistic nature and I detected a growing sense of inner dissonance or rebellion. It seemed like the closer I got to articulating my deeper insights, the more this rebellious side wanted to not necessarily negate my ideas, my expressions but shroud them in mystery, as if acting as a protector of difficult truths. This...unexpected interplay, which is documented in the book, led me to develop a form of intellectual thinking that did not temper the inner dissonance but embraced it."

Images from the festival: