Nine months since publication, and, like most any novelist who gets a book out, I’m on to something else, to earning money and not by writing novels. You won’t likely be the “one in a thousand”: we all know this.
For me, the four years of drafts, hand-to-mouth living and then book-promoting, all while trying to stay true to the page, has given way to new work, in technology. I’m again on that river where business and science provides the current. The journey has a logic but it leaves out (or buries, perhaps) a lot of human experience.
All of us who know this about life in the world realize that there is a weakening of perspective, just when it is most needed. In my case, this week I’m reading about synthetic biology-a topic that sounds scary and yet promises (in a context of climate change and biofuels) hope.
What do I think about the growing human power to alter nature? Am I willing to join in? What is my spiritual anchor, from which I might form a moral point of view?
Meanwhile, I age, while people I love are older still. A hike I took yesterday I’ll find too hard in ten years. All my gathered musings stay with me… needing only memory triggers to emerge. What I affirm (adding up what I’ve said and implied) is that I, a writer with a novel out, again feel the spiritual and moral hunger and doubt that led me, upon spending July 2001 at the Omega Institute, to begin The Seeker Academy.
The book, to date, has sixteen Amazon reviewers and three editorial reviews. Some are brief, a hundred or so words; others are six or seven times longer. I will leave it to readers to form their own views of the reviews and the reviewers, but I’ll assert that there is now a body of reviews that finds the novel compelling, important and accomplished.
Important also or first, I’ll add, because the subject is important.
And yet, the leaders of the secular spiritual (or holistic, mind-body-spirit, integral or new age) movement refuse to review the novel. This even as twenty independent reviews affirm it as a respectful, gripping story about a subcultural they are devoted to. I sent copies to over sixty leading editors and retreat leaders and teachers; of these, only one has read the book and given comments.
Her name is Nancy Slonim Aronie; she owns the Chilmark Writing Workshop, is a Harvard instructor and teaches every year at Omega, Esalen, Kripalu and other major retreats. This is what Aronie wrote:
“With exquisite facility of language, Gussin takes us on a very real spiritual journey: the ups, the downs, the all-arounds. I’ve been there. L.D. Gussin nails it!”
Despite this review from an insider, and the engaged comments by Amazon reviewers, movement leaders won’t review the novel. Why? I’ll approach this question in my next post. I may also publish the names of all the gatekeepers who won’t give my novel a chance.
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