Pat Perrin's Blog
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May.14.2013
My new play, The Lullaby Tree, is now available on Kindle. It is inspired by the shortest verse in the King James Bible:
Jesus wept. —John 11:35
Here’s a bit of PR copy:
The Lullaby Tree is the first play in Wim Coleman’s forthcoming “Aesopeia” cycle about the life of the...
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Apr.21.2013
“Save oxygen: stamp out small talk. ”Thus Spake Aforista
I seldom agree wholeheartedly with the Postfuturist Sage Aforista, but I’m right on board with this saying. Whenever small talk starts, Pat and I both glaze over and remain in a quasi-catatonic state until the conversation returns to...
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Apr.11.2013
In my previous post, I certainly didn’t mean to “diss” Charles Darwin by calling him the “consummate hedgehog.” The world of ideas must have its hedgehogs as well as its foxes. It is true that Charles’s überfox grandfather Erasmus anticipated a lot of evolutionary theory, including Natural...
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Apr.09.2013
Here are a few lines to celebrate National Poetry Month …
Organic life beneath the shoreless wavesWas born and nurs’d in ocean’s pearly caves;First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass,Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;These, as successive generations bloom,New powers acquire, and larger...
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Apr.05.2013
When my teenage daughter broke up with her boyfriend recently, her Awesome Grandma sent her a t-shirt with this slogan:
A WOMAN NEEDS A MAN LIKE A FISH NEEDS A BICYCLE
It’s an old maxim, one that I can remember seeing on t-shirts back when I was in high school. I hadn’t seen or heard it...
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Apr.01.2013
“There is no such thing as ancient wisdom; it is always new.”Thus Spake Aforista.
Count on the Postfuturist Sage Aforista to say something strident, hyperbolic, and even untrue. Of course there is such a thing as ancient wisdom, and of course we all need to be mindful of it in this speed-of-light...
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Mar.09.2013
I must admit that I’m fairly obsessed with the ideas of the late psychologist Julian Jaynes. If you’ve been following these posts, I’m sure you’ve noticed. Just about everything that Pat and I write has been influenced by his mind-blowing classic, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the...
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Mar.05.2013
“Happens all the time,” says Coyote. “That’s what myths do. They happen all the time.
—Ursula K. Le Guin, Dancing at the Edge of the World
Pat and I like this quote so much that we put it at the beginning of our new novel, Mayan Interface. It sums up a lot of our thinking about Story (with a...
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Feb.17.2013
How much are we shaped by the stories that others tell about us?
I left that question hanging at the end of my last post. As it happens, the ever-popular neurologist Oliver Sacks touched on it in a recent article. In his 2001 memoir, Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood, Sacks recalled a...
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Feb.06.2013
It’s a story perfectly suited for a blog entitled “Story.”
I mean the recent unearthing of the bones of King Richard III under a parking lot in Leicester—a discovery so fresh that the bones are still cold, so to speak. The find has me thinking about another king, a currently reigning queen, and...
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Feb.01.2013
In my post of December 10, 2012, I mentioned certain historical catastrophes that heralded the end of civilization, including poetry slams, back-of-the-book indexes, the death of Levon Helm, the Internet, and even writing itself. I conspicuously didn’t bring up the introduction of the printing...
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Jan.12.2013
If you’re at all serious as a writer (or sculptor, painter, composer, fishing-fly maker, or anything else that involves creative work), you’ve surely gotten some lesson—a sort of epiphany, even—that had a last impact on your work. I was just re-reading Harold G. Henderson’s classic book...
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Dec.21.2012
It’s New B’ak’tun Day! And no, it doesn’t appear that the world is coming to an end, nor have their been any verifiable reports of extraterrestrials showing up. For further details about such rather widespread misapprehensions, check out our post of October 18. Things seem to be shaping up much...
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Dec.20.2012
An Uncustomary Book Review of Mayan Interface, and a good read in itself!
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Dec.14.2012
Nice review of Mayan Interface on the Fiction for a New Age. Blogger PJ Swanwick asks: “What role should fiction play in fostering spiritual/metaphysical growth?”
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Storytelling, like all art, like life, is an act of learning—of finding out. We are mistaken to assume that stories of transformation are only about transformation, mere illustrations. Instead, they are transformation itself, acts of practical alchemy, with the power to alter the reality of every receptive person they touch. (That’s why we must learn to recognize a hate-based tale in any garb, and admit that nothing holy feeds on pain.) As we live our stories and tell them, we learn what they are about … and they change … and they transform.”
—from our memoir/essay “A Mexico of the Mind” (anthologized in Solamente en San Miguel.)
About Pat
I'm a writer and visual artist, the author of books and essays for both mainstream and educational publishers. My husband, Wim Coleman, and I often collaborate, and together we've written, edited, or contributed to some 65 publications. Earlier on, I spent...