1986—Pat     An ending. Three years of fun with literature and film and artworks and the writings of physicists, of making art and winning a couple of awards, of piecing thoughts together on paper, left me with a PhD in Art Theory and Criticism from the University of Georgia. My first degree in art, it marked the end of my art-teaching years. My shiny new credentials didn’t lead to an exciting new job, so I contacted a woman I’d heard lecture, talked her into hiring me, and drove over to Los Angeles.

A beginning … of many new beginnings. And an excellent move, because Wim and I met and married while we were both working on Marilyn Ferguson‘s newsletter, Brain/Mind Bulletin. When we got the contract for PragMagic, we had to bring some structure to the 10-year accumulation of material we were updating, adapting, and commenting on.  We decided to start with a section called “The Power of Story.”

We wrote about how the stories that run through our minds affect our lives. Drawing on research, commentary, and experience, we described ways of modifying those stories. (Though similar notions are lately called “secrets” and “the law” these ideas had been around a long time even when we wrote about them.) Here’s how that section started. (download pdf file)

So our lives together began with Story. Which would naturally lead to mutant foxes.

We have great news. Our forthcoming novel, Mayan Interface, has won the Silver Medal in the Adventure Fiction category of the 2021 Living Now Book Awards. Here’s a thought from the founders of the awards:

 “Books are an important tool for gaining knowledge about life-improvement goals, and the Living Now Book Award results announcement is a must-read list for helping us achieve those goals.”

 We’re delighted to have attained “must-read” status even before our book’s publication! We’ll keep you informed about the release of Mayan Interface, which is scheduled for September.

It’s been a while since we climbed pyramids and stood in that stone gateway that led us into this story. You’ll see more about all that on the book page.

Mayan Interface

Neofoxes may actually be said to be specialists in one thing: Story.

Telling, hearing, finding, living … Story.

The first book we worked on together was PragMagic (Pocket Books, 1991). We distilled a decade of reporting that had appeared in Marilyn Ferguson’s Brain/Mind Bulletin, a newsletter that had become a clearinghouse for all kinds of research and discoveries in science, health, creativity, psychology, social sciences, and education. We took this information and turned it into a whopper of a self-help book. Throughout the book we emphasized Story: How can this or that piece of information be used to enrich the story of your life?

We still see the primacy of Story reasserted all over the place. I’m just now looking at a video of the legendary split-brain research pioneer Michael S. Gazzaniga talking about “your storytelling brain,” and how the human is a “storytelling animal.” And it doesn’t much matter whether our stories are “real” or “made-up.”

We once had the privilege of collaborating with cognitive philosopher Daniel C. Dennett on an experimental essay/story called “Media-Neutral,” which eventually appeared in our first novel The Jamais Vu Papers. In it, a psychiatrist discovers that he’s a character in a book—The Jamais Vu Papers, in fact. Desperate to understand how being fictional affects his life, our character goes to Dennett for advice. “Media-Neutral” was great fun to work on, and Dennett threw himself into his therapist-philosopher role wholeheartedly. (The piece was reprinted in Speculations: The Reality Club 1—click to download.) Continue reading →