Interview with North Atlantic Books Publisher Richard Grossinger

Just this past week our very own Richard Grossinger was the guest for Diet Soap’s podcast interview. For the uninitiated, Diet Soap is a Portland, OR based ‘zine that “seeks anti-capitalist fiction, gonzo and personal nonfiction, and a way out.” They have issued four paper versions in addition to their online copy and have recently begun the podcast series. Richard was the guest for their 27th episode, which can be streamed in its entirety here. The show is hosted by Doug Lain, who spoke with Richard about everything from his books Waiting for the Martian Express and The Bardo of Waking Life to President Obama, Adolph Hitler, commodity fetishism, and the hidden longings and capacities of the soul.

In the interview, Richard explains that Martian Express was originally entitled “A Critical Look at the New Age” – not an unsympathetic, but certainly a critical look – an attempt to pick through the mythologies of the movement and find what is truly transformational. Having been introduced to what is considered avant-garde literature (and specifically the Black Mountain Poets) and the New Age movement simultaneously, Richard sees the magical, alchemical, and personal transformational elements of the New Age as grounded in something like Charles Olson’s Causal Mythology, which has a critical element to it, and the poetic intelligence to this is much more hard-edged and tough-minded than its psycho-spiritual context. This perspective is at odds with a New Age counter-culture whose material arose in its own context and is thus much more boundary-less. For Richard, these two movements were always indistinguishable, and some 20 years and a dozen or more books after Martian Express, his The Bardo of Waking Life is a much more refined and precise attempt to establish these differences and champion the truly transformational.

In his new and upcoming book, 2013: Raising the Earth to the Next Vibration, Richard asserts that “by individuals changing consciousness they can change their own universes and their relationships” to the social structure:

… to make structural changes in things through very mysterious and indirect ways. … [There] is an unknown kind of collective unconscious or global transformation or Gaia or whatever you want to call it – impulse – which is driving the whole thing and making use of this sort of extant society and people’s internal workings, and kind of changing perceptions, inner phenomenologies and meanings, and changing them in such a way that almost unintentionally people change society and our collective waves pass through. And so I think you need the individual work to be able to internalize that, deepen it and give it – you know, hook it up to the larger cultural changes. I don’t think you can support the larger social structures simply structurally and through social action.

Rather than being repelled by pop culture, for instance, Richard has always tried to find in it something esoteric and meaningful. Everything is part of the seed consciousness – the fundamental consciousness responsible for all derivative forms of awareness – of humanity, and it is better, to take an extreme, to see the likes of “Hitler as a profound initiate, a magician and a shaman who completely blew it.” This line of reasoning, which Richard invokes from a book entitled The Angel of Auschwitz, follows that Hitler’s “destructive fascist demonic behavior was a failed magic which was meant actually to serve humanity and to work toward the creation of something that was sacred and humanist and that he blew it.” To turn someone like Hitler or Bush “into only serving an evil function, you lose the possibility of growth and transformation there.”

The title of his forthcoming book is itself a suggestion of positivity; while everyone talks about the impending calamities of 2012, Richard is steering the conversation to a new age that can be altered by consciousness, rather than being merely accepted according to mysticism and mythology. 2013: Raising the Earth to a New Vibration will be available in April.

CLICK HERE to listen to the entire Diet Soap interview with Richard Grossinger.

Behind The Scenes With Reiki Expert Don Beckett

I’ve always felt an intense connection to the world and to people, a connection that I can’t quite explain. I’ve tried to articulate it in various ways, but have always felt that I was missing the mark in my explanation. After reading Reiki: The True Story by Don Beckett, I’ve found at least one way to articulate this sentiment. In his book Beckett explains that Reiki is a Japanese word meaning “universal life energy,” and one Reiki teacher, Hiroshi Doi, defines Reiki as “a wave of love!” In the interview below Beckett describes how, through a series of incredible serendipities and his passion for Reiki, his book, Reiki: The True Story, was born.

Q: When did you think about becoming a writer? Was there someone who got you interested in writing?

A: I’ve always had a natural tendency for writing. I remember getting in trouble, in junior high school, for being too good a writer. The teachers thought the papers I was turning in were either plagiarized or that someone else was writing them for me! About that time, my mother was also a great encouraging influence on my writing. I had saved up some money (about $60) and wanted to buy a rowboat. My mother reminded me that we lived in the near-desert of northwestern Colorado, surrounded by 8,000 acres of sagebrush, and convinced me to buy a typewriter instead.

Q: What made you decide to write this book?

A: I was asked to do it. Otherwise, I probably would never have thought of doing it.

Q: Is there any particular story to tell concerning the writing of this book?

A: Yes — the whole thing was a great sequence of serendipities: the book itself, my receiving the information that led to it, and the unfolding of my unusual Reiki career along the way.

What opened my eyes to a different view of Reiki than the standard American model was my serendipitous attendance at the first Usui Reiki Ryoho International (URRI) conference, in 1999. I had been looking, for eight years, for a teacher to initiate me into the third level of Reiki — and that year I met the right one, totally unexpectedly. It just happened that we were both volunteers in the Distant Healing Network, and that our philosophies of Reiki were very similar. She accepted me as a student, and I ended up spending time with her in New York, and receiving my “master” initiation at Niagara Falls. Then she told me about the URRI conference that was coming up in a couple months: It would be held in Vancouver, Canada; and it was open only to “Reiki Masters” in the lineage of the teacher who was hosting the conference. It just happened that my third-level teacher was in that lineage; therefore, I was allowed to attend the conference.

What made this URRI conference so special was that it featured a Japanese Reiki teacher, who was a member of the Usui Reiki Society (Usui Reiki Ryoho Gakkai) in Tokyo — Mr. Hiroshi Doi. The very existence of the Usui Gakkai had only recently been discovered by the rest of the world, and Mr. Doi was the only Gakkai member to reveal anything about it to the outside world (as far as I know, this is still the case, ten years later).

Almost everything that we received there from Mr. Doi was greatly inspiring to me. His information answered questions that many of us had been asking for some time, and confirmed what many of us had felt — that what the world had learned as Reiki, via Hawayo Takata, contained some inaccuracies and outright fabrications.

I returned home from the URRI conference and began writing my own Reiki manuals, incorporating the information I had learned from Mr. Doi. Then, about a year later, I received something even more invigorating and quite astonishing: an email from a Reiki teacher in England, whom I had never heard of. His name was Taggart King. As I recall, he said he was contacting me because he knew I had attended the URRI conference. His email contained some Reiki information from Japan, which he thought would interest me.

What he sent was so far beyond interesting — I felt like an archaeologist who had just been handed the “missing link”! It was Reiki information from a Buddhist nun (106 years old at the time) in Japan, who had been taught by Mikao Usui himself! Taggart King had received the information from another English Reiki teacher, Chris Marsh. Chris was a student of Japanese martial arts as well as Reiki, and had been traveling to and from Japan for decades. He spoke Japanese fluently, and was himself a Buddhist — and his martial arts teacher had introduced him to this nun. She was a relative of Usui’s wife, and was introduced as Suzuki-san.

What Taggart King sent me in the email were things learned by Chris Marsh, from Suzuki-san. She had begun teaching Chris what she had learned from Usui himself in the early 1900s. Chris had shared the teachings with Taggart King and another English Reiki teacher, Andrew Bowling — who just happened to have been one of the organizers of the URRI conference in Vancouver. Andy and I had met there, and had both felt a special connection to each other. I believe it must have been through Andy that Taggart King got the idea (and my email address) for sending this newly acquired Reiki information to me, of all people!

The following year, 2001, Chris Marsh returned to Japan and was introduced to eleven more of Usui’s surviving students. He and Andrew Bowling continued to learn from these students, and to share the information with Taggart King, who continued sharing it with me.

In the fall of 2002, I moved from Arizona to the Hawai’ian island of Kaua’i. I had never imagined myself living in Hawai’i … until messages about Hawai’i started popping up in my life, and I began to feel drawn there. I decided to confirm or deny the attraction by having a locational astrology reading. The reading said Yes, that Hawai’i was the very best place in the U.S. for me! And that the farther west, the better. So I went to the island of Kaua’i — which, of course, just happened to have been the birthplace of Hawayo Takata….

I was imagining myself having lots of Reiki clients and students there. I made several different brochures, and put hundreds of copies of them all over the island. They brought me one student: a Japanese woman from Tokyo, who was vacationing on Kaua’i for two weeks. What happened, instead of clients and students, was the Reiki book.

One day I got an email from a Reiki student in Moscow (I had met her on the Distant Healing Network, and she had become my student). She wrote that she had shown my Reiki manuals to a publisher, and that he wanted to publish them as a book! I was shocked and delighted! Immediately I started to rewrite them in the form of a book. I was feeling a great sense of responsibility for every word then, and I began to question everything I had written. I saw that much of it was merely what I had taken — without question — from my own teachers, and from books and websites. And I saw that many of these things were not verifiable, and that some really did not make sense!

Suddenly I had been given a great task, and I threw myself into it. Living in the most beautiful place I had ever seen — on a hilltop in the center of the island of Kaua’i — I shut myself in a small room and worked day and night on this book! My living situation was yet another serendipity, having been offered to me by the friend of an email acquaintance. I shut myself in my bedroom there, and came out only long enough to grab a little food twice a day and to take a walk (maybe 40 minutes) in the wonderful, soft, evening twilight.

Day and night I worked on the book. Questioning and meditating. Searching the Web for information. And receiving more Japanese revelations via Taggart King. Also, I started emailing Dave King (no relation to Taggart), a Reiki teacher who, with his partner Melissa Riggall, had made several trips to Japan. Between the two of them, Dave and Melissa had interviewed and/or been taught by many students of Hayashi and Usui. Dave, as well as Taggart, proved to be a great source of Japanese information for this book.

I had never been so strongly focused on anything before in my life. I found it surprisingly easy to keep this focus through the long hours every day. I was receiving tremendous revelations from Dave and Taggart, plus intuitive revelations from my meditating. The puzzle that Reiki had previously been was now starting to fit itself together as a coherent wholeness!

In less than three months the writing was finished. I sent the manuscript to my friend in Moscow. In addition to acting as my agent and doing the translation, she had offered to create the photos necessary to illustrate the book. So I left all of that to her, and went back to wondering if some Reiki clients and students would soon begin appearing in my life. I was still marveling at how the book project had been given to me; and how, to such a great extent, the book had written itself. Everything I needed had arrived in such an effortless flow, and I had been shown how to put it all together.

Only then, after the writing was finished, I was told some things about the energetic nature of Kaua’i — which led me to marvel even more. I met someone who told me that people deliberately came to Kaua’i from all over the world, for the purpose of writing books or doing other types of creative projects! She said that Kaua’i was known for its intense, inwardly-directed energy, which was so helpful in keeping people focused on their creative projects (just as I had discovered by my own experience). Then I learned something else remarkable: that the islands of Hawai’i are said to correspond with the seven major chakras in the human body. Kaua’i has the place of the brow chakra — associated with the “third eye,” with insight and clairvoyance — which also is considered the center of Reiki energy in the body.

There were so many serendipities! But still no clients or students for me. So I started making a website. For a couple years, I had wanted to make one on Reiki, Johrei, and Macrobiotics. I had been slowly learning the technical aspects, and thinking of what to say; and, in the spring of 2003, I launched the first few pages of the site.

With my initial work on the book finished, and the website started, and still no Reiki clients and no place to call home, it seemed clear that I was no longer needed on Kaua’i. Then I began to get messages about Kona, on the island of Hawai’i. I packed my things and hopped a plane, and landed in Kona. Two weeks later, exploring the island with a fellow traveler, I arrived in the town of Hilo … and felt at home for the first time since living at a hot springs in Utah in the early 1990s. (Not until months later did I find out that Hawayo Takata had lived and practiced Reiki in Hilo for years, and that her ashes were kept there for years after her death!)

Once I had a place to live, I made new Reiki brochures and, as before, put hundreds of them all over the island. For months. With nearly the same response as on Kaua’i. So, again, I focused on the website. Through it, I was beginning to hear from Reiki people all around the world. I was eager to make an electronic version of the Reiki book, which people could download from the site — but there were no illustration photos for the book yet. And then my student in Moscow wrote that she would not be able to do the photos after all.

I thought of someone else — a Reiki person and a photographer — whom I figured would be perfect for the job. But, after months of negotiations, that didn’t work out. Then there was a problem with the Russian publisher. My agent/translator retrieved the manuscript and found a second potential publisher. More months passed, with no action there. Then a third publisher — again, claiming to love the book. And, again, no action. Finally, the agent/translator declared that she would find a way to publish the book herself (which she did, in 2007)!

Meanwhile, I had eventually found a photographer, in Hilo. A world-class, world-traveling photographer of natural and exotic places. His name was Michael Ash. We met at the downtown crafts market — where he was selling postcards and greeting cards and larger prints of his remarkable photos, and I was trying to interest people in Reiki.

Michael agreed to do the photos for the Reiki book. He wanted to do them outside, which I thought was an excellent idea. The accomplishment of it became another lesson in patience for me, though. Using a borrowed camera (digital, which was not Michael’s usual format), which was available to us only occasionally, and having to match the camera’s availability with breaks in the Hilo rain — plus the fact that Michael lived about 20 miles from me — it took us months to get the photos.

It was March of 2005, in fact, when the Reiki ebook was finally made and available on my website! Shortly after that, it was read by a medical doctor in Turkey — who had stopped practicing medicine, in favor of Reiki and Eric Pearl’s Reconnection® energy — who single-handedly got it translated and published in Turkish.

In the spring of 2006, I received a similar offer from Iran, for translation and publication in Farsi. After that came offers of translation into French and Spanish and Danish. Reiki people all over the world — especially Reiki teachers — were lighting up at the discovery of this Japanese information! And I kept updating the ebook — publishing the Seventh Edition in December 2006.

The Iranian and Danish translations ended up not being finished … and I kept wondering if there would ever be a print edition in English! During my first year in Hilo, I had looked into finding an English-language publisher for the book. I really thought that almost any publisher of Reiki books would jump at this one, since it contained such dynamite information, which was not available anywhere else. I submitted it to a well-known publisher of Reiki books … who took months to decide on rejecting it.

I looked at the guidelines offered by several other publishers and agents — and was totally disgusted by them! They were all nearly identical, even much of the wording. And, before they would even look at a page of manuscript, they expected the author to design a two-year promotional campaign for the book; to fly around the country at his own expense, implementing this campaign; and even to contribute thousands of dollars to the publisher’s advertising budget! I couldn’t believe what I was reading! These were major, mainstream publishers and agents — but they were describing what used to be called Vanity Publishing!

I couldn’t bear researching this any further, much less even to think of submitting anything to these people. I figured, if the book was eventually published in enough other languages, then maybe an English-language publisher would notice it and come to me. I contented myself with the ebook, and with the growing number of Reiki people — from everywhere but Hawai’i — who were finding me through my website.

In 2007, someone offered to find an English-language publisher for the book. Early in 2008, thanks to her work, we received an offer from North Atlantic. Then it was “deja vu all over again” for me — days and nights of concentrated research (gathering additional information from the outside world) and, most of all, updating my own understanding of what Reiki really is, how it works, and how any kind of healing works, regardless of the technique or method. My understanding of these things had grown so much, since the last updating of the ebook, that I had to rewrite the book almost entirely. I’m very grateful for that, because it’s now so much better than it was before! I’m especially grateful for the influence of Roger Orcutt, Michael Daniel Neary, and Nichijo Fumon — for steering me to crucial information on kototama, Johrei, and healing in general: information that improved the book enormously! And to Zeyneb Belbez, my MD friend (and guardian angel) in Istanbul, who keeps reminding me that life is about balance!

From the very start of the first incarnation of this book, back in 2002, I’ve clearly felt that it is not “my” book; that I was merely chosen to be the vehicle for it. There are too many serendipities to think otherwise: Taggart King picking my name out of the cosmic hat, sending his information to me; my being sent to Kaua’i, the birthplace of Hawayo Takata, for the initial writing of the book — and then to Hilo, where she lived and practiced Reiki for years (I’ve been to the house that she used as a Reiki clinic there), and where her ashes were kept for years after her death. During the writing of both incarnations of the book, I felt strongly that some of the insights were coming directly from the spirit of Mikao Usui … and that even Hawayo Takata was happy to see her version of Reiki history corrected!

CLICK HERE to learn more about Reiki: The True Story.

CLICK HERE to visit Don Beckett’s website.

Transformative and Inspirational Living with Lucy Harmer – September 2009

Welcome to Lucy’s journal for transformative and inspirational living!
By Lucy Harmer, author of Discovering Your Spirit Animal (May 09) and Shamanic Astrology (Oct 09).

Here we are, it’s time to launch my first ever blog column! An exciting new venture into virtual communication! I will be dedicating my journal entries over the coming months to the theme of “transformative and inspirational living” – finding the fun, magic and laughter in everyday occurrences! I will be exploring ideas, thoughts and quotes from my first two books; Discovering Your Spirit Animal, which was published in May this year, and Shamanic Astrology, which will be published next month (October 09). I look forward to our journey together…

SEPTEMBER 2009

Going bats!
Messages that appear in the strangest of ways…

Over the past month, I seem to have had a lot of new things that I have had to uncover and learn about, both in my personal life and in my career. It’s interesting how much fear can arise when you are confronted with a completely new situation; I notice that I often try to push this fear away, rather than acknowledge my feelings.

It always amazes me how a spirit animal will turn up at exactly the right moment to give you a message for your life. Last week, I was feeling particularly confronted by some new information I had to deal with. I’d had a really hard day and was ready to crash out in bed, exhausted. The moment I walked into my bedroom however, I heard a loud flapping sound. In the next second, a large black bat flew over my head! I was completely shocked; I stood, rooted to the spot, as the bat frantically flew in circles round and round my room.

I looked over to the window, which was slightly ajar. The bat had flown in through a tiny gap! I pushed the window open wider, and tried waving my arms around to try and encourage the bat to fly out of the window. The only thing that happened was that the bat flew to the top of my very tall closet – out of reach of my waving hands – and settled there!

This called for new measures; I fetched a large stepladder, climbed to the top of it and waved my hands again at the bat. It flew off my closet – but still refused to fly out of the window! I climbed down the ladder, grabbed the duvet from my bed, climbed back up the ladder and – balanced precariously (don’t try this at home!) – proceeded to wave my duvet cover at the bat to try and move it closer and closer to the open window. It still wouldn’t go out!

By this time, a good forty-five minutes had passed, and I decided to give up! It then dawned on me that maybe the bat had turned up to bring me a message that I needed to hear in my own life. I remembered that the spirit animal of the bat symbolises rebirth and teaches us to face our greatest fears. One of bat’s most powerful messages is to remind us that we are in a continual state of transformation – and that we do not need to fear change in our lives. The bat in my room reminded me that I needed to create my own reality; to start to stretch my imagination so that things that I thought weren’t possible would actually become possible.

I thanked the spirit animal of the bat for the lesson that the bat in my room had been trying to show me. The moment I did this, the bat flew over to me, flew in a small circle around my head once, and then flew straight out of the window!

My book, Discovering Your Spirit Animal, has an index of fifty-two spirit animals for you to discover the meaning of the messages that different animals bring into your life. What are the animals in your life trying to tell you? This month, I wish you every success in uncovering their hidden messages.

With love and blessings,

Lucy

CLICK HERE to learn more about courses, consultations and seminars run by Lucy Harmer.

CLICK HERE to learn more about Discovering Your Spirit Animal.

CLICK HERE to learn more about Shamanic Astrology.

More than Just a Summer of Love: New June Releases

June is named after Juno, the Roman goddess of marriage. Some believe that good luck will be brought into their new household if they get married in this month. It’s no wonder that June is known for its large number of wedding festivities! Whether you’re a newlywed, celebrating your nth anniversary, or embarking on a path to discover intimate relations, our June releases will accompany you in your exciting journey this season. Enter into this unpredictable summer with new books that teach and explore the eternally challenging but rewarding topics of sexuality, intimacy, and the afterlife.

To order, please visit www.northatlanticbooks.com.

- – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – -

Conscious Conception: Elemental Journey through the Labyrinth of Sexuality
By Jeannine Parvati Baker and Frederick Baker

In an age when modern reproductive technology is moving at a rapid and alarming rate, Conscious Conception is an alternative exploration into understanding personal fertility, as well as a comprehensive guide to discovering newfound meaning in our sexuality. Combining knowledge of myth and culture, authors Jeannine Parvati Baker and Frederick Baker offer a step-by-step manual of fertility awareness, depth psychology, and psychic birth control and interweave the five elements–Earth, Water, Fire, Air, and Ether–as tools for discovery in the face of reproductive challenges. Including numerous contributions from experts in the field, the book investigates a broad range of topics, from the causes of infertility to the spiritualization of sexuality. Conscious Conception urges us to see all of the possibilities in life’s plan of continuation and to seek a clearer communion with our own reproductive experience.

$25.00/$29.95
Trade Paper
978-0-938190-83-7
416 pages, 8-1/2 x 11

On sale June 2, 2009

- – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – -

Cupid’s Poisoned Arrow: From Habit to Harmony in Sexual Relationships
By Marnia Robinson

Cupid’s Poisoned Arrow combines revealing personal experience, an easy-to-understand discussion about the science of making love, and information from sacred texts on sexuality. Focusing on the ancient territory of “bonding-based” lovemaking, it offers a refreshing approach to sexuality and spirituality for men and women interested in redefining and strengthening their intimate relationships. Marnia Robinson describes the biological mechanisms behind passion, the “lows” that often follow sexual satiation, and even why the human brain is vulnerable to compulsive sexual behaviors and other addictions. In doing so, she reveals how bonding-based lovemaking can restore balance and promote well-being and authentic monogamy. Emphasizing gentle intercourse with periods of relaxation, Robinson presents specific mammalian bonding behaviors that help couples stay emotionally attached to each other and explains why they work. This book is for anyone questioning why his or her intimate relationship has become fragile—or has failed—and willing to try an approach that’s so ancient, it’s new.

$18.95/$23.00
Trade Paper
978-1-55643-809-7
416 pages, 6 x 9

On sale June 23, 2009

Click HERE for the author’s website.
- – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – -

The Western Book of Crossing Over: Conversations with the Other Side
By Sheldon Stoff

This reflective series of conversations with his wife Lorraine after her death enables author Sheldon Stoff to take readers on a journey through the process of living, dying, and living again—in the afterlife. Insights gleaned from both Western and Eastern traditions, especially those of Kabbalah, provide a universalist, non-sectarian context for Stoff’s experiences. With chapters addressing reincarnation, fulfilling one’s life mission, and the significance of finding one’s soul mate, The Western Book of Crossing Over presents a transcendent view of human consciousness and what it means to be alive. Packed with fascinating details about the afterlife, the book serves as a passionate reminder of the importance of keeping an awareness of the afterlife in order to live fully and authentically on this side of the life-death divide. Eleven original drawings of the Other Side based on the conversations between the author and his wife by their son Jesse provide a fascinating visual counterpoint to Lorraine’s descriptions of the afterlife and her uplifting, ultimately hopeful and joyful messages of love.

$14.95/$18.95
Trade Paper
978-1-58394-266-6
176pages, 6 x 9

On sale June 30, 2009

Click HERE for the author’s website.

Tissa Abeysekara, 1939-2009

On April 18, Tissa Abeysekara — writer, filmmaker, actor — passed away in his native Sri Lanka from complications resulting from a mild heart attack, two weeks shy of his 70th birthday. We feel honored to have had the privilege of introducing Tissa’s poignant fiction to an American audience with Bringing Tony Home. Tissa will be missed by his family, friends, and readers.

The following memories and reflections were contributed by Mark White, Scala House Press.

- – - – - – - – - -

The argument that what constitutes poetry is precisely what is lost when poetry is translated into another language is generally ascribed to Robert Frost. Until I had the honor of working with Tissa Abeysekara on the stories that would ultimately form Bringing Tony Home, I had always paid closer heed to the other half of that partial truth, that what constitutes poetry (and literature in general) is precisely what is saved in translation: namely, the poet’s and, by extension, another culture’s voice.

From my first introduction to Tissa’s work, what struck me most about his writing were the traits that we generally use to judge poets: his use of language, diction, syntax, and his ability to remain fixed on a detail — a piece of landscape, for instance — until he was satisfied that it was fully explored.

None of this is to say that his stories aren’t extremely moving on many levels: “Elsewhere” can be read as a severe indictment of Sri Lanka’s classist and patriarchal systems, and “Hark, the Moaning Pond ” is as powerful a myth-telling as I have ever come across. But for the most part it was less the terrain that Tissa covered than it was the language he used to explore that terrain that I found so affecting.

Randomly opening the collection, for example, I find this passage from “Elsewhere”:

It was dark under the rubber trees, and the sad whistle held until the Little Train came out of that gloom into the bright sunlight, and beyond the embankment on the left I saw a strip of paddy, a winding river of emerald green. On either side the undulating land was thickly timbered, and past all that and far away on the patch of blue sky there was a bluer shape like a brush stroke — Sri Pada, the Holy Peak — and it began moving with my angle of vision.

These two sentences are representative of the style he uses throughout all of his fiction. At their core, I believe, they reveal less a storyteller’s prose than they do a mirror to the movements of a mind. Like waves in the incoming tide, each phrase that Tissa employs, each fragment of thought, moves just beyond the previous one to cover the next piece of landscape, the next node of thought that he was exploring.

Tissa didn’t write to convey knowledge; his stories reveal a mind, nearing the end of its life, trying to make sense of everything in it. It was through language, through the distinct, undulating cadence of his sentences, that Tissa explored that mind.

And words. Like a poet, Tissa clung tenaciously to his words. A Sinhala writer who had adopted English as his “mother tongue” in the early 1960s, Tissa’s command of the English language was impeccable, and words were his blood. But of course he remained Sinhala, and Sri Lankan, and words like Amerikkan piti, banian, Gamage, hackery, niyara, Wesak, and so on, filled his prose. Most of Sinhala derivation, and some the legacy of Portuguese and British colonialism.

And nearly all of it “Greek” for Americans with little knowledge of Sri Lanka beyond news accounts of tsunamis or civil wars. So in the process of preparing the stories for American publication with Tissa, we were faced with the challenge of what to do with those words. While the meaning of most of them, in the context of their respective passages, could be inferred by a careful reader, there were many that I suggested we might consider “translating” for the sake of inclusivity. With not much effort, we certainly could have found “American” replacements that would have retained the integrity of the stories while making them slightly more accessible.

But in the end it was Tissa’s voice that won out — virtually every Sinhala or “colonial” word or phrase remained as he had originally placed it — and rightfully so. For it was in those words, I came to realize, it was in the precise details of his childhood landscapes that, if not his muse, then certainly Tissa’s identity as a writer, resided.

Sixty years into his life, as he set out to explore his memory through these beautiful stories, those words remained just as they were when he first experienced them as a child: Amerikkan piti, banian, Gamage, hackery, niyara. . . “Translating” them for the sake of “understanding” would have obliterated Tissa’s landscape, and with it, precisely what constituted his poetry.