David Stevens — An interview with the author of Developing your mindfulness practice 🙂!
So… read any good pamphlets lately?
I love a good pamphlet, and by that I mean crazy pamphlet, even when it was Jack Chick telling me that I am going to hell. The internet has ruined them. A pamphlet is like a mode of poetry with constraints imposed not by rules (length of stanzas, rhyme patterns, etc) but by size and cost and commitment to get the thing finished and to the printer in time to hand out at the next demo or march. Hand out enough of them, and your words will change the world! Nowadays anyone just starts a blog or a website or jumps onto reddit and starts raving without end - free verse gone crazy. There is no room for bloat in a pamphlet, and they are the better for it. 🙂
Are you the type of person who enjoys a good pamphlet from the hotel, doctors office, or wherever else?
I like a nice piece of propaganda, though I sometimes feel dirty afterwards. I like seeing other worldviews, especially intense ones, but only for a short while, which is why a pamphlet is perfect. A guilty pleasure is a full on pamphlet that accords with my own world view, that I can read with a knowing smirk and nod along with. Yeah, look at us against the whole world!
Do you have a mindfulness practice?
Not a regular one, though I find it useful at times and I am glad I have been given the tools. What I resent about mindfulness is how it is forced on us as an antidote to the things being imposed on us by the very people forcing it on us. In a job I had a number of years ago, there were people falling by the wayside because of increasing workloads and unrealistic expectations in a really stressful environment. To fix the employee problem, management brought in mindfulness practitioners to teach us stuff to use, on our own time, outside work hours, to deal with the problems caused by work. I suppose that was better than just having jars of valium around the office - “Hey kids, they’re free! Grab a handful!” - but they could also have hired more staff. 😡
What brings you peace?
Now we are getting too personal!
There’s a certain Lynchian/Night Vale thing going on with this story and I’m curious if you are familiar with either of those or if there were other inspirations for this?
I am certainly familiar with David Lynch. A Lynch film can be like a mindfulness practice, you have to commit and just live in the moment that is there and forget the rest of the world. I failed to do that the first time I saw Eraserhead. I was sitting in the cinema, and thought, this must be nearly finished. I looked at my watch and only 20 minutes had passed. You have to decompress first!
Where do we think the reader of the pamphlet goes from here?
Well there are two groups of readers. First there’s the pilgrim. He’s around. (It tends to be a ‘he’.) There is always someone like him around. Someone who is happy to pay the price to transport him to another world, when the price of that is a human life or human suffering. He’s out there, going about his business, sizing up the folk around him, as they pass him in the street, or sit near him on their daily commute. Then there’s us, sitting bored on the train in the days before everyone had a phone. We finished our book and we had forgotten to buy a paper, so we read this thing on grainy paper with weird spelling that someone had left lying around, and strange and dull as it is, we read it to the end. And we wonder, is the fellow this was written for on this train? Living next door? Waiting behind a tree next time I go on a nature walk? And we go on living our lives knowing there are pilgrims out there.
How many times has this story been rejected by other markets?
But Kevin, there are no others! There has only ever been you. OK, it was rejected 23 times, which is far from the highest number of rejections I have.
What’s a great short story you’ve read recently?
I just bought “Hello Earth, Are You There?,” a selection of Brian Aldiss’s short stories published for his centenary, and I am looking forward to reading those.
What book are you reading right now?
I recently finished “Loss Protocol” by Paul McAuley. He is such a good writer, with a massive range, from space opera to first contact to this most recent novel, a near future dystopia with a focus on psychedelics and inner rather than outer space, and possible dimension jumping and encounters with archetypes. Another recent read was “Three Days in April,” by Edward Ashton, another near future dystopia. The future is not looking good, but we all knew that.
Do you have anything else you’d like to share?
Be kind to others, we may all be someone else’s Johnny. I know I am. 🤐