Mappa Auctorum: Authors and Environs (Children's Book)
Coauthored with my son, Oliver, who is an illustrator, this book is comprised of a series of drawings of remarkable authors in remarkable environs which we felt were expressive (or expressionist) of the authors' aesthetic and ethical preoccupations. Our work is inspired by art of Dante and Blake, and by the whole history of allegorical maps and emotional cartographies (e.g. Robert Fludd, Madeleine de Scudéry, Heinrich Khunrath). For instance, we have Emily Dickinson swimming in an underwater ocean milieu. We have Herman Melville moving around in a cutaway of an enormous modernist building/mountain labyrinth that contains many rooms, conduits, roads, and rivers, bridges, wells, abysses...
This narrative recounts the anguish and the opportunities for spiritual growth that I experienced since 2020 when both of my sons were diagnosed within a year of each other of Bipolar I illness. One of my sons went the direction of medication and therapy and the other took his own path. I intend this work to honor my boys' struggles and offer some bit of hope to other parents faced with similar situations.
Inspired by ten years of teaching a first-year seminar on animals-human relations, and two recent memoirs from scientists for whom ocean life serves as a topos of self-understanding (Imbler’s How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures, Hannah Stowe’s Move like Water: My Story of the Sea, and Xiaolu Guo’s Call Me Ishmaelle), these essays consider the multiple ways that the study and poetics of the ocean have moved beyond the phallocentric bias of traditional male-centered narratives.
Sexing the Sea: Essays on Gender and the Ocean