Almost everything I’ve written or made in the aftermath of my wife’s sudden passing in 2015 is here, some of it in multiple formats, for free, accessible via the drop-down menus above. Status, fame, money–-those fruits of external validation and public recognition–-all appeared irrelevant, impertinent really, from the shadow of that loss. So “free” was important to me. And time felt most pressing: I wanted my work out there RIGHT NOW. This website is the way I accomplished all that: free, here, right now. I’m now retired (I was an English professor at the University of Pittsburgh for the last 37 years of my 40+ year career; here is a link to a thumbnail CV of my academic credentials:KameenCVProfessorWeb). I now live in Olympia, Washington. You can contact me at paulkameen07@gmail.com.
What’s Newest
Newest poetry book: the other side of the light
November 8, 2024: Poets, like all artists, can inhabit liminal spaces that are both vividly present, right now, documenting the moment, and powerfully futural, opening ways towards what’s next and new. These two ways of “envisioning,” often at odds in settled times, tend to coalesce cooperatively at historical moments like ours, an old order on the way out, a new one not yet fully fledged, see-er and seer becoming one. The poems in this book may seem on the surface to be doing the former in an extreme way—they are tiny and precise records of perceptions, almost-nothings in a way—and very little if any of the latter—absent as they are of assertions or prescriptions, or even linguistic novelties. For me, what these poems don’t do is more important than what they do. My foundational belief is that the eyes we see with create a default path forward. So to alter that path, which is urgently important right now, one needs first to learn to look in a new way at what’s right there, now, in the moment.
the other side of the light PDF
Newest essays: a couple of manifestos
The New Not-Normal (after the Pandemic): a manifesto in defense of neurodiversity
November 2, 2024: The New Not-Normal (after the Pandemic) proposes a number of radical changes to our customary ways of defining what is a “normal” social temperament. The default norm in American culture—extroversion—creates an artificial sense of privilege for those who display it, one that has promoted a wide range of “diagnostic” categories to classify non-normative temperaments as aberrant. The pandemic turned this power dynamic topsy-turvy, which calls for reimagining it from the ground up, creating a new model that is founded on equity and tolerance.
The New Not-Normal 11:10
Writing Myself In: an essay and a story
September 30, 2024: The “story” half of this book, inspired by a vivid dream I had one night last spring, has a futuristic, sci-fi aspect to it. When I woke up, I knew I had to try to write about what the dream wanted to say. It ended up as sort a personal meditation on some of the things that have animated my thinking, lately and over the course of my life, about human affairs in general, as they proceed on both an organizational level (a philosophy of leadership, if you will) and a personal level (a philosophy of life and how best to live it). It uses the discourses of quantum mechanics and capitalism as tropes to examine both the awful path Western culture traverses toward its own demise and to proffer alternative ways of imagining a better one. One friend suggested that the next revision step should be to “write yourself out” of it, which got me thinking about my lifetime of “writing myself in” to everything I made and teaching others to do that as well. That culminated in an essay called “Writing Myself In,” now the other (first) half of the book.
Writing Myself In 10:12
Newest Book of Essays: Reading/Writing Outside the Lines
October 1, 2024: Last spring I decided to send out my most recent scholarly work just to see how it would fare in the current marketplace. All three of the essays this book comprises have now been accepted for publication in reputable scholarly venues. I’m still waiting to hear about the fate of the book itself, which I can’t, of course, publish here in the meanwhile. Here is the preface to the book, to give you an idea of what I’m writing about:
Preface PDF
Newest book of essays available here: waking up: reading wisdom texts
May 18, 2023: These essays explore a range of “wisdom” texts, most ancient, some more recent, some not even of the verbal variety, i.e., plants, cosmic systems, and temporality. They seek to promote a set of reading practices, a way of seeing, that can entice such texts to yield their “hidden secrets,” which can be healing both for us, individually and collectively, and for the earth we are so blithely destroying in our ongoing somnambulance.
waking up PDF
Updates on older work:
December 8, 2023: This Fall: Essays on Loss and Recovery, my keystone book, has been named one of the Top Notable Books in the 2023 Shelf Unbound Indie Book Competition. If you only have time for one of my books of essays, pick this one. PDF here, audio book under Books of Personal Essays above. Paperback and Kindle on Amazon.
This Fall Print version
Newest Music
November 3, 2024: I just added my 2024 holiday album, “My Blue Angel.” Something different, only one Christmas song, the music in a higher register, my guitar sounding like my ukulele, but more ethereal. Just the right shades of blues.
My Work
“Anyone who goes against the pace of the grind culture is living as an outlier and a risk-taker.” Tricia Hersey
Personal Essays:
I’ve written 12 books of personal essays since 2016. This Fall, my keystone book, which opens the series, was named as a “Notable Book” in the ShelfUnbound Indie Book Awards. These books are available for free, here, via the drop-down menu above, and in paperback and Kindle form, at cost, on Amazon.com.This Fall, Last Spring, First, Summer, and In Dreams, are also available as audiobooks here and/or on Audible.com.
Poetry:
I’ve written 6 books of poems since my wife passed in 2015. I also include 2 others that compile poems I published individually earlier in my career. It’s all here for free, in PDF form from the drop-down menu at the top the page, along with audiobooks for most of them. Paperbacks and Kindle versions are available at cost on Amazon.
Scholarly Books:
I published two scholarly books during my career as an English professor. The first, Writing/Teaching, which won the College Composition and Communication Outstanding Book Award in 2002, explores the teaching of writing in the context of cultural and historical ideology. My second book, Re-reading Poets, documents my life-long love of poetry via the many specific poets who have made my life deeper and more livable. The publisher owns copyrights on these books, which are available at their cost via the usual online venues. I provide more information about these under the “Scholarly Books” drop-down, above.
Essays and Talks:
I published numerous articles and book chapters during my career, the major ones (from the 80s and 90s, when articles rather than books were the primary vehicles for scholarly exchange) are available here in PDF form. I also include my favorite talk, a couple of recent stand-alone essays, and the first essay I wrote after my wife passed, which opened the portal to all the rest of this work.
YouTubes and Songs
I have no notable musical talent or experience. After my wife died I began to play guitar and sing (all covers initially) for emotional release. I recorded many, many cover albums to share with family and friends. There is something quite magically therapeutic about making someone else’s words/music your own, singing it out, and then listening to it come back you via a recording. Then, all of a sudden, I began to binge-write my own songs, recording 8 full albums, archived now for free at https://paulkameen.bandcamp.com/ This burst lasted for about three years, then stopped completely. I have no way to account for it aside from the sometimes strange effects of trauma on creative production.
I include here one of my original-composition albums, a few of my current favorites among the many guitar-based cover albums I’ve recorded over the last 8 years, and the three albums I’ve recorded this year (2014) with me playing my new ukulele.
During the pandemic I created a number of YouTube series, some combining photos I take on my walks with songs I cover as soundtracks, one with me reading my own poems, a few at a time, once a week over a six-month period, all to share with family and friends. Here is a link to that site: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGc0sDl44WnOI9hjIBTenJg