Here is everything I’ve finished over the last six months or so. PDFs free, paperbacks on Amazon at cost of production.
my tiny poems from olympia
November 28, 2024: I just restarted my Instagram posts after a year’s hiatus. Check out my most recent reels and “tiny poems” @ https://www.instagram.com/paulkameen/
newest book of essays: Reading/Writing Outside the Lines
November 26, 2024: “All of a sudden, in late October [2023], I went from having no books on my docket to five, each of which looked really interesting to me.I figured I’d read a bit of each to decide which to focus on first, then stage the others going forward. They were all so captivating to me, though, each in its own way, I just couldn’t pick one. So I ended up reading them all simultaneously, ten or fifteen pages of one, maybe a chapter of the next and so forth, night after night for a couple of weeks.Very shortly a wonderful thing began to happen: I’d be in the midst of one and would think I was still somehow in the midst of one of the others. Or, occasionally, all of the others! It was as if I was not reading five separate books about widely divergent subjects set in vastly different contexts, but one book with five different facets. I began to wonder how that could possibly be.” The essays in this book report three successive iterations of that wonderment, enacting a method (not a theory) of reading anyone can apply to their own reading preferences and rhythms.
reading writing outside the lines PDF
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 PDF
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.