Newest book of essays
June 24, 2024: Reading/Writing Outside the Lines is in submission now. I will provide updates as this process moves along.
Check the drop-down menu above for all the books currently available for free here.
For example: 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
Newest poetry book
The Other Side of the Light, all new poems, is in submission now.
Check the drop-down menu above for all the books currently available for free here.
For example, for some quirkier poems : insta-poems
May 25, 2023: Early in 2023 I created an Instagram page pairing photos I take on my walks (uploaded in reel form) with bits of poetry I write (what I call “my tiny poems from Olympia”) about things I see or think along the way. This book compiles those poems. As you’ll note, some of them are not so “tiny,” in which case I may have taken excerpts, sometimes over multiple days, or revised them to suit the photos and fit the space. These are the original texts from which all of that material was drawn, updated now to November, 2023, when I suspended work on the series. This iteration is sans reels, of course. To see the original posts with images visit my Instagram page: https://www.instagram.com/paulkameen/
insta-poems PDF
Or for more traditional-sounding poems: September Threnody
August 30, 2024: This book brings together the three monographs I wrote in September 2016--Li Po-ems, Harvest Moon, and In the Dark–a year and a half after my wife’s sudden death, poetic series so different from one another it’s hard to believe the same person wrote them. I was often writing multiple poems a day, “live,” in real time, on this website, just trying to keep up with the flood of feelings I was trying to process. If you only have time for one of my poetry books, pick this one. PDF below. Paperback available at-cost on Amazon.com.
September Threnody PDF
A new hybrid book: 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
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
March 31, 2024: I bought myself a ukulele last Christmas, such a simple and sweet instrument. I’ve added a separate page for my first albums of uke-based music. There is a sampling of my guitar-based music on the Music page as well.