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The lyrics to “The Song from The Poseidon Adventure,” also known as “There’s Got to Be a Morning After,” a song apparently written in a single night by two 20th Century Fox songwriters, Al Kasha and Joel Hirschhorn, and then later beautifully sung by the gifted Maureen McGovern, who had been working as a secretary (the lyrics can be found at  http://www.superseventies.com/sl_morningafter.html), could be seen to have four levels of meaning.  According to Northrop Frye’s theory of symbols, these would be literal, symbolic, archetypal, and anagogic.

The literal level presents us with the hypothetical meanings of the words themselves in relation to each other within the poem.  This level is the most basic level of meaning.  On the literal level, the words, “a morning after,” pose us a question:  a morning after what?

On the symbolic level, we add an extra level of meaning to the words.  This level is the level of metaphor as comparison.  On this level, morning, sunshine, and light are “waiting” for us like different people who can be found as the result of a search.  To find morning, we have to undergo a journey or quest across a “bridge,” followed by an ascent, or “climb” to some higher level where morning becomes like a place we reach, a distant “shore.”

The archetypal level of the lyrics unites our experience of the poem with our knowledge of mythology as a source of basic patterns that travel throughout a culture, permeating its imaginative forms.  Here we have a solar myth—a God of light like Christ whose “escape” from this world across the “storm” of his death to the distant “shore” of heaven after death is also like the return of the sun to the sky after night.

Anagogically, we have the story of resurrection, or the hope that there will be life after death, the morning after the storm of this life has passed.  This level presents the story of the soul, or if you prefer, human mortality in view of the possibilities for eternal life suggested by the cycle of nature, the mornings that continue to come after each night, without fail, “while we’re living,” in spite of “time,” especially “night” and “darkness”:  there’s got to be life after death.

Because of the symbolic richness of the lyrics to “There’s Got to Be a Morning After,” it would seem to be no accident that this song won an academy award for Best Original Song in 1972. All four levels of meaning—literal, symbolic, archetypal, and anagogic—work to make the song into a little masterpiece on morning, life, resurrection, and the hope of an afterlife.

Garden Urthark is the author of Other World, an epic mystery in five parts available for a limited time as a free eBook from Smashwords at http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/51153.

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(The following represents the conclusion of John Kamenich’s interview with Garden Urthark.)

Interviewer:  Do you think art should be personal or objective?  Like a newspaper—treating things that affect many many people, not just one, not just your personal experience, but experience for all people—which do you prefer in art?

Kasa:  I agree with you [Joshua].  Art can be personal.  There’s nothing wrong with that.  If you communicate well about your personal experience, it’s no longer personal.

Joshua:  Right.  It’s your job to communicate with other people, to make the personal universal.

Interviewer:  So you can paint family members—that’s fine.  You can paint your son—you can paint him if you do a good job.  Right.  If you’re professional.  It’s the same for poetry and literature, right?

Kasa:  Yes.

Joshua:  We agree.  Because that woman, Joanne Greenberg, who wrote the book I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, about her personal experience with mental illness, she brushed off our book, Portraits, because she said it was too personal.  It was personal, so she refused to write a blurb for our book’s cover.  But her own writing in Rose Garden seemed to me to be pure personal writing.

Kasa:  Because the paintings were mostly members of our family—that apparently upset her.

Joshua:  T.S. Eliot talked about the objective correlative.  As I understand that, he meant that you could find an objective way of presenting any emotion, even a personal one.

Interviewer:  You like T.S. Eliot?

Joshua:  He was a snobbish man who represented rich people.  I liked Dreiser better, and Melville.  I side with the working class. That’s why in music I like the Beatles.

Interviewer:  Let’s talk about the working class.  Your family was from the working class, although your father became a doctor.

Joshua:  That is true.

Interviewer:  You even went to Landon School, an exclusive private school in the affluent Washington suburb of Bethesda.

Joshua:  Yes I did.  I dropped out after 10^th grade because I simply couldn’t square the Landon experience with my own background.  My father’s father was a coal miner.  My mother’s father was an adding machine repairman.  At the time I left Landon, I identified with black people and saw myself as a kind of revolutionary.

Interviewer:  Are you still a revolutionary?

Joshua:  Very much so.

Interviewer:  Tell me about your revolution?

Joshua:  Well, I read Marx’s Capital and I think I understood a good part of it, but I haven’t been able to understand the way Marx’s teachings got twisted in the Soviet Union and China to justify political despotism and tyranny, mass murder, and persecution of millions of people.  My head never got twisted around to think that I could glorify communism.  It certainly wasn’t the answer.  But capitalism is not the answer, either.  I believe in social and economic equality among all people; social equality which would include the underprivileged like my wife, who is deaf, and the poor, who have every right to all the privileges that rich people presently enjoy.  The world is a big place.  There’s plenty for everyone here.  Let’s share with each other.

Interviewer:  As in utopia?

Joshua:  Yes, as in utopia.

Interviewer:  We finally got around to talking about your idea of economic equality. 

Joshua:  Yes.

Interviewer:  How would you implement your idea?

Joshua:  Well, I’m not a politician.  I was interested in communes when I was in college, but I read about them in a book and the book I read unwittingly revealed the alpha males of any commune ended up with all the desirable women.  The communes simply reenacted the selfishness of the greater society.  For that reason, I knew they wouldn’t work.  There had to be another answer.

Interviewer:  Like what?

Joshua:  I don’t know.  I don’t have the answer to that.  I only know what doesn’t work so far.  This society doesn’t work.  There should be no poor people.  There should be no excluded people, like deaf people and mentally ill people.  What I have chosen to do to bring about change is present my conflict with the present system, just as graphically and powerfully as I could.

Interviewer:  Mythology is very important to you.  As Northrop Frye would put it, you are or seem to be in the midst of fighting with society’s myths of concern in an ongoing fight for freedom.

Joshua:  That is true.  I stand for freedom and so I find myself continually fighting with the antiquated and prejudicial and often stupid mythology we have inherited.

Interviewer:  Yet you try to see the good in that mythology.  You don’t reject it all?

Joshua:  Yes, I continue to be Catholic, for example.

Interviewer:  Do you see the story of Christ as a myth?

Joshua:  I do in the sense that Frye does.  As a writer, I understand the story of Christ as a central story of Western culture.  As a person, I understand it as a mystery far too great for my rational understanding.  It has to be accepted on faith.

Interviewer:  So you believe Christ was a historical personage?

Joshua:  Yes, I do.  But as Frye said, the historical Christ is not the real Christ.  The Gospels were not interested, Frye said, in presenting the historical Christ.  They were interested in presenting the mythical one. That’s why the Gospels are such bad history.

Interviewer:  What is the mythical Christ?

Joshua:  It’s everything Christ stood for—the poor, the excluded, the oppressed, the persecuted.  Love for all, not just for the winners, but for the losers also.  Some who are first will be last, and some who are last will be first.

Interviewer:  Would you like to end our discussion on that note?

Joshua:  It seems as good a stopping point as any other.

Interviewer:  How do you feel, Kasa?

 Kasa:  Fine with me.

 Interviewer:  Well, thank you both for sharing with me.  Thank you very much.

 Joshua:  Thank you.

 Kasa:  Thank you.

Garden Urthark is the author of Other World, an epic mystery in five parts available for a limited time as a free eBook from Smashwords at http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/51153.

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(The following represents a continuation of John Kamenich’s interview with Garden Urthark.)

Joshua:  You told me the classes [in Seoul,Korea] were not heated.  You told me when you sat in class you could see your breath go white.

Kasa:  If it went down to zero, they added a little heat.  You had three pairs of socks on.  Shoes.  Your feet would be freezing.  You weren’t permitted to wear your coat in class.  You had on a long sleeve shirt and under it, you’d wear a couple sweaters.  You’d bring a pillow to sit on on your chair and warm it up.  Everyone wore a uniform.  The bathroom was way off outside.  The teachers had a bathroom down the end of the hall, but you weren’t allowed to use it.  Students had to go outside to the toilet outside which was just like a hole in the ground.  You could see everything in it.  The bathroom had a cement foundation with a hole.   It smelled horrible.  It would make your eyes burn to look into it.  I could never shit in that hole; I only peed in it.  There were windows way up high.  The men used the same bathroom as the women and at the same time.  There might be a man in there peeing.  There was no rape.  No one was afraid.  There were two stalls for women, one stall for men, and two pee places for men.  They had another bathroom outside the library, just as primitive.  (You had to bring your own toilet paper for the bathroom—there was no toilet paper.)

When you entered class, you had to take off your shoes and put on white slippers because they didn’t have a vacuum to clean up dirt dragged in on shoes.  Your feet would freeze in those slippers.  When we had a break, we would go outside and try to warm ourselves in the sun.

Interviewer:  OK, did you ever have homework from school?

Kasa:  I had math homework.

Joshua:  Did you do it?  Or did you get your sister to help you or what?

Kasa:  I did it myself.  Lousy.  I didn’t understand math.  I understood Korean history.  Mostly, I did a lot of sewing.  Knitting.

Interviewer:  Would you make clothes for yourself?

Kasa:  I made things for the school and they would sell what I made and give me nothing.  I had to do it for credit to get a grade.

Interviewer:  You made clothes for adults or for kids, which?  What size?

Kasa:  Rugs.  I made rugs.

Interviewer:  You didn’t make clothes?

Kasa:  Other kids made clothes.  I made rugs.  I knitted them.  I found the teacher would keep things I made for her house, to make her house look nice.  My brother, who was deaf, asked me what I was doing and he would get angry.  He would get angry and face the teacher and ask why I was making rugs, not for the school?  He would get angry and face the teacher.  He even went to the president’s secretary and said, “This is illegal what you’re doing.  I don’t permit her to do that.  That’s for your home.  Better she should study.  Why are you doing that?  It’s no good for her!”  One woman was fired because of that.  She hated my brother.  He wanted deaf people to have a good education.  Deaf people were supposed to be very skilled in making things like rugs and clothes.

Interviewer:  All right.

Kasa:  I was very patient.  I had a hard time at that school.  I suffered so much.  Americans are spoiled but Americans are smart.  They get a good education.

Joshua:  Right, right.  They get a different education.  You got what’s called . . .

Kasa:  National Government School.  It was not free.  Deaf people had to pay for registration.  It was supposed to be free but the school did accept money.

Interviewer:  So you feel like your education was a waste of time?  A waste of your life, like jail?

Kasa:  There were fun things.  Deaf people were all together like a big family.  Deaf people enjoyed being together and talking.  It was great.  There was no education.  The teachers were very strict authority figures.  There was one teacher who used to molest me by kissing me all over and hugging me.  I would scream—I didn’t want it—and fight with him and he would hold me and hug me.  The man was deaf himself.

Interviewer:  How old was he?

Kasa:  He was around 40 and I was 14 or 15, 16—from age 14 to 18.  Wait a minute:  8^th, 9^th, 10^th, 11^th . . .

Joshua:  Twelfth grade is the last grade in high school.

Kasa:  In 8^th and 9^th grade I was mature and beautiful.  10^th, 11^th, 12^th.  In 12^th grade he let up on me.  He liked me because I was thin.  Thin and tall.  I don’t know.  Other teachers liked me too.  But they didn’t abuse me the way he did.  Only one deaf man did that.  There were two girls he used to hug and kiss, me and one other, but mostly me.  This was the deaf man who told the funny stories in class. Deaf people liked and respected him because he supported deaf people.  Of course, he abused me.

Joshua:  When you saw him you used to try and escape. He would grab you.  If you were alone in a hall, you’d try to escape and he would catch you.  How did you escape him once he got you?

Kasa:  I would punch him and everything, pull his hair, punch him.  He was a big man.  He would almost break my ribs squeezing me. He would kiss me all over—on the lips, on the cheeks . . .

Joshua:  What did other student do when they saw that?  They were just quiet?

Kasa:  They were just quiet—they permitted it.

Joshua:  Did they think you would become a prostitute or anything?

Kasa:  No, it was the teacher himself, not me.  I was just defending myself.  He would mess up my clothes and everything.

Interviewer:  Kasa was abused.  Were you abused, Joshua?  Do you have that in common with her?

Joshua:  Yes, I was.  However, I was not abused sexually.  And I had a great youth.  My father was an alcoholic, but I steered clear of him as much as possible, like Huck with Pap in Mark Twain’s Huck Finn.  My problems came as an adult.

Interviewer:  What do you mean? 

Joshua:  I had experiences like the ones I describe for my character, Moody Santo, in Other World.

Interviewer:  How so?

Joshua:  Well, the plot may be fiction, but the characterization is true to my own experience.

Interviewer:  Do you have mental illness?

Joshua:  I can’t answer that.

Interviewer:  Why not?

Joshua:  Let’s just say I based my novel on personal experience, which includes direct experience and what I would call analogies of experience.  I will not say anything more than that.

Interviewer:  Is this an example of your muteness?

Joshua:  Yes.  Someone who is mute is not necessarily someone who can’t talk, but someone who doesn’t talk.

Interviewer:  Well, Kasa does not seem to be mute the way you are.  When given the chance, she talks freely about herself.

Joshua:  And I think that’s great because her muteness consists mainly in her not being able to speak vocally.  But she also is reluctant, as you may have already seen, to speak up in most social situations, even with deaf people.

Interviewer:  [To Kasa]  Is that true?

Kasa:  Yes.

(To be continued . . . )

Garden Urthark is the author of Other World, an epic mystery in five parts available for a limited time as a free eBook from Smashwords at http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/51153.

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(The following represents a continuation of John Kamenich’s interview with Garden Urthark.)

Next time I came to visit, Christmas decorations were up.  Kasa and Joshua’s tiny house was just as cozy as ever.  We sat together, quite comfortably, in their living room.  Using Joshua as my interpreter, I started by saying to Kasa:

Interviewer:  You are deaf and you can’t talk.  That means you’re mute.  Some people in the past talked about being dumb, deaf and dumb, but deaf people don’t like to hear that kind of expression any more.  How do you see yourself:  as mute or deaf or what?  Tell me.

Kasa:  I don’t know.  I like to read in English.  So I can remember things.  Deaf people today go to college and use interpreters to help them learn and they’re not mute.  They can write what they feel. 

Interviewer:  You and Joshua have called your art “Mute Art.”  What do you think about the idea of mute art?  That’s a different thing than being mute as a deaf person, right?  Mute art means you don’t know how to talk about your art with other people.  Is that right?

Kasa:  Deaf people can think, talk:  if they’re educated, they’re not mute.  I’m mute, yes (I can talk a little).  In Korea, my sisters and brothers didn’t tell me about what was happening.  They didn’t keep me informed.  I didn’t read.  I came to the United States.  I was behind in my English.  Art?  I don’t know.  Painting?  What?  You have to read a lot to know how to express yourself.  If you don’t read, you’re called mute like me.

Interviewer:  What does mute art mean to you?

Kasa:  It means I’m quiet.

Joshua:  It means we don’t know how to talk about our art with other people.  [To Kasa]  You agree with that?

Kasa:  My teacher, Professor Van Nistrooy, is very skilled as a painter, but still, he can’t explain his art well.  He seemed mute himself.  He could show something was wrong in the way perspective was set up or the composition.  But to tell me a story about the art, he wasn’t professional.  My husband tells a good story about a painting, but my two teachers, Mr. Van Nistrooy and Un Young, a Korean teacher who happens to have made it here in America, were not able to do that.  Value, shadow, composition—that’s all.

Interviewer:  Do you agree with your husband that your art is mute art?

Kasa:  [To Joshua]  “Is your art mute art?”

Joshua:  Yes, I feel like I’m mute.  I can’t express myself about my writing with anyone.  I don’t know how to express myself.  So when I see my own art, I feel mute.  I don’t know how to talk about it.

Kasa:  I think you’re much better at expressing yourself about your art than Mr. Van Nistrooy or Un Young.  Do you agree with that?

Joshua:  I haven’t met them, so I don’t know.

Kasa:  You’re very imaginative; they aren’t.

Interviewer:  [To Kasa] OK, well, tell me about your education.  Did you get a good education in Korea?

Kasa:  Nothing.  Nothing.  Because the teachers themselves used grammar with sign language.  I was deaf, so I didn’t understand them.  They knew nothing about deaf culture.  They were the same as all hearing people.  Deaf people have to use KSL [Korean Sign Language], but those teachers didn’t know it.  So I had to guess what they were saying.  I could understand one deaf teacher who used to tell great stories about himself because he used KSL.

There were two deaf teachers.  One was married to a hearing woman who had gone to a highly prestigious university and was a pharmacist.  Deaf people did not like this teacher because he was a snob.  But he did know KSL and could entertain us with interesting stories.  On Sundays, he was a missionary in our church, but in class he liked to tell off-color jokes.  He was a hypocrite who refused to support my brother’s dream to become a teacher, even though my brother took private English lessons (tutoring) from him. He taught English and acted as an advisor to deaf students.  The bastard used to pick on me in class.  I was very shy and would go beet red when he compared me to my deaf brother and sister and told me I was stupid compared to them—in front of the whole class. 

The other deaf teacher taught practical math.  Deaf people liked him because he supported deaf people.    

Joshua:  Your school was very strict.  In the morning you would parade around the grounds and exercise together like communists.  Sometimes teachers would abuse students physically.  Like you told me one time, you were talking in math class and you weren’t paying attention and the teacher beat you with a stick, a pole, what?  Metal?  A metal rod?  A wooden rod, like about three feet long, that he held with both hands?

Kasa:  He held it in both hands.  I was very bored.  The teacher was talking.  Another girl was interpreting what he said into KSL.  She loved math.  I wasn’t interested.  All the other girls were bored.  Only one or two were paying attention.

Interviewer:  You were talking a little with another kid and he caught you?

Kasa:  He caught me and came over and stood in front of me and said, “Who are you talking to?”  I said, “I don’t know.”  The other girl said, “Don’t tell him—be quiet.”  He said, “You’re not going to tell me?”  He took the pole and he hit me over and over, in the head, and in the stomach.

Joshua:  [Seeing Kasa is reluctant to go on]  You’re not going to tell us?  That has nothing to do with you!  He did it, not you!  Why are you ashamed to tell that to other people?  Are you scared?  What are you scared of?  He abused you; you did not abuse him!  You did nothing wrong.  Why are you embarrassed?

Kasa:  He hit me hard.  I fell down.  He continued to hit me.  I was covering my head with my arms.  He was hitting my arms and continually beating me.  Crying and screaming, I hurt so much I didn’t know what was happening.  I was 13 years old.

Joshua:  So you immediately went home without telling the school, without telling the principal or anything.  You went home—what happened?  You just left school.  Your mother said nothing.  Your mother saw the bruises?  Did you have any bruises?  No one said anything about it?  Next day did your mother go to school with you?

Kasa:  Nothing.  The principal was inaccessible.  You couldn’t talk to the principal as you can here in the United States.  Other times, one teacher ordered a girl to the front of the class and punched her three times in the stomach.  Another teacher had a girl come to the front of the class and hold her hands out.  He hit her twenty times on the top and bottom of her hands, 20 times with a wooden baton.

Interviewer:  Wow, they were abusive there, weren’t they?  That sounds absolutely terrible! 

Kasa:  We were innocent kids.  The teacher who beat me was a young, handsome man.  He was new at the school and didn’t know me.  I felt like the teacher made a big mistake. 

Interviewer:  He sure did.

Kasa:  That teacher was the most boring teacher in the school.  He just concentrated on math and math only.  He told no interesting stories about himself or anyone else.  You just couldn’t pay attention to him.

Joshua:  You were telling me once that if you even came late to class, the teachers would make you crumple up paper and wash windows.

Kasa:  It was discipline to wash the windows with newspaper balled up, and wash the windows without water or rag.  You had to clean the windows with your own breath.  Water and rag would make it easy.  We would clean the windows in the teachers’ offices.  Sometimes the boys would slip us a rag that we would quickly use and then hide in our pocket and go back to the balled paper before any teacher could see us.

Another disciplinary measure the teachers used was to have us shine the wooden floors to the school’s halls.  How did we do this?  First we’d rub a candle on the floor to make it waxy, then we’d take a glass mug like for drinking beer and rub the wax into the wood with the bottom of it.  After that, we would buff the floor shiny with a rag.

(To be continued . . . )

Garden Urthark is the author of Other World, an epic mystery in five parts available for a limited time as a free eBook from Smashwords at http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/51153.

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(The following represents a continuation of John Kamenich’s interview with Garden Urthark.)

Joshua:  Hey, can we get off the subject of where I’m from?  I’m from God who is our home.  I’m really not from any other place.

Interviewer:  You believe in God?

Joshua:  Yes, I do.

Interviewer:  Are you a member of any particular religion?

Joshua:  I’m Catholic.

Interviewer:  How do you square that with being a disciple of Northrop Frye?

Joshua:  I have no trouble with that.  You can examine a crucifix as a collection of atoms or as a religious symbol.  Either way, neither view should conflict with your beliefs.  The crucifix is still a crucifix, whether you look at it atomically or symbolically.

Interviewer:  Some people would say it is only a collection of atoms.

Joshua:  They would have an incomplete view of the crucifix then.

Interviewer:  What would the complete view be?

Joshua:  I’m not sure.  But it would include the importance the crucifix has had for Western culture from prehistoric times to the present, including the metaphysical importance.

Interviewer:  What would the metaphysical importance be?

Joshua:  Well, on one part would surely be that Hitler was defeated in World War II. Israel once again became a nation.  And countless people have depended on their belief in God to overcome the selfishness, greed, and cruelty that seem to rule this world.

Interviewer:  Couldn’t all that be blamed on our animal ancestry—on instinct?

Joshua:  Maybe.  But I prefer the Bible.  You said that I was a disciple of Frye’s.  That’s kind of a strange word to use—disciple.  Frye was not Christ, just a literary scholar and critic.  I suppose you could call me a follower of Frye’s, but even that might be misleading.  I believed him when he said that biblical and classical symbolism permeate and inform the entirety of Western literature, acting like a kind of key to its symbolism and meaning.

Interviewer:  So why do you need religion?

Joshua:  Well, my religion is something apart from literary criticism.  It no longer sees the crucifix as a collection of atoms, even by means of Frye’s brand of science.  It sees religion as something beyond science, that is, metaphysical.  As of yet, I have neither seen nor heard of any explanation for it better than the one I have heard since my earliest consciousness, that there is a God, that there is only one God, that he is all-knowing and all-powerful, and that he has worked through history and through the church to influence the course of human history.  I don’t think I would believe this with scientific evidence to the contrary, but I have never seen any such evidence.  Even the Catholic Church accepts evolution as a possible explanation for the creation of human beings.  Let me just say that because I don’t understand or can’t fully explain why I am Catholic doesn’t mean I shouldn’t be Catholic.  The world is full of irrationality.  If religion seems at times irrational, so be it.  I only know it has done much good in my life and when I really needed help from other people, religious people stepped in to help me.

Interviewer:  What kind of help did you need?

Joshua:  I needed help and let’s just leave it at that.  Psychologists always talk about help and how much they want to give it to you.  When I really needed help, priests stood behind me with an encouraging word, the right word, the word I needed to hear.  That was all the help I needed.  Such encouragement did not come from psychologists.  They did not know the word.  They did not know that God loved me, no matter who I was, and that I deserved to be treated with the respect that every human being deserves and nothing less.

Interviewer:  You sound like you’re distrustful of psychologists.

Joshua:  This is just another subject I’d like to avoid.  Can we skip to something less personal, like my creative writing?

Interviewer:  Well, if you would prefer, we can talk about something else.  I have no problem with that.

Joshua:  Religion is something personal.  I feel no need to justify my faith to any other person than to myself and to God.  I am not a theologian, but if I ever get into theology, I’ll let you know.  I doubt I will.  I simply don’t have time.  Besides, I trust the church to take care of that for me.  With all the mistakes the church has made, historically and even recently, I still trust it, so if you want answers to why Catholics believe as they do, go to the people who can answer you.  As I’ve already said, to me the world is not a rational place.  In that context, my religion makes perfect sense to me.

Interviewer:  Let’s talk about Other World.

Joshua:  All right.

Interviewer:  It’s a fascinating book.  How long did it take you to write it?

Joshua:  About eighteen years, but there are some parts of it that were written over thirty years ago.

Interviewer:  Were you trying to create something like a mini-replica of the Bible, something like an episodic epic connected as little books?

Joshua:  I think you’ve perceived exactly what I tried to do.  For much of the time I worked on the book, however, I did not know exactly what I was doing.  Finally, what had been an unconscious process became conscious and the form of the book suddenly became clear to me. 

Interviewer:  You certainly have incorporated the theme of death and resurrection in a way few, if any writers, ever have.

Joshua:  Thank you.  I am proud of what I’ve done.  But, you see, just as many authors have said—a book actually writes itself and the author merely gets it down on paper, though it’s actually a much more complex process than that.  I named the author of my book Garden Urthark.  I felt that what I was getting down on paper had special significance, something like, but not the same as, sacred scripture.  Other World is what Northrop Frye called the secular scripture of romance.  It’s important but will never have the importance or authority of myth or religion.  I am still Catholic.  I have not given myself up in any way to the worship of a literary work of art, which would be idolatry.

Interviewer:  As the name Garden Urthark suggests and as you say in the explanation you give for the name in the back of Portraits, a garden is simply the human shape you wish to give to nature and the books you write are like an ark in which you wish to preserve what has traditionally been called an imitation of nature, a replica of model of nature or an action, as is sometimes also said, in literary art.  We haven’t spoken much of your wife’s art or of the graphic forms—rectangles, circles, spheres—that you sometimes use in place of words in your writing.

Joshua:  How about if we get to that next time we meet?

Interviewer:  Sounds good to me.

We had much more to talk about and agreed to meet in another week, next time with Kasa present.  Like William Blake and William Morris, Kasa and Joshua publish their own work through their own publishing company, Edizione del Cuore.  Just by talking with Josh, I felt I had glimpsed something of the vision of love and freedom Garden Urthark was supposed to be about, yet not through a discussion of any governmental or legislative changes.  The revolution was all in a change of perspective and the energy behind the change to make the revolution real. 

(To be continued . . . )

Garden Urthark is the author of Other World, an epic mystery in five parts available for a limited time as a free eBook from Smashwords at http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/51153.

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Normally, an interviewer identifies himself.  Imagine that I am an 87-year-old man.  My name is John Kamenich.  Imagine that I gave 2,000 acres of my land—about half—to a group of young people who formed a commune on it and that I sold my remaining half and came east from Colorado to live with my only surviving relatives here in Bethesda, Maryland.  I am Josh Mirabene’s uncle by marriage to his father’s sister.  And we all know that Josh is the writer for Garden Urthark the way John Lennon was the rhythm guitar player for the Beatles; at least, that is the way Josh has explained his position to me, and I am perfectly willing to accept his explanation.  Josh’s deaf Korean wife, Kasa, is the artist for Garden Urthark.  We can liken her to Yoko Ono, though Kasa is a much more traditional artist. 

Imagine that I am also a World War II veteran and that I was a tank commander:  a miserable piece of business that was—there was nothing heroic about it.  I’ve known pain and I’ve known suffering.  I know the consequences of standing up for what you believe in.

On a cold winter morning in January of 2010, I interviewed Josh and Kasa at their tiny home in Kensington, Maryland.

Interviewer:  Joshua, are you the author of Other World? 

Joshua:  I am the writer, not the author.

Interviewer:  Who is Garden Urthark? 

Joshua:  Garden Urthark is the author.

Interviewer:  How could the writer not be the author?

Joshua:  Authorship is a group effort; even when people go down on a title page as the author of a book, they are inevitably members of one group or another and whether consciously or unconsciously expressing the thoughts and feelings of that group.

Interviewer:  Can’t say I really follow you.  Please explain.

Joshua:  I say on a special explanatory page in the back of my book, Portraits Deep in the Castle, that Garden Urthark is an “enterprise that contains, as in an ark, the revolutionary process of transforming reality into a vision of human love and freedom.”  That revolutionary process is what wrote Portraits—and Other World—not me.  I was just one part in the process.  Other parts include, say, the Beatles, whose music affected not only me but millions of people.  If you want me to simplify what I’m saying even more, I could say, as you already have for me, that Garden Urthark is a name for a group—a name like, “The Beatles”—and Kasa and I are members of that group.

Interviewer:  If you will remember, the Beatles were not so keen on revolution.  John Lennon said, “You can count me out.”

Joshua:  John Lennon said, “When you talk about destruction,” you could count him out.  I would agree with that.  I am not in favor of any kind of violent revolution.

Interviewer:  You seem to like the Beatles quite a lot.  In fact, you say as much in the final essay of Portraits.

Joshua:  When I was a boy, I bought every single Beatle 45 record when it came out.  Then I bought each album when it came out.  But I didn’t buy Revolver.  I thought that album couldn’t have been authentic.  I didn’t  believe the Beatles would make an album with a title like that.  So I didn’t buy it for years. 

Interviewer:  Did you recognize any of the songs that were on the album?

Joshua:  No, but I bought a tape of the album many years later, when I was in my thirties, and I loved it.

Interviewer:  What did you like about it?

Joshua:  I liked “Tomorrow Never Knows” and “For No One” best on Revolver.  But let’s not talk too much about the Beatles.  A good number of readers would have no idea what we we’re talking about.

Interviewer:  Maybe if you explained a little they would be able to understand better.

Joshua:  I’m not capable of it.  I haven’t memorized the lyrics to all the Beatles’ songs.  A lot of times I have no idea what they’re saying and even if I do, I’m unable to remember the lyrics even if I do understand them, not that they’re not good.  Don’t get me wrong:  the Beatles are an experience.  They are not a set of lyrics.  The music, the people, the lyrics—all of that—including the popularity and fame of the group, goes into the experience that the  Beatles are, not just any one thing.  With so much going on, anyone who wants to sit down and discuss the merits of a rhyme between “hand” and “understand” is missing something.  Oh, I know people do it.  I’m just not that kind of person.  (Laughs.)

Interviewer:  (Laughs.)  Let’s talk about you a minute.  Where are you from?

Joshua:  I’m from Washington, DC, although I was born in Suburban Hospital, which is in Bethesda.  I lived in Washington at the time.  I lived in Washington for the first four years of my life, over by the intersection of Georgia Avenue and Military Road in Northwest.  Right near Fort Stevens and Nativity Church.

Interviewer:  I see.  Did you know Lincoln almost got shot at Fort Stevens?

Joshua:  Yeah, I read that Oliver Wendell Holmes yelled at him to duck down or something.

Interviewer:  (Laughs.)  How did you like Washington?

Joshua:  I loved it.  My great aunt lived down near North Capitol Street and Florida Avenue somewhere.  She rented the upstairs of a row house and I used to love to visit her because every time I saw her she gave me a Hershey bar.

Interviewer:  That was nice.  Where did you go after DC?

Joshua:  We moved to Norfolk,Virginia.  My dad got his first job as a radiologist there.

Interviewer:  So you moved to Norfolk.  How did you like it there?  Want to tell me about it?

Joshua:  We rented a little house.  Up to that time, we had lived in apartments.  A crazy boy was supposed to have lived in the house next to ours.  His name was Sonny.  I don’t remember ever seeing him.  But one time he swung me around by the legs and threw me in a bush.  I remember that.  He was a lot older than I was.

Interviewer:  That’s too bad.  That must have hurt.

Joshua:  I remember thinking:  well, I finally met Sonny and he was crazy.

Interviewer:  How long did you live in Norfolk? 

Joshua:  One year.  We moved back to Washington when my dad got a job in a radiology firm here.  We lived one year in Silver Spring and then moved to Bethesda, where I lived from age seven onward, till I finished graduate school at age 24.

Interviewer:  Interesting.

(To be continued . . . )

Garden Urthark is the author of Other World, an epic mystery in five parts available free for a limited time from Smashwords at http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/51153.

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Sylvia Browne appears to have come into the public eye in 1990 with her publication of Adventures of a Psychic:  The Fascinating and Inspiring True-Life Story of One of America’s Most Successful Clairvoyants.  In this book, which became a New York Times bestseller, Sylvia Browne recounts her true life story as a psychic, medium, clairvoyant, and channel.  Born in 1936, she grew up in Kansas City, Missouri, and she has published 58 works, 22 of which have been on the New York Times bestsellers list.   

For 17 years, she was a weekly guest on the Montel Williams Show.  She has helped find missing children and helped solve crimes.  In 1974, she started The Nirvana Foundation for Psychic Research, which is a nonprofit corporation that has since become the Sylvia Browne Corporation, and as successful as she has become as an author, even international celebrity, she continues to give private readings.    

Having read eight books by Sylvia Browne, I see her mythological universe as existing something like the Judeo-Christian, especially Catholic, one on different levels.  Heaven for Sylvia Browne exists in other dimensions than this world and thus figuratively on a higher level, one of timeless bliss where the spiritual existence of all living beings knows its ultimate freedom and experiences its ultimate fulfillment.

On the Other Side (Heaven), the spirit has magical powers.  It can transport itself effortlessly through flight, can communicate through telepathy, and can build on the knowledge of this world, infusing discoveries into the minds of the living.

Since the Other Side exists in a timeless space, the spirits there do not experience anything like our anxieties in time.  The purpose of this life in our space and time is to refine and purify the spirit through suffering and experience.  A spirit chooses to live in his world, carefully designing what Sylvia Browne calls a person’s life “chart.”  The chart is a life plan developed down to the finest details of how a person looks and all she or he experiences, including how a person dies.  Browne identifies a series of life themes, one of which, for example, is the victim.  In her view, spirits choose this life theme in order to learn through suffering and teach others by their example.  The victim type includes people who are brutally murdered by serial killers as well as Nazi concentration camps.

It is possible to visit the Other Side in dreams (see Sylvia Browne’s Book of Dreams). Ghosts, for example, are spirits that, for one reason or another, do not make it to the Other Side; they choose not to leave this world—they are as if trapped here.  We all live many lives, punctuated by breaks on the Other Side during which we refresh ourselves with the company of our most dearly beloved friends, including our spiritual guide and soul mate (they are not necessarily the same person).  We choose to come back again and again, becoming like contestants in a trial or test.  The object is to learn in what Browne believes to be the toughest school there is in the universe, namely, life on Earth as we know it.  And thus there is life on other worlds less demanding, less difficult, than life on Earth.

 Self-Hypnosis and Death by Guillotine?

Sylvia Browne offers her readers a chance to regress in consciousness back to the most painful ending of a former life.  Following her advice in the back of Past Lives, Future Healing:  A Psychic Reveals the Secrets to Good Health and Great Relationships, I taped my own voice in the part of hypnotist and hypnotized myself several times, finding each time, to my surprise, that my last life ended tragically in the 1700s.  In 1789, I was guillotined in Paris, France. My name had been Auguste Lebrun. 

Always the skeptic, I found on further investigation that the guillotine had not come into use until 1792, so my date of execution must have been wrong.  However, I did have a pretty clear vision of a place, a square in France.  I could see a great dark crowd in tricornered hats gathered there.  The execution itself occurred in a courtyard.  The imagery had been vivid:  I had a clear picture of the people gathered for the execution, including some ghastly old women spectators.  Did I actually see my head being tossed around after I had been decapitated?  I did.  (Historians, please tell me I was wrong—that no such thing could have occurred!)

I don’t know what crime I had committed or had been accused of.  Had I been rich?  I don’t seem to have been.  I had seen the crowd gathered in a great square.  I had seen the crowd from above.  Is that because I had been imprisoned in a tower above the square and could thus look down?  I had been transported to the guillotine by a cart with a hay-strewn floor.

Maybe there was more to what I had perceived than what I thought.  In The Other Side and Back:  A Psychic’s Guide to Our World and Beyond, Sylvia Browne says that birthmarks are usually a sign of a place where one suffered a mortal wound in a previous life.  Curiously enough, I discovered at the age of 17 that two vertebrae in my neck were fused, probably fused at birth, according to my father, a radiologist.  My football career came to an end since my neck was unable to withstand the shock of collisions at the speed and force of boys at the level of varsity play.  Did the place where the vertebrae were fused indicate the juncture, as if to mark the place, where the guillotine blade had passed through my neck?  I had died as Auguste Lebrun at the age of 41.  I couldn’t make much sense of having died at that age as far as symbolism in my present life, although I had married at the age of 41 in this life.  The hypnotic vision I had experienced had seemed so authentic, yet I remain skeptical—I am a Catholic, after all.

 Other World Meets the Other Side

Now I had all but completed my novel Other World by the time I came to Sylvia Browne’s books.  However, there are some interesting parallels between her mythology and the mythology presented in Other World.  The Other Side and the tunnel of light to it make appearances in Other World, however, it remains unclear whether these appearances, as experienced by the central character or hero, Moody Santo, are actual manifestations of something like a heavenly other world or hallucinatory symptoms of an illness.  From a practical or pragmatic point of view, they do work to help Moody rather than hurt him.  Moody gains magical powers in the beam of energy he is able to emit from his brain and the ability to propel himself through space by simply willing himself through it.  Other World, which Moody Santo briefly visits after death, does fit in with Sylvia Browne’s idea that we can experience other lives on other planets. 

Sylvia Browne believes that the soul exits in ideal form in a body at exactly the age of 30, and in Other World, people enter their afterlife at just about this age also—28 for men, 24 for women.  Importantly also, just as Sylvia Browne insists that she can communicate with spirits and that telepathy is the true mode of communication of spirits on the Other Side, Moody remains in contact with his murdered brother’s spirit after his brother’s death, and telepathy occurs between Moody and his true love, Norma.

Almost every person in this life has what Sylvia Browne calls a spirit guide.  Although most people are not consciously aware of having such a guide, the spirit guide is like the guardian angel of Catholicism or like Virgil and Beatrice combined in one, these two figures having acted separately as Dante’s guides on his journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise.  The spirit guide cannot be a person who has been alive during one’s own present life.

The spirit guide is a spirit or person one makes an agreement with before starting a new life and who is there for a person as something like the still small voice of traditional religions.  Incidentally, Sylvia Browne has started her own religion (the Society of Novus Spiritus), the headquarters for which are in sunny California.  Sylvia Browne’s spirit guide is a South American Indian whom Browne has actually seen.  Her name is Francine.

Sylvia Browne does not believe in a devil or Satan but rather believes that a person who is evil simply never visits the Other Side and simply revolves through life after life in this world without rest, this being the closest thing to Hell in Browne’s mythology.  She speaks of such spirits as part of a Dark Side that passes through the Left Door instead of through the tunnel of light that leads to the Other Side after death. 

Browne tends to be suspicious of the word imaginative, as if from her point of view it would be almost impossible to think of anything that is not in some way real, including leprechauns. The theory of correspondence as passed down through psychic Emmanuel Swedenborg to the American transcendentalists, notably, Emerson and Thoreau, appears to have taken a radical turn in Sylvia Browne’s view of reality.  On the other hand, I believe that imagination is one of the most liberating forces within the arsenal of human intelligence.

The Mythological Universe

The structure of Sylvia Browne’s mythological universe conforms closely to that of Catholicism in the sense of accommodating the traditional levels of Heaven (the Other Side), Purgatory (ghosts), and Hell (this life, and especially its Dark Side as entered and re-entered through the Left Door).  Ruling over this mythological universe is a beneficent God in union with a female deity (Azna, the Mother God) reminiscent of Catholicism’s Mary, but absent any Satan figure of all evil.  The traditional figure of the guardian angel and saints, as intercessors, are present as the spirit guide who acts as a still small voice that counsels every person through the trials of this life.

As a psychic, Sylvia Browne is able to actually see and act as a medium for her own spiritual guide (Francine), which gives Browne the nature of something of a prophet in her own religion as the deliverer of the word of God or the Other Side to anyone who will listen.  Her courage in spreading the word of her remarkable, sometimes bizarre, but always highly creative perceptions is to be admired.

You can start anywhere with Sylvia Browne’s books.  There is no need to read them in any particular order; they circle around the same subjects from different angles.  I particularly enjoyed reading about ghosts in Visits from the Afterlife:  The Truth About Hauntings, Spirits and Reunions with Lost Loved Ones.  You can check out Sylvia Browne’s website at http://www.sylviabrowne.com. 

Garden Urthark is the author of Other World, an epic mystery in five parts available free for a limited time from Smashwords at http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/51153.

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On March 22, 1820, Commodore James Barron and Commodore Stephen Decatur fought in a duel at the Bladensburg dueling grounds just outside Washington, DC.  Each man aimed at the other’s hip in order to lessen the chance of a fatal injury; though each man wounded the other, the wound Barron inflicted on Decatur proved fatal.

James Barron

Stephen Decatur

 

 For Captain James Barron

 And the future unraveled as foretold

By a dream like a tale from days of old.

They said you killed a malicious corsair—

You were a hero even in my eyes,

And yet you slandered me for thirteen years—

You ruined me and my career with lies!

As commodore over the Chesapeake,

I did not expect the Leopard to attack.

Our countries were not at war but at peace.

For thirteen years you portrayed me as weak.

I would not have killed you in a duel—

I aimed not for your heart but at your hip—

By chance my bullet would become as cruel

As your insane view of my leadership.

It’s strange how after thirteen years of blame,

You were unprepared for death when it came.

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Sometime in 1986, I conceived the idea of substituting blocks of color for names of characters and certain other words in my literary work, thus finding a way to integrate verbal and visual art.  I worked with two basic shapes of different sizes, rectangles and circles that would approximate the letter height and length of a word.  At that size, the shapes would flow uninterrupted within the syntax of the sentence, creating meaning.

A page from "Orange."

At first, I experimented with pieces of color construction paper, cutting out my shapes by hand and pasting them into my work where words had been before.  If I kept the colors consistent, that is, if I used one color and only one color for the same word wherever it appeared, I could create a replica or imitation in pure color of a word.  This was before computers.  I had no effective way to share my work.  Color printing was and continues to be very expensive.  I knew no publisher would publish what I had done.  So I put my work away in a drawer as a kind of prototype and forgot about it—for twenty years.

By 2006, I had decided that I could try to publish a book in color that once again I knew no publisher would touch, featuring art by my deaf artist wife, Kasa, a complete unknown.  Immediately I saw an opportunity to publish my color field literature as I would come to call it—after the Washington color field painters of the 1960s.  The computer allowed me to reproduce my color blocks fairly easily and, since I was self-publishing the book, I would assume the expense.

The story I had chosen to render as color field literature was a chapter in a science fiction novel I had written first in 1980, and then rewritten more than once, though this particular chapter largely went unchanged through all my revisions.  The novel’s name is simply a block of orange color.  For the sake of convenience, we will call this story “Orange.”  It is available in two books of mine, one of which can be bought on amazon.com:  Portraits Deep in the Castle, a collection of poems, stories, and essays by me and reproductions of paintings in oil on canvas and acrylics on canvas as well as watercolors and drawings in pencil and pen by my wife.

Another page from "Orange."

I wasn’t able to find a name for what I’d done until after I’d had our book printed. During a lunch break from my day job, which is located in Washington, DC’s Chinatown, I wandered into the National Portrait Gallery where I found myself before one of Gene Davis’s color field paintings.  I realized that what I’d done with literature was something like what the color field painters had done with art.  I had stripped syntax down to a level reachable only through emotion. 

"Black Grey Beat" by Gene Davis

In the front matter of Portraits Deep in the Castle, I included a description of my wife’s and my own art as being what we called “Mute Art.”  Although my wife is deaf and has difficulty speaking, she is not mute; I am hearing and can talk and so I am not mute.  But we did feel as if we were nevertheless mute in a sense, mute since we were unable to talk about our own work, finding ourselves very much in the predicament world-renowned literary critic and scholar Northrop Frye described as existing for all art when he said criticism can talk but all the arts are dumb.

I had turned the tables on the reader, rendering him or her mute like myself, able to recognize a meaning yet unable to formulate the meaning in a word.  For even if you were to use a word as a substitute for any of the blocks of color I had used, you would change its meaning by using it.  I had created art that could not be paraphrased except by the most impossible and cumbersome, even ugly, of circumlocutions, creating a situation in the viewer’s mind like the overload of information assumed for the mind of a schizophrenic.

The reader would be mute not because he or she had too little to say, but too much:  could we describe this state as a form of  catatonia? Yet the reader would not be sick; he or she would be in an altered state of consciousness similar to that encountered by people presently considered to be ill.  Which brings us to the question:  are such people sick or are they simply misunderstood as psychiatrist R.D. Laing believed they were?

As Laing said in the The Politics of Experience (1967):  “What we see sometimes in some people whom we label and ‘treat’ as schizophrenics are the behavioral expressions of an experiential drama.  But we see this drama in a distorted form that our therapeutic efforts tend to distort further.” 

He also said in the same brilliant work:  “Some people wittingly, some people unwittingly, enter or are thrown into more or less total inner space and time.  We are socially conditioned to regard total immersion in outer space and time as normal and healthy.  Immersion in inner space and time tends to be regarded as antisocial withdrawal, a deviation, invalid, pathological per se, in some sense discreditable.”

Hence the discomfort level very probably rises in readers of my work as they are subjected to the challenge of supplying meaning to the block of color they encounter in place of a word.  The person considered to be ill, like the reader of my work, the person who “has entered this inner realm,” can be seen to be on a journey.  As Laing says, “We do not regard it as pathologically deviant to explore a jungle or to climb Mount Everest. We feel that Columbus was entitled to be mistaken in his construction of what he discovered when he came to the New World.  We are far more out of touch with even the nearest approaches of the infinite reaches of inner space than we now are with the reaches of outer space.”  Laing goes on to explain:  “We respect the voyager, the explorer, the climber, the space man.  It makes far more sense to me as a valid project—indeed, as a desperately and urgently required project for our time—to explore the inner space and time of consciousness.”

Criticism would thus seem to become by analogy a form of therapy for the reader of my work.  But criticism, like a cure, is not what we’re really after.  In The Politics of Experience, Laing advocated that “people who have been there and back again” (ex-patients, or, by analogy:  other readers) act as guides back to meaning for those as if lost on the journey.  The journey is one of “existential rebirth,” from inner to outer, from death to life.  

The reader is not ill.  He or she is simply lost or seems to be, only from the outsider’s position of being unable to translate his or her experience into an acceptable form of expression.  The reader does not need to be cured.  He or she needs to be brought back into what Hawthorne described as “the magnetic chain of humanity.”  The reader should not lose heart, for his experience of disorientation in inner space is bound to end in understanding as the connections between color blocks and character names and other simple concepts become clear.

Laing’s encouraging words for the schizophrenic may thus be taken to heart by the readers of my work:  others may say you have lost contact with them:  it may not be easy to contact the reality you have lost contact with during the time you have entered the inner space of my story.  And because these others “are human, and concerned, and even love us” and could even be “frightened,” they may try to “cure us.”  But as we have seen, we do not seek a cure, we seek a way back, we seek an end to our journey, we seek what might be called the comic resolution to our quest for meaning, and therefore, as Laing concludes, “They may succeed. But there is still hope that they will fail.”

Garden Urthark is the author of Other World, an epic mystery in five parts downloadable for free for a limited time from Smashwords at http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/51153.

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A brand is a promise.  Today writers are content creators and the brand they create establishes and builds a relationship that can move across media platforms, from film and TV to traditional publishing, self-publishing, traditional media, and new media or social media.  Who are you?  Who is your audience?  And what’s your mission?  The answers to these three questions form elements of the brand creator’s signature story, the simple yet powerful story that evokes an emotional response, holds top of mind awareness, and moves across the various media platforms, creating mindshare.

These are basic principles of Philippa Burgess’s “Your Media Brand Workshop.”  The thirty-six-year-old native New Yorker transplanted to Hollywood conducts the workshop over weekly nationwide dial-in phone conferences.  And in between imparting her message, Philippa takes time to “check in” with each phone participant to find out what each is working on, offering guidance and next steps.  “We get things done,” Philippa declares.

Based in Studio City, California, Philippa likes to relate that her father was a dreamer while her mother was a very practical person.  So Philippa likes to see herself as a healthy mixture of the two, a person who can help people take simple concrete steps to make their dreams come true.  What she does is inform, inspire, and challenge her “merry band” of charges to participate, contribute, and connect.  Passion drives the entire business.

Philippa Burgess

Philippa is passionate about her “Media Brand Workshop” and regularly appears at such events as the San Francisco Writers Conference to make a pitch for it.  She knows the realities of the market.  After graduating from USC with concentrations in film and international relations, she worked three years for ICM (International Creative Management), and then founded her own company, Mason Burgess Lifschulz, which evolved into her present company, Creative Convergence.  She runs Creative Convergence with partner Bradley Kushner.

As the company’s website points out, Creative Convergence specializes in literary management as well as management of screenwriters and writer/directors, producing film and television projects, and provides entertainment and media consulting services for companies and projects.  “Company and client credits include projects for Disney Channel, Lifetime, Sci-Fi, Starz, MTV, Cartoon Network, CBS/Paramount, ABC, New Line Cinema, Fox, Sony, and Paramount.”

Alumni of this program have gone on to publish books and eBooks, create apps and web series, produce feature films and shorts, get both local and national publicity, sell TV movies, gain literary representation in both publishing and film/TV, secure financing for projects, increase their public profile, and win awards. In addition to moving their own projects forward, common benefits to participants are establishing a strong community of fellow content creators and embracing the creativity involved in reaching out to find and engage an audience.

Philippa herself was co-producer on the film Dual, consultant on the TV pilot 52 Fights produced for ABC Touchstone, and Men’s Guide to the Women’s Bathroom at CBS-Paramount as well as consulting producer on the web series My Bitchy Witchy Paris Vacation.  Anyone interested in “Your Media Brand Workshop” can email Philippa Burgess at course@creativecvg.com.

Garden Urthark is the author of Other World, an epic mystery in five parts downloadable for free for a limited time from Smashwords at http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/51153.