A conversation between James Shaheen (publisher and editor of Tricycle) and author Douglas Penick, moderated by Jess Skyleson
You will receive an email reminder with a link to join in the days before this event. If you have any questions, write to: arrowsmithpress@gmail.com
Douglas J. Penick has published novels on the 3rd Ming Emperor (Journey of the North Star) and about spiritual searchers (Dreamers and Their Shadows), as well as his and Charles Ré’s translation of Pascal Quignard’s A Terrace In Rome. Shorter works appeared in Agni, Chicago Quarterly, Cahiers de L’Herne, New England Quarterly, Kyoto Journal, Tricycle, Utne Reader, and many others.
James Shaheen James Shaheen is the editor and publisher of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, an independent quarterly magazine that presents Buddhist wisdom and practices from a number of traditions to a Western audience. James began his Buddhist practice in the mid-1990s, studying with teachers from a number of Buddhist traditions. He is particularly interested in Buddhism's growth in the West and its applicability to Western politics, culture, and everyday life.
Jess Skyleson, an ordained lay member of the Order of Interbeing, is a former aerospace and mechanical engineer who began writing poetry after being diagnosed with stage IV cancer at age 39. Their poems have been published in Evocations, Nixes Mate Review, The Under Review, the 2020 Oberon Poetry magazine, as well as the Wickford Art Association's Poetry & Art book and exhibit.
“In this illuminating work, Penick explores contemporary crises using the frame of a classic story from Buddhism... By reflecting on personal as well as global issues, Penick models an unflinching but also compassionate orientation toward life."
— Publisher’s Weekly
A brilliant, compassionate, heart-breakingly written, woven, acknowledgement of the unimaginable Anthropocene rolling toward us. As Douglas says, “We are being carried forward into a disturbed and disturbing unknown.” But this is not a book of gloom and doom, as he writes, “We must move forward.” And he does so with insight and wisdom, with Buddhist stories, with the life of the Buddha, with turning points in his life with his Teacher, Trungpa Rinpoche, and with touching, telling alightings from his own life from childhood until his aging (slightly) now. Well worth anything you can give to its reading, musing, in this vast humming, in this “Ocean of Buddhas.”
— Zentatsu Richard Baker
“Ravaged jungles, extinction, our own death, these familiar fears. But held in unknowing, they turn more intimate, far stranger, wind-blown and insistent whispers that open in our heart, dream lines across the anthropocene. Everywhere Douglas Penick looks — in world literature, old religions, his own mind — he finds their hints and clues and fragments and images, brief memories. He invites us into the same bold practice of vigorous waiting. There are hidden pathways here. Please come in.”
— Kidder Smith
Translator of Sun Tzu: The Art of War