I’ve been trying to imagine what a real interviewer would ask me about this book. Since I don’t have one yet — this is a soft launch with no publicist, no PR campaign, and no platform to speak of — I decided to interview myself.
Q: Who is this book for?
The honest answer is that I wrote it for a writer I kept meeting — at workshops, in correspondence, in conversations that went on too long after the official part was over. A writer who could execute the craft. Who understood structure. Who could write a competent scene. But who felt that their best work was happening somewhere underneath the work they were producing.
I wrote the book for that writer. If that’s not you, it may not be your book.
Q: Is this an academic book?
No. God, no.
The book is written in a literary register — it takes ideas seriously, it moves through them carefully — but every concept has to answer the same practical question: how does this help a writer write? If it can’t answer that, it doesn’t go in the book.
Q: Do I have to know Jung to read it?
You don’t have to know Jung. But you have to be willing to take psychology seriously as a lens for understanding why stories work. If the word “unconscious” makes you nervous, this may not be the right moment for this book. Come back to it later.
Q: Why Jung specifically?
Because Jung gave us the vocabulary. Shadow. Persona. Archetype. Active imagination. Individuation. These are not abstract philosophical categories. They are precise descriptions of things that happen in stories — things that writers have always done instinctively — given language and framework.
Q: What do you want writers to take away from it?
Permission. Permission to not know yet. Permission to follow the image before you understand it. Permission to go into the dark without a flashlight and trust that the story will show you where the light is.
That’s what the book is, finally. An argument for permission.
Available now at The Jungian Press.