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On The Table Read, “the best book magazine in the UK“, author Shepherd Siegel talks about the creative work that went into this new book, Tricking Power Into Performing Acts Of Love.
Written by JJ Barnes
I interviewed Shepherd Siegel about his life and career, his creative process, and what inspired him to write his new book, Tricking Power Into Performing Acts Of Love.
I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area in the midst of that whole utopian sixties thing. When I made it into college, I decided that I wanted to become a music teacher. Music comes out of the earth—from human experience, which is politics—and reaches for the heavens, for the spiritual. That reconciliation between the political and the spiritual has been my lifelong theme.
I started out on ‘cello, but soon hit the harder stuff, playing standup and electric bass. My first group, Moe Mac and the Melody Wranglers, played country music. Reaching for harmonic and rhythmic challenges, I played in the jazz trio Swingmatism, but the big career move was with the power pop band Thin Ice.
Still, the teaching thing seemed right. My first teaching assignment was with youth in lockup in a California Juvenile Detention Center, the only un-mellow job in bucolic Santa Cruz. I went on to earn my doctorate at Berkeley, with studies in anthropology and special education. And I developed Career Ladders, an innovative internship programs supporting troubled and troubling youth who were making the transition from secondary school to adult life.
In graduate school, I learned academic writing, and I have over thirty publications in the education field. In search of a broader audience, and in service to the utopian dreams of my youth, I wrote Disruptive Play: The Trickster in Politics and Culture, whichwon awards from Foreword Reviews and the Colorado Independent Publishers Association.
After years of pondering what do you get when you braid a utopian political vision with spirituality, I stumbled into an epiphany: in a word, you get the Trickster’s approach to social change. The Trickster’s blessing comes through the practice of not taking power seriously and making room for more love and less power. The pranking and practical joking of The Trickster opens this portal and the pathway away from our current malaise of Warrior infatuation and towards a more perfect society.
I never wanted to write a book per se. I ALWAYS wanted to contribute to making the world a better place. In helping schools and adult agencies around the US adopt Career Ladders, we knew that writing it all down, from the policy advocacy to the nuts and bolts of implementation would help sustain and make it more widely available. Thus my first book, Career Ladders, was a hybrid textbook that made the case for such internship and case management programs, but was also used to train professionals in education and adult services.
I grew up in a climate where people were not afraid to dream of a better world, where I learned from the artistic, spiritual, and political practices of grownups who retained the ability to be playful in a way that they were as children, and I was intuitively drawn to this as a solution to the political versus spiritual dilemma. Having practiced activism with like-minded colleagues and allies over the years, I set about the task, as a full-fledged middle-ager, of finally writing down what had come to me as a youth.
My personal experiences in radical peace and art and education movements led to research in mythology, anthropology, popular culture, sociology, political history, art history and so forth—that brought a more panoramic context to what had been my personal experience (one small but inspirational chunk of history, 1960-2010).
I started to write it down, I read and learned about nonfiction writing, I accumulated ideas, stories, knowledge and inspiration from many books. I paid attention. I let others review and make critiques. I borrowed the best of the ideas discovered through research and conversation.
This process finally produced Disruptive Play: The Trickster in Politics and Culture, and took about fifteen years. From that point, its companion book, 2022’s Tricking Power into Performing Acts of Love, took only another three.
The original intention—to cast some connecting spiderwebs amongst the folks who dream of a better, more fun world—has not changed. But Disruptive Play was written in thrall to the heroes of my youth: The Beats, The Simpsons, Abbie Hoffman, Marcel Duchamp, Alfred Jarry, Andy Kaufman, and so forth. With the notable exception of Lisa Simpson, all white males.
Tricking Power into Performing Acts of Love is a companion to Disruptive Play that broadens the scope of the exploration to look beyond Western males and to include trickster women.
My biggest challenge was a very exciting one. Scholarship and psychology propose a personality profile for the Trickster archetype, one that I fleshed out and expanded in both books. But Tricksters, though they ultimately have no gender, and are known to play with it, switching it up when it suits them. But in general they are presented initially as male.
So the intriguing research question was to try and discriminate between when a folk and mythology character profile was being colored by the patriarchal climate in which the story was told, and when that profile resonates authentically with the collective unconscious, when it transcends cultural bias. So researching the female trickster proved to be a complex but rewarding challenge. I hope that folks will read this part of the book with as much interest and excitement I had in writing it.
It starts with books. I love making use of the library and the Internet, but as a writer, it’s important that I buy books, because a big part of my process is marking them up and posting notes on the book itself. Equally important is note-taking, a necessary adjunct to careful reading of the source. We’re all human, we all have biases and ideas that we bring to the endeavor. But just as vital is the integration of facts and ideas that challenge our initial assumptions. These are basic principles of good scholarship.
Tricking Power has two beating hearts. The first is a suite of three chapters, The Triumph of Eshù Elégba and how that West African Trickster god presents perhaps the world’s most complex and complete Trickster persona. The journey of enslaved people from their West African spiritual milieu to the founding of a Black culture, of expressions of humanity throughout the Western arts, is one of struggle, demand for justice, and triumphant beauty, a collective spiritual energy that lights the path to liberation.
Likewise, female tricksters have never had the luxury of the carefree, cartoonish, ribald, and rib-tickling trickster adventures that populate much Trickster mythology and folklore and genres like slapstick. As the oppressed sex, they enter the fray of human politics with a variation on the Trickster that comes equipped with the moral prerogative to right the wrongs of sexism.
This second beating heart, A Million Years of Fifty Female Tricksters, bears a title inspired by the sexy and victorious poses of Nancy Archer in 1958’s Attack of the 50 Foot Woman and Loana in 1966’s One Million Years B.C., played by Allison Hayes and Raquel Welch, respectively. And evolved by the twenty-first-century version of the immortal Wonder Woman, played by Gal Gadot. In the freeing air of speculative science fiction, these women sacrifice none of their sexual appeal and dispense with the stereotype of helplessness that more typically shackles them.
Indeed, female tricksters more frequently combine with hero and warrior personae than do males. Most profoundly, female tricksters raise the possibility of tricksterism and governance.
As this work emerged, I was able to create “bookends” to the two hearts. Opening chapters that address the critical role of slapstick in conjuring tricksters and the connection between the very young child and grownup tricksters. And a chapter about one of the world’s greatest trickster types, the most famous person to have never become famous, Lord Richard Buckley. The bookend on the back end is an entertaining piece on the trickster attribute of time travel and the enormous cultural influence of Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure.
I belong to a couple of writers’ groups who help me edit the original piece, and then before I submit for publication, I have a professional editor who goes through the manuscript. Since I cite all of my sources and include a selected bibliography, having a copy editor who reviews all of my footnotes and endnotes is essential.
Save perfectionism for the final draft. No matter how ragged, just get your first draft done. Make your points more clearly with each revision. Read what you’ve written aloud, and/or have others read it aloud to you, this will bring clumsiness and errors to the fore. Consider outlining. Not everyone needs to outline, but there are plenty of writers who don’t and who should.
I’d like to get out there and interview people with whom the Trickster Force is strong. I’d like to amplify their voice, their wisdom, and the advice they would give to others so that we can grow a movement that transcends power.
In the beginning of our interview, I spoke of my main intention, which is to contribute, and wanting to inspire people to think about tomorrow, to dream a better world. We need this now more than ever. Though I have confidence in my writing, and I have done my best, that may or may not be good enough. But for every reader I attract, my efforts increase in value, as does my gratitude and pride of accomplishment.
Blog, purchase options, and the whole idea here at https://shepherdsiegel.com
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Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Disruptive-Play-The-Trickster-in-Politics-and-Culture-294703337871991/
Twitter: @ShepherdSiegel
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shepherd-siegel-phd-9b0b951/
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