The View From the Other Side of My Head: My Education in Shamanic Trance chronicles the first few years of the author’s education. Beginning with a co-worker’s request that he help her with a rather unusual homework assignment, his deepening exploration of the dreamworld, accompanied by various Spirits and informed by anthropological scholarship, modern shamanistic literature, and recent neurological studies, led him to a new understanding of ancestral and personal traumas, intimacy with a tree, the bowels of a Phoenix, several moments of satori, and a wilder and wider sense of the human mind’s workings, capabilities, and place in the world.
Features of the book/author’s note:
This memoir of a modern American’s inadvertent introduction to and fascination with the dreamworld presents an unusual perspective on shamanic trance. It is unlike the vast bulk of literature on the subject in several ways. Although it is informed by Polynesian shamanic tradition, it is neither an anthropological study nor a contribution to the history of religion, nor does it purport to convey ancient Indigenous wisdom. (Pace, Carlos Castaneda!) It is not an account of drug-induced mental states (no drugs were abused in the making of these trances). It is not a how-to manual. It does not attempt to express a philosophy, ideology, or theology of shamanism. It does not proceed from a stance of authority, rather, it is an “Alice’s-eye” view of the plunge into Wonderland: a step-by-step account of a modern, agnostic/atheist American, educated to view the world through the lenses of verbal fluency, Aristotelian logic, and Western science, suddenly discovering that within him and biologically integral to him resides a consciousness additional to the one apparent to daily awareness; a consciousness that operates, as do the many biological organs and processes that work autonomously within us, to maintain, inform, and mediate our relations with the world and within ourselves. The book describes the profound disorientation, confusion, and socially isolating impact of the experience and the author’s adjustment to it. It contains numerous descriptions of shamanic trance states. Within the limits of verbal language’s ability to do so, the author attempts to convey as faithfully as he could what he saw, felt, heard, and did. In this, too, the book is unusual, being the rough testimony of a novice’s stumbling progress into the dreamworld, rather than the polished reports of “journeying” by experts and adepts in which an interpretive coherency constructed after the fact may obscure what it actually was like to be there.
As such, the book is particularly directed towards people curious about the experiential aspects of shamanic trance, and people who are in the initial stages of exploring trance for themselves and want the support, validation, and sense of community that comes from comparing experiences. It meets needs beyond those addressed by the “how-to-be-a-shaman” literature and is largely ignored by scholarship.
The book’s organization is unusual. It combines poetry and prose to depict the story holistically and in keeping with the interface between the sensual, imagistic, allusive language of trance and the more purely verbal focus of our ordinary means of discourse. I wanted to give the reader a more accurate taste of shamanic trance than can be achieved by prose alone. I have worked hard to avoid the main pitfall of such hybrid writing, which is to impair accessibility and clarity.
Praise for the writing of Seth Steinzor
“Recommended . . . compelling . . . strong and consistent use of sensory images . . . almost surreal, musical quality . . . humorous and intriguing . . . captivating throughout . . . a memorable retelling . . .”
—U.S. Review of Books
“. . . achingly personal . . . the finesse—and humor—of someone who has read the classic closely and lovingly. . . . Ultimately, Steinzor’s poem is not merely a rewriting of Inferno—the kind of exercise given to undergraduates in which they’re asked to consider who would populate Dante’s hell today. It’s both a paean to Dante’s unendingly enthralling vision and—given Seth’s visceral, even hotheaded emotional reactions to each shade—a personal meditation on humans’ transgressions against one another.”
—Amy Lilly, SevenDays
About the Author
Born in 1952, Seth Steinzor grew up in the suburbs of Buffalo, New York. His parents encouraged his verbally precocious creativity. After graduating from Middlebury College in 1974, a job with the local Public Defender led Steinzor to law school. He slept on his 1979 Juris Doctor degree until in 1990 Vermont Attorney General Amestoy promoted him from Civil Rights Investigator to Assistant Attorney General. During the next twenty-seven years, he represented the State, married, fathered two children, divorced, and wrote most of In Dante’s Wake. He retired in 2017 to a life of woodworking, gardening, voracious reading, and writing.
SPECS
The View from the Other Side of My Head
Nonfiction
Paperback Original
Trim Size: 6 x 9
Page Count: 252
Price: $19.95 (CA $26.95)
ISBN: 9798991413404
Publication Date: MARCH 20, 2025
Distributor: IPG/Chicago, Ingram.
Rights sold: All rights available.
Rights: Dede Cummings, dede@greenwriterspress.com
Publicity: Sophia Lawrence, sophialawrence27@gmail.com
Distributor: IPG; also available through Follett/Baker & Taylor, Ingram, and other wholesalers.
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