Writing has been a passion of mine for more than 50 years. I got my first poem published when I was 18 years old, and haven’t looked back since that time. However, most of my writing has been anything but oriented to naturist fiction. It was only since my retirement as an educator and mental-health counsellor that I have found using naturism as a backdrop, or should I say, a foundation, for my writing.
I published a small book in 2009 called Though a Jungian Lens: Swamplands, a book I wrote while spending the winter in Mexico, somewhere along the Yucatan coast. Many of the photos in the book were taken while I wandered through the mangrove swamp while nude, and the writing of the book was done while I was nude.
A few years later, in 2013, I wrote the first of three poetry books that used both photography and words to capture just what it was like to explore the psyche of a naturist. This was the first time I used nude photography in a published book. The three poetry books written are now out-of-print and will likely stay that was since they were more personal, than they were designed with the reading public in mind.
The next year, 2014, I tried my hand at writing a novel, A Small Company of Pilgrims. I am still unsure about whether or not I could call it a naturist novel, in spite of the fact that naturism is an essential part of the story. Rather than being a naturist genre story, it is more of a literary novel that wrestles with human nature, especially when confronted by nudity, in our modern world. I since that initial publication, have added to the book, including a new cover. The book has met with mixed reviews as the book challenged the reader to look at the world through a different lens, a worldview that encompasses not only naturism, but also Buddhism and depth psychology.
Then I wrote a second novel following the continuing story of the protagonist in the pilgrim novel, René Beauchemin. In the spring of this year, 2017, I published It’s Complicated When a Man Meets a Woman. The reviews for this second book are significantly higher due mostly through the simplifying of the story while still keeping a strong foundation of naturism, psychology, and Buddhism. Naturism plays a significantly larger role in this second novel. And, in my opinion, it remains literary fiction that looks beneath the layer of one’s skin to discover the truths of what it really means to be a human in relationship to others.
In order to find out what is available to the reading public, please check out my author page at Amazon.