Posts on the Visionary Literature genre, general and non-fiction
My work, The Anathemas: A Novel of Reincarnation and Restitution, rates an “honorable mention” in this excellent article on The Shift Network site, “Visionary Fiction and the Global Pandemic: A Brave New World” by Jodine…
Dr. Gary Schwartz, Scientist and Parapsychologist In March-April 2017, I wrote a three-part series for the Visionary Fiction Alliance website entitled “Visionary Fiction and the Science of Consciousness.” Given the audience there, it is tailored…
Where do the ideas and visions that eventually become complex cities and timeless books come from? I don’t know actually—how to blunt a piece from the get-go! However, I do know that they first show up as blip of light barely large and lasting enough to evoke a “What the heck was that?” It gets a smidge of our attention before it flicks on by.
Art is kind of an innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purposes through him.
Carl Jung, “Psychology and Literature,” Modern Man in Search of a Soul, p. 169
Join me in Celebrating Visionary Fiction Pioneer Monty Joynes on the Visionary Fiction Alliance website. I am the fortunate owner of a set, each inscribed with a personal message, of all four volumes of the original…
It may come as a shock, or at least a revelation, to Visionary Fiction readers and writers that Carl Jung, the eminent Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology, defined Visionary Fiction and described it in detail in a lecture delivered in 1929, “Psychology and Literature,” included in the volume Modern Man in Search of a Soul. Rather than the narrow sub-genre it is often reduced to, Jung depicts Visionary Fiction as a super-genre that forms one of the two major divisions of artistic production: “I will call the one mode of artistic creation psychological, and the other visionary.”
I recently had the good fortune to come across the website of a group of like-minded writers who had formed the Visionary Fiction Alliance. Of course, I jumped in enthusiastically and joined. My effort to help make the “visionary” genre better known started ten years ago, after several grueling rounds with agents over an earlier version of my novel, The Anathemas (eventually published by Outskirts Press in 2010).
