Joey Madia, New Mystics Reviews

(2009, Fisher King Press, www.fisherkingpress.com, ISBN 978-0-9810344-4-7) Reviewed by Joey Madia Eighteen months ago, I reviewed Dr. Staples’s Guilt with a Twist, a book with which I had some reservations. In the case of The Creative Soul (subtitled “Art and the Quest for Wholeness”), a relatively short book (91 pages including the Index), he has expanded on my favorite section of Guilt, dealing with the process of creativity as it applies to mental health and the integration of the Shadow, a core idea in the work and writings of Carl Jung (Staples is a Jungian analyst who trained in Switzerland after making a mid-life career-switch at the age of 50). 
 Inherent in the process of integrating one’s Shadow is the first step of acknowledging that it exists and exploring the push and pull of opposites at play within us all. It is this dynamic tension between good and evil, light and dark, loyalty to other and loyalty to self that feeds and fuels our creative impulses. For those whose deni...

As an avid reader, writer, and writing teacher, I’m always on the lookout for new authors and new forms of literature, especially re-inventions of the novel. My own experimentations with what constitutes the novel form have paralleled the innovations found in film and music—using technology to aid with research, presentation, formatting, marketing, and all the rest. In Mel Mathews’ novels I have found a new form that leaves modern innovations behind and instead goes for a simplification of the novel into its earliest roots—as a kind of hybrid journal, fairy tale, travelogue, and reiteration of fact thinly veiled as fiction. At least, it seems to be fact thinly veiled as fiction. The parallels between Mel and his main character abound, and the lines of reality are often crossed (“You’re in the next book,” his main character says to people along the way). Samsara (the third book in the series) opens with a potential clue: “The lies will be honest.” In Menopause Man there is even an exten...