Showing posts with label creativity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label creativity. Show all posts
WRITE THE WORLD!
TAP-DANCING ON THE RAZOR’S EDGE
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It’s the smallest and most dynamic and most important bridge in human experience—one that everyone would like to be standing on, but few have the courage to attempt:
It’s the bridge of VISION--that links dream with reality.
It’s a very small bridge and very narrow and uncomfortable when you first step onto it. But the longer you’re on it, the more maneuvering room you realize you have. The more comfortable it becomes standing on what you recognize as the razor’s edge.
You learn to tap dance.
You learn to laugh and cry again.
You learn to enjoy the dance, to sing while you dance.
You learn perspective. You build character. You turn from butterfly to lioness.
Sooner or later, you should begin to feel, as I do, incredibly fortunate to be doing what we love the most—storytelling—and getting paid to do it. As a producer, editor, literary manager, author consultant, and brand launcher, I get to be an alchemist, turning stories into gold.
And as someone who tries hard to always think OUTSIDE THE BOX—especially since the boxes either are crumbling or have already crumbled--it has been thrilling to see my clients’ DRACULA THE UNDEAD on page one of cnn.com and on the New York Times extended list—after I added a brand name to the mix; and to be producing my clients’ Jerry Blaine and Lisa McCubbin’s THE KENNEDY DETAIL, which appears from Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster after we found a way to get Clint Hill to write the forward, and we managed to set up, with our reality partner Renegade83 a 2-hour Discovery Sunday special which garnered an Emmy nomination. These clients danced the danced successfully, and because they, like all storytellers, are inveterate masochists are already back on that bridge dancing that crazy dance again.
No one is forcing you to do this. Remind yourself of that when the going gets toughest. You’ve chosen this career, and you can only lose at it if you quit.
What you are doing, in business terms, is creating the most valuable commodity on earth, “intellectual property.” And today that is worth more than real property!
You are entering an infinite profession, of unlimited potential. Not even the sky is the limit—my client Nik Halik’s The Thrillionaire has been in outer space! In this world of studios crashing, networks retrenching, publishers conglomerating, where everything is changing all the time—at least one thing is constant: the need for stories never ceases.
“Trackers” are highly paid by the major studios to find stories and bring them in.
No wonder storytellers were considered sacred among the ancient Greeks--because they were the channelers of STORIES, stories that described reality in terms humans can relate to.
Therefore don’t let your ego prematurely destroy your career, as I have seen it do for so many writers. “No ego” should be your mantra, as you take your WORK, not YOURSELF, seriously.
Eventually, on that razor’s edge, you’ll learn that though the Promised Land IS worth the promise it’s the struggle to get there that is the most valuable experience of your life.
As storytellers who are here this weekend because you actively pursue your vision, you know full well how narrow the bridge we stand on is, how fragile. But you should also know that we’re heroes for even attempting to cross this bridge.
I’d like read a tribute to your work by the greatest Greek poet since Homer and Sappho. His name was Constantine P. Cavafy, and he lived in Alexandria, Egypt, and died less than a hundred years ago:
The First Step
The young poet Evmenis
complained one day to Theocritus:
"I've been writing for two years now
and I've composed only one idyll.
It's my single completed work.
I see, sadly, that the ladder
of Poetry is tall, extremely tall;
and from this first step I'm standing on now
I'll never climb any higher."
Theocritus retorted: "Words like that
are improper, blasphemous.
Just to be on the first step
should make you happy and proud.
To have reached this point is no small achievement:
what you've done already is a wonderful thing.
Even this first step
is a long way above the ordinary world.
To stand on this step
you must be in your own right
a member of the city of ideas.
And it's a hard, unusual thing
to be enrolled as a citizen of that city.
Its councils are full of Legislators
no charlatan can fool.
To have reached this point is no small achievement:
what you've done already is a wonderful thing."
So let’s pause to celebrate--and applaud ourselves right now--for even being here today, on this step—whether it is your first, or whether you’ve taken a few steps already. If you are among the latter, you’ll appreciate the words of the great playwright-poet Samuel Beckett: “Do not come down the ladder. I have taken it away.”
Let’s also face it: you’re in “show BUSINESS,” as my client and partner Michael A. Simpson constantly reminds me; and you must deal with it as the BUSINESS of SHOW. What years have taught me is how important it is, never more so than today, to understand the BUSINESS of being a visionary, a person others call “mad” or “insane.” Remind them of Salvador Dali’s response: “The difference between myself and a madman is that I am not mad.”
I always say that the difference between a visionary and a con man in the creative world is SUCCESS. No one believes you can really do it, because everyone has told them how hard it is—and they themselves are too fearful to try.
Yes, it is difficult. That’s why, though everyone in the world has a story, NOT everyone—only YOU—are doing something about it.
Your personal cutting edge difference will be dealing with your career as a business on all fronts. Business requires a plan, an investment, a marketing program, and unceasing determination to move the flag across the field, remembering, for consolation, that if you die in the midst of your own dream that, by definition, has to be a happy death!
As Muriel Rukeyser said, for us humans, “the universe is made of stories, not of atoms.” Whatever it’s really made of, all that matters is how we perceive it. And it’s through stories that we form our perception.
When you’re standing on the razor’s edge in fear, or complaining—as all of us constantly do--remind yourself:
No one is FORCING you to tell your stories to the world. No one is holding this gun to your head but yourself.
You’re here by your free choice, while they are behind their counters or their commuting dashboards or their tellers’ windows because they are afraid to take the chances you are getting used to.
Meanwhile, you are following your dream.
Welcome to the world of storytellers:
What is a storyteller? A storyteller is a simply a communicative dreamer—a person who dares to learn how to communicate her dreams to all of us.
Doing so is not only his privilege, it’s his responsibility. I always told my Occidental College students, “If you have a dream, and fail to express it, you have denied all of us a unique vision that only you can bring us.”
But Aristotle said, “Excellence is not a plan.” Dreamers need to plan. An authorpreneur who truly wishes to succeed in the commercial world of storytelling needs to analyze it from a business point of view. AMBITION and VISION are NOT ENOUGH. You must equal them with CRAFT, TECHNIQUE, AND SKILL.
In my book, A WRITER’S TIME, I wrote that four things are needed to succeed in Hollywood:
1) Persistence (endurance, determination)
2) Contacts (networking)
3) Being a fun person to work with (and its corollary, “Staying off everyone’s life is too short list”) and
4) TALENT
It’s sobering to realize that any one of the first three are sufficient in themselves. Bad movies can be made through sheer persistence; mediocre books can be published just through strong contacts. But the 4th, the one we’re all looking and hoping for, is NOT sufficient. Talent alone must be combined with the others.
And add LUCK or GOOD TIMING and, remembering what someone said that the “harder I work the luckier I get.”
You might also add ORIGINALITY—which Joe Roth defined as “being able to think of something that hasn’t been on TV!”
Recently, trying to maintain the business of show business, my company has evolved. We raise independent financing for films, and encourage writers to become filmmakers to move their projects forward. We consult with writers on their career strategies one on one. We launch brands. As literary managers, we look for the next Sue Grafton or Robert Ludlum whose vision CLEARLY extends into the future.
What we learn from the tap-dance on the razor’s edge is:
TOUGHEN UP.
KEEP MOVING FORWARD DESPITE YOUR PRESENT MOODS. A week from now, you won’t even remember how you feel today; so don’t let it stop you from working. My wife Kayoko is always reminding me that Gandhi said, “Full effort is full success.”
PERSIST. NEVER GIVE UP. Yes, you may be going through hell. But “if you’re going through hell,” Winston Churchill advised, “keep going!”
NEVER PUT DEADLINES ON YOUR CAREER.
TAKE YOUR CAREER, NOT YOURSELF, SERIOUSLY. Don’t go from saying “I just want to be better” to “I just want to write what I want to write.” I’ve repeatedly seen clients lose the humble perspective created before success hit them, and sabotage their careers.
NEVER PUT ASIDE YOUR VISION, BUT PERFECT IT, PERFECT IT, PERFECT IT and make allies of those who can help you do that to bring your craft and skills to the level of your talent and ambition. If you continue pursuing your dream no matter what until you achieve it—and then you’ll have bigger dreams, of course—by definition, YOU CAN’T FAIL. Carlyle put it this way: “Success is steady progress toward a worthy goal.”
Walt Disney was turned down 302 times before he got financing for Disneyland.
Frank Herbert’s DUNE was rejected 36 times. Don’t let your representative give up at 32!
George Lucas was forced to put up his own money to pay for “Star Wars” because NO ONE believed in his vision. By the time the film came out, he was bankrupt. He is now fabulously wealthy of course—PRECISELY BECAUSE HE WAS UNABLE TO SELL ANY OF THE RIGHTS TO THE FILM OR ITS SEQUELS. Shakespeare played politics to get the Globe Theater built for his own plays. Sophocles and Aeschylus had to do the same thing in the time of classical Greece. Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, in fact most late nineteenth century novelists began their careers SELF-PUBLISHING.
Jerzy Kosinski’s STEPS won awards, but was rejected by publishers 34 times—once by its very own publisher, after it had already been published.
Remember what William Goldman observed, in his Adventures in the Screen Trade: NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING.
In today’s tough world of authorpreneurship, be flexible and always THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX.
Yes, the business of becoming and being a professional writer is hard. The hard part is the great part. That’s why you’ve chosen to do it. The river is wide between where we are now and the success and attention we want is on the other side. The razor’s edge is thin and dangerous. You don’t NEED to do this. You’re DESTINED to do this.
What could be a happier mission in life?
How can you fail at being yourself?
And now you know what the bridge is—a razor’s edge--and how to dance on it, just promise me and yourself that you won’t fall off.
“Art Informs Life and Life Informs Art”: Dennis Palumbo on Art, Life, and Psychotherapy – Part II
SECOND THOUGHTS
By Vincenzo Di Nicola, MPhil, MD, PhD, FCAHS, DLFAPA, DFCPA
Dennis Palumbo, MA, MFT
Introducing Dennis Palumbo – Psychotherapist and Writer
It is a pleasure to introduce Dennis Palumbo, MA, MFT, to the readers of Psychiatric Times. Dennis is a licensed psychotherapist in Los Angeles, CA, where he specializes in treating individuals in the creative arts community of Hollywood. He is uniquely well-suited for this specialized work given his double, even triple, skill sets as a former Hollywood scriptwriter and current detective fiction novelist,1 teacher of creative writing,2 and his work with Robert Stolorow, MD, incorporating intersubjectivity theory in his psychotherapeutic work. Dennis will soon be addressing readers of Psychiatric Times in a monthly column of his own, “Creative Minds: Psychotherapeutic Approaches and Insights.” His latest essay is about his role as Consulting Producer on the recent Hulu TV series, “The Patient.”3
We have had an enriching exchange about art, life, and psychotherapy for several years. Dennis was our invited guest for the inaugural meeting of American Psychiatric Association Caucus on Medical Humanities in Psychiatry in New Orleans, LA, in 2022. Dennis’ uniquely diverse and specialized skill sets allow me to explore the question of the relationship between the psy disciplines and detective fiction. More generally, I wanted to explore the roots of creativity and empathy in creative writing and clinical work and connect it to therapy.
Di Nicola: A friend of mine, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, PhD, was asked by Stephen Colbert on his show to describe cognitive neuroscience in 5 words. Without skipping a beat, Steve said, “Brain cells fire in patterns.” That echoed our teacher Don Hebb’s discovery of “cell assemblies” at McGill University. As a social psychiatrist and philosopher, my answer would be that “Meaning emerges in social context.” What would your 5 words be? Either about writing or about therapy?
Palumbo: For writing: “Communicating inner worlds in narrative.”
For therapy: “Therapy explores subjectivity in context.”
Di Nicola: We grew up on opposite sides of the US-Canada border in steel towns with large immigrant working class populations. I am a first-generation Italian immigrant who grew up in Hamilton, ON, while you are a third generation Italian-American from Pittsburgh, PA. What does your Italian heritage mean to you generally and as a writer and therapist?
Palumbo: I take great pride in being an Italian-American. Growing up in Pittsburgh, I learned a lot about the Italian craftsmen, painters, and contractors who built much of the city. I think I have inherited the Italian love of good food, pride in hard work, and talking with your hands! I also value our long legacy as visual artists and performers.
As a therapist, I think my background as a child of Italian-American blue-collar workers informs, consciously or not, my prejudice in favor of hard work, consistency, and passionate emotions. Not that I trumpet these values in session with patients, but I must admit that I am drawn to patients who exhibit them.
I also relate to struggle itself, having grown up hearing of my grandparents’ struggles against ethnic stereotyping and all-out discrimination. So the career struggles of my creative patients, especially in such brutal marketplaces as Hollywood and publishing, affect me deeply, and supporting them comes naturally.
I can only think of 1 or 2 clinical colleagues who share my Italian-American heritage, both of whom take their work seriously and passionately. The rest of my colleagues are primarily Jewish, though one Gentile has snuck in.
In my Hollywood career, most of my fellow writers and producers were Jewish. There are a good number of Italian-American creatives in the entertainment industry, but most felt the need to anglicize their names (best-known example is David Chase—originally DeCesare—creator of “The Sopranos”). This was particularly true for performers, like Tony Bennett (Antonio Dominick Benedetto), Pat Cooper (Pasquale Vito Caputo), and Dean Martin (Dino Paul Crocetti).
As a writer, particularly in my fiction, my Italian-American heritage is front-and-center. The protagonist of my Daniel Rinaldi mystery series is a proud Italian-American, and this aspect of his character, background, and opinions is highlighted throughout the books. (In one of the books, reference is made to a very reticent public figure with a rock-ribbed Republican background. As described to Rinaldi by an acquaintance: “He’s a WASP, Danny. All he cares about is Scotch and quiet.”) Which reveals some prejudice on my part!
Other Italian-American characters show up throughout the series, as well as in some of my short stories. Sometimes, their being Italian-American is an important aspect of their characterization; sometimes it is just incidental.
Di Nicola: Psychiatry and the Cinema explores film from the dual perspectives of the Gabbard brothers: Krin, who teaches comparative literature, and Glenn, who is a well-known psychotherapist.4 What are the implications of transferring insights from the page to the screen for you as an author?
Palumbo: Since the beginning of my writing career, prose and screenwriting have been intertwined. I started writing short stories while still in high school and received some very nice rejection notes from many of our finest magazines. I continued writing stories when I arrived in Los Angeles to try to break into TV and film writing. Interestingly enough, the same week my then-writing partner and I were hired as staff writers on the ABC sitcom, “Welcome Back, Kotter,” I sold my first mystery short story to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. And it was while I worked on that popular sitcom that I sold my first novel, a science fiction thriller called City Wars, to Bantam Books. Throughout my Hollywood career I continued to write Op-Eds, reviews, essays, and short stories.
I would say the biggest takeaway from my scriptwriting experiences, both in TV and film, was a sharpening of my skill at dialogue, which I feel enhances my fiction immensely. Writing for Hollywood also teaches you to “cut to the chase”—as they say in the entertainment business—in that your work in prose becomes more streamlined, less flabby and overwritten. On the other hand, sometimes when adapting a prose work—a novel or short story—for the screen, it is actually better to expand on a scene (or even a sentence) in the work to maximize its dramatic effect. For example, I was once hired to write a screenplay based on a novella by Jim Harrison. At one point in the narrative, the main character goes to a bordello where, as Harrison wrote, “it cost him $300 not to get a hard-on.” A vivid, explanatory sentence, and another rueful reminder of the character’s mid-life crisis. In my script adaptation, that 1 line became the basis for a 3-page scene. It was an event in his life that, while perfectly described as an ironic single sentence in the novella, needed to be dramatized to work onscreen.
In transferring material from the page to the screen, as in much in life, there is no “one-size-fits-all” model. Which, by the way, is exactly how I feel about psychotherapeutic treatment.
Di Nicola: David Gilmour was a delightful film critic for CBC television. When his 16-year-old son Jesse dropped out of school for a year, his father made a deal with him: he had to watch 3 films a week of his father’s choosing. His charming memoir, The Film Club,5 tells the story of that year and what happened to their father-son relationship. What are the implications of transferring insights from the arts (novels, screen) to “real life” and to therapy?
Palumbo: When it comes to this question, the usual answer is that art informs life and life informs art. The latter position is much more easily grasped: things happen to people in life (marriage, divorce, childbirth, job loss, chronic illness, etc) and artists transform these experiences into either a narrative, musical, plastic or visual form. Books, plays, films, TV series, poems, musicals, etc, derive their expressive power by reflecting or transforming or questioning or validating the assumptions associated with the whole range of the human experience. So that part is easy to understand; ie, the phrase “art imitates life.”
Where it gets interesting is when we consider how readily and powerfully the arts inform life. To take a cliched example, after the hundreds of romantic stories produced by Hollywood over the past 100 years, couples have some particular ideas of what their relationship “should” be like. Certainly they are aware that whatever is going on their relationship, it surely does not seem or feel like what has been seen by them onscreen. Case in point: years ago, there was a popular TV series called “Hart to Hart,” in which Robert Wagner and Stefanie Powers played a rich, beautiful, breezily-romantic couple who solved crimes (of course they did). While the series was on the air, the wife in a couple I was seeing explained that her goal for therapy was: “To be like the couple on ‘Hart to Hart’.” Of course, a nearly impossible model to emulate.
None of us are immune. When I was a kid, reading about the witty writers dining regularly at the Algonquin table, I just assumed that when I grew up and became a famous writer, that was how I would spend my evenings: breaking bread and drinking cocktails with smart, sardonic, and well-dressed fellow celebrities. Despite my screenwriting success, the sobering fact that working in Hollywood was not actually like that was pretty dispiriting.
Di Nicola: No, we are not immune, Dennis. The Italian film, Cinema Paradiso by Giuseppe Tornatore, tells the poignant story of Totò, a boy without a father, and Alfredo, a gruff childless film projector who befriends him in their Sicilian town. There are hilarious scenes where the young boy sneaks a peak at the town priest censoring the love scenes from the movies that Alfredo cuts out. Years later, when Totò has become a filmmaker in Rome, he finally returns home for Alfredo’s funeral who has left him a special legacy: a reel of all the “outtakes” from the films of his childhood and youth, representing the love that is absent from his life. When I met my father for the first time in Brazil as an adult, many images and metaphors flooded my imagination but none captured my experience better than those “outtakes” as a concrete metaphor for the missing pieces of my life.6,7
Palumbo: Our models for sexual attraction, courage, success, popularity, and even parenting are being portrayed constantly now online, as well as on film and television, plays and musicals, books and graphic novels. And often these artistic representations of “real life” are so impactful that some people are stirred emotionally more by portrayals they see than by events in their own lives.I had a patient recently who detailed all the effort he was putting into a Valentine’s Day dinner with his girlfriend. “Nowadays,” he told me, “it’s all about the optics.”
Isn’t everything nowadays? Even politics is frequently described as “show business for ugly people.” The implication being that it is all show business.
So what does that mean for therapy? Not only does the clinician have to explore and untangle a patient’s early childhood, the familial dynamics and patterns, but to see this in the context of a media/image-drenched culture in which the patient is embedded. A culture that gives birth to assumptions, prejudices, prescribed desires, and shifting personality models. This means the clinician has to have a significant familiarity with these cultural touchstones and explore their meanings—for him- or herself as well as with the patient.
Just as the arts can provide us with insights into our own issues and concerns, and why certain films or books or poems can “change one’s life,” good therapeutic treatment enjoins with the patient to see what patterns (or narrative, if you like) underlie his or her particular engagement with life. Which means drawing as much from everything the patient has seen, read and listened to as from the real-life events in his or her experience.
Di Nicola: How do you think philosophy informs your work and how does your work reciprocally affect your philosophy?
Palumbo: Good question. I will try to keep my answers short, though it deserves a longer one.
There are certain philosophical books (for example, William Barrett’s The Illusion of Technique and Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus) that have had a profound impact on my theoretical thinking in terms of my work with patients. Though I have a pretty good grounding in both Gestalt and intersubjectivity theory as guidelines in my work, I have moved away from adherence to any concrete orthodoxy. As a therapist, I do not subscribe to the “one-size-fits-all” model of clinical treatment, and this allows me a certain freedom of approach in my work with patients.
At the same time, my clinical work over these 30 years has informed and given perspective to any philosophical ideas that I too easily embraced. Simply put, my patients and their issues, beliefs, and unique histories are a continual source of surprise and wonder to me. As St. John of the Cross put it (though in a markedly different context), “I came into the Unknown, beyond all science.”
I must admit, I respond more favorably to philosophical writers whose literary skill predominates (Camus, Schopenhauer, de Beauvoir, some Nietzsche) or else whose intellectual reach excites me (Kant, Wittgenstein, Spinoza), whether I agree with them or not. But I do find that these categories of thought provide an intellectual base for my clinical thinking, whereas most conventional “personality theories” tend to restrict it.
Di Nicola: In the middle of the 20th century, Hollywood experienced an entertainment industry blacklist as part of a moral panic called the “Red Scare.”8 Does the Hollywood blacklist have any relevance today?
Palumbo: It has no relevance as such today, though its spirit lives on in “cancel culture.” Both are examples of Hollywood’s timidity and unwillingness to buck social/authoritative forces in fear of diminished profits. I feel similarly about the old Hays office and its code for movies.
These kinds of investigations or codes, whether originating in Congress or self-generated by the industries involved, speak to the single goal of profits, which in turn is based on getting the greatest number of viewers, which really means offending the least number of viewers. To do that, content providers (today’s term, which I loathe) need to conform to and in fact reinforce the conventional beliefs of the audience. Which was the genesis of the Hays Office and its crusade against overt sexuality (straight or gay), substance use (except alcohol, which was permitted as comedy), satiric views of religion, or any plot that hinted at a crime going unpunished. The blacklist occurred as a result of an anti-Communist paranoia, famously spearheaded by Joseph McCarthy. Today’s cancel culture, derived initially from the (long overdue!) #MeToo Movement, has now become merely another way for commercial content providers to insulate themselves from criticism (much of it warranted) that they are insensitive to the experiences of non-white, non-male, and non-straight individuals.
As the culture changes and the pendulum of what is acceptable swings back and forth, it is important for the artist to stay true to his/her creative vision. Certainly, no easy task in a brutal, demanding, and still quite conventional marketplace. For the therapist, often justly accused of being an agent of the dominant culture, it is important to stay attuned to the subjective experience of the patient, in the lived context of the patient’s world.
Di Nicola: How do you feel as a psychotherapist about the level of violence in the culture generally and more specifically in the portrayals of the entertainment industry in which you have been intimately involved in various roles?
Palumbo: That is a complicated question, as most of yours are! It deserves more space than an interview allows. Caveat aside, I have strong feelings about gun violence in the US and think our inadequate gun laws lead to more domestic shootings, road rage events, and gunfire outbreaks in public places like bars or parties. As a psychotherapist, I have seen how the level of violence has increased an overall unease in some patients. In addition, the rise of anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim violence has been particularly disturbing, both to me and to my patients.
Yet, while the level of violence is unacceptable, its depiction on the news and social media has an effect on consumers that is somewhat unwarranted. History shows us that violence has been an aspect of our lives as a species and as nations since time began, so it is probably untrue that the level it is at now is somehow unique. As Neil Postman pointed out, in the past, before world-wide communication, “bad news” was learning that your neighbor’s farm had burned down, and so you and everybody else in town could go help rebuild it. Nowadays, with global communication’s unprecedented reach, we learn of wars, famines, and violent revolutions occurring all over the world, about which we can do very little. This adds to our feeling that “things are getting worse,” and yet this may or may not be empirically true. So addressing my patients’ concerns about how dangerous and violent the world seems has become more and more front-and-center in our clinical work. Especially when it affirms old childhood messages about the patient's vulnerability about external events, how treacherous and dangerous others can be, how incompatible ethnic and religious differences are.
The second part of your question is more problematic. For one thing, I am the author of a series of psychological thrillers which often depict implied or even graphic violence in some scenes. My defense of this aspect of my novels is that these scenes lend authenticity and suspense to the narrative, and are to be expected in the genre. I must admit, too, that I derive a reasonable catharsis from writing these types of stories. My joke is that it is better for my violent urges to be on the page than out in the real world! Parenthetically, most research on the effect of violence in entertainment (primarily visual representations on film and television) is contradictory. There are certainly isolated incidents of a particular violent act depicted in a film replicated in real life by someone who claims to have been inspired by what they saw onscreen, but these are outlier events. Violence in drama has been a staple of narrative since the Greeks, if not before. From Oedipus and Medea to Punch and Judy, from Shakespeare to pulp magazines, violence and popular narrative have been hand-in-hand.
Moreover, in my practice, I treat writers, directors and actors who routinely work in genres whose narratives are often quite violent. My sense is that, since most artists understand that drama demands conflict, and that violence in some cases is both appropriate and expected (based on the genre), the use of it is merely grist for the mill. Though in my own case, I will never forget being a guest on a PBS interview show after the release of my fifth Daniel Rinaldi novel, Head Wounds, which featured several pretty harrowing scenes. The first question the host asked was, “Dennis, are you all right?”
Stillness, Quietude, Equanimity
One of the chapters of Dennis’ book on writing quotes Saul Bellow, a Nobel prize-winning writer born here in Montreal, who said that writing possesses a “stillness that characterizes prayer.”2 In that chapter, Dennis recommends quietude: “A hushed, private space, to which a writer is granted access by the act of writing itself.” It brings to mind a quality that another Canadian, the great physician William Osler, MD called aequanimitas—equanimity. Stillness, quietude, equanimity.
And let me add one last word. I have always been inspired by the first word I learned in ancient Greek, σωφροσύνη, sophrosyne—“soundness of mind,” which I interpret as a judicious balance. Dennis Palumbo has that, in spades.
Resources
- For a superb, reassuring and therapeutic guide to writing, consult Dennis Palumbo’s Writing from the Inside Out. John Wiley & Sons; 2000.
- For his latest Daniel Rinaldi thriller, read Deniss Palumbo’s Panic Attack. Poisoned Pen Press; 2021.
Dr Di Nicola is a child psychiatrist, family psychotherapist, and philosopher in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, where he is professor of psychiatry & addiction medicine at the University of Montreal and President of the World Association of Social Psychiatry (WASP). He has been recognized with numerous national and international awards, honorary professorships, and fellowships, and was recently elected a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences and given the Distinguished Service Award of the American Psychiatric Association. Dr Di Nicola’s work straddles psychiatry and psychotherapy on one side and philosophy and poetry on the other. Dr Di Nicola’s writing includes: A Stranger in the Family: Culture, Families and Therapy (WW Norton, 1997), Letters to a Young Therapist (Atropos Press, 2011, winner of a prize from the Quebec Psychiatric Association), and Psychiatry in Crisis: At the Crossroads of Social Sciences, the Humanities, and Neuroscience (with D. Stoyanov; Springer Nature, 2021); and, in the arts, his “Slow Thought Manifesto” (Aeon Magazine, 2018) and Two Kinds of People: Poems from Mile End (Delere Press, 2023, nominated for The Pushcart Prize).
Dennis Palumbo is a licensed psychotherapist in private practice, specializing in working with creative patients. His award-winning series of mystery thrillers—the latest is Panic Attack—feature psychologist and trauma expert Daniel Rinaldi. He is also the author of Writing From the Inside Out, as well as a collection of mystery short stories, From Crime to Crime. Recently, he served as Consulting Producer on the Hulu limited series “The Patient.” Formerly a Hollywood screenwriter, Palumbo’s credits include the feature film “My Favorite Year,” for which he was nominated for a Writers Guild Award for Best Screenplay. He was also a writer for the ABC-TV series “Welcome Back, Kotter,” among numerous other series. His short fiction has appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, The Strand, Mystery Weekly, and elsewhere. His work helping writers has been profiled in The New York Times, Premiere Magazine, GQ, The Los Angeles Times and other publications, as well as on NPR and CNN.
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