“Shanespeare is here..!!

‘Shanespeare’ is a humorous nickname that Chögyal Namkhai Norbu gave me two years after he first met me that he used for many years to make fun of my attachment to my image of myself as a poet and teacher of Creative Writing. After learning my family name and having some of my work read to him by Maria Simmons at a retreat in Paris in 1980, he said, ‘Now I know two English poets, Shakespeare and Shanespeare…!!’

AN INVITATION TO JOIN ME ON ‘THE WAY OF THE POET’ – MY NEW PUBLICATION ONLINE ON SUBSTACK, WHERE YOU WILL FIND POETRY, PROSE ARTICLES, AND SONGS, AS WELL AS AUDIO AND VIDEO OF MY WORK.

‘The Way of The Poet’: 

– ‘the habit and discipline of the notation of consciousness’; 

– ‘using the practice of creative writing as a parallel process to the practice of meditation to help one see through the hypnotic power of discursive thought and disturbing emotions so that one can let go of one’s compulsive psychological fixations and free one’s mind from them.’

I am very proud to have been able to serve as a Founding Editor of ‘The Mirror’, at a time long before the internet was created, when we had no other choice but to publish as an actual monthly physical newspaper that we had to take each month to the post office to mail out via snail mail to students of Chögyal Namkhai Norbu around the world, to help link them together to build the International Dzogchen Community and I remain committed to publishing my writing in ‘The Mirror’ whenever the current Editors are kind enough to feel that they wish to include something I have written.

But I have a lot of unpublished material in my archive that I have written over the years, which I now want to publish, and since I have just celebrated my 78th birthday, I feel that, if I am to succeed in publishing most of that work before I am too old to do so or my time on this Earth is over, I need to publish more than four pieces of writing a year, which is all I would be able to do if ‘The Mirror’. – which now publishes just four times a year – were to publish one of my pieces in each edition.

For this reason, after giving this much thought, about a month ago, I began to publish my work online on the newsletter website for writers, SUBSTACK, where many famous and not-so-famous writers publish, and I am very happy to invite readers of ‘The Mirror’ to visit my publication, ‘THE WAY OF THE POET’ on Substack.

If you follow the link to my Substack publication you will be able to read my writing for free, but I would be very grateful if you would support my work by subscribing to my publication, which you can also do for free. If you subscribe, you will receive a weekly email newsletter from me with new writing, and your subscription will help to move my publication’s numbers up in Substack’s algorithm which will then bring my writing to the attention of more people.

I very much look forward to you dropping by to visit my publication ‘THE WAY OF THE POET’ on Substack, where you will be able to leave comments on what I write, to which I will try to reply.

John Shane