George Saunders and Ruth Ozeki: New Fiction Alchemizing the Secular and the Sacred with Jerry Webster, PhD

George Saunders and Ruth Ozeki: New Fiction Alchemizing the Secular and the Sacred
Instructor: Jerry Webster, PHD
October 22 - November 19 (5 Sessions)
Thursdays, 6:30 PM - 8:30 PM ET 
Virtual va Zoom

Brought to you by Odyssey  

Course Description: Celebrated American Buddhist writers and practitioners, George Saunders and Ruth Ozeki, continue to illuminate edges in our world: the profound, the earthy, the profane.  These two authors write from the foundation of decades of Eastern spiritual study and practice, enabling us to encounter and enlarge our present world from such wellsprings.   Their carefully crafted writings employ panoramic viewpoints plus an array of exploratory writing practices which together prove to be captivating reading.  Simply put, their writings embody wide and deep uniqueness.  Both writers have earned international acclaim for their visionary approach, such as Saunders being selected the 2017 Booker Award Winner for his work Lincoln in the Bardo and Ozeki being shortlisted for the 2013 Booker Award for her work A Tale for the Time Being. 

In his new novel Vigil, George Saunders again revisits the Bardo, the Tibetan Buddhist word for a major transition, a word especially used to describe the time right before one’s death, and indeed, the time thereafter.  Saunders being Saunders, his work is at times mind-blowing, at times tearjerking.  In The Typing Lady: And Other Fictions, Ruth Ozeki, a Zen Buddhist priest, opens us, through her eleven dramatic short stories, into a vast array of different settings, playing, dancing, with the concepts of time and space.  With Ozeki, as usual, her poignant and heartfelt narratives ground themselves in an underlying tension regarding how one might begin first to heal oneself and then help to heal others.  

In addition to analyzing the readings, this course will introduce participants to basic meditative teachings and techniques as formulated and practiced by these two writers.   

*Top Rated Instructor*

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