Dear Fellow Travelers…

…the most crippling disease of our time: the same four stories flattened out and told over and over… how to steal; how to kill; how to diminish; how to live dead whilst alive. The periodic tables are more captivating.

A great soul, a great storyteller, has a life lit by a winged thing … one which rustles, throws off flashes of lightning when sensing treasure … a sudden thought, an abrupt intuition, whilst passing over any unmapped mountain range… and holds to those flashes, does not ignore the pull to fly closer, to prospect.

Refuse to submit to anyone who insists we ought understand the entire world as though it is merely a shopping list… to be copied from week to week. The mystery. Hold to the mystery. Mystery is Imagination’s most ancient name.

In making your story, tell whomsoever will listen, in your own way, and with love … then tell them again: Story that lasts is a Fire that flows from anything in us that is Eternal.

Painting of Firebird and Carpet  is the cover for the forthcoming Creative Fire book by C. P. Estés

excerpt from ms The Storyteller’s Bible for Filmmakers, Animators, Writers, Artists, Gamers and Inspirators, by Clarissa Pinkola Estés, ©1970, and The Creative Fire: A Manifesto on Living A Life of Creativity, by Clarissa Pinkola Estés, ©2009, All Rights Reserved.

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Paul Marsh, Carrier of Stories Across the World, Passes Away In Milan

A letter to the dear souls who knew and loved Paul Marsh, even though I do not know all of you by name… I think of you very much now. cpe

Paul Marsh… dear father to his precious children, dear husband of the beautiful and feisty Susie Marsh, sweet friend to so many…. Paul was the foreign agent for my work through my U.S. agent, Ned Leavitt, who also treasured him.

Paul, and his wife Susie, and Marsh Agency colleagues, were also the carriers en masse of thousands of authors’ stories across the world… finding homes in publishing houses as far-flung as Iceland, Estonia, Korea, Turkey, Brazil, Germany, Japan and most any nation in the entire world with a printing press.

Just this, in between my bursts of tears hearing this devastating news of Paul’s sudden passing… Paul was the last of the gallant men of the world, a man who was quietly wise… incredibly so in a time when edginess has been vaunted as absurdly more valuable than depth.

To us United Statesians, Paul, having diplomas from Cambridge and University of Göttingen, also had a personal reserve, that seeming reticence that Brits are sometimes known for ‘across the pond’ here.

But I found over the years (he has been ours for over 15 years now) that under his quiet demeanor, I could say silly things to him, and he would giggle like a child.

Thus, at book expos,