SOULSCAPES received a 4+ star review, making it an IndieReader Approved title.
Following find an interview with author Lee Woodman.
What is the name of the book, and when was it published?
The book is called SOULSCAPES and was published by Shanti Arts Publishing in December, 2023.
What’s the book’s first line?
The first line in the book is from the poem, “A Child Asks:”
What is God?
What’s the book about? Give us the “pitch”.
SOULSCAPES is about “other ways of knowing.” Spiritually, I would call myself a seeker who admits, discovers, and ponders all gods. This collection of poetry explores faith, spirit, and unmeasurable forces. I learned growing up, in France and India and in the United States, to be open to all aspects of faith: Hindu, Muslim, Jain, Buddhist, Christian, Jewish, Native American, and worldwide tribal beliefs. I’ve steeped myself in research about many other areas of spiritual belief and practice: origin stories, spirit animals, tarot, witchcraft, the occult, past lives, lucid dreaming. I’m both a rational skeptic and a believer in things unexplainable by logic. So, poetry seems the perfect way to explore and love both the scientific fact-based world and the magical, mysterious unknown.
What inspired you to write the book? A particular person? An event?
I was invited to an artists’ retreat at VCCA (the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts) in March 2022. Ready to start in on the fifth volume of my “Scapes” series, I wanted to research the various meanings of spirituality. A colleague there told me about an exhibit at the Minneapolis Institute of Art called “Supernatural America: The Paranormal in American Art,” which I found fascinating. That was the beginning of a year of studying many different perceptions of godliness in different cultures and natural environments.
What’s the main reason someone should really read this book?
The main reason people should read this book is to ask themselves deep questions. We often long for absolutes, especially when the world is in crisis from violence, pestilence, and climate change. But we live in a relative world. As we learn new things that we never thought imaginable, like new universes discovered by the James Webb telescope and The Chandra X-Ray Observatory or capabilities of robots and AI, we are invited to open ourselves to new ways of thinking. SOULSCAPES is an exploration of the way we reach for something greater than ourselves, and recognize there is something cosmic and divine in the natural world.
What’s the most distinctive thing about the main character? Who-real or fictional-would you say the character reminds you of?
There are many characters in SOULSCAPES. Given that it is a poetry collection about different ideas, animals, humans, artworks, and spirits, the reader may be captivated by an elephant, an orca, a passion flower, a witch, or a child who believes in a past life.