The Long Story

Radio, newspapers and getting into things

Edwin got into radio before he had any real experience in either radio or writing. As a teenager in Columbia, South Carolina, he walked into WCOS and pitched the station manager an idea: instead of recycling yesterday’s newspaper, he would call police, fire and highway patrol early in the morning and bring the station fresh news. He got the job and eventually found himself broadcasting overnight from a glass booth above a drive-in restaurant.

Radio opened the door to newspapers. He covered civic meetings and obituaries, city and county government and politics, then investigative stories that put him in places most people would avoid. While reporting in North Carolina, he infiltrated Ku Klux Klan activity, gathering license plates at cross burnings and at one point staring down a shotgun while sitting in his Austin Healey.

Later, writing features for Gannett in Florida gave him license to follow curiosity almost anywhere. He spent a night performing under the Ringling Bros. Big Top, tried out with the Houston Astros for a story, and covered the final Apollo mission aboard the SS Statendam alongside writers and scientists including Norman Mailer and Isaac Asimov.

Teaching, poetry and the people who showed up

Graduate school at the University of Florida became another unexpected turn. Edwin and professor David Rebmann developed a course on the Beat Generation. Wondering how to make the class more interesting one afternoon, Edwin picked up the telephone, called City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco and asked to speak with Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

Ferlinghetti took the call.

That conversation led Edwin toward ecologist Howard Odum and then to Energy Consciousness Weekend: A Celebration of Ecological Consciousness at the Spring Equinox, bringing Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder and Michael McClure to Gainesville for a meeting of poetry, environmental thinking and science. The road eventually carried Edwin west to Boulder and the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa.

Years later, while teaching at Miami-Dade Community College, he served on the Miami International Book Fair committee and successfully argued that the Fair needed someone a little less predictable: Hunter S. Thompson. The committee eventually agreed, with one condition: Hunter was Edwin’s responsibility.

The sea

Somewhere along the way, Edwin found another classroom. He earned his captain’s license while teaching college and later left academic bureaucracy to captain a 60-foot schooner in Tortola in the British Virgin Islands. Asked by one charter guest to follow a minute-by-minute itinerary, Edwin tore up the schedule and offered a different plan: whichever way the wind blows.

For years, sailboats were not vacations. They were home. There was the 34-foot Physalia at Dinner Key Marina in Coconut Grove. Later came Raconteur, a 44-foot cutter-rigged CSY. In 1988, Norman Mailer came aboard Raconteur during the Miami Book Fair, and the two spent an afternoon in the cockpit talking about writing, courage, politics, censorship and the difficulty of keeping the rebel artist alive.

Mind, body and another kind of classroom

The search eventually moved inward. Psychotherapy, meditation and mind-body work became a major part of Edwin’s life. Years after his first experiments with meditation and Eastern philosophy, he interned at the Center for Mindfulness at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. The same questions that had taken him across the country, into classrooms and onto sailboats increasingly became questions about stress, fear, awareness and how people actually live inside their own lives.

He brought that work into psychotherapy, teaching and books including Stress Rx and The Alphabet Soup for Stress Reduction, along with retreats, stress-reduction programs, Tai Chi and Qigong.

Still writing the story.

Edwin has written across poetry, psychology, stress reduction and ecological consciousness. His books include Confront Reality: You May Be a Salad, nominated for a Pulitzer Prize; Stress Rx; The Alphabet Soup for Stress Reduction; EARTHWISE: An Approach to Planetary Sanity & Eco-Journal; and Captain Madness: Living the Life of Riley.

Captain Madness gathers the threads together. Not because the life suddenly becomes orderly, but because it doesn’t. Again and again the story returns to serendipity, curiosity, wrong turns, risk, and the choice to follow what feels alive rather than what is expected.

That may be the closest thing to a plan there ever was.