“Paradise is a Hard Gig”
“The Lost Animals”
“The Practice”
Jack Butler’s home town is Alligator, Mississippi, but he has lived in Louisiana, Missouri, Arkansas, Texas, Santa Fe, Oklahoma, and California. He has degrees in English, mathematics, and writing and has published eight books in sixteen editions worldwide, including four novels, three U. S. paperback reprints, three British editions, and one translation into Japanese. He has published individual pieces in The New Yorker, Poetry, Atlantic, The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times Book Review, and has been nominated for the Pulitzer and the Pen/Faulkner.
He has practiced yoga faithfully and extensively for six years. The benefits, both physical and metaphysical, are astonishing, but he estimates it would take at least another fifteen years to become anything like a master. He zen as well as he can, but has never received a direct transmission.
Retired, he now lives and works in Eureka, California. His fifth novel, Practicing Zen without a License, purports to be a sourcebook for zen for people in the 25th century, whose fragmentary “ancient” writings are from our era.
Click the links above to reader Butler’s poetry.