Story behind green novel, Strange Days Indeed, by Stuart R. Ward

About Author, Stuart R. Ward
& Crafting of Green Novel
Strange Days Indeed

Vegetarian my whole adult life -- I'm now 59 -- I went vegan, for ethical and health reasons alike, in 2006, during research of my novel Strange Days. As is the wont of more bohemian souls, I also pursue clothes-free living whenever weather, whim and circumstance allow, around my northwest rural home region. Getting mindfully naked in nature has got to be one of the easiest forms of feel-good therapy around. During the seven years I worked at a local rural spring resort, I rallied to change its repressive cover-up policy, one reflecting society's super entrenched compulsory/compulsive dress mindset. I've called a secluded two-acre, off-grid patch of high desert woodlands home for 30 years.

An inveterate dreamer, I'm sometimes given over to rarefied visionary states of mind. I imagine the way things could be. It was at the spring one day, after more body-friendly ways held sway, I began suspecting everyone was a nudist at heart. All that was needed to embrace one's inner nudist was a peaceful natural environment, example, a bit of body acceptance -- and permission.

Fodder for a novel, I thought. Why not spin a yarn about the whole bloomin' world going naked?

The tale that emerged over the next three years -- growing to include the advent of universal vegan diet and holistic living as well, for reasons I'll explain -- coalesced as my subject understanding, elusive self-knowledge and writing discipline grew. Result: a crazy-quilt blend of visionary fantasy, quasi-autobiography, alternative-culture history and unabashed polemic for body freedom and compassionate diet. It's a work aimed towards all questioning the validity of either or both of these customs and who might enjoy their interweaving in a cautionary tale. Or anyone pulled to novels with positive alternative-reality themes. And any veterans of the 60s' back-to-earth movement.

Tying vegan diet to body freedom for twin story themes might seem unlikely at first. A bit of reflection, though, reveals their deep interconnection. Consider the following, improbable scenario: A nudist resort situated right next to a slaughterhouse. Even the most gung-ho, meat-loving nudist would be hard pressed to enjoy his hamburger in any semblance of naked peace while having to bear the stench of death and plaintive cries of sentient beings meeting their doom around the clock, forever reminding him of the violence of his food selection. See the connection? So long as the dispatching of animals' lives takes place far away, it's easy to go into denial and disassociate from one's meal the horrific realities of the wholesale slaughter of our fellow sentient species we've been taught to accept as normal all our lives. Freeing one's inner body of the vestments of such cruel diet, which directly perpetuates the systematic taking of life, allows greater peace of mind to enjoy being mindfully naked (and everything else) in the outer realm -- knowing in some small measure one's helping make the world a more life-form friendly place by what one eats.

As both subjects are personal and often controversial, telling a bit more about where I'm coming from is perhaps in order. Of course, it's done at the risk of telling more about myself than most might ever want to know.

It's said one's worldview jells about the age of 17. A native San Franciscan, I hit that marker in 1967 a half-hour's walk from the Haight-Ashbury during its full-tilt, mystical blossoming best. Being super impressionable and naturally nonconformist -- inwardly at least -- and having grown up a tad more dysfunctional than some, I drank in the colorful down-to-earth counterculture like one dying of thirst. Though too hung up to become one of your classic peace-and-love hippies, I resonated fully with the ethos of living consciously and peaceably. I quit eating all flesh and heeded the call to get back to nature. Seven rough but informative, wanderlusting years later, I snagged a couple acres of land in the juniper and sage foothills of Mount Shasta, at the top of the Republic of California, and hand-built a snug, solar-powered cabin over the next three years. I'd learned then to get by happily on modest means, after having been raised in a twenty-room Victorian awash in a sea of stuff.

Suddenly free to lose my clothes whenever I felt like it without one blessed soul saying boo, I luxuriated in the simple, euphoric joy of spending warm weather naked in sun-splashed nature -- sometimes for days at a stretch. I was able to hike and even drive around nude. I soon found being free of clothes did wonders in helping rid me of conformist social conditioning and made me feel better about myself, more in tune with the real me, that stranger I'd only caught glimmers of before. Over time I cultivated an exquisitely rich, renewed sensory awareness and continued turning around my absurdly repressed, guilt-drenched body attitude. I began frequenting various West Coast mineral springs resorts that allowed mindful public nakedness: Harbin, Orr, Jackson, Sierraville, Stewart... There I dealt with deeper layers of body shame. Within the grand crucible of socialized nudity's mutual mirroring of our essential physical beings all sorts of convoluted feelings -- from vulnerability, false modesty and objectification of self and others to the delightful sense of freedom and insatiable curiosity about seeing humanity unshackled from cloth -- are brought to the fore and tried on by one and all.

The joy and freedom of getting free of clothes among kindred spirits in the balm of nature was heady stuff. I experienced ongoing breakthroughs in feeling at home in my skin among others were doing the same, all of us working to break the iron link forged between nudity and sex and not-okayness -- locked in the mind since toddlerhood. I got in touch with repressed sexual feelings, formerly inaccessible feelings of my denied shadow self. As I reached a critical point in body acceptance, I let my chimerical imagination, unduly fond of dreaming up alternative positive realities, have free reign. That day I found myself visualizing how, in a far gentler world, clothes-wearing might well become optional everywhere. Consider: over the years working at the springs I'd witnessed droves of people -- all ages, backgrounds, and degrees of fitness -- tickled to have discovered a place where, for the first time ever for some, it was all right to be naked in public. Everyone really was a nudist at heart, but life was a masquerade and costumes compulsory.

Subject for a novel indeed, I thought, the day so nice it felt criminal to wear anything.

The evolution of the novel to encompass peaceful diet was perhaps a natural one, given my long veggie lifestyle. I'd spent a few years enjoying being a naturist and attending annual nudist gatherings at clothing-optional resorts and cultivating body acceptance amid others. Then, while researching the new, expanded novel, I discovered that modern nudism was originally linked part and parcel to healthy, animal-free diet and really getting back to nature. I gradually came to see nudism by itself as something of an irrelevant, niche lifestyle. Good for remedial learning to get happy in one's skin and being accepting of others' nakedness in a nonsexual environment, yes, but on another level just another reductionist "-ism" or indulgence, divorced from holistic interconnectivity. I realized body freedom needed to be integrated into natural living -- including nonviolent diet -- to free the inside of one's body, thus fostering full body freedom and helping transform the world by refusing to be party to diets perpetuating pain and misery.

Admittedly, while writing about nudity lends itself to humor and lighthearted spins, the constant systematic slaughter of sentient beings doesn't at all. The book's tone sometimes shifts gears addressing each, but I'd like to think I interwove the themes in a way the open-minded reader will appreciate. The book shows, through my characters, Zet and his eventual partner, Nuela, the experiences they share on both lifestyle choices.

It's a novel with a thesis -- what the French call a Roman a These [read with accent marks]. Even if one isn't currently a veggie or card-carrying nudist, the work, laced with a judicious amount of humor, will likely hold something for anyone no longer buying into the wonky mainstream mindset that's passed for reality for millenia. And for anyone swept up in the wave of global transformation now afoot, on track to reclaim our planet's potential to become the paradise we know it could be.

Desert Sage Books
13715 Thrush Road, Montague, CA 96064 USA