(Cont'd from home page)
Stuart R. Ward's debut novel is a crazy-quilt time-bent memoir scoping the world's current clothes-happy, carcass-craving habits and growing trends towards body acceptance, body freedom and natural diet. Equal parts nudist novel, vegan novel, visionary fantasy and quasi-autobiography, the work breaks away from other, nonfictional books on the subjects. Subjects rarely dealt with together in any guise, though, as the narrator reveals, they're flip sides of the same coin.
Zet tells how dress and diet habits colored his life growing up in the sixties' kaleidoscopic San Francisco, California. He recalls the long journey within after realizing he, along with many of his generation, had been sold a bill of goods, and tells of his fitful search for new ways, living close to nature, that honored self, others and the planet. He reveals how such singular diet and dress customs made his journey and those of eccentric relatives and peers more...well, interesting.
"Advocates of body freedom and natural diet must have felt at times they were stranded on some strange flesh-eating, textile-obsessed planet."
Mulling over our current extreme times, Zet offers a flood of reasons why we kept dutifully wrapped in cloth, even in nicest weather -- though it crimped our comfort, drained our pocketbook and essentially invalidated the integrity of our beings. And he delves into what could've ever possibly driven us to routinely rob, kill, and devour fellow sentient beings, by the billion, each year, in so doing generating worlds of needless suffering, destroying health, perpetuating world hunger, degrading the planet's ecosystem -- and stifling spiritual awareness of life's interconnectivity.
"...an enlightening story that creatively promotes a more aware and compassionate way of living."
- Will Tuttle, Ph.D,
author of The World Peace Diet - Eating for Spiritual Health and Social Harmony
Zet grows up dysfunctionally, not far from San Francisco's blossoming Haight-Ashbury counterculture, with its upbeat down-to-earth way of living. Swept into the merry contagion, he soon realizes he'll never fit into conventional society. He flees the city and goes to live in the woods and build a cabin. There, over the decades, he revels in the glad tidings of nature, shedding conventional conditioning along with his clothes, and radically changes his diet. With the grace of years -- confirming it was more the times, that were weird, not him (necessarily) -- he comes to find a gentle quirky humor in it all.
Hoping to make sense of things, he explores myriad contributing factors to our bizarre former habits, then boiling them all down to one: humanity's profound disconnect from nature. One brought about over millennia of unthinking habit, insatiable greed and yur garden-variety spiritual ignorance. He muses over how we first got separated from nature -- to the point the notion of not concealing one's body in public was deemed perverse and the idea of not devouring slain sentient beings thought unhealthy, even vaguely subversive somehow -- and traces our current trends to reject such wonky ways.
All the while, he ties unfolding events to his own fitful quest for liberation, using his life as ready example for how staggeringly strange our times were, how prevailing conditions all too easily slowed the unfoldment of our innately noble peace-loving selves.
"...Quimby's take on his own experience of the times...is astute, wryly humorous, and often laugh out loud funny ...Zet's psychological honesty and clarity as he works through his emotional and cultural baggage are endearing... The book is much more than a polemic for the naturist movement."
- Sibyl Walski, Mount Shasta Herald [CA]
Using a futuristic sci-fi story framework to gain fresh perspective on these two habits, Strange Days is a sometimes serious, sometimes pixilated tale about body acceptance, body freedom and natural diet -- and journeying to new realms.
Realms for a while longer below the radar of today's mainstream consciousness.
"We felt the need to devour part of an animal carcass before thinking we'd had a real meal."
So says Zet. Even as he tells of his experiences and those of his quirky relatives, his memoir brims with real names in the news, dates, quotes, and figures, supplying capsule American histories of nudism and veggie diet. Included: Germany's early 1900's nature-cure movement -- little known but profoundly influential proto-hippie phenomenon -- and the later sixties' hippie counterculture as it emerged in San Francisco and promptly turned Zet's head around.
"...Ward takes us on a cultural journey, some of it rooted in the past and some, imagined, projected into the future. And what a future, indeed."
- VegNews
Zet remembers body freedom advents: Spencer Tunick's worldwide nude-group photo shoots, Nevada's Burning Man, Berkeley's Naked Guy, the pro-peace Baring Witness movement. Also: clothing-optional mineral springs, World Naked Bike Day, Britain's Naked Rambler and The Freedom To Be You movement, U.S. rainbow gatherings, and nude holiday cruises -- one of which he goes on with his eventual partner, Nuela. Veggie flashbacks include the 60s' natural-food movement, speculations on how man first came to devour fellow species, and the explosion of interest in plant-based, organic, whole-food and raw-food diets. Of course, he delves into how the powers-that-were dismissed and twisted towering mountains of evidence linking animal diets to the onset of every degenerative disease under the sun.
In his most detailed remembrance, Zet recounts how he and old city friends join in an historic 2011 Bay-to-Breakers footrace in San Francisco, in which thousands of springtime celebrants stroll across town naked one spring day and triumphantly reclaim their long-denied body freedom. Back home, he and Nuela write a fantasy about the run triggering a planet-wide body liberation. At the last, our narrator tells how catastrophic natural disasters and a grand leap in spiritual awareness lead humanity to its current enlightened era. A time in which mankind's long cherished hopes for planetary peace become a reality.
And body freedom and peaceful diet are universal.
Strange Days Indeed is printed on 100% POST-CONSUMER RECYCLED PAPER. No trees were felled in its making.
A generous portion of any profits generated from the book's sale will be donated to worthy environmental, animal rights, and naturist causes.
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The following book review was published in California's Mount Shasta Herald March 13, 2007:
Local Author's 'Strange Days' Are Our Own
by Sibyl Walski
It is 2061. Zet Quimby, a 112 year old, has written his own first person account of the strange days when he was young, before the catastrophic earth changes of 2012 forced what remained of humanity to rethink how heavily it could afford to walk upon the earth.
"Strange Days Indeed" is well embedded in Siskiyou County and draws heavily on the author's personal experience. Local readers will easily recognize many places, and possibly several people, because author Stuart Ward has a gift for descriptive writing, and an intuition for the right word.
Quimby looks back over the abyss of an event horizon which ended the world as he knew it, after he and other survivors recreated a gentler society more attuned with the environment around it.
They now live in close connection with nature, in a clothing-optional community and the understanding that the other creatures who share the earth are sentient, intelligent beings, not to be used for dinner or the raw materials for clothing.
The reader will easily recognize the strange days of which he speaks - they are our present and the recent past most baby boomers remember, beginning in the 1960s, when the old social structures were challenged in earnest, and began to morph into something else or simply break down in many areas.
Quimby's take on his own experience of the times, as he compares his own inner inclinations and developing life philosophy with the expectations of the mainstream culture is astute, wryly humorous, and often laugh out loud funny. It is also poignant and sometimes a bit sad.
His stance as an involuntary outside observer gives him the emotional distance to analyze the unexamined cultural beliefs that demand conformity and condition group behavior.
Most people, for example, do not go naked in public. Consequently, says Quimby, there is an unhealthy quality of "forbidden sexual fruit" that surrounds the idea of the nude human form which he himself spent years trying to overcome. Ironically, Quimby himself grew up the son of a clothing magnate, forced to be a closet nudist who could never appreciate the values of consumerism and vanity that drove the clothing industry.
He did not find out until he was in his late teens that his mother's side of the family were naturists, who believed in a holistic, clothes-free lifestyle that included healthy nutrition as well as nudity.
His "clothes-horse" mother was the odd one out in that family, but he could relate completely. His life up until the earth changes became a long search for places to drop the imprisonment of clothes - and society's conditions about them - among kindred spirits, and much later to embrace a consciously cruelty-free diet that excluded anything obtained by exploiting animals.
His travels up and down the West coast led him to live somewhere in the high plains desert outside Montague. Without power tools he built his off-the-grid cabin from scratch, where he could live without clothes to his heart's content.
The book's characters are well developed and sympathetic and Zet's psychological honesty and clarity as he works through his emotional and cultural baggage are endearing.
The book is much more than "a polemic for the naturist movement," as some reviewers have said. It is really about spiritual purity and existential transparency. Shucking his clothes is only the symbol for the deeper work.
His life task seems to be to identify and drop the repressive, shame-based internal conditioning that, for him, is represented by garments.
Ward has a witty, intelligent writing style [...]. The passages on cruelty-free diet are [...] pulled off with persuasive eloquence and compassion for all sentient life.
Anyone who has felt compelled to embark on a spiritual quest should be able to relate to the greater story without feeling compelled to step out of one's knickers in public.
There are places of the spirit that any person thinking deeper than the superficial passing show knows must be there - and that inner terrain is easily revisited in Quimby"s company.
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© Stuart R. Ward. All Rights Reserved.
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