The Seeker Academy [Paperback]

L. D. Gussin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 5, 2007

Using the tools of literary fiction, The Seeker Academy explores the holistic healing (mind-body-spirit) movement, which has its roots in the beat-hippie counterculture and, earlier, in a romantic movement dating back three centuries. Author L. D. Gussin populates the story with characters struggling with how to live their lives. At local centers and retreats, they engage in wellness and spiritual practices, some which go beyond current Western norms. While middle class, their anxiety in the face of modern culture makes them, or some of them, seekers after purity, almost like religious fundamentalists. Yet, they tend to be social liberals¿even when they find the levers of social change to be beyond their reach and so a distraction. With drama, dislocation, hope, and longing, the novel's characters are striving for connection. "With exquisite facility of language, L. D. Gussin takes us on a very real spiritual journey; the ups, the downs, the all arounds. I've been there. L. D. Gussin nails it!" ¿ Nancy Slonim Aronie (Aronie is an author, NPR commentator, and holistic retreat workshop leader who, with Robert Coles, teaches Literature for Social Reflection at Harvard.)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"... the story serves as a vehicle to illustrate and reflect on extremely relevant issues for today and for the future." -- Guillermo Maynez, Amazon Top 500 Reviewer

"A superb job... I saw parallels with the classic Zen And The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance." -- Dr. Richard G. Petty, author "Healing, Meaning and Purpose

"Differing viewpoints [among the] students and faculty ... imbue the thoughtfully-composed story with a satisfying richness." -- Kirkus Discoveries Magazine, January, 2007

"With exquisite facility of language, L.D. Gussin takes us on a very real spiritual journey.... [Gussin] nails it!" -- Nancy Slonim Aronie, author "Writing from the Heart"

"[Gussin] possesses the rare ability to avoid abstraction even when writing about rarefied philosophical issues." -- Christopher Noel, author "In the Unlikely Event of a Water Landing: A Geography of Grief"

"Differing viewpoints [among the] students and faculty ... imbue the thoughtfully-composed story with a satisfying richness." -- Kirkus Discoveries, March, 2007

"The yearning for connection and understanding is a central theme in this thoughtful and introspective story." -- Midwest Book Review, August 6, 2007

"[Incorporates] knowledge of spiritual seeking communities in America (since Thoreau, the Transcendentalists, and Chautauqua) and in Europe with the Romantics." -- Janet Riehl, author "Sightlines: A Poet's Diary"

The mix of action and reflection narrated through Grace Hudson, the deft touch of lightly interspersed philosophical offerings, the focus on whole human beings and how they have this rich variety of mixed psychologies and beliefs all contribute to making The Seeker Academy a compelling and insightful read. L.D. Gussin opens up a window that clearly lets the light in, and allows us to see out onto a spacious vista, replete with helpful markers to inform us on our own journey into this territory. -- Integral Review, June, 2008

The yearning for connection and understanding is a central theme in this thoughtful and introspective story. -- Midwest Book Review, August 6, 2007

From the Publisher

Chapter 37 begins:
Trumpeter was within thirty yards of her by the time she sensed someone's near presence and turned his way. His white travel wear, crisp against the tawny grasses, exposed only his neck and head, cupped hands, and sandaled feet. His expressions again looked more weathered than she had remembered.

"Hi, Grace," he said, once he had halved the remaining distance. She was struck by his swiftness. Then she sensed that his resolve had brought him only to where he could greet her, and he might not quite know what more to say. But the connection she had felt lay between them, never mind how little they had ever yet spoken, had been there in fact.

He could be her older son, grown uncannily to manhood.

"This is a surprise," she said, even if it wasn't so, entirely.

"It seems we are both leaving now."

"And Willa, too, I'm told. Is she here?"

"I'll meet her back in town in a couple of hours."

"Were you in the handmade mask last night? I didn't see Willa."

Trumpeter smiled, shyly; then his expression turned reflective.

"She watched from outside," he said. "I was there with her some of the time. That ongoing role--it results from a promise I made to Monk."

"Do you mean that the things you said were staged?"

"There are always a few actors. It's staged in the sense that he each time has us read things and assigns us points of view and then we im-provise."

"Do you rehearse? Is it that contrived?"

"No, it's spontaneous. Monk says it's mostly about listening."

"Theater as meditation--breathing into varied points of view?"

"Well, I guess."

Now, anyway, he seemed to care less about the performance than she did. She was still getting used to having him stand there. "Ask me questions, if you want," she told him.

"Did you get tired of the Seeker food?"

"Only recently... ask real questions, if you want."

"What will you do when you go home?"

She looked in his eyes, then beyond him to the horizon. The river squirreled through the upper left edge of the frame; so, she faced north. The knotted woods behind Trumpeter hid an open view of the Catskills.

With a sudden laugh, she said, "What I'll first do, though you may not like hearing this, is calm down. I'll have to and probably want to." She pointed, to draw his gaze to his right. "In winter, looking downhill from a site on my street, we see both shores of the river."

His eyes had flared at her levity, but he followed her lead. Relaxing, he eyed the Hudson. He doesn't skip past it or counterfeit his effort, thought Grace. That's what Sophie meant when she said he tried. I wonder if I can do the same.

"It's too tightly wound there, you know," she continued. "The goal may be peace but it's a jittery search. Not that I think it can be other-wise--the risk makes it so. What Seeker tries is so much against the grain."

Trumpeter watched the river. "And then what will you do?"

So, he had brought a challenge.

"Once I'm calm? I'll need a minute on that question. I'd taken time here to start to ask it of myself. My musings won't yet quite flow; but you can listen along."

In a canoe just days before, Monk had told her that Trumpeter sought an escape hatch. His mood now was otherwise; he seemed accepting--as if he wanted only to face what would come next for him.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 312 pages
• Publisher: 4361 Press (April 5, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0978917006
• ISBN-13: 978-0978917005
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,928,041 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Recovering, Re-connecting and Re-Awakening: A Novel of Hope, May 26, 2007

By 

Dr. Richard G. Petty (Atlanta) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Seeker Academy (Paperback)

The book is deceptive. When I was asked if I would be interested in reviewing it, I expected a novel about holistic medicine and the spiritual path that I would polish off in an evening. Instead it has taken me three weeks to read. Not because it is badly written: far from it. After a slightly clumsy prologue, the book uses a story as a skeleton around which to wrap a careful examination of some very important ideas. Gussin is a very good writer and some of the prose and the images that they conjure up are luminous.

Grace is a forty-something woman whose twelve year-old niece has been going through the ups and downs of chemotherapy for leukemia. Grace is a former actress who is still acting her way through life. After the turmoil of her niece's illness and days spent with other sick children, she is emotionally and spiritually drained. Not because of what has happened or what she has experienced, but rather that the events have uncovered a deep existential yearning.

So it is that she finds her way to the Seeker Academy, which could be any one of a hundred personal growth centers that I have visited. Here she meets an interesting and insightful group of people who are among the estimated thirty million Americans who describe themselves as spiritual seekers. The book does a superb job of describing the spiritual and emotional hunger of so many of us. How many of us have an uncomfortable feeling that there is something missing in our lives? That there is something important that we have all forgotten?

The characters have all brought their own emotional baggage, and amidst all the love and peace we still see people who can be mean and defend their positions and beliefs with religious fervor. Gussin captures the narcissism and spiritual elitism that can crop up amongst spiritual seekers and so disappoint people when they meet this world. There are the anti-science counter-culture folk who believe that to reason is to lie, and representatives of an array of beliefs and positions, including those who refuse any help from conventional medicine, even when in serious trouble. Grace samples classes, therapies and ideas like a person who is starving and stumbles into a five star restaurant.

There are discussions of Karma; survival after death; whether there is a purpose and a meaning to life that we sometimes miss because we have to focus on the mundane world; whether it is possible to have a spiritual life and to remain engaged in the material world; the advantages of controlling our reactions to, rather than escaping from the world; romanticism, reason and tragedy; the nature of reality and much more besides.

Grace learns at first hand how emotions can be stored in the body, and how skilled bodywork can release them. She also discovers that the seekers at the Academy are there for a dozen reasons. They are not just trying to heal some ill defined something, recover from trauma or find enlightenment. Most are just trying to re-connect with another human.

A car crash involving some of the characters sharpens the beliefs and actions of the cast, and leads into scenes where concepts and ideas are explored with rare intensity.

Gussin is clearly writing from experience. In the course of the book Grace discovers that real change is possible, and sometimes in a short space of time. But she then realizes that she no longer wants to change. She has a world to go back to. Yet despite her reluctance to change, it is giving nothing away to say that the experiences do change her beliefs and perceptions. Despite some of the difficulties that people bring with them to places like the Seeker Academy, for the person who arrives at the right time in his or her life, the experience can be life changing.

Teaching stories, parables and analogies have been used since the beginning of time, and in expert hands can be an extremely effective way of communicating difficult ideas. I have read some books in which characters discuss abstruse ideas and have sometimes come away scratching my head, thinking that even the most earnest angst-ridden undergraduates don't talk like that! Gussin, though, succeeds very well indeed. The characters are lively, the ideas clear and the dialogue does not feel contrived. The format allows the author to talk about some complex and important ideas, without the formalism of a book about philosophy.

The best books, movies, articles and scientific papers do not give you all the answers, but make suggestions, challenge us and suggest new questions. More than once I saw parallels with the classic "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance." Both books suggest answers, challenge assumptions and pose a great many questions.

It was those questions that forced me to read the book far more slowly than I would normally. Despite the apparent certainties of some of the characters, the author does not pretend to have all the answers, and the book is the stronger for it.

If you are interested in some of the big questions in life, or if you feel that hunger that I described above, this is an excellent, well-written and engaging book.

Highly recommended.

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hunger for Connection Brought to "The Seeker Academy" Banquet, April 2, 2007

By 

Janet Riehl "Riehlife Village Wisdom for the ... (St. Louis, MO) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Seeker Academy (Paperback)

Yes, the characters in L. D. Gussin's "The Seeker Academy" are "hungry for the truth" as Christopher Noel says on the book's cover. But, these characters are even hungrier for connection,as symbolized by the Gorganzola-and-fig pizza at the book's beginning.

This hunger for connection extends in every direction. Their hunger grows vertically--into the world of the spirit (upward), and it extends into a wish for greater depth within themselves(inward and downward). The hunger grows horizontally and outward into relationships with romantic and married partners, family, friends, community, and casually encountered strangers. The masterful contribution of "The Seeker Academy" is laying these hungers for connection vulnerably bare and deftly showing the multitude of ways we human beings push and pull through,and often past, our desires. I frequently found myself pausing to make a mental note as I recognized a comment in the text that pointed to a tendency in myself.

From a writing craft standpoint, one of L.D. Gussin's greatest achievements is in his credible and warm fleshing out of leading lady Grace Hudson, and telling the story through her eyes. Grace, a middle-aged drama teacher in a middle school brings impeccable observation and a tendency toward wry mimicry into her roles as matron, mother, care-taking aunt, and then among the elders of the temporary staff at the Seeker Academy.

What better guide could we have into the culture of the Seeker Academy? ("Grace wanted to dismiss this coded talk.... But she also felt Sophie to be thoughtful and sincere.") Gussin doesn't go for satire, but neither does he go for whole-hog idolatry of New Age spiritual shopping. Very gently, Gussin reveals the wounding and natural human yearning that has drawn these people into the world of the Seeker Academy. Gussin also reveals, in a balanced way, the extent that this world of spiritual mélange delivers healing for wounds, and rapture for transcendental yearning--and to the extent it does not.

An amazing feature of The Seeker Academy is its encyclopedic knowledge of holistic healing and the history of spiritual seeking communities in America (since Thoreau, the Transcendentalists, and Chautauqua) and in Europe with the Romantics. Interwoven among the book's conversations and theatrical performances is a compendium and classification of New Age Philosophy. Make no mistake, Gussin has done a great deal of homework which undergirds The Seeker Academy. In addition to the broad swath, there is even practical, detailed information on how to perform sitting meditation.

Gussin's style in its slight formality, occasional sentence inversion, elegance, and wording of chapter titles reminds me pleasantly of the early 20th century books that crammed our bookcases when I was growing up in the 1950s and devoured books from an earlier generation. ("Grace knew that her body would ache the next day, as her heart ached from the winter in hell, but she was glad for the struggle.") There's a graciousness here that serves Gussin's tale well. I love the lyrical thread of poetic imagery that weaves through the book.

Grace Hudson lives up to her name, embodying as she does the quality of grace and carrying the surname of a great American river. Grace enters the Seeker Academy as a person willing "to give life a chance." Her "role-the-dice openness" helps her navigate the turbulent waves of her Seeker Academy experience with its not-yet-digested emotions and ideas.

Although Gussin's book is a novel of ideas, the relational strand of connection most compels me. The message I take away at the end of "The Seeker Academy" is that yes,"this life is a guesthouse" and in every moment we have the choice presented to us to be the decent human beings
we essentially are.

--Janet Grace Riehl, author Sightlines: A Poet's Diary

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Penetrating observations and insights, May 1, 2007

By 

Winslow Eliot http://winsloweliot.com/ - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Seeker Academy (Paperback)

If you've been on a retreat of this type, you'll find this story in The
Seeker Academy familiar, riveting, intriguing.

If you haven't been on one, but wondered what it's like, and what the
people who go there are like, Gussin's novel is the next best thing.

The `hero' as she is referred to in the beginning, is Grace Hudson, who
probably would not refer to herself as such. She is a middle-aged,
warm-hearted wife, mother, and teacher, who takes the illness of her
niece very hard and seeks solace in a New Age spiritual retreat center.
She neither saves someone nor is saved; she simply experiences the many
classes and conversations offered at Seeker, and mulls over those
experiences.

At the start we're taken into an emotionally-charged and vividly described
children's hospital, seen through Aunt Grace's eyes. Shifting gears, we
are transported to summertime at a holistic retreat center, where we are
enveloped in an entirely different arena. Here we persevere with Grace as
she explores her sadness, her relationships, and her self, without knowing
what she's really looking for.

She is not the only seeker who does not know for what they seek. Her most
challenging task is to try not to think, but to simply experience. The
effort to not think, to just breathe, for example, leads Grace and her
friends to contemplate and discuss what they're not thinking about. But
what they're more interested in is connection with each other. Grace is
definitely not a loner, and likes to talk and share as much as she likes
to experience.

Appreciators of fine writing will enjoy the exceptionally crafted
sentences and overall structure of this novel. The writing is fastidious,
elegant, the descriptions lyrical, the dialogue superb in the opening
chapters, and intellectually stimulating later on.

Those who appreciate a history of the New Age movement and its
forerunners are also in for a treat: Gussin includes a great deal of
detail and background information.

And appreciators of holistic healing and new age communities will also
enjoy Gussin's penetrating observations and insights. Anyone who has been
to one will recognize him or herself or someone they know in these pages.
He is not sarcastic, nor is he affectionate: he offers us his clear,
dispassionate gaze as he unfolds his tale. No one is a caricature, nor is
anyone a hero. Ultimately each one seeks what we all do: to become
themselves - kind-hearted, helpful, healthy human beings.

Highly recommended.