This week I’m with Warren Stribling, airman, legionnaire, teacher and writer (oh and author) which is a very eclectic portfolio for any adult life. He now lives in Mexico with his wife, but has been known to teach English as a foreign language in France, after a stint in the French Foreign Legion.
Our conversation was interesting as he is the first person I’ve met who is openly a part of the stories he writes, which begs the question about how close to home the fiction is to reality. As we progressed though it became apparent that although the circumstances and settings may be similar, the story really is just that, fiction. Not only is he a writer of novels, with two in the Sin and Zen series so far and possibly more to come, he is also the master of the observational ultra short, flash fiction many of which are driven by competitions he enters.
His blog posts are a different genre again and very philosophical in nature and could be called a sort of public journal designed to help Warren think about the big questions of life. He doesn’t set out to be an authority in the subject of the inner world but somehow it strikes a chord with others. The genesis of this perspective lies in therapeutic writing to making sense of himself and the circumstances he found himself and others in.
One of the things that became apparent as we talked was that we both have very interesting conversations with our other (better!) halves and that these can never be planned, as you don’t know what’s going to happen next. Talking, we touched on how coronavirus is exposing us to the global fear of death – and that perhaps we don’t need to focus on this because the truth is that no-one knows what will happen from one moment to the next. And perhaps this would allow us to use our big brains to work on being more accepting of the inevitability of death and the reality of who we are in terms of being connected to everything and everyone. Warren used an interesting phrase to describe where we are as almost being at the end of the hero’s journey of humanity.
If you’d like to find out more about Warren then why not visit him on his site https://www.wstribling.com/. And you can pick up the Sin and Zen series on Amazon too. You can also email him at write@wstribling.com.
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