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About

To tell the truth of
who you are, you either need
endless words or none.
from Haiku Wisdom

I live. I contemplate. I listen. To my thoughts. To plants and animals. To people who have had wildly different experiences.

 

I read. I wander. Through spirituality, science, psychology, philosophy, religion, anthropology, sociology, the supernatural, the paranormal, the loopy, the crazy.

 

I know it’s all connected. I try to say how. I feel every moment matters. I stop for the ant that meanders across my computer screen.  

 

I come at all this from every angle that occurs to me. I come up short. When I stop trying, I come closest.

 

I love most when I surprise myself.

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How Did I Get Here

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I didn't set out to write poetry or philosophical essays.

 

In college I wrote humor for The Harvard Lampoon. After graduating in biology from Harvard, I taught science and math, wrote screenplays in Hollywood, played in a band, and spent years wandering through psychology, philosophy, religion, science, and anything else that seemed to hint at how life fits together.

 

Eventually I stopped trying to build a career around art and started sitting down each morning with coffee, a notebook, and no expectations. That simple practice became the center of my life. It is teaching me that the search for approval only kicks up dust in the search for truth.

 

I’ve now given up trying to define myself. I write poems, essays, aphorisms, or screenplays as inspiration moves me. I photograph ordinary moments that suddenly flare with the glow of something beyond. I wait to feel whether I’m writing what I think, or what I think is true.

 

If something unites the art I make, it is a desire to connect what people tend to keep separate. To look below, behind, or beyond wherever people tend to stop looking. To express the awe I feel before existence.   

Horn Tooting

​

  • Harvard graduate, summa cum laude (Biology)

  • Former writer and Vice President of The Harvard Lampoon

  • Screenplay optioned by Warner Bros.

  • Poems and essays published in The Aurora, The Rye Whiskey Review, and The Still Point Arts Quarterly

  • Contributor to The American Bystander

  • One of my pieces was included in The Best of the Harvard Lampoon: 140 Years of American Humor, alongside work by John Updike and Conan O'Brien

© 2018 by Chris Dingman
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