Go Deep and Take Plenty of Root, Erik Storlie's latest memoir, explores his conflicted prairie-Norwegian roots, a sixties Beat scene in Minneapolis that inspired the early Bob Dylan, friendship with the poets James Wright and Robert Bly, and his almost fifty years of Zen meditation. This book illuminates a tectonic shift in American life, Storlie's embrace of the contemplative arts, and the real-world challenge of bringing an idealistic meditative practice into marriage, divorce, raising children, and the deaths of parents.
Advance Praise for Go Deep and Take Plenty of Root
In Erik Storlie's remarkable memoir, he takes us on a mad tour of Secret Minnesota-and this is not Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon. I loved discovering Storlie's Midwestern beatnik paradise, a place where Bob Dylan and the poet James Wright might show up at the next party. Storlie was one of the original Minneapolis mystics; he searched for the ecstatic, the illegal, and the unspeakable in the bars of Dinkytown. What he found will delight the reader.
--Pagan Kennedy, author of The Dangerous Joy of Dr. Sex and Other True Stories
In Erik Storlie's superbly detailed and touching memoir, we see how, by way of many tensions with both parents, and by an evolving liberating attention to their veiled individuality ("I knew it was hurt that tensed and wrinkled the skin around his eyes"), he gains insights into their hidden natures and comes to an awareness of what he calls at one point "sorrow beyond my fathoming"....This is wonderfully tender, accurate writing, and brings us into the presences, events and relationships of one writer's past that can enhance the present for all of us.
--Michael Dennis Browne, author of Things I Can't Tell You
Erik Storlie's previous memoir, Nothing on My Mind, recounts the arrival of psychedelics in Berkeley in the mid-1960s and his experiences with Zen teachers Shunryu Suzuki and Dainin Katagiri. He refuses formal Buddhism, convinced that America and Americans need meditation practice, but not the ceremonial and cult-like elements of Japanese Zen. Go Deep and Take Plenty of Root takes us a step further, demonstrating that Asian meditative practice can be reconciled with and can deeply infuse an American life. Here also we meet close up the poets James Wright and Robert Bly.
--Scott Edelstein, author of Sex and the Spiritual Teacher
About the Author: Erik Storlie's first memoir, Nothing on My Mind: Berkeley, LSD, Two Zen Masters (Shambhala 1996), describes the explosion of interest in psychedelics and Zen in the 1960s, his struggle to integrate the psychedelic experience with meditation, and his study and practice with Shunryu Suzuki and Dainin Katagiri Roshis. He assisted Katagiri Roshi in founding and developing the Minnesota Zen Meditation Center, completed a PhD in American Studies, and taught for thirty-five years at an inner-city college in Minneapolis. An early student and friend of the poet James Wright, he is a frequent participant at Robert Bly's mythopoetic conferences. He now teaches meditation and mindfulness and leads retreats for the Center for Spirituality and Healing at the University of Minnesota.
