Expatriate and world traveler Ricker Winsor has brought long years of experience to bear in this collection of short essays, most of which have been published at Reflets du Temps in Paris over the last ten years. An artist and writer, Ricker Winsor contemplates a cornucopia of interests and concerns including fishing, art, loneliness, and marriage among others. He writes and paints in Indonesia where he lives with his Chinese Indonesian wife, Jovita, and two dogs, Sniper and Nana. Vintage photographs by the author. From the introduction by David Kherdian: Ricker Winsor is a committed artist, an investigative thinker and truth seeker, whose abiding territory is the arts, which includes social movements, causes, and practices: corollaries that are also leading mankind toward equality, liberation and truth. By putting himself under what he is looking at he draws us inward to see what he sees, to learn from his experiences and the subjects under his study. He is a student of life, in particular a directed life that is both used and formed by art. Ricker Winsor's undefined restlessness along with his criticism of the status quo and his country slowly begins to emerge into a lover's quarrel, which is a common dilemma among artists estranged from their homeland, James Joyce being our greatest example, along with Thomas Wolfe, whose appetites for life were as large as their personal visions. Home is where the heart is, and this is where Ricker begins his inward journey, that will eventually take him into his true interior home, with its influences deeper than the ties of his birth place. He begins by asserting his earliest dreamed remembrances, actualizing their influences by going out to them-beginning with a trout fishing trip to the Catskills, where he reaffirms his earliest impulses possessed in childhood dreams that he seeks now to reclaim. His first tale ends with a mystical encountering with an otter, who invites him to a joined swim that takes him deeper into his psyche, confirming his spiritual quest and leading him to what will follow. As he marks his continuing steps, we follow with our own dreams of becoming-our realities, too, caught in the net of loses and gains, that we can measure from our own understanding. How is this unknowable place to be found that drives the artist relentlessly without a foreseeable end, seemingly unattainable? Samuel Beckett says that when an artist stakes his claim he has no country or brother. But if the artist has no country, he does have a divided stage, the one he performs on and the one he leaves behind, where cast and crew remain intact, that he can revisit but to which he can never again belong. This is what he has, and it is the price he must pay for the gift of his art. Ricker is telling us that the artist must find his truth and purpose from within himself, by unfolding the understanding locked in his subconscious, to give it a new life in forms and symbols that are within him. He must earn his way back through his own struggles-his art at war with the resisting outside world-by using the material of his life to awaken the spirit, transforming dark into light. David Kherdian is an Armenian American writer, poet, and editor. He is the author of over forty books and the recipient of many awards. He is known best for The Road from Home, (Greenwillow Books, 1979), based on his mother's childhood during the Turkish genocide of the Armenian people. Primarily he is a poet and a review of his recent volume of poetry, Living in Quiet, is included in this collection of essays.
About the Author: Ricker Winsor attended Northfield Mount Hermon School, Brown University, where he studied English, and The Rhode Island School of Design where he received BFA and MFA degrees. He has worked as a photojournalist, as a cabinetmaker, as a teacher, and as an exhibiting landscape painter. He performed professionally for thirty years as a Delta blues musician, guitar and vocal. Ricker is an expatriate living in Surabaya, Indonesia with his Chinese Indonesian wife, Jovita, and two dogs, Sniper and Nana. His writing was published beginning in the '60s during his photojournalism days but Pakuwon City is his first book. His home in the United States is West Wind Studio in Bradford, Vermont. He is working on a new book, Spiritual Matters.