1.
What inspired you to write this book? The Zen Time Traveler is the culmination of a lifetime of
spiritual exploration. I wanted to make the koans of Zen Buddhism come alive
for contemporary readers. I am not a Zen priest, abbot, or roshi. I’m a fantasy
writer, a storyteller with a Zen practice. I did not write The Zen Time
Traveler to make myself important or for fame and fortune, but to
spread the dharma in some small way.
2.
What exactly is it about — and who is it written for? The Zen Time Traveler is the story of Stephen Maine, an
ordinary human being with a beginner’s Zen practice, who finds himself
transported by a mysterious haiku to the Song Dynasty China in the year 1225.
Stephen cohabits the body of a young Japanese monk named Wùkōng who is traveling
around China collecting the enigmatic, sometimes humorous, seemingly irrational
anecdotes and parables that are the koans, which are intended to break one out
of rational thinking and experience the world in a new way.
Readers might be
familiar with koans such as “What is the
sound of one hand clapping?” or “What was your original face before your
parents were born?” Wùkōng turns out to be an important figure in the history
of Zen Buddhism. (To say any more about Wùkōng would be a spoiler.)
Stephen/Wùkōng meet Yabaku, a beautiful, mystical Chinese sword maker who has
created a weapon named after herself that is the “sword of judgment.” Both
Stephen and Wùkōng fall in love with Yabaku, creating a conflict for both men.
Stephen must decide whether to stay in the 13th century with
Yabaku or return to his life and wife Joanna in the 21st century.
Wùkōng must choose between returning to Japan with his bundle of koans or
staying in China with the magical swordsmith.
For people who don’t
know much or anything about Zen and koans, I’m hoping this book is a lively
introduction to them. For Zen practitioners, I would like this book to be a
fresh take on koans from a first-person perspective, as the main character
Stephen Maine lives them. I’m hoping The Zen Time Traveler will
appeal both to spiritual seekers and fantasy readers.
3.
What do you hope readers will get out of reading your book? The Zen Time
Traveler deals with both familiar issues like mid-life crises and
marital struggles, and larger, more cerebral Buddhist concepts like the
suffering caused by attachment to the things of the world, and the elastic
nature of Time. If the book sends people on their own spiritual quests, I will
consider the book a success. If they just enjoy it as a fun time travel
adventure, that would be wonderful too.
4.
How did you decide on your book’s title and cover design? The publisher supplied
both the design and the title. The elegant cover art is well thought out. The
black background represents the Void. The yellow streak down the center is the
portal to the past, and the red symbol beneath the title is the kanji for Time.
I had a different working title. The editor at Discovery Publishers provided
the title, which neatly encapsulates Zen and time travel.
5.
What advice or words of wisdom do you have for fellow writers – other than
run!? I often tell
aspiring writers that there are no rules. One can write about anything, in any
style, if people want to read it. That’s the only criterium. We have such
disparate works as James Joyce’s wildly inventive novel Ulysses,
and Gadsby, a 1939 novel by Ernest Vincent Wright, that
contains no instances of the letter “e.”
6.
Were there experiences in your personal life or career that came in handy
when writing this book? My whole life
has contributed to the writing of this book. That includes early psychedelic
experiences that gave me an illusory experience of the Oneness of Everything,
my acting career, my marriage, my practice of the esoteric,
transformational martial art Shintaido, even my long years as a technical
writer and project manager for software development companies in the San
Francisco Bay Area and elsewhere, and finally, my practice of Tai Chi and Zen.
7.
How would you describe your writing style? Which writers or books is your
writing similar to? My writing has
been described as “whimsical.” Aside from a couple of writing-for-hire
cyberpunk novels I wrote in the 1990s in the world of the role-playing fantasy
game Cyberpunk 2020, there is little violence in my books, unless
you count the events of my first novel, The American Book of the Dead,
a black comedy about World War III, in which everybody dies.
The Zen Time
Traveler has been compared in
reviews to the writing of David Guy (Jake Fades, Hank Heals)
and Ruth Ozeki (The Book of Form and Emptiness, A Tale for the Time Being).
The Ozeki comparison is flattering but I don’t believe it for a minute. Ms.
Ozeki is a Zen priest and has been shortlisted for the Booker prize. I’m
a genre writer with a Zen practice. A better comparison might be Before
the Coffee Gets Cold, a 2015 time travel story by Toshikazu Kawaguchi that
was made into the movie Café Funiculi Funicula.
8.
What challenges did you overcome in the writing of this book? I found The
Zen Time Traveler easy to write. I used an unusual method to move
through the story. I was inspired by Philip K. Dick, who claimed that he wrote
my favorite science fiction novel The Man in the High Castle by
repeatedly casting the I Ching to see where to go next. There
are seventy-eight short chapters in The Zen Time Traveler, with a
koan in almost each one. Instead of creating an extended outline as I have done
for previous books, as I started the next chapter I would sift through the many
collections of koans at my disposal, the Gateless Gate, the Book
of Equanimity, the Blue Cliff Record, the Iron Flute,
and other sources, until I found a koan that would propel the plot forward.
Sometimes this inquiry would take only a minute or two, sometimes a couple of
hours. The koans dictated the progression of the novel.
9.
If people can buy or read one book this week or month, why should it be yours? The Zen Time Traveler is a fun read and an exploration of
serious philosophical topics in a fantastical setting. I would hope that the
book both entertains and enlightens. If I had one word for readers, it would
be, “Enjoy!”
About The Author: Stephen Billias is the published author
of seven fantasy novels, one collection of short stories, and a literary
novel, Pilgrim Maya, that he wrote with his wife Bela Breslau. He
is a MacDowell Fellow. Stephen has worked as a professional actor,
street-performing juggler, dishwasher, New York City taxi driver, technical
writer, and project manager. He is a longtime practitioner of the esoteric
Japanese martial art Shintaido. He lives in Deerfield Massachusetts where he
and Bela established and ran the Shintaido Farm, a spiritual retreat center for
the practice of Shintaido, from 2006-2016. He sits with the Boundless Way Zen
group in Northampton, Massachusetts, where he is often jiki (practice
leader) or doan (bellringer). For more info, please see: https://billiasbreslauwriters.com/
“The heart of our
problem, linguists tell us, is this: English has 44 sounds but only 26 letters.
To make up for those missing 18 phonemes, some letters are forced to work
multiple jobs. C performs three roles in cup, lace, and charge. H helps out in
honor, thicket, and laugh. If 26 employees had to cover 44 positions, the work
would suffer, and so would those employees. Another problem is this: Every
sound in English has, on average, four ways of spelling it. Ask a toddler to
spell cat. Then ask them to spell kid, chrome, and queen.”
--Enough Is Enuf: Our
Failed Attempts To Make English Easier To Spell by Gabe Henry
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For
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Association, Sarah Lawrence College, Nonfiction Writers Association, Cape Cod
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times at Morgan James Publishing Red Carpet, and Connecticut Authors and
Publishers Association. He served as a judge for the 2024 IBPA Book Awards.
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and The Washington Post. His first published book was The
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was featured in The Sun Sentinel and Miami Herald.
Born
and raised in Brooklyn, he now resides in Westchester with his wife, two kids,
and Ferris, a black lab rescue dog, and El Chapo, a pug rescue dog.
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