Paul Whiteside Smart
The gap is growing between professionalized culture and humanity’s need to reflect and seek to understand the world it inhabits. I worked a lifetime in small town newspapers, learning the joys of collaboration, of building a consonance that reflected community. Now free of career, I work to bring deep compassion into my creative writing, my radio work, my films, in an erudite manner that trusts audiences’ need to reach for understanding. I embrace intuition and delight in creating material that is full of the contradictions that define beauty and meaning in our complex world. I struggle for art that rewards the process over the product.
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In my non-fiction writing, I explore what changes, what remains the same. I work with the past as a collaborator in my fiction. My films and radio work feed off collective energy, and involve a blend of the real, the mythic, and improvised philosophizing. My life is about engaging with the world as fully as possible. I sense the start of a new renaissance.