Blog Archives
Symphony of Self
Symphony of Self: Compose Your Life, by Ann Mracek, is a reflective self-development book built around a fresh central idea: life can be understood through music. Mracek, a composer and lifelong music teacher, uses rhythm, harmony, dissonance, tempo, improvisation, silence, and legacy as ways to talk about healing, choice, relationships, and personal growth. The book’s guiding belief is clear from the start: “your life is not fixed. It is composed.” That idea gives the whole book its shape, making it feel less like a lecture and more like an invitation to sit at the piano of your own life and notice what you’ve been playing.
What makes the book engaging is how naturally Mracek blends music with personal story. She writes about childhood silence, her imagined dragon, teaching piano students, meeting her husband, writing music, building friendships, and learning to listen inward. These memories don’t feel random. They work like motifs that recur in different keys as the book moves from inner listening to consistency, fear, connection, rest, and, finally, legacy. Her tone is warm and encouraging, and she has a knack for turning abstract emotional work into something readers can picture and feel.
The strongest thread in the book is its focus on awareness. Mracek keeps bringing the reader back to the idea that change starts by listening closely, whether that means noticing old patterns, choosing healthier relationships, or making room for silence. One of the book’s most memorable lines comes in the chapter on rest: “The rest is as important as the note.” That sentence captures a lot of what the book is doing. It honors action, but it also gives real weight to pause, reflection, recovery, and the quiet spaces where a person can finally hear themselves.
The book also has a practical, meditative side. Each chapter includes or points toward guided meditations, and the appendix gathers them as part of an ongoing practice. The musical framework keeps the material organized, so the reader moves through the book almost like a composition: beginning with frequency, finding an inner melody, working through tension, learning connection, resting, and then performing a more honest life. The illustrations add a gentle, playful quality that fits the book’s approach, especially when the ideas get spiritual or emotionally deep.
Symphony of Self is a heartfelt guide for readers who are drawn to music, spirituality, creativity, and personal reflection. It’s a book about tuning your inner life, listening for what feels true, and choosing your next note with more intention. Mracek’s voice is sincere, hopeful, and deeply invested in the reader’s growth. By the end, the book feels like a reminder that becoming yourself doesn’t have to be harsh or hurried. It can be practiced, listened for, adjusted, and composed.
Pages: 352 | ASIN : B0H2X5916C
Jazzoetry Lives
Jazzoetry Lives is a slim but spiritually packed collection of poems rooted in Black history, jazz, memory, grief, and resistance. Author J. Vern Cromartie frames “jazzoetry” as a living form, one that moves through The Last Poets, Langston Hughes, blues traditions, Black Arts voices, and the ache of contemporary racial violence. The poems travel from Congo Square and the Satilla River to Alabama, Oakland, Ohio, and beyond, carrying tributes to figures like John Coltrane, Alice Coltrane, Kamau Seitu, Amiri Baraka, Bob Kaufman, Zahieb Mwongozi, and Langston Hughes. What emerges is less a conventional poetry collection than a call-and-response across generations, with music acting as both memory and medicine.
Cromartie’s lines often return like a chant, and at their best, that return feels ceremonial rather than merely structural. In “Alabama,” the repeated cry of the title and the invocation of Coltrane create a sorrowful music that gathers Birmingham, the 16th Street Baptist Church, capitalism, and mourning into one long, bruised breath. “And the Killings Go On” is even more direct, almost painfully so, naming Bobby Hutton, Betty Scott, Melvin Black, and Oscar Grant in a cadence that refuses the reader any easy distance. The book isn’t interested in decorative grief. It wants the wound visible.
The writing has a raw quality that feels tied to performance. Some poems read as if they’re waiting for drums, a bassline, or a room full of people murmuring back. “A Gathering of Sounds” captures that beautifully, with music exploding into fragments and sheets of sound before slipping into silence. I liked how Cromartie treats jazz not as background atmosphere but as a way of thinking, remembering, and surviving. At the same time, the collection can feel uneven when its political declarations become too blunt, as in “Elon Musk has a God Complex,” where the anger is clear. Even there, I respected the book’s refusal to soften its judgments. Its ideas are fierce, ancestral, and unapologetically Black, and its best moments make history feel less like a record than a rhythm still beating under the floorboards.
By the end, especially with the inclusion of Langston Hughes’s “The Negro and the Racial Mountain,” I felt the collection circling back to its deepest concern: the freedom of Black artists to speak from their own ground without apology, translation, or disguise. Jazzoetry Lives is warm-blooded, grieving, insistent, and often moving. I’d recommend it to readers who care about Black poetic traditions, jazz-inflected verse, political poetry, and work that carries the weight of cultural memory with both tenderness and fire.
Pages: 54
I Wrote The Book I Desperatley Needed
In Listening to Spravato, you share part memoir and part practical meditation on how music shapes the experience of Spravato treatment for depression. Why was this an important book for you to write?
When I began Spravato, I realized that almost no one was talking about what the treatment actually feels like from the inside. I’m a conservatory‑trained musician — my first instrument is drums — and I studied with the infamous composer and songwriter Leonard Bernstein as well as the Count Basie drummer “Papa” Jo Jones when I was a very young drummer. My whole life has been shaped by sound, yet nothing in my musical background prepared me for the sensory and emotional intensity of Spravato. I wrote the book I desperately needed: something honest, grounded, and willing to describe the strange, disorienting, and sometimes beautiful interior of the experience.
What did you feel was missing from existing conversations about Spravato treatment?
Most conversations focus on dosage, insurance, and side effects, but almost none address the inner landscape — the dissolution of time, the shifting sense of self, the vulnerability, the unexpected clarity. And almost no one talks about how music shapes that experience. Music isn’t background noise in Spravato; it’s part of the treatment. I wanted to bring nuance, honesty, and practical guidance to a space that often feels clinical and incomplete.
I also discovered a huge gap: while there are many playlists for raw ketamine — and I researched a tremendous number of them — almost none are designed specifically for Spravato. And the timing differences matter. Raw ketamine sessions are generally much longer, and more intense with long, slow ascents and descents that unfold over a wide emotional arc.
Spravato, by contrast, is a structured 120‑minute treatment, but the shape of the experience is completely different: a sharper onset, a shorter and more concentrated peak, and a more abrupt descent. Using a raw‑ketamine playlist for Spravato is like using a marathon training plan to run a 5K — the proportions and pacing are simply wrong. That gap was one of the reasons I felt compelled to write the book.
What themes were important for you to explore?
I wanted to explore disorientation and grounding, control and surrender, and the emotional truth of sound. Spravato forces you to listen with your nervous system, not your ego. It also taught me humility: that “good” or “bad” music depends entirely on for whom and for what purpose. The music that defines my identity as a musician is not always the music that supports me in the chair.
Were there genres or artists that surprised you by working especially well—or especially poorly?
Absolutely. As a trained musician, I assumed I knew exactly what would work. I was wrong.
Ambient and drone‑based music — which I once dismissed as “New Age nonsense” — turned out to be surprisingly stabilizing. Jazz and hard bop, much of the music I make, would blow a Spravato patient out of the water; it’s too energetic, too directional, too full of forward motion.
Vocals were the most intrusive — they activate the language center of the brain, which pulls you out of the Spravato experience. And on top of that, my favorite pop/rock ballads — Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon, James Taylor — are songs where the lyrics are as meaningful (or more) as the music. Many of them make me cry. That’s not what you want when your brain is in a state of heightened neuroplasticity. You don’t want to be pulled into narrative, memory, or emotional autobiography; you want space, not story.
That said, jazz isn’t completely off the table. The book includes a jazz playlist built from ballads and gentler classics — the kind of pieces where the swing is subtle, the harmony is warm, and the emotional temperature stays steady. When curated intentionally, that kind of jazz can work beautifully.
What conversations do you hope Listening to Spravato sparks among patients and providers?
I hope it helps people talk about the experience, not just the protocol. Questions like: What did you hear? What grounded you? How can we make this safer and more intentional? Ultimately, I want people to feel less alone — whether they’re sitting in the Spravato chair for the first time or guiding someone through it.
Author Links: GoodReads | Website
You’re sitting in the chair, the medicine starts to rise… and suddenly, everything feels unfamiliar—and you don’t know how to navigate it. You came to Spravato hoping for relief, but instead you’re facing something intense, unpredictable, even overwhelming. The room is quiet, the experience is shifting—and no one really tells you how to move through it.
Listening to Spravato: Sound, Silence, and the Medicine of Music is not another clinical manual or vague “relaxation guide.” It is a grounded, compassionate roadmap that explains exactly how to prepare, what to expect, and how to use sound and music as anchors during treatment. Bridging clinical understanding with lived experience, Justin Page invites readers into the Spravato chair as a real, vulnerable space—where what you hear, feel, and bring with you matters more than you’ve been told.
Inside the book, you will discover:
- Preparation: How to walk into your session feeling calm and supported instead of anxious and uncertain.
- Sound as structure: The invisible force shaping your entire experience—and how to make it work for you, not against you.
- Music pitfalls: The overlooked mistakes that can quietly destabilize a session, and how to avoid them completely.
- Session phases: What really happens inside your mind as the medicine takes effect, and how to move through each phase safely.
- Environment: Why light, blankets, headphones, silence, and even clinic noise matter—and how to take gentle control of them.
- Landing the session: The often-missed moment where the experience truly “lands,” and how to make it count.
- Integration: A simple, grounding way to make sense of what you experienced—without overthinking or overwhelm.
Drawing on years of severe depression, suicide attempts, and the fragile hope of esketamine treatment, Page writes with rare tenderness and precision. He treats sound not as background, but as architecture, shelter, and sometimes a lifeline. Ambient music becomes a room you can rest inside; a soft piano line feels like a hand on the shoulder; carefully chosen playlists help the mind move through altered states with more safety and coherence.
This isn’t theory alone. The book includes practical tools, sample playlists, and exercises that patients and clinicians can use immediately—like having a calm, experienced guide sitting beside you. Page is skeptical of grandiose claims about “healing frequencies,” yet generous enough to acknowledge that symbolism and intention can matter deeply when the nervous system is open and afraid. His approach is humble, precise, and focused on care in the smallest, adjustable details.
Listening to Spravato invites readers to see the Spravato chair as more than a medical setting: it is a sonic environment, a threshold, and a place where attention to sound can gently reshape the experience of treatment. For anyone navigating Spravato—patients, loved ones, nurses, therapists, and clinic staff—this book offers language, structure, and tools for turning one of the most vulnerable spaces you will step into into something steadier, kinder, and more intentional.
Enter your next session with confidence, safety, and something steady to hold onto.
Clinically Reviewed
Listening to Spravato
Listening to Spravato, by Justin Page, is a personal and practical meditation on how music shapes the experience of Spravato treatment for depression. Part memoir, part guide, and part argument for more intentional clinical care, the book follows the author’s journey from years of severe depression and suicide attempts into the fragile, complicated hope offered by esketamine sessions. Page explores the Spravato chair as more than a medical setting, showing how light, blankets, headphones, silence, clinicians, playlists, and even the soft crunch of recorded snow can become part of the treatment environment. At its center is a clear and quietly radical idea: when the mind is most vulnerable, sound isn’t background. It’s structure, shelter, and sometimes a lifeline.
What moved me most was the book’s tenderness toward suffering without ever turning it into spectacle. Page writes about depression with an intimacy that feels earned, especially in the personal note where he remembers being sixteen and feeling that the word “depression” was far too small for the storm it named. That passage gives the rest of the book its emotional gravity. The later chapters on playlists, clinic rooms, and session phases could have felt purely technical, but they don’t, because they’re rooted in the lived knowledge of someone who has needed these tools to survive. I found the “one bad trip” chapter especially striking. The absurd interruption of a Spotify ad, followed by the terrifying intrusion of a screaming solo flute and a rumbling Beethoven passage, makes the book’s central argument suddenly visceral. Page doesn’t merely tell us that sound matters under Spravato. He lets us feel how quickly music can become a menace when the self is unmoored.
The writing is strongest when it trusts its own lyric intelligence. Page has a gift for turning sensory experience into language that feels both precise and haunted: ambient music becomes architecture, a soft piano feels like a hand on the shoulder, public soundscapes offer “the comfort of a crowd without the threat of contact.” I admired the way he balances poetic reflection with practical restraint. He’s skeptical of mystical claims about 432 Hz and “healing frequencies,” yet he’s generous enough to admit that symbolism can matter when the nervous system is open and afraid. Its ideas are persuasive because they are humble. Page isn’t selling music as magic. He’s arguing that care is often found in the smallest, adjustable details.
I came away from Listening to Spravato with a renewed respect for the unseen textures of healing, for the chair, the headphones, the nurse outside the door, and the final grounding track that helps a person return to themselves. This is a compassionate, idiosyncratic, and quietly necessary book, one that makes a convincing case that treatment environments should be designed with more imagination and more mercy. I’d recommend it to Spravato patients, clinicians, clinic owners, music therapists, and anyone interested in how sound can help hold a person steady when language has gone temporarily out of reach.
Pages: 118 | ISBN: 9798256399498
The Atmosphere of War
Sawadika American Girl follows an American teenager in Vietnam War-era Bangkok, as music, first love, and shared sorrow help her find a place for grief, longing, and belonging. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
Most people aren’t aware that during the Vietnam War, Thailand served as a major US military outpost, with over eight military bases scattered throughout the kingdom. In addition, thousands of American families lived in Bangkok with fathers who worked for the American Embassy, USAID, the CIA, the US Military, and as private contractors. All in direct or indirect support of the war effort. On top of that, in 1968, the year my novel takes place, nearly 5,000 GI’s were pouring into Bangkok each month on R&R, bringing their turmoil with them. This created a ‘little America’ that was complex and combustible and often at odds with Thai sensibilities and culture. Having grown up in Thailand, I understood these underlying tensions and knew it was fertile ground for a story. Making it a coming-of-age story with a 17-year-old female protagonist struck me as a powerful and unexpected way to shed light on this overlooked pocket of history.
Music feels central to Piper’s emotional life; how did you approach writing piano as both technique and feeling?
Music anchors Piper emotionally in a world that doesn’t make sense. The act of playing the piano becomes a private space where she works out her emotions. Her piano teacher is a Thai Prince who had studied with the great Chilean pianist Claudio Arrau. Arrau’s technique was legendary for centering the body for maximum emotional expression. This is what the Prince teaches Piper. Her efforts to master this technique symbolize her struggle to come to terms with what is going on in her life.
The character of the Thai Prince who studied with Arrau is based on a piano teacher I had. There was a vibrant classical music scene in Bangkok at this time. Renowned musicians had Bangkok on their concert tours. This made sense because the Thai King was a talented jazz musician and composed his own music. And as a young girl, the Queen studied classical piano in Paris. I love that thread of the story because no one expects it, but it is absolutely true.
Jack and Piper’s relationship is brief but deeply affecting. What did you want their connection to reveal about war, loneliness, and belonging?
Life is always precious. But war, even the atmosphere of war, perverts that value, making life more precious and less precious at the same time. Piper and Jack experience this intensity from different vantage points, but each is tuned in to the sense of loneliness and dislocation that proximity to war brings. Most of the story unfolds during a single week, about the length of a soldier’s R&R. Under such conditions, time stretches. Three, four, or even five days together mean everything. That perception of time is woven into the fabric of their relationship.
How did you balance the intimate story of Piper’s coming of age with the larger historical forces surrounding her?
The bulk of the novel unfolds over a single week in 1968. That is on purpose. The assassinations of MLK and Robert Kennedy had happened, the Tet Offensive had occurred, and the casualty rate for soldiers and civilians in Vietnam was at a high point. All of that darkened the mood for Americans working in Bangkok. There were tensions with the Thai government. As a dependent, this increased the pressure for Piper to behave a certain way and not put a foot wrong. That kind of control is at odds with an individual’s ability to come of age, which is by definition about asserting one’s independence in a way that produces some kind of personal and intimate transformation. This put Piper on a collision course with the forces around her.
Author Links: GoodReads | Instagram | Facebook | Website | Amazon
One night, Piper ditches the American Teen Club to party with an older crowd. Sparks fly when she meets Jack, a 19-year-old GI on R&R from Vietnam. Defying the Army’s non-fraternization policy, they pledge to spend his leave together. As the hypocrisy of the war closes in on them, Jack’s name surfaces in a drug investigation and Piper discovers a disturbing truth about her father, forcing both to decide what they are willing to risk for a few more days together.
Sawadika American Girl is the story of a young American woman coming-of-age on the periphery of a brutal, unjust war.
ABBA- The Making of an Unstoppable Musical Phenomenon
Michael Mascioni’s ABBA: The Making of an Unstoppable Musical Phenomenon is less a conventional band biography than a wide-angle study of how ABBA became a durable cultural ecosystem. The book moves from the obvious milestones, Eurovision and “Waterloo,” the peculiar alchemy of Agnetha and Frida’s voices, the immaculate pop construction of songs like “Dancing Queen” and “The Winner Takes It All,” into something more expansive: the Mamma Mia! empire, ABBA Voyage, the museum, tourism, tribute acts, fan communities, solo careers, and the strange elegance with which ABBA transformed from a recording group into a living global franchise. Mascioni is quite clear that he isn’t trying to tell the whole history of the band. What he wants to trace is the machinery of endurance, and in that respect, the book is unusually focused and often genuinely interesting.
What I liked most is that the book understands ABBA as both music and atmosphere. Mascioni keeps returning to that tension between emotional melancholy and radiant surface, and I found that persuasive because it gets at something essential in ABBA’s appeal. He’s especially good when he lingers over the afterlife of the songs, how Mamma Mia! recontextualized them, how Voyage turned nostalgia into spectacle, how even the museum and fan travel to Sweden become part of the meaning of the music rather than mere merchandising. The examples accumulate in a way that can feel repetitive, but they also create their own force. By the time he’s discussing audiences singing along with tribute bands, fans visiting Stockholm because of the group, or the band’s music being carried forward through theater and curated multimedia experiences, you feel the scale of the phenomenon rather than just hearing it asserted.
There’s real enthusiasm here, but the prose can be citation-heavy, and sometimes more compilative than shapely. Mascioni often builds chapters through long strings of quotations and testimony, which gives the book breadth. That method lets the book feel communal, as if ABBA’s story can only be told through the many people who’ve orbited it: musicians, scholars, producers, curators, fans. I also appreciated that the later chapters don’t simply circle the old hits. The sections on Agnetha’s and Frida’s solo work, on Chess and Kristina från Duvemåla, and on the sheer persistence of fan culture give the book a fuller, more textured emotional register than a nostalgia piece usually allows.
I came away feeling I’d been shown something real about why ABBA still matters, not just as a beloved pop group, but as a carefully sustained emotional world people keep choosing to reenter. That lasting resonance is the book’s strongest argument, and Mascioni makes it with conviction. I’d recommend it most to committed ABBA fans, pop-culture readers interested in legacy and branding, and anyone curious about how songs become institutions.
Pages: 136 | ASIN : B0DQ6F5953
Thomas and the Magic Violin
I found Thomas and the Magic Violin to be a deeply moving picture book that I would be delighted to share with children in my classroom. The story follows Thomas as he works hard to prepare for a spring concert, facing the frustration, self-doubt, and perseverance that are such familiar parts of learning something worthwhile. What I loved most is the book’s gentle message that growth often comes through patience, encouragement, and the quiet support of others. It presents musical practice honestly, while still wrapping the story in warmth and wonder.
This book stands out because it treats children’s emotions with real respect. Thomas is discouraged, embarrassed, determined, and hopeful, and those feelings are shown in a way young readers can understand. The relationship between Thomas and the older violinist across the courtyard is especially beautiful. Their connection is not built through long conversations, but through music, listening, and kindness. From a teacher’s perspective, that makes the story especially powerful, because it shows children that mentorship can be quiet, meaningful, and life-changing.
Illustrator Sofia Panchyshyn’s artwork is soft, expressive, and full of feeling, using warm pastel colors, floral details, and flowing musical lines to create a calm, magical atmosphere. The pictures help tell the story by showing Thomas’s changing emotions, the beauty of the courtyard setting, and the almost dreamlike presence of the master violinist’s music. I was especially taken by the scenes where the music seems to travel through the air, turning sound into something children can see.
I would highly recommend this book for classrooms, libraries, and families. It opens the door to thoughtful conversations about practice, resilience, artistic expression, grief, and gratitude, all in a way that remains accessible to young readers. Most of all, it is a lovely reminder that encouragement can leave a lasting mark on a child’s life. Thomas and the Magic Violin is a tender, memorable book that I loved, and I believe many children will find both comfort and inspiration in its pages.
Pages: 38 | ISBN : 978-9528206088
Clarity
In Writing in the Wound, you share with readers what it means to be shaped by academia, gendered power, and migration, and how your reliance on music proved to be a method of rescue. Why was this an important book for you to write?
I began writing Writing in the Wound at a moment of profound emotional and political intensity in my life. After years of navigating the Canadian immigration system, I found myself confronting not only institutional barriers but also the deeper psychological and embodied impact of living within them.
Initially, I considered writing a more overtly critical, policy-driven book—one that directly addressed the failures and frustrations of the immigration system. But I realized that such a project would take me away from my core as an artist.
What felt more urgent was to write from within my own lived experience—through sound, memory, and relationship. This book became a way of tracing how I endured, and what allowed me to stay. In that sense, it is not only a story of struggle, but of artistic becoming.
In its early drafts, the manuscript was expansive and uncontained. Over time, it found its center—particularly through my relationship with my mentor, which offered a space of care, listening, and growth. That relational grounding became essential to shaping the narrative.
Ultimately, this book created a new path for me—a path where I was no longer masking who I am or what I am enduring within this system. It allowed me to situate myself clearly as an artist, while also naming the conditions I was navigating.
I wrote this book not just to document what happened, but to understand how one continues to create, even within systems that constrain and wound.
Music appears as discipline, refuge, and language—when did it become central to your survival?
Music became central to my survival during the uncertainty of the COVID-19 period. After serving as Music Faculty for Semester at Sea, I travelled to Karachi due to the pandemic and found myself unexpectedly unable to return to Canada for nearly two years, at a time when institutions were largely closed and opportunities had disappeared.
In that period of precarity, when academic institutions had stopped hiring faculty, and it was difficult to teach remotely from where I was situated, music shifted from being a practice of expression to a practice of sustenance. Earlier compositions, like Anticipating and Living with Purpose, had received recognition on international charts and in competitions, which gave me the confidence to continue applying for opportunities. Then, Perils of Heavy Rainfall received Second Prize in Listening during COVID contest (2020).
Gradually, commissions and invitations followed, including from organizations such as New Music Edmonton and New Music Calgary, as well as from the International Women’s Day festival and the Canadian Music Week platform. What began as a fragile thread of continuity became, over time, a means of survival—both materially and emotionally.
Was there a moment when you felt your voice shifting—from survival to assertion?
Yes—there was a moment when everything I had been experiencing condensed into a single, clear sentence: that after 17 years in Canada, I still did not have permanent residency, and that this was not incidental, but tied to the structural limitations of the immigration system.
This clarity came to me in July, during a later stage of working on Writing in the Wound. By that point, the writing had begun to settle, and I was able to see my experience not only as something I had lived through but as something I could name with precision.
Being able to name that so directly marked a shift for me. Until then, much of my writing had been about processing and surviving. But that sentence became a position—it allowed me to see my experience not as an individual struggle, but as part of a broader systemic pattern.
Around that time, I also began to explore new pathways within the immigration system, including applying on humanitarian and compassionate grounds. That process required me to articulate my story not only as narrative, but as a formal claim—something that could be recognized within institutional frameworks. In that sense, my voice was no longer only expressive; it became strategic and assertive.
This shift was also reflected in how my work moved into public space. My writing on the undervaluation of artistic labour was published in Canadian Dimension, and I began sharing my story in community settings, including an event with Action Dignity. Speaking in those spaces—where these issues are often not centered—felt like an important act of bringing lived experience into public discourse.
That momentum continued with invitations to speak at larger gatherings, including a Labour Day event, where my story was witnessed by a wide network of community organizations.
In that sense, assertion was not a single moment, but a series of acts—each one moving my voice from private endurance toward public articulation and advocacy.
What is one thing you hope readers take away from Writing in the Wound?
At its heart, the book asks: what happens when our scars begin to speak?
I hope readers come away with a deeper recognition that the wound is not only personal, but structural. Experiences of migration, racialization, and institutional struggle are not simply endured—they also carry strength, insight, and endurance. They shape ways of seeing, feeling, and creating that are often overlooked or undervalued.
For those navigating migration and racialization, these experiences are frequently internalized, fragmented, or rendered invisible. This book is an attempt to give them form—to show that what is carried in the body and in memory can become voice.
If there is one thing I hope readers take away, it is that these experiences are not only sites of injury, but also sites of knowledge. When scars begin to speak, they do more than tell a story—they begin to name the structures that produced them, and in doing so, open the possibility of shifting those systems—and one’s positionality within them.
Author Links: GoodReads | X (Twitter) | Facebook | Website | Amazon
For Dr. Shumaila Hemani, music began as a calling. It unfolded into a life path through a rare human connection with eminent ethnomusicologist Professor Regula Burckhardt Qureshi, whose faith in her awakened the courage to risk everything for the artist’s path.
Spanning nearly two decades — from 2006 to the present — across the academic corridors of Harvard and the University of Alberta to the soundscapes of London, Boston, Chicago, Edmonton, Mumbai, Karachi, Calgary, Banff, and Toronto, and a world odyssey aboard a floating campus, Writing in the Wound is a story of resilience and fragile belonging, of visibility and erasure, and of the power of art — in particular Sufi music — to transmute pain into wisdom.
It is an intimate testament to truth and vulnerability in the face of institutional silencing, immigration precarity, and the long endurance toward permanent belonging.
