For as long as I can remember, writing has been both an extension of imagination and a way of figuring out what I truly believe.  Through high school journalism I quickly discovered that I enjoyed the challenges of deadlines and trying to figure out the hidden and compelling drama behind the most ordinary stories.  I guess in this sense writing was a form of both puzzle solving and exploration—and a chance to do it with elan and personality. 


This penchant for letting writing lead as much as record carried over to my professional career as an ecologist and environmentalist.  Whenever I was part of study or research team I was always recruited to convert the “collective wisdom” of a group or research team into an intelligible form.  The recording process almost always led to new questions and ideas that spurred further investigation and occasionally more powerful ways to protect animals, habitat, clean air, and water. 

Whether I’m writing novels, memoirs, science, social commentary or screenplays, I seem to be guided by an invisible hand that only grudgingly accedes to convention and is always on the lookout for a powerful irony, a novel metaphor or a revolutionary idea.  I would like to think that my writing provokes, inflames, and evokes a certain disquietude that all may not be as it appears. 

In Dire Straits: Keeping Spirit Alive When the Wheels Come Off is my third and most ambitious published book.  It is even more provocative than the other two, confronting head-on conventional ideas about healing from rheumatoid and auto-immune illnesses and examining closely the many tenuous assumptions that support conventional treatment approaches. 

The book also jumps to a higher level--sketching out the possibility that immune-system disease bears an uncanny similarity to the system breakdowns now being experienced for planet earth as a whole.  In each case, the remedy may be a guerrilla kind of strategy that draws upon the full power of individual reason, imagination, and higher intention.

Jim Currie
Author of IN DIRE STRAITS: KEEPING SPIRIT ALIVE WHEN THE WHEELS COME OFF