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Unconventional Means
The
Dream Down Under
Anne
Richardson Williams
with
Aboriginal Traditional Stories
as told by Lorraine Mafi-Williams
Interior artwork by Anne R.
Williams
Revised & updated second edition
Original trade
paperback │236 pages
$18.95 | ISBN-10: 1597190012
LCCN:
2004097679 | June 2005
Adobe PDF eBook | 245 pages | $18.95
ISBN-13: 9781597190008 | ISBN-10: 1597190004
More info │Reviews
|
Read
excerpts online
The Adobe PDF eBook
edition of
Unconventional Means contains
the complete text & page layout/design of the original trade
paperback, with color versions of the illustrations substituted for the
black & white illustrations of the paperback. The eBook also contains a
bonus section featuring color snapshots related to Anne's journey.
(Note: Due to the desire to maintain the original design of text and
illustrations in the eBook version of
Unconventional Means, the eBook is only available in Adobe PDF
format.)
Click on the button below
to buy
Unconventional Means
from the Pearlsong Press
online store. To buy more than one copy or to use a discount code, click
on
the Pearlsong Press Store link in the lefthand column.
All original trade paperback editions purchased directly from Pearlsong
Press via this website are autographed by the author.
In her authentic voice, Anne Williams takes us
on a personal and yet universal journey to Australian Sacred
Sites and into ancient sacred stories that still contain powerful
medicine. Move across a world
and a continent as two women, one American and one Australian, describe their
reality in language that stirs your heart. Travel becomes adventure and
life becomes the journey.
Anne Williams
captures the art of the quest, showing how even perplexing or painful experiences can be
ultimately understood as a necessary part of the soul's journey.
Unconventional Means: The Dream Down Under
is a tapestry of stories woven together with reverence for the more
subtle, intuitive realms of our nature. The author's connection with
Lorraine Mafi-Williams, an Aboriginal Elder, awakens the reader to honor
our shared humanity. We are reminded of the vast inner world that connects
each of us and is often forgotten or dismissed in our modern culture.
Anne's journey speaks
to our universal need for healing the rift between the masculine and feminine in order to
realize divine union within our own hearts. With vivid images that capture your imagination and
take you there, she has painted a story within a story about opening up and trusting the
essence of who we truly are.
Return to top of page
A Spiritual Travelogue &
Unconventional Memoir
Shattered by family tragedy in the early 1960s, an upper-middle-class
Southern teenager finds solace in art and literature. Decades later, she
is called to the continent whose literature whose comforted her, and to a
magical connection with an Aboriginal woman transcending race and half a
world.
The essence
of Unconventional Means is captured by its front cover, Ayers Rock,
Australia's most famous natural landmark, is superimposed on a middle
Tennessee landscape like a portal from Music City to the Land Down Under.
It's a surrealistic image, befitting the true story of a woman whose
dreams, visions, meditation and intuition drew her halfway around the
world and across a continent to find the Aboriginal woman whose ancient
stories of a land and its people would help heal her.
Artist Anne Richardson Williams originally published Unconventional
Means in 2000 through her own In Circle Press. Nashville's Pearlsong
Press is publishing a revised and updated second edition in June 2005. The
new edition contains additional illustrations, a glossary, and an update
on events occurring since the first edition was released.
At the encouragement of Pearlsong Press editor and publisher Peggy Elam,
Ph.D., Williams also added to the second edition text bridging the first
section's account of her teenage attempts to cope with family tragedy
through art and reading, eventually finding solace in a novel set in
Australia, and her call to Australia decades later as she approached her
50th birthday.
Midwest Book Review called the first edition "a unique and moving
work....a singularly unforgettable read." The second edition magnifies
that promise.
"Anne Williams has written an intelligent, lyrical and inspirational tale
about her excursion into the outbacks of Australia and of her soul,"
Steven McFadden, author of Legend of the Rainbow Warriors, said of
the second edition. "The true story of her pilgrimage is beautifully and
directly told, creating a literary roadmap of trust that readers might
learn how one soul navigated unconventional—but vital—pathways forward."
Unconventional Means (ISBN 1597190012, LCCN 2004097679, second
edition, revised & updated; trade paperback, 236 pages, $18.95) contains
black-and-white illustrations, end notes, and a glossary. It is available
June 2005 from Ingram Book Group, Lightning Source, Inc., Broadart
Company, and Pearlsong Press.
Return to top of page
Reviews
of
Unconventional Means
The Dream Down Under
A
Journey of Transformation
Michael White of
Brush Creek, TN
January 2001 review of
the
2000 In Circle Press first edition
In Australia there is a very famous rock known as Uluru, a monolithic red
sandstone boulder of a mountain that shoots up out of the desert plain. In
the evening as the sun is setting it glows radiant red, like an ember. It
is one of the sacred sites of the Aboriginal peoples, who still use it as
a place of pilgrimage and ceremony.
Unconventional Means
is the story of a pilgrimage to
that stone and, with that, a pilgrimage to the aboriginal places that lay
veiled under the veneer of western, modern life in America. It is the real
life adventure of a woman who is unafraid to explore the world, both
externally and internally.
Anne writes very much in the tradition of Alexandria David-Neel, who
published travel accounts of her journeys into Tibet in the 1930s. Anne,
like David-Neel, is no ordinary tourist, and her account is both poetic
and prophetic. She uses the teaching of the Aborginals and what she has
gleaned from the esoteric traditions of the East and the West to lead her
on her pilgrimage.
She is moving by unconventional means, and when decisions are made about
where to go she uses the visions she sees in meditation, her dreams, and
the signs that come to her in daily life to make the decisions. These are
her portals into a reality very distinct from conventional western
thinking.
Anne is watching what happens in her perception of the world in a way that
is focused differently than the typical modern American. She has learned
and practiced the techniques of the sacred, she has studied meditation and
yoga, and has reached deeply into the traditional ways of tribal people.
In particular, when she practices meditation, she is aware in such a way
that what she sees becomes vision and in that vision she can find the
solution to situations in her life and answers about what she should do.
But meditation is just one of the ports of entry into the aboriginal
world. Dreams are another, and just as Anne watches in her mind's eye for
visions, she watches in her sleep to see what transpires in her dreams.
Finally, she also watches as the events of the day transpire to see in
those events signs that can reveal openings that show the way.
She has entered the magical universe and is giving us a report of what it
looks like and how to navigate in that terrain.
Her methods are very feminine, highly intuitive, and reflective of ways
that can be used to reach conclusions without the deductive logic of
western reason.
In 1993 Anne saw a picture in a book of an Aboriginal woman in Australia,
an elder and a storyteller. Anne felt an immediate kinship that acted like
a magnet to draw her halfway around the globe to seek out the woman. In
1997 she went to Australia with no assurance that she could ever find this
person—and yet by her unconventional means she not only finds her but
travels around Australia visiting ceremonial sites, hearing traditional
stories and participating in ancient ceremonies.
In the course of her journey she tape-records many of the conversations in
which Lorraine Mafi-Williams, who among her people is called Alinta, tells
stories about the sites they visit. These stories are stories of
initiation and transformation, used to hold people together and teach them
who they are. Anne also gets to hear Alinta's life story, and we see that
in Australia the elders among the Aboriginals grew up in the tribal
culture only slightly removed from their ways before the invasion of the
Europeans.
Alinta had grown up in an Aboriginal hut, living on the earth in a nomadic
lifestyle. She tells of being schooled by the whites and how the
Aboriginals would sneak off to learn from their own elders after the
school day was done. She teaches Anne the techniques of "spirit journeys"
that take place in the dream world. She tells that her ways, her
ceremonies, are not lost and are still alive in the elders. These elders
are willing to share them, not only with their own peoples, but with the
white and black cultures as well, knowing that someday we will all be one
people.
Anne is a harbinger of this awareness. Her book is a travel adventure in
the life of the mind and a journey of transformation that has immense
value as we move into the global consciousness that is now possible in the
world. Her book, published by In Circle Press, is beautifully illustrated.
Michael White has compiled and edited two books:
Safe in Heaven Dead:
INterviews with Jack Kerouac
and Light of the Three Jewels by
Khenchen Palden Sherab Rinpoche.
His stories, poems, essays, interviews and reviews have been
published in the US, Canada, England, Italy, Japan and India.
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Praise for Unconventional Means
Steven McFadden, author of
Legend of the Rainbow Warriors (a revised edition of which will
be published in 2005), read the galley of Anne Richardson Williams'
Unconventional Means: The Dream Down Under, the second edition of
which was published by Pearlsong Press in June 2005.
It
was a photo of aboriginal elder Lorraine Mafi-Williams, also known as "Alinta,
Woman of Fire," in McFadden's 1992 book Ancient Voices, Current
Affairs: Legend of the Rainbow Warriors that called to Anne so
strongly that she ended up traveling halfway around the world to find her.
The revised & updated
Pearlsong Press edition of Unconventional
Means contains new material bridging Anne's childhood
attraction to Australia, which developed after the heroine's journey in Nevil Shute's A Town Like Alice helped her cope with personal
tragedy, with the adult events that precipitated her to the Land Down
Under. The Pearlsong Press edition also contains a touching update to the
original narrative.)
Here's what Steven McFadden
had to say about the second edition of Unconventional Means:
Yesterday I put a double
CD of "Four Bach Orchestral Suites" on the stereo, pushed the play
button and sat down at my desk with the galley for Unconventional
Means. It was a pleasure and a wonder to page along, and to re-read
the story. Beautifully done. The typography and layout of the pages are
a perfect compliment. I had a happy afternoon taking the journey again
page by page and scene by scene. My sincere thanks for giving me a
chance to take this meaningful reading pilgrimage with you, and to
remember Alinta.
Incidentally, I happened
to catch an episode of the CBS TV series "Survivor" earlier this week.
It seems one of the teams on the show is called "Alinta." Hmmmm?
At any rate, you are
welcome to use any of this e-mail for the blurb, as suits the purpose.
Here's an official attempt at blurbage:
Anne Williams has
written an intelligent, lyrical and inspirational tale about her
excursion into the outbacks of Australia and of her soul. The true story
of her pilgrimage is beautifully and directly told, creating a literary
roadmap of trust that readers might learn how one soul navigated
unconventional—but vital—pathways
forward.
Steven McFadden
Author, Legend of the Rainbow Warriors
Director, Chiron Communications
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