Four years after Tucker K Sullivan's first book
Relate! One Human to Another,
he brings us
Raw Material: Open This Book at Random.
A book full of Easter eggs, strange non-sequiturs, and unanswered questions.
Raw Material
invokes the feeling of inspirational graffiti on a bathroom wall, fragments of overheard conversations in a crowded bar, or writing prompts summoned from a deeply delirious mental state.
is a book for novelists, songwriters, artists, thinkers, philosophers, and the clinically insane, to be
opened at random
, to inspire further thinking beyond its pages.
An experiment in mindfulness, of stream of conscious thought, and creative writing,
Raw Material,
is meant to be read with an open notebook, or a blank pad of paper, to inspire further thought in its readers.
began as a writing exercise with the simple goal of filling an entire spiral bound notebook with beautiful or thought-provoking word combinations. It was meant to be filled with starting points, short poems, book titles, band names, or future lines for longer projects. Originally intended to be written slowly over years and thrown in the back of a closet, suddenly unfolded into an interesting and unique manuscript.
Filling each page with stream of consciousness writing, with each line totally unrelated to the last, a practice of mindfulness developed through the writing process. Each thought would come, be written down, acknowledged, and then let go. It became an exercise in both meditation and creative writing.
The book took shape, becoming something worthy of being shared with the world. Rather than thrown in the back of the closet, it was turned into the book that it is today.
shines when it is opened at random, and the thoughts within spark further thoughts in the reader. There are even a few blank pages in the back of the book to be filled by the reader, with their own mindful, poetic thoughts, hopefully inspired through their unique perspective upon their individual reading of the book.
It is a book for creatives, artists, writers, thinkers, and amateur aspiring spiritual/philosophical practitioners.
TUCKER'S FAVORITE LINES FROM THE BOOK:
"You're a force of nature through your frontal lobe alone"
"I can't wait for right now"
"I had to sprint across thin ice to get here"
"Our cities smell like humans"
"Fever dream journal"
"The true breakthrough in lucid dreaming comes when you're awake"
contains thousands of strange thoughts and poetic fragments just like these, for the adventurous mind to chew on.