AvantGuild Member of the Week: Marjorie Giles
Age: 79
Location: Dobbins, CA
What are you working on now? Embarking upon a strategy planning conference with Michele Pariza at Creative Concepts, to market my Tao book, Under the Plum Tree, The Tao of Everything, and backlist book titles, Gold Rivers of Northern California, Haiku, Single Woman Homesteader and Secret of the 2 Bar 4 Ranch.
What’s the most helpful thing you’ve learned about freelancing/writing?
Get a proper database system going that allows search for titles, publication, accept, reject, contact, deadline, revenue, notes. I use File Pro and keep a log of Inkwell products which include mss, cartoons, fine art, criticism, freelance etc.
What’s been the worst career advice you’ve ever received?
“Send money.”
more after the break
How did you go about writing the Tao books?
The Tao books were given to me by the trance mediium Marshall Lever, who received teachings in private home world-wide. Students appeared by word-of-mouth and attended weekly sessions in Paris, London, San Francisco, Tokyo and elsewhere. I studied in San Francisco with
private readings. As a recognized writer, I was given transcripts of
the recorded lessons “to do with as (I) pleased.”
I started with Shambhala about 30 years ago and they wrote that the manuscripts needed more editing. Six years ago I as winding up a book by a nuclear physicist who wanted to combine his Prebyterian-missionaries-in-China upbringing with nuclear or quantum physics. I had worked with this man in the late 1940s and took the job partly because I felt I owed him my life. As his first research associate in the revival of biophysics, and the only biologist among physicists, Ernie Pollard had touted my work all over academia and at all his overseas presentations. So, when I got paralyzed with polio while pregnant in 1950 at Yale, I had a creditable reputation. My late husband then moved us to Stanford and where he abandoned me and our two infants and I needed a job fast. Ernie sent me to Wendel M. Stanley, a new Nobel laureate in viruses and authorized my work with him as a Master of Science level. Stanley hired me for his own research and I became marketable to anyone who wanted a Nobel prize.
As Ernie’s book project ended, I felt increasingly conscious of the
Chung Fu manuscripts. I could hardly wait to get at them. The physicality of the prevailing pragmatism in science was stifling to me. Nothing unseen was in there anywhere, no spirits, no recognition of the intuitive sources scientists depend upon. Nowadays Fritjov Capra, Feynman,Stephen Hawking and others are lapping at the gates of spirituality but cannot bring themselves to perceive what’s in there. At least, now they’re starting to talk to the Dalai Lama.
Join Baratunde Thurston (left), The Onion’s Director of Digital and author of How to Be Black, for an entertaining look at creative social media campaigns in our 
