Local author challenges readers to start a new countercultural movement

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Curtis White’s newest book, published by Melville House, seeks to challenge those who are disheartened and disillusioned by the current political situation to try and revive a new radical countercultural revolution.

“Living in a World that Can’t Be Fixed: Reimagining Counterculture Today” was published this month and in it White asserts that the state of our society is such that the Civil War never ended, it just continued under cold war conditions for 150 years. The things wrong with America, White said, will never be fixed.

He argues that instead of listening to the talking heads on TV we should reject the dominant culture in the same resistant way American countercultural movements have done, he argues, since the late-18th century, starting with romanticism.

Counterculture doesn’t just mean the 1960s, he said. It means any movement that spurns societal norms. These movements, he argues, have actually had a profound effect on the cultures they reject, creating real change.

White said he sees his view, that all options presented to us by the nation state are futile, as realism not cynicism. He said he believes we must instead use our personal autonomy to put all our energy into creating the world we want for ourselves.

White moved to Port Townsend three years ago, because, he said, it was the kind of community he had always wanted to live in. Before moving to Washington, White taught literature and creative writing at Illinois State University for 30 years while his wife Georganne Rundblad was teaching sociology at Illinois Wesleyan.

Before publishing his first nonfiction book, White found relative success as an experimental fiction writer, having published seven books between 1981 and 2001.

His non-fiction career first began after he published an essay in Harper’s Magazine titled “The Middle Mind” in 2002, which outlined what White believes to be almost a middle class of thinkers who control the mainstream zeitgeist.

White said this article became widely shared and “ruffled a lot of feathers” until he was approached by Harper Collins to turn the concept of the article into a book. That book would be published in 2003 titled “The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don’t Think for Themselves.”

“I was, without really meaning to, thrown in to another career as a social critic,” White said.

White said he does not believe his processes in writing fiction and nonfiction are dissimilar. In his fiction work, he said, he often writes using unorthodox narrative structures. His non-fiction, he said, he also approaches as storytelling as he tries to “seduce” people to see things differently.

Though he now publishes with an established trade publisher, his approach hasn’t made him any more main-stream.

“Most writers still try and write for the New Yorker,” he said. “They were always my enemy, I wanted to write something they would never touch.”

White’s newest book can be purchased at Elliot Bay Bookstore, Powell’s Books online or directly from the publisher. Some of his previous works can be found at Imprint Books in Port Townsend.