Bob Rich, Author of “The Hole in Your Life-Grief and Bereavement” by Joan Y. Edwards

Today I am honored to interview Bob Rich,  PhD. He is the author of “The Hole in Your Life” as well as many other intriguing books. Thanks for being with us, Bob.

You are welcome. It’s great to visit you in the USA from Australia.

Let’s get started.

1. How many books have you written?
Thirty-four plus one-half plus one-thirteenth. You never get a straight answer from this silly fellow, do you? But it’s true. The one-thirteenth is because perhaps the best short story I’ve ever written, Artist’s Revenge, is one of thirteen stories in the anthology, “Pivot,” and I’ve been notified that it has won an award. You’ll see the medal on the book page: https://bobrich18.wordpress.com/bobs-booklist/#pivot
The one-half is because I am currently pestering agents and publishers with a science-fiction series, “The Doom Healer,” and four of the five planned volumes are completed. Then there are twenty published books listed at https://bobrich18.wordpress.com/bobs-booklist and ten others that are complete, but I have withdrawn them or they have never seen daylight.

2. What caused you to be interested in being a counselor?
Have you read my fictionalized autobiography, Ascending Spiral?
https://bobrich18.wordpress.com/bobs-booklist#ascending
In 2007, I recovered bits of five of my past lives, and their reconstruction is much of that book. The last time I died and planned my current life, I asked for the gift of the healer.
In high school, I was a lame duck collector: all the distressed kids came to me. Trouble was, then I worried more about their problems than they did themselves, so after graduating I
went in for research rather than therapy. All the same, when a friend’s wife died, it was me he sought out.
After a couple of years of unemployment, I trained as a nurse, which toughened me up. As a nursing student, you are taught, “It’s not your pain. You’re not there to share it but to
relieve it.”
In therapy they just need to realize they can do things differently.

3. Please tell us about your daughter, Natalie, who died recently.

          When Natalie was two, she toddled up to a pregnant woman, looked way up into her eyes and said, “Did you know, babies come from a woman’s tummy?”
At three, she caught the flu. While picking up medicines for her, I found some blocks with the alphabet on them. By the end of the day, she knew all the letters, and thereafter read street names, shop signs and everything else with writing on it. As I say in the first chapter of my book dedicated to her, which  you’ll find at http://grief.lhpress.com she badgered us to send her to school at four.
We lived a near self-sufficient life by 1981. Her mother was preparing a chicken for dinner and requested that Natalie pluck it. She refused and was a vegetarian ever since.
As a teenager, Natalie decided she wouldn’t have children and became the perfect auntie all kids loved. And poor thing, she had the same sense of humor that tortures me.

4. You wrote “A Hole in Your Life” as a way to handle your grief when your daughter, Natalie, died. That was a very loving thing to do.  How did writing the book help you?
Two ways, both of which are research-validated.
In the book (pages 28-29) I have “William Funchess suffered terribly as a prisoner of war in Korea. Years later, he wrote a highly successful book, published in 1999. ‘I got yellow pads and ball point pens and spiral notebooks and just started writing. The minute I finished writing, the nightmares stopped.’”
Second, when you have progressed through grief enough, you  want something positive to come out of your loss. Again, I describe a man whose previously violent father wasreleased from jail. My client forgave him and they became friends. Then father died. Six months later, he (my client, not his dead father) rescued a teenager from a violent home situation. In a similar way, this book is my tool for reducing the suffering of others.

5. What are three things you hope people will gain when they read “A Hole in Your Life?”
OK. Several of my beta readers are psychologists. Three of them have said that reading my book was like professional development in grief therapy.
Second, most people have suffered serious losses: the death of a loved person, a physical injury, failing at an exam and so missing out on a profession, divorce, you name it. It can be your guide in how to handle such misfortune.
Third, many of us find ourselves supporting someone who has fallen into such a hole. My book is the rope.

6. Please share three experiences that influenced you to fight to care for our planet.
What a wonderful question!
Again, I need to return to my past-life recalls. I have reported in Ascending Spiral that I’ve been told: this is the life when I have to witness the end of humanity or be part of the movement that saves us. Well, I’d rather have the second! Being a father, then a grandfather and now a great-grandfather is also motivating. And all sentient beings in the universe are my family, and I do my best to work for a good life for as many of them as I can.
Finally, we are so lucky to live on such a beautiful planet! My favorite people include birds, whales, butterflies, trees covered in blossoms (and even when they are not). Bob Brown, who started up the Greens movement globally, has said that there is no need for justification in human terms for protecting nature. It has value in its own right. Isaac Asimov’s Earth was completely covered in a mechanical coating. That’s a nightmare.

7. How did you find the publisher for your books?
I started writing for a marvelous self-sufficiency magazine, Earth Garden, in 1980. Sadly, the magazine died of old age a few years ago, but until then I had a byline column as their owner-building expert. In 1984, the magazine’s publisher and I combined to write what ended up  as The Earth Garden Building Book: Design and Build Your Own House. He already had 8 published books, so he had no trouble getting us going with Nelson Australia, which then
got gobbled up by Penguin, although there was nothing fishy about it. (Get it?)
My second book was Woodworking for Idiots Like Me. It is a series of short stories, each with a woodcraft lesson. Penguin couldn’t put it neatly in a box, so passed on it, but a small publisher, Aird books, asked Earth Garden magazine for a lead to a good woodworking book, and it was a match made in heaven, which lit up about 60,000 purchasers.
As the internet took off, and I took off writing fiction, I went with a series of brand new electronic publishers. They were ahead of their time and went broke, one by one. Then new technology came around, and e-books could be read on special readers, and you know where that led us
I self-published a few when that was still seen as shameful, so did so through my own publishing company.
When I wrote Sleeper, Awake, I was part of a Yahoo group with a bunch of other Australian authors, one of whom let us know that she was in an author cooperative. The idea was to do all work themselves. She was the acquisitions editor, so I queried her. She loved it, and I was in.
Part of the shared work was reviewing each other’s books. I provided a public review for one, and sent a private message to the author with a long list of edits and suggestions for improvement. This man was the acquisition editor’s husband, and so she invited me to join the editing team. Soon, I was editing for quite a large number of small independent publishers, and I could choose between them when I wanted to publish a new book. My main publisher is the aptly named Loving Healing Press.

8.  What is the source of your inner spirit?
Chocolate?
When I was a student, a group of us had regular discussions. The others were one each of Catholic, evangelical Protestant, Salvation Army, and evangelical atheist. Me? I argued with all of them. My final conclusion was, if there is a God, my job is to be the best human I can be. If there isn’t a God, the only way to make sense of existence is to be the best human I can be. Given my scientific training, since those ancient days I have built up a working hypothesis of what the Universe is like, what it is for, what our little humans’ role in it is. This is a best guess on the basis of the evidence life has rubbed my nose in. If new evidence comes along, I  modify the model.
OK, here is what I’ve arrived at: The Universe is alive, and conscious. Quantum physics demonstrates that consciousness is fundamental. Observing creates reality. The universe of matter and energy we perceive is there because the Universe observes it.
My guess is that our particular Universe is a young one of Its kind and needs to develop lots of the equivalent of brain cells. These are  beings with the potential for morality, like octopuses, all mammals including whales and humans, possibly trees and queen bees and things.
The role of the material universe is to provide a school for souls, until they graduate as enlightened spirits. So, we are all apprentice Buddhas, apprentice Jesuses, although, heaven knows, some have an AWFUL long way to go. So, every action is a potential tool for moving toward the purpose of life, which is
enlightenment.

9. Tell us about the part of Australia where you live.

I live in Healesville, a little country town with an outlying western suburb called Melbourne. Thanks to the air pollution there, we have beautiful sunsets. Humans are working hard at causing the extinction of anything that moves and anything that’s green, but my area still has some lovely nature.

Bob’s Bio
Bob Rich, PhD, is a visitor from a faraway galaxy, where he is an historian of horror. So, Earth is his favorite place in the universe. Nowhere else do sentient beings engage in a game of killing non-combatants (war). Nowhere else are child raising practices designed to harm children. And delicious for an historian of horror: nowhere else is the entire global economy designed to destroy its life support system. Here on Earth, he is disguised as an Australian storyteller, with 20 published books, six of which, and over 40 short stories, have won awards. He has retired five times so far. He still works as an editor for several small publishers. Above all, he is a Professional Grandfather. Anyone born since 1993 is his grandchild.
Everything he does strives for a survivable future for them, and one worth surviving in. This means environmental and humanitarian activism: an attempt to change a worldwide culture of greed and aggression into one of compassion and cooperation. He has been writing since 1980, with a byline column in “Earth Garden” magazine and other periodicals.
When he was 23, a minister of religion told him he was a Buddhist. Since his timemachine was in for service, he couldn’t check on the internet, but a day in the University library validated this claim. He decided not to sue the Buddha for plagiarism, as an act of metta (loving kindness).

Three of Bob Rich’s Many Books

1. The Hole in Your Life: Grief and Bereavement with Titan Literary Award Seal https://bobrich18.wordpress.com/bobs-booklist/#grief

 

2. Ascending Spiral https://bobrich18.wordpress.com/bobs-booklist/#ascending

3. Anikó: The Stranger Who Loved Me
https://bobrich18.wordpress.com/bobs-booklist/#aniko

Thank you for being with us today, Bob. I know those who read it  will enjoy learning about you and hopefully will read one of your books to encourage them.
Please leave questions for Bob in the comments area. 

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Joan Y. Edwards, Author
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