Howdy
I’m Mike Goodenow Weber and this is Stories for a New Florence, my fictional accounts conveying my discoveries, primarily about psychology and culture, from across the past 35 years.
I’ve been interested in history, psychology, culture, and spirituality since middle school. I began my career in 1988, at age 22, as a journalist for the internationally-influential Brain-Mind Bulletin — writing about psychology — and as a researcher for the bestselling author Marilyn Ferguson.
In 2007, I wrote my own nonfiction book in the field, Visionary Behavior: Creative Intelligence in Action. I went to 45 bookstores in 10 states and sold a modest 1,000 copies. I realized then that plays or stories with characters were a more compelling way to explore what most interests me.
And in September 2022, I brought out my first novel, Renaissance Radio, about six adventurous young Westerners from the Jazz Generation who launch a national radio show about psychology and culture in 1928 — and find themselves wrapped up in a huge controversy between Sigmund Freud and Otto Rank.
I’ll be bringing out my second novel in July. A psychologist and his wife, who own and run a stage theater in Denver, bring actors over from West Germany as part of a cultural exchange. While putting on plays — including The Diary of Anne Frank, Faust, and an original play about German poet Friedrich Holderlin — the Americans and the Germans end up exploring American and German psychology and culture. As they all wrestle with the psychology and culture of Fascism, one family’s Nazi past triggers an ever-rising danger.
Almost all of the stories here will be adapted from these novels, which will extend across five generations and a century — with one family and their friends engaging with the ever-developing field of psychology and each generation’s culture.
The first five thinkers in psychology that this family and their friends favor are Otto Rank, Abraham Maslow, Roberto Assagioli, Arthur Janov, and Stanislav Grof.
The first four cultural figures that this family and their friends encounter are Louis Armstrong, JRR Tolkien, Laurence Olivier, and John Denver.
Look forward to hearing your feedback!
Mike
I’ve worked with more than 700 elected leaders from 45 states on policy, communications, or both, including writing 2,000 speeches. But my real loves have been psychology and culture. I began my career as a researcher for bestselling author Marilyn Ferguson and writing for Brain / Mind Bulletin, the internationally influential journal about consciousness, psychology, and human potential. In 2007, I published my book Visionary Behavior: Creative Intelligence in Action. I’ll be sharing here my discoveries from across the past three decades.
My Fiction
In coming weeks and months I’ll be writing fictional accounts about five thinkers in the field of psychology: Otto Rank, Abraham Maslow, Roberto Assagioli, Arthur Janov, and Stanislav Grof. And stories about eight cultural figures: William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Sinclair Lewis, Louis Armstrong, Laurence Olivier, JRR Tolkien, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Elton John. To be followed by many more.
