Bio

According to his latest business card, Eliezer Sobel's current job title, at age 55, is "Human Being." Although, as his wife Shari Cordon points out, "He only works at it part-time."

While serving in his capacity as an amateur human over the years, Sobel divided his time between the creative life—writing, painting, playing music, performing—and the life of the spiritual aspirant—suffering, seeking, striving, sitting. The sordid details of that journey are chronicled in his new book, The 99the Monkey: A Spirtual Journalist's Misadventures with Gurus, Messahs, Sex, Psychedelcs and Other Consciousness-Raising Experiments.

Sobel's two paths merged at one point in the form of the Wild Heart Journal: “Art, Creativity & Spiritual Life”, for which he served as publisher and editor for five years, through 2003. The magazine developed from his book, Wild Heart Dancing, which in turn grew out of intensive creativity workshops he led for many years at Esalen Institute and similar venues around the U.S.

Minyan, Sobel’s award-winning first novel, was shuffled between multiple agents and accumulated multiple rejection slips for nearly 15 years. (See First Novel Blues.) Then, in a coincidental and staggering wave of encouragement from the city of Knoxville, Tennessee, of all places, the Knoxville Writer’s Guild gave Minyan the 2003 Peter Taylor Prize for the Novel, and only weeks later Knoxville’s New Millenium Writings awarded Mordecai’s Book, loosely excerpted from Minyan, its 2003 First Prize for short fiction.

Sobel has also published articles, short stories and poetry in Tikkun, Yoga Journal, Quest Magazine, Inner Directions, Magical Blend, New Age Journal, Mudfish, the Village Voice, Epoch, Zeek, The Hook, The Journal of Pastoral Care, The Minetta Review, the Widower, and others. He also served as the Associate Publisher and Editor of The New Sun magazine in the late 70s.

Sobel writes:

“Wild Heart Journal published a series of articles intended to encourage creativity in children, under the umbrella, ‘I’m a Real Artist.’ The series included ‘I’m a Real Dancer,’ ‘I’m a Real Singer,’ and of course, ‘I’m a Real Writer.’ The idea was to rail against the notion I had struggled with my whole life, waiting for the world to acknowledge and legitimize my identity as a writer, rather than simply writing to write, or writing because, as the series conveyed, each and every one of us has a voice of authenticity and originality worthy of expression. Unfortunately, this whole theory got shot to hell when Minyan won the Peter Taylor Prize, for it turned out to be true, I did need that external validation to feel like a real writer. Despite publishing numerous articles and a few non-fiction books, it was only then that I felt I had earned the right to call myself a writer--at least for a few months, until the glow of publication wore off and I was faced with that highly irritating job requirement: writing.

"I always liked Henry Miller’s assessment: ‘I am not a writer, I am a man telling the story of my life.’

Eliezer Sobel lives in Richmond, Virginia with his wife, Shari Cordon, and three cats, Plum, Peanut and Squarcialupi.