By what narrow path is the ineffable silence of Zen cleft by the scratch of a pen? The distilled insights of forty years, Norman Fischer’s Experience: Thinking, Writing, Language, and Religion is a collection of essays by Zen master Fischer about experimental writing as a spiritual practice.

Norman Fischer is a Zen priest and abbot who lives in Muir Beach, California. Active in San Francisco Bay Area poetry circles since the 1970s, he has been publishing prose and poetry ever since. He is executor of the Philip Whalen literary estate.