Robin Gregory's Blog

Robin Gregory’s “The Improbable Wonders of Moojie Littleman” is a heartwarming and deeply imaginative tale that weaves together magical realism, mysticism, and the universal quest for belonging. This award-winning debut introduces readers to Moojie Littleman, an orphan with physical disabilities and a mysterious destiny, whose journey is as extraordinary as it is moving.
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Moojie is not your average hero. Struggling with physical limitations, loss, and rejection, he faces a world that often seems indifferent to his existence. After losing his mother, Moojie moves to his grandfather’s ranch, where he encounters the enigmatic "alien outcasts" of the Light-Eaters. This group becomes central to Moojie’s transformation as he learns to embrace his own healing powers and confronts the profound truths about love, family, and forgiveness.
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What sets the book apart is Gregory’s lyrical prose, which balances poetic descriptions with an almost whimsical sense of humor. Her vivid imagery brings to life a world where goats carry secrets, bees seem to hum with purpose, and even watermelons hold symbolic weight. The mythical elements are seamlessly intertwined with Moojie’s emotional struggles, creating a narrative that feels both grounded and otherworldly.
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The story’s heart lies in its exploration of belonging. Moojie’s longing for acceptance resonates universally, and his relationships—with his gruff but loving grandfather, the mystical Light-Eaters, and a captivating young girl—are written with tenderness and depth. The Light-Eaters, in particular, serve as a mirror for Moojie’s own struggles, teaching him that otherness can be a source of strength rather than a burden.
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Moojie’s final trial is a culmination of his journey, forcing him to face his fears, embrace his uniqueness, and redefine his identity. Gregory handles this climax with sensitivity and power, leaving readers with a sense of hope and wonder.

Qaraq: 1001, The Reincarnation Chronicles, is a visionary tour de force, a dizzying romp through history, science fiction, nature, mysticism, myth, and psychology. In the course of this tale, you will be taken into the memories of not only people, but of creatures, and atoms, and human-made structures. It’s as detailed and time-spanning as Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and shares similar notes of psychedelic, witty, mind-boggling, surrealism.

At the center is Sarah Fleming. She has disturbing visions that place her in other times and faraway places. They are often violent, lurid, and unsettling. She thinks she’s losing her mind. As well, Sarah is pregnant and her husband, Amar, doesn’t want the baby. Though Amar is interested in her visions, she’s hesitant to share them because their relationship is already strained. It’s only through the help of her therapist and a group of neighbors, that Sarah begins to unravel the mystery of these visions, and to understand a past life history with Amar. Hang on to your seats. You gotta pay attention with this one!

Dear friends,

If you've been wanting to read award-winning THE IMPROBABLE WONDERS OF MOOJIE LITTLEMAN, here's your chance to get the ebook for FREE:

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“Fans of the brilliant Pan's Labyrinth by Guillermo del Toro, are certain to enjoy The Improbable Wonders of Moojie Littleman by Robin Gregory. They both feature young protagonists who find themselves within a family where they don't fit in, and they both escape into a magical world, where they have the power to make a real difference. Moojie finds respite from his difficult life in the world of a magical and mythical clan. He learns that he has a great destiny to fulfill, but it may cost him his life."--SOPHIA TZARVELLA, author and international, award-winning filmmaker

Greetings critters!

I just posted a new blog on my web page, and don't know how to transfer it over here.

If you care to take a peek, I hope this will take you there.

2024/05/29/update-on-my-extraordinary-life-and-spectacular-reckonings

Take care and stay inspired!

Dear writerly mates,

I'm not sure you're interested but I'd like to share a free opportunity that I jumped on for reaching readers.

Did you know you can post 3 Favorite Reads of 2023 with space for self-promo through a free membership with Shepherd [dot] com/ 4.8M visitors in 2023/

I've been a member since its inception. So have many colleagues in the Authors Guild.

My page just went up. (Ben provides the template):
https://shepherd.com/bboy/2023/f/robin-gregory

For more info: forauthors@shepherd.com

Deadline: 12/23!

Happy Holidays!

This is book by Pierre Pradervand and Jonathan Ellerby is about healing. Not just healing an ailing body or mind. It is about healing a sense of separation from the All-Encompassing, Unconditional Love of our Creator. It is about recovering from the seeming fall from grace, and reclaiming our divinely mandated experience of heaven on earth.

But how does one explain healing when it has little to do with the mind, or even the body, and everything to do with Love?

Over history and prehistory, a similar message has been broadcasted by a number of enlightened souls—poets, teachers, artists, writers. But, like a dandelion that keeps sprouting through concrete, its seeds fall on the fallow ground.

Mr. Pradervand explains that it has not helped that human power structures, such as religion and government, systematically challenge and subdue the message. We have only to look at our present state of civilization to see the result: unprecedented chaos and confusion. The author goes on to compare religious and spiritual teachings, and to show how they too have either manifested separation and alienation or preserved the teaching of transcendent Love.

Is there a way to free oneself from the spell that leaves us feeling alone and alienated?

The author says, yes, yes, and yes. He did it, and so can we. For him it was a sudden awakening. His journey away from religion and into the heart of Love (another word for God), began when he was suffering from an illness. At the time, he encountered a flight attendant who was the “incarnation of kindness.” He was so deeply touched by her attention to a little boy flying alone that he was enveloped by it. He later reflects on the experience this way: “Everything was taking place on the level of the heart.” In so many words, he surrendered his identity to that feeling or essence—Love without opposites. When he came back to the awareness of his human state, he was physically healed.

This book is not about fixing, reforming, or improving the body; it is about fixing, reforming, and improving our relationship to Love—which can and often does lead to physical healing. In a nutshell, it is about re-claiming one’s self-image. “The real healing, which transformed my whole life, was that vision of existence and of a universe governed by love,” writes Mr. Pradervand.
Perhaps today, more than any other time in the Earth’s history, humanity needs to reclaim this pure and essential teaching. “The Gentle Art of Spiritual Discernment” delivers it in a kind, non-judgmental manner to anyone wanting to manifest peace and well-being, even in a turbulent world.

I recommend that you read "The Gentle Art of Spiritual Discernment: A Guide to Discovering Your Personal Path" slowly, contemplate the ideas, the stories, the messengers, commit them to heart. It will be a sure friend as you cross the desert stretches of doubt, fear, and confusion, and at last realize that you are a transcendent being, loved beyond measure.

Heartfelt thanks to Destiny Books and Pierre Pradervand for sending me an ARC.

"A lovely book that fills a much needed genre -- inspiring, cultivating the imagination, and providing gifts of wisdom with a bit of humor for audiences of any age. Most books that an adult would pick up are full of stories of human dysfunction and offer little for the imagination to create anything better for this world. The Improbable Wonders of Moojie Littleman takes a very different approach -- recognize human weakness but show us that so much more is possible. With nuggets of advice that can help anyone with practical challenges in their own life. The book is a lovely story that will leave you laughing, tearing at the corners of your eyes, and turning the pages. Robin Gregory exhibits a unique craft as a writer, selecting out impressionable details to paint a colorful picture of context and space. She cultivates a fun way of expressing words of frustration without swearing, and a thoughtful way of conveying wise messages that a Buddhist monk would appreciate. Suitable for young and old. I would love to read more books like this."--Joanna Malaczynski

Time is a fickle mistress. Even scientists and philosophers can’t figure her out. Some days, there’s too much of her, other days there’s not enough. Either way, time’s metaphorical teeth seem to always be snapping at our bottoms. As Shakespeare wrote in Othello, “There are many events in the womb of time which will be delivered.” Our world today: Pandemic. Economic collapse. Social polarization. Natural disasters. Political corruption. Riots. News and social media deliver half-baked truths through grids of clickbait, hard-core branding, and trolling. I need a reality check, an escape from time. That is why I turn to magical realism.

Since the emergence of Covid, many of us feel locked into a linear sense of time. Days seem to inch forward with painful slowness. Pages of the calendar are left blank as weeks lapse into months. That can make us feel trapped. It is little comfort when governments are collapsing around the world, social order is deteriorating, and the Earth itself appears to be falling apart. We are losing a shared sense of reality. Certainly, social media, TV, cell phones, and virtual reality—designed to fill our time without due context—cannot mediate our experience of what all this feels like. Technology withholds the bread and tells us to eat cake.

In her 2018 Nobel Lecture, Polish writer, Olga Tokarczuk, said, “Literature is one of the few spheres that try to keep us close to the hard facts of the world.” Perhaps that explains why I am clinging to magical realism, in particular, more now than ever. To be sure, there are other forms of fiction that explore history, chronologies, and timelines, but what magical realism does is stop the clock, turn so-called reality on its side, shake out the missing ingredients, and present a new “normal.” The reordering of time, the deconstruction of time, gives me a better grip on reality.

As a teenage introvert with a wild imagination, I never could have survived the pressures of growing up in an overpopulated Catholic hothouse without the benefit of magical realism. When I first read Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, it was like stepping out of time and finding a new home. It epitomized the adolescent experience of being afraid and alone, uncomfortable in my own skin. “I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself,” says protagonist, Gregor Samsa, when he wakes up one morning transformed into a bug. In a public statement, Max Brod, author and journalist, referred to Kafka’s prose as “a spiritual act of unusual dimensions.” For me, this liberation meant freedom from a material sense of self circumscribed by age or time. And it had the immediate effect of alleviating feelings of fear and separation.

Today, the pandemic epitomizes discomfort, fear, and separation. I am not sure how others are dealing with it, but again I find inner strength through magical realism. Recently I re-read Laurus, published in 2012 by Russian author Eugene Vodolazkin. It opens in plague-ridden 15th-century Russia. When the protagonist, Arseny, a gifted herbalist, faith healer, and prophet, falls for young Ustina, he reveals himself to be a possessive lover. While giving birth to their child, complications arise. Arseny’s pride prevents him from calling a midwife or allowing Ustina to go to confession. Ustina and the child die and he bears the responsibility. Filled with remorse and guilt, he adopts ascetism and sets out on a pilgrimage that spans several centuries.

In my humble opinion, the triumphant feature in this story is Vodolazkin’s audacious, seamless, rollicking manner of time-tweaking. Translator Lisa C. Hayden writes in the introduction that Laurus seems to occur outside of “expected times and locations.” Illogical events “feel natural and almost comforting, rather than contradictory or peculiar.” In that same fashion, Laurus can provide comfort right now.

As he barrels through the narrative, Arseny’s experiences are not time bound. His ability to foretell the future, and to enter and exit different centuries, seems normal to him. He dips in and out of time while gaining both practical and esoteric wisdom, the latter of which can be inconsistent or illogical. Though he dispenses herbal remedies, he believes that faith and prayer are what actually bring about miracles. His grandfather tries to teach him a more orthodox version of reality, insisting that the body itself is timebound, though the soul survives it. Whatever else it is, orthodox religion puts the body into a linear trajectory with a terminal destination. Arseny refuses to be bound by religion and embodies a magical realist viewpoint that allows for never-ending cycles of being.

Traipsing across a plague-riddled landscape does have its problems. Death surrounds Arseny. What starts with losing Ustina and the baby stalks him to the end. For a spell, he loses a sense of divine connection. “Get used to separation,” said Death, “it is painful, even if it is only temporary.” In the face of death, Arseny grapples with a limited sense of time, with what is rational, but experience gradually causes him to depend more on that which is considered irrational.

Time-tripping is a fairly young literary device. Through magical realism it becomes a normal aspect of reality. Adolfo Bioy Cesares is cited for introducing it in his novella, The Invention of Morel (1940). It is the story of a fugitive of the law who escapes to an island. There, scenes are re-enacted, two suns inhabit the sky, objects and people disappear and reappear. Time and reality are presented as constructs of a hallucinatory mind.

In 1967, Gabriel García Márquez stormed onto the world stage with One Hundred Years of Solitude. It is set in the realistic but fictitious town of Macondo where no one has ever died. Though the narrator speaks at a rapid-fire pace, time seems to stand still. The ghost of Jose Arcadío Buendia speaks to this idea when he wonders if God did not wish for anyone to know “for certain where the limits of reality lay.”

A similar method of manipulating time follows in Angela Carter’s novel, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972). In the narrative, she makes a direct reference to time and how humans are compelled to reorder it. In the story, a city’s inhabitants succumb to a nightmarish plague of suicide. The mastermind behind it all, Doctor Hoffman, creates monstrous machines that crack the surface of time and space, and plunge civilization into chaos. The hero of the story, Desiderio, says, “I must gather together all that confusion of experience and arrange it in order.”

In 1985, Gabo, as García Márquez came to be known, again deconstructed time in Love in the Time of Cholera. The chapters progress chronologically while relying on flashbacks for context. The narrator rehashes certain events in duplicate, connecting seams between the experiences of multiple protagonists. The story does not rely on dates or history and people cannot remember the past with any consistency. At times the future is as easy to recall as the past. There is no consensus of reality.

Herein lies the rub: reality is not rational.

In 2002, Newsweek announced that magical realism should be given last rites. The staff-written proclamation accused it of being a “trend” that had lost its luster. Fortunately, nearly twenty years later, I can safely say that they were wrong. Dead wrong.

How do magical realism and time-tweaking relate to second millennium calamities?

The coronavirus is a strange, irrational thing, a shapeshifter, a bully, one so dumb that it sometimes kills its own host. We are told that it infects some and not others. It can be caught and then caught again. It kills one person, while barely announcing symptoms in another. The fear of it, and its mutations, keeps us bound inside our homes, masking our faces, obsessing over germs. Many have lost jobs and homes and loved ones because of it. We are terrified of the air that sustains us. To look at this little demon under a microscope, you’d think it stepped right out of Grimms’ Fairy Tales.

In Laurus, humans are infected by plague as well as by grotesque mutations of character. Religious interpretation might suggest that the latter came first, that mutations of character incited the plague as divine punishment. But Vodolazkin does not go there. When young Arseny’s grandfather speaks of a former patient, Yeleazar the Windblower, a disabled stutterer who “suffered from excess gases,” he says the Lord remembers him “with love.” A wise monk speaks of a God who recognizes individuals through their heartfelt expressions, and not according to judgment that mediates across time and space. In this manner, magical realism can offer a voice for the soul, a language of the heart, outside the dictates of time, as well as orthodoxy and religion.

When Arseny first encounters strange tormenters, greedy, bloated, unwieldy humans, he reacts by throwing mud clods at them to dislodge their demons. Later he simply prays for them. When he is accosted, lynched, and nearly drowned, he repeatedly withdraws from external activities and circles back to his own internal logic, a childlike faith. His chronology spirals around this theme. With each incarnation, Arseny further sheds layers of pride, and the strange creatures are less able to provoke him. If anything, their debasement nudges him toward greater healing acts, which seem to occur outside of time.

In the same measure, there appear to be strange new beasts in our midst today, creatures who hoard supplies, who drive like banshees, who fight over parking places, who partake in violent protests, and who exercise brutality in the name of righteousness. In Laurus, the monk explains to young Arseny that there are all kinds of creatures, “androgyns,” “satyrs,” and “sciapods,” beasts born with dog heads, and no heads, with teeth on the chest, eyes on the elbows, and so on. “Someone had lodged that self into another’s body,” he says. Arseny asks what is their purpose? The monk says they have none, God “lets everyone live as their hearts desire.” He says the future will depend “on the strength of your love” and “on the strength of your prayers.” And as Arseny’s love and faith grow along the way, he proves that neither beast nor plague can destroy him. In a delicious subversion of religious hierarchy, the concept of time is all that threatens Arseny’s experience of the eternal.

Vodolazkin’s Areseny, and his Italian companion, Ambrolio, live without reference to clocks or calendars. Existing outside a space/time continuum, they view past, present, and future all at once. Ambrogio refers to time as a sensory device that keeps people from getting “mixed up,” a necessary illusion. When Arseny begins to fear death, his grandfather assures him that everyone takes “Adam’s journey,” and the “joy of liberation” awaits all. In Laurus, Arseny has all the time—three hundred years—he needs to accomplish that liberation. It is not time, but experiential ticks and thematic tocks that mark the signature of his evolutionary bloom.

Toward the end of Laurus, Arseny loses track of linear reality. The words one day become a sort of mantra that help him “overcome the curse of time.” After he dies, after he is liberated from time, he seems to reap the full benefits of experience. Miracles take place at his burial site. Through others’ memory of him, he transcends time. A shining irony gleams off the surface of this idea: time and reality are viewed as unstable and what is irrational becomes the stabilizer. A mythical or esoteric reality seem utterly natural.

No question, 2020 gave birth to a generation of heroes. Tireless firefighters, health care personnel, and disaster relief workers performed magnificently and continue to do so. On the other hand, apart from the coronavirus, the year also spawned an epidemic of controversy and divisiveness that is still disrupting the world. The storming of the US Capitol on January 6th shattered our expectations for resolution. Magical realism helps us to accept that sometimes in life there are no concrete answers; and insisting on them can make things worse.

Magical realism takes fiction beyond the fixed Proustian model that insists that the past shapes the present, and memory selects its version of the future. In order to process an all-inclusive reality, magical realism offers freedom from temporal constructs. It liberates us from the concepts of a selfhood, a life, or a power apart from unbound consciousness. We cannot control external events, but we can certainly control our responses to them. Once we get a glimpse of this timeless nature of being, we can be at peace amidst the chaos. Magical realism lends us a perch from which to view a reality that is alive with paradox and uncertainty.

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ROBIN GREGORY is a screenwriter and award-winning author of début The Improbable Wonders of Moojie Littleman. She contributes non-fiction articles to Film International Magazine, Modern Literature, Ginosko Literary Journal.

Her website is: www.robingregory.net/

In an interview with New York Times reviewer, Dave Itzkoff, Jim Carrey explained his latest book, “Memoirs and Misinformation,” co-written by author of Wall Street satire “Mergers & Acquisitions,” Dana Vachon. “It’s the end of the world, and we have the perfect book for it.”
“Not the end of civilization,” he continued. “Just the end of a world, the selfish world. We’re getting over the Ayn Rand, ‘you can be a jerk and we can all live in a paradise of jerks’ thing. That’s what we’re going through.”

Part autobiography, part fiction, Carrey and Vachon draw disparate parts of experience together to pull off an unconventional memoir/farewell letter to civilization as they know it.

It opens with the broken, bed bound, paranoid, messy version of Jim Carrey. Apocalyptic and soulless, Los Angeles serves as a backdrop for his mental state. Visceral ruminations follow, treating Hollywood as a trope for civilization teetering on the brink of extinction.

This Jim Carrey trusts no one. Reality is fickle. Celebrities are phonies. Even time is a “trick.”

Allrighty then.

If it weren’t for Carrey’s brilliant humor, and Vachon’s taught, lyrical prose, I might not have been able to take this grim version of Hollywood culture. Jim Carrey, Drama King, is an apocalyptic persona within an apocalypse. He exposes the underbelly of acting, agents, celebrity, and privilege, while yearning for friendship, romance, and meaning.

No one is safe passing under his purview. Least of all himself. While watching a television show explaining how Cro-Magnon annihilated the Neanderthals, he falls apart, drawing parallels to his fear of “total erasure.” He asks, is the “value of an existence as part of a species forever looping between horror and heartache…?” Lonely, restless, narcissistic, he looks to his guard dogs and a computerized security system, that speaks ”in the voice of a Singaporean opium heiress who summered in Provence,” for affection.

He’s in mourning for the world, and for his lost “self.” Terrified of life, terrified of death. The thought of John Lennon’s final portrait taken in the morgue, sends him into a self-grooming frenzy, just in case he dies and fanboys at the morgue sell his photo to the highest bidder.

Flashback to the beginning of the end.

This Jim Carrey is on top of his game. In a darkly comedic scenario, he’s at a banquet celebrating a whopping box office success. Surrounded by grifting dignitaries (investors), he charms them with an absurd guzzle from a bottle of expensive wine. Further laying the groundwork for a sleazy, black comedy of Hollywood culture, Carrey and Vachon go on to describe his early (fictionalized) career, poking fun at Nicolas Cage, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Tom Cruise, and the celebrity addiction to cosmetic surgery.

In a world where even reality TV is fake, Jim Carrey continually asks himself, What is real?

He affirms in interviews that some passages were written from real life experiences. As a sincere seven-year-old, he definitely was desperate to bring a smile to his ill mother’s face. He truly does carry a torch for the singer, Linda Ronstadt, who he dated in his twenties. He is still mourning the loss of his friend Rodney Dangerfield.

And yet, he is quoted in a press release, saying that "none of it is real, and all of it is true."
In the end, Carrey and other stars are battling an alien invasion, a slapstick finale that pokes fun at the book itself, as it correlates his misfortunes with Armageddon.

Ultimately, “Memoirs and Misinformation” is a feverish, visionary dream. It echoes Dostoevsky’s diary, “Notes from the Underground,” that opens with “I am a sick man.” Both books amalgamate fiction and non-fiction. Both expose illusions upon which society is formed, and the resultant effect on individual lives. And both are narrated by terribly clever, unreliable characters who emblazon the egotistical self struggling to maintain control over life rather than transform. #

I think I’ve watched the film, "The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey", a total of seven times since it came out in 1988.

Why am I crazy about this film?

Why, nearly thirty years later, did The Guardian call it a “jaw-dropping head trip” a “fish-out-of-water time travel story” that withstands the test of time?

It’s not only that my husband’s brilliant cousin, Geoffrey Chapple, co-wrote the script. And it isn’t just that the director, Vincent Ward, merits a shrine after spawning a number of subsequent masterpieces, despite spite of whopping setbacks. (To name one: his "Alien III", got the top spot in the London Times list of ‘greatest sci-fi movies never made.’) I loved "The Navigator" for its visionary overtones, religious and metaphoric imagery, and sheer childlike elegance. Add these qualities to inspired crafting, and you have storytelling with curative powers.

What’s it about?

Griffin is a nine year-old psychic, haunted by fragments of a dream about a journey to a celestial city. He sees a great cathedral and a figure roped to a steeple, about to fall.

We’re in stark, black and white Cumbria, 1348, the year of the Black Death. The people of a mining village live in fear of the advancing plague. Griffin’s older brother, Connor, returns from the outside world in a state of despair. Griffin tells of his dream and reveals their only source of survival:

Make tribute to God. Place a spire on a distant cathedral. Do so before dawn or the village will be lost.

Griffin, Connor, and a few other men embark on an extraordinary journey as they tunnel through the earth to a new world, a fabled, full color, land of untold extremes—the unfamiliar and distant future of 1988.

Why would I want to watch it now, thirty-two years later?

As Rotten Tomatoes said: “The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey creates its own logic, framing the story in the linear form of an ancient legend.”

Since 2020 seems to be a reenactment of medieval history, I recommend this timeless film right now. It has a way of inspiring creativity and courage. Above all, it restores hope for humanity.