The Man in the Empty Boat

With rare honesty, Salzman offers a window into a writer's mind as he struggles with balancing family life, personal tragedy, and the creative impulse. Salzman's self-deprecating humor bears within it a real and moving journey toward inner peace and self-acceptance, one that is grounded in the realities of modern life.

Salzman is an author I found ten years ago, and, once found, was devoured. And then, nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing. It's been a long time. I finally Googled Salzman and learned he'd written one book in the last few years, this one, this little memoir.

I got my hands on a copy at last. Happy to say that I devoured it, too.

It explains why Salzman has been so quiet. He suffers from anxiety. Panic attacks. And simultaneous writer's block.

It is the little story from a Taoist classic written twenty-three hundred years ago that has soothed his troubles, a story of a man in an empty boat. To sum it up, if a man in a boat is hit by a boat that is empty, the man won't get angry, so why can't we be a man in an empty boat?

Let's hope that Salzman can find a way to be that man in the empty boat and write his wonderful stories down, too.