About the Book: For fans of Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act: A Way of Being and Alva Noë’s Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature, multifaceted author Dale M. Kushner examines the creative mind by looking back at her own creative work—a fairy tale she wrote decades ago.

During a personal crisis novelist and poet Dale M. Kushner wrote a fairy tale to survive it. Decades later, she returns to that story to ask a larger question: what do fairy tales teach us about creativity, trauma, and transformation? That inquiry became Wild Freedom: The Princess Who Found Her Name - On Fairy Tales, Imagination, and the Creative Mind a hybrid work of fairy tale, memoir, and reflection that explores imagination as a vital psychological and spiritual practice.

A student of psychiatrist Carl Jung, the author invited notable Jungian thinkers Henry Abramovitch, Kenneth W. James, Dariane Pictet, and Murray Stein, to write essays to accompany the fairy tale, suggesting readers partake of their own journeys of self-discovery.

About the Author: Dale M. Kushner is a novelist, poet, and essayist. Her debut novel, The Conditions of Love, was nominated for the Texas Library Association Award for Outstanding Adult Fiction, and her poetry collection M received Special Mention in the Pushcart Prize 2024. She is the author of the popular Psychology Today column “Transcending the Past,” which bridges art, psychology, and science.

About Tamara Dean: Tamara Dean has been camping, fishing, hiking, and gathering wild foods from an early age, led and inspired by her parents. Her essays and stories have been

published in The American Scholar, The Georgia Review, the Guardian, One Story,

Orion, and The Progressive, and she is author of The Human-Powered Home:

Choosing Muscles over Motors. She teaches writing independently and through

Dale Kushner in Conversation with Tamara Dean