Linguist Laurel Airica Talks About New Book, Horsing Around

Horsing Around is a 10×10 coffee table book of beautiful equine photography accompanied by amusing commentary on lust and marriage. The concluding essay, Writing English and Jumping to Some New Conclusions, offers a treasury of puns and anagrams regarding our human/animal nature and the abiding power of love. Horsing Around provides a compelling ride for anyone who enjoys delving into words to discover deeper meanings and for all of those who hope to make their love and marriage a galloping success. Written by distinguished English linguist Laurel Airica, and assembled in creative collaboration with multi-media designer Lucy de Castenou, Horsing Around is a perfect gift for horse lovers, word lovers and human lovers on the verge of matrimony. And because love is what makes the whirled go round a lot more merrily, every time you buy a copy of Horsing Around, we will donate a portion of the purchase price to Smile Train ( http://www.smiletrain.org www.smiletrain.org ), a nonprofit organization that contributes to the health and happiness of young children all around the world. More about Laurel Airica: Laurel Airica took to words like a bird to the skies and began her literary flights of fancy early in her life. Particularly enchanted by rhythm and rhyme, palindromes, puns, the glitter of alliteration and other electro-poetic linguistic phenomena, she was startled by her first chance encounter with a pun at the age of two; and announced to her parents with absolute certainty at age three or four, I bet I now know all the words in the English language. By six, she was questioning suspiciously the origins of the alphabet. Who says ABCD?! she wondered to herself, as there was no one else to whom she could pose such a question. She pictured in her minds eye the 26 letters strewn like shells along the See of Consciousness but doubted that this was their littoral* origin. Laurel began decoding this symbolic language of the collective unconscious in her early teenage years. Decades later, she wrote a lengthy performance piece entitled, eSoterica, by Laurel Airica, which she assumes to be the definitive exegesis of the letter S in verse. Over time, she became aware of the rich subtext embedded in the language at the level of symbol (cymbal) and sound. She now believes that language is not merely grammatical but holo-grammatical, as well. She thus contends and demonstrates in her work that using the curiosities of English as a mirror in which to view our own idiosyncratic natures and presumptions of reality is like peering through a magic lens that makes the obvious suddenly visible. Laurel expresses her insights in a variety of forms including nonfiction articles, metaphoric fantasies, MetaWhimsical verse and interactive curricula all geared to various ages and levels of sophistication. Horsing Around is the first of many projects that she intends to make widely available. When publicly presenting her savory suites of stunning punning in rhyming and alliterative metaphoric verse Laurel enjoys incorporating music, movement and visual aids to simultaneously communicate multiple levels of meaning and the innate rhythm and dance of words. At various times, audience members have compared her work to Shakespeare, Mozart, Dame Edith Sitwell and, most recently, M.C. Escher. In whatever form she writes, Laurel endeavors to convey positive, uplifting and liberating messages in ways that educate and entertain simultaneously. Among her many intentions for her whimsical wordplay is to stimulate logophilia a love of words in others and to help young minds become unPenned. Laurel has worked with youth (from nursery age through teenage), shared her curriculum for Self-discovery with psychology students at Santa Monica High School (Keeping Current with the Life’s Dream), and uses WordMagic’s Simplistic Linguistic FUNdaMENTALS to enhance language skills, self-esteem and visionary thinking among elementary school students. Raised in a family of highly literate and accomplished professionals in the visual and musical arts, Laurel received a bachelor’s degree in English Literature from UC Berkeley. In 2005, she received a Masters Degree in Spiritual Psychology from the University of Santa Monica a small private university that attracts students from around the world to its profoundly transformational counseling programs ( http://gousm.edu/”>http://gousm.edu/ ). Laurel has assisted many hundreds of individuals from all backgrounds and professions to realize and more fully express Soul Purposes in life through her spiritual counseling work. She is currently studying and practicing Soul Medicine a process developed by psychotherapist Gautama Katzman for facilitating emotional healings and spiritual awakenings simultaneously. Laurel also works as a communications consultant for visionary people with companies and projects that are focused on making a positive difference in the world. For information about her counseling and communications services, please visit http://www.laurelairica.com www.laurelairica.com .