Conscious and Unconscious in America: Part One Rochester Unconscious

Conscious and Unconscious in America, Part Three: Nashville Conscious is a searching, intelligent, and deeply personal literary work about art, memory, selfhood, and the long effort to live consciously in America.

In this third volume of Richard Thomas's bold literary project, Michael/Richard moves from old wounds toward clearer self-possession. Through reflections on Charles Grodin, Viola Spolin, Jean Renoir, Robert Altman, postmodernism, politics, aging, marriage, friendship, and the act of writing itself, the book becomes both a personal reckoning and a cultural inquiry.

This is not a conventional novel, memoir, or essay collection. It is a consciousness narrative: a literary exploration of how a life is interpreted, defended, revised, and finally owned. Thomas blends philosophical reflection, film criticism, autobiographical fiction, artistic self-examination, and sharp cultural observation into a work for readers who want serious writing about the inner life.

At its center is a powerful question: How does a person remain free, truthful, and artistically alive after years of rejection, misrecognition, and institutional pressure?

Challenging, intimate, and original, Nashville Conscious speaks to writers, artists, performers, thinkers, and readers drawn to literary fiction, hybrid memoir, cultural criticism, and books about the difficult work of becoming fully oneself.