Jacques Pluss

My life has been as "contemplative and contradictory" as is the poetry in "Under a Shaded Sun." It has been as varied as that of my paternal grandfather, Otto Pluss, the subject of one of my 2016 volumes. It is entitled "The Last Pasha: A Swiss Adventurer in Egypt, 1909-1911," and has been published as an Amazon KDP eBook and as a softcover version by Amazon's CreateSpace. My latest work, "Time Be Damned: Barrier, A Love Story" departs from poetry or memoirs. It is a fantasy based on romance, time travel, and paranormal themes in the context of historical fiction. It describes a two-hundred year long love relationship between two individuals. One relationship, set in the last years of the American Revolution, occurs in 1782. The other, taking place against the background of the Counter-Culture and the Vietnam Conflict, occurs in 1973. Throughout, the volume stresses the timeless nature of true love. It is available as an Amazon KDP eBook and also in softcover.

I was born in May, 1953 in the maternity hospital of the University of Zurich, Switzerland. Being the Head Resident in Dermatology at the hospital, my young father (who was Swiss) wanted me to be delivered by the Department Head of the Dermatology faculty. Well, fine, but my mother (an American who had just received her M.D. degree weeks earlier) went into intense labor very early in the morning, and the Department Head was still sleeping away at home. Rather than being delivered by another physician, my father (a very intense fellow) insisted that my mother wait for the Department Head by "holding" her contractions. This very painful action led her to scream away until a nurse gave her a rubber bar to clench between her teeth! And yes, I was born a few hours later, and in good shape, too! Of course, my mother was furious at my father and threatened to have me named after a former boyfriend of her's! Nope, it didn't work, but it apparently gave the maternity staff some good gossip!

I spent my early years between Queens, New York City, and the charming town of Aarau in Switzerland, where my paternal grandmother, Mira Pluss, and her companion, a very handsome, urbane Slovenian named Milko -- a political refugee living in Switzerland -- lived in a beautiful Victorian mansion bought by my paternal grandfather, Otto Pluss, prior to his death at an early age in 1935. I loved those early years, learning to ride and care for horses with Mira and Milko, traveling across the globe with my parents and then, after a marital split, with my father. He was working for an international medical firm, was multilingual, and was sent all over to check on research and development. I lived, for short periods, in Hong Kong, Saigon (before the Vietnam War), London, Rome and Brussels (Belgium). Wow! When I was with my mother, first in Queens and then on the eastern end of Long Island, New York, I often heard her own mother speak of her childhood in the early twentieth century. She told me of her family's relationship with their cousin, the accomplished though not always popular journalist and social critic, Lincoln Steffens. She emphasized his courage in the face of corrupt New York "bosses" around 1900. I admired the man's disdain for what he believed were the commonplace hypocrisies of "normal" social convention. I never met him, of course, but hearing and reading about him started me on my own course as an author. So, too, did I gather tremendous romantic inspiration as a fledgling author by spending much valuable time among the American Colonial settings of eastern Long Island (photos of Stony Brook Grist Mill in Winter, a young Lincoln Steffens, the author in Aarau in 2010, and Jessica Stephens the day she became Jessica Stephens-Pluss [October 31, 2010 -- Wahlpurgisnacht for all Pagans out there] on this author page.)

What more can I say? This tale could go on forever, but I'll skip to teenage years. I spent five years in an upscale boarding school with a vaguely religious twist in Stony Brook, New York. I simply could not keep out of trouble, nor did I really want to. What aggravated my teachers all the more were my good grades and a modest skill at sports. I was nearly ejected from the place twice in my senior year, but I wiggled out of things using my wit and charm!. Once, the headmaster even said he would pray for me, but it probably would do no good! Then, life opened up its uglier side. My first love was killed in a car accident on my eighteenth birthday. Her sudden death plunged me into a sort of manic depression coupled with severe, almost sociopathic anger. Needless to say, I reacted badly in my grief and had an affair with a peculiarly disturbed beauty who ended up in an institution for the emotionally impaired. In my own way, I cared for her deeply. I adamantly refused to attend college. I worked as a groom at a horse farm. Finally, just as the draft was ending, I joined the U.S. Army to hide from "things." But, as "things" happen, I turned out to be a surprisingly good young soldier, and I was assigned to "Special Operations" and trained in "psychological warfare." Multilingual myself, I attended interrogations of enemy prisoners, operated clandestinely in Laos, and after a back wound ended my career "in country," found myself working as an intelligence clerk in the American Embassy in Saigon! Those were some years, and reflecting now on that time, I can hardly believe I did "whatever it was I did" back then.

After my discharge from the Service, I never really went home. Nothing seemed to be "the same" to me. I moved from one place to another, married and divorced quickly three times, and stayed in various places mostly on the shores of the Lake of Geneva. I studied neuro-psychology, became a psychoanalyst and had a small, part-time practice. I drank too much and finally stopped completely. I stayed in school--the perpetual student--until I was over thirty. I received a PhD. from the University of Chicago and later taught at colleges and universities. But, through it all, my main aim was to avoid conventional working. I lived in beautiful condo's and in dank basement apartments. At one time, I owned and helped train 24 horses imported from Europe and rode the "competition jumper" circuit. Then, I went "bust" and ended up as a barn worker for a while. Have I yet "settled down?" Well, it seems so, but we'll see. Now, as I move into my middle sixties, I write full time. I've done poetry and I've done prose. I alternate between joyous and darkly grim. Throughout this journey we call "life," I have always written and I have always read. I've gone from the serious notions of Sigmund Freud to the realism-naturalism of Stephen Crane and to the fantastic images sketched by Edgar Allan Poe, Lord Byron, and Percy Shelley.

In conclusion, I observe the beauty, the support and the maturation of my wife Jessica, thirty years my junior and once upon a time, one of my best students. I do always keep in mind the words spoken by Byron in his "play in verse," "Don Juan": "Make journeys. Attempt them. There is nothing else." Whenever it need be recorded, those words will be my epitaph.