Lionel Fisher

A former journalist, freelance writer, newspaper columnist, corporate communicator, and advertising creative director-copy chief, Lionel Fisher lived and worked in San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Miami and Portland, Oregon, before moving to Southwest Washington’s Long Beach Peninsula in 1994. He is the author of Celebrating Time Alone: Stories of Splendid Solitude (Beyond Words Publishing, 2001), On Your Own: A Guide to Working Happily, Productively and Successfully from Home (Prentice Hall, 1995), and The Craft of Corporate Journalism (Nelson-Hall, 1992).

Fisher also writes several self-syndicated humor/lifestyle/seniors columns including one on the art of being alone. If you're an editor seeking a fresh, addictive addition to your newspaper, magazine or ezine, he would welcome talking to you about writing a regular piece for your publication.

He is also at work on a new self-help book on the issues of aging with the working title of “My Name Is Earl and I’m Old”/A 12-Step Program for the Rest of the Journey. As a serene, perplexed or simply joyful traveler on life's journey past meridian, would you care to contribute your thoughts and feelings for Fisher's new book? Join a conversation in the Forum section. Your counsel on aging with dignity, courage and grace would be most welcome.

Reach him at beachauthor@hotmail.com

The seed for his 2001 book, Celebrating Time Alone: Stories of Splendid Solitude, sprouted in the coastal community to which he moved in January of 1994. "It's a reclusive place," writes Fisher, "the last knuckle on a rain-scoured finger of land lapped by the beige waters of Willapa Bay and the gray Pacific, wrapped by khaki sands and olive clouds except in summer when the sky is the color of washed denim. Here, wind and water lean on the land, thrusting a constant coolness from across the sea, buffing the stars at night to an awesome brilliance.”

The book is a spiritual, emotional, and practical guide to living well enough alone, even magnificently, instead of seeking our happiness, our fulfillment, our answers, our very identity in others when we first must find it in ourselves, something we can only do alone.

His reflections on solitude came into keen focus during the early years of introspection spent living and writing by himself on the remote Pacific Northwest beach to which he retreated and kept a detailed journal to record his thoughts, feelings, and emotions during this climactic period of willful isolation.

In Celebrating Time Alone, the Hong Kong-born author interweaves his own insights and experiences with the stories of the "new hermits" to whom he talked across the country – men and women who have achieved amazing grace alone. Those who have stretched the envelope of their aloneness to Waldenesque proportions, achieving great emotional clarity in the process. And those who, through necessity or choice, prefer to savor their individuality in smaller servings.

The book's central premise is timeless, says Fisher: "There are gifts we can only give ourselves, lessons no one else can teach us, triumphs we must achieve alone. Being alone, whether by circumstance or choice, is not tragic, as society conditions us to believe. What is tragic, and so wasteful of the preciousness of life, is that too many of us think we are nothing alone. Celebrating affirms that it is all right to be alone, to want to be alone, even to be lonely at times because the rewards of solitude can make the deprivations so worthwhile."