Come and explore with author Shawn Thompson a sense of curiosity and inquiry fed by a passion for asking questions.

By way of introduction, the person who made this website - which is me, in the black-frame glasses and greying beard to the left - has made a life out of publishing books and articles and teaching in a smallish university in the mountains.

Along the way, this person - me again - has interviewed diverse people from politicians, to scientists, to lawyers, to federal prisoners, in locations from Europe to Southeast Asia to the United States and Canada, trekked through jungles and been chased by wild pygmy elephants in Sabah in northern Borneo, slept inside the Jakarta zoo, sailed on a navy submarine, tracked down a fugitive from the police to a villa in the Dominican Republic, wandered inside a giant bat cave in Borneo, got married in the Philippines and was an expert witness in a trial in Buenos Aires. It was an unusual trial. The judge was ruling whether an orangutan as an intelligent creature should be kept in captivity. The orangutan won, despite some outrage from Argentinian authorities, and was sent to a sanctuary in Florida. There has been some consulting on wildlife documentaries. Combine those adventures in writing and journalism with teaching in a university for 25 years where the academic tribe has strange rituals and odd abstractions and that's exposure to a diversity of points of view - and you get me. I have no idea if that is a formula of some kind. I might not be able to do it again if I tried.

So, that's all nice, but what's the connection to the topic of this website?

In my 20s, I was writing a PhD thesis on the Romantic visionary poet and artist William Blake, then swerved sideways into journalism, then swerved sideways from journalism into teaching in a university. That illustrates the point of this website: I made a career out of not knowing much besides being able to read and ask other people questions. When I came to teach interviewing techniques to others, I realized that I didn't even know as much about asking questions as I thought. I plunged into reading the professional literature on asking questions and found most of it lacking much depth, except for psychotherapy and Zen Buddhism. So now I needed to think about the lessons from those who ask the best questions and the way to do that.

Am I qualified to do that? That's for others to decide. Others have been Buddhist monks. Nice, I wish I'd done that, but I haven't. Maybe in another incarnation. Others have a PhD in philosophy. Nice, I wish I had one of those, but I don't. A bit too academic for my taste even for my academic side. But what makes anyone qualified to do anything? How much of the qualifications that we achieve is what is learned from the experiences and thoughts of others?

In this website. I want to explore ideas about how to enrich our lives by learning to ask deeper, more original, more authentic questions. I'll interact in ways that I learned from Michel Foucault, Mikhail Bakhtin, Martin Buber and Bill Maher, all long dead except for Maher for the moment. I wish I'd had their intelligence, but I don't. I have to manage with what I have.

You can join me. I am not hiding behind a digital wall. My email is out there on this website. I will do Zoom consultations as a writing coach for anyone writing for a good cause to help people, wildlife and nature.

I have to ask. If you read this far, why, why, why? What is it that you are seeking? Honestly, ultimately, you find that within yourself, not within me. Good luck on that, fellow traveller. May you find what you seek and much, much more.

Shawn Thompson, on the grey side

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With two friends at the Singapore zoo, having a look at the orangutan photos in the author's book. The small orangutan is touching a photo of an orangutan in the Singapore zoo that he may recognize.

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