Mark Sommer Papers

Background on Mark Sommer

In a career that has spanned five decades, Mark Sommer has been an explorer, author, award-winning public radio and print journalist, memoirist, and filmmaker chronicling and advocating for progressive social, political, cultural and environmental change. Born in 1945 in Columbus, Ohio to Austro-Hungarian immigrant Adolph Sommer and Brooklyn native Muriel Ehrlich Sommer, Sommer excelled in school and other arenas, eventually moving east to attend college at Cornell University. With an educational focus at Cornell in government, history, and literature, he also partook in the intense mid-Sixties political ferment in Ithaca and New York City, attending antiwar demonstrations, serving as Associate Editor of The Cornell Daily Sun, and publishing an intent to burn his draft card. He gradually became disenchanted with the academic approach to knowledge and understanding and decided to follow his pursuits outside academia after graduation. Declining graduate school acceptances to Harvard and Berkeley, he chose instead to join the antiwar movement and New Left think tank, the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) in Washington, D.C.

Following his first trip to Europe (and first love affair, eventually leading to his manuscript Kissing Joy, about that magical summer) Sommer moved to Washington, D.C., where he became a witness to and participant in some of the pivotal moments and movements of the 1960s. He was a founding contributor to Liberation News Service, a protégé of cofounder Marcus Raskin at IPS, and participated in the siege of the Pentagon in October 1967, where he finally did burn his draft card. In D.C., Sommer resided in a communal house, which together with IPS provided meeting places for noted writers, journalists, activists, and artists active in the diverse protest movements of the time. The spring of 1968 brought the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., nationwide urban insurrections, and a secret invitation for Sommer to visit North Vietnam. Raising funds from magazine and book publishers, Sommer flew to Hanoi with three other young colleagues. Along the way they stopped briefly in Paris just when street fighting broke out in the Latin Quarter at the outset of the May 1968 revolution.

Following his transformative trip to Hanoi and the North Vietnamese countryside, and after reporting on the demonstrations at the July 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, Sommer chose to disengage from a leftist politics he felt was moving towards rage, despair, and self-destruction. On the day after Richard Nixon's inauguration, he moved west to explore the counterculture of the San Francisco Bay Area. Receiving a 1-A and ordered to a pre-induction physical on his return from Hanoi, he applied for and received a conscientious objector exemption from military service. He migrated to Northern California, where he taught in several alternative "free" schools in California and Canada to fulfill his alternative service obligation and worked as a wilderness experience guide. He lived (and at times almost died) in the deep woods, on homesteads, and in communes, in Northern California and the west coast of British Columbia. Sommer's personal quest for meaning also led him to mind-altering experimentation with hallucinogenic drugs, including LSD. The illuminating but ultimately unsustainable states of mind he experienced through hallucinogens led him to abandon them and devote himself instead to meditation and Buddhist practice. He initially studied with Zen master Shunryu Suzuki-roshi and other teachers in the San Francisco and Berkeley Zen centers and at Tassajara, a mountain monastery. Over time he migrated to a more eclectic and heart-centered practice and has pursued Buddhist meditation for the half century since.

In 1972 Sommer met his future wife, Sandi, when they converged on a Zen community around Kobun Chino sensei in Los Altos, California. They first moved into a communal house of Zen students, next to the coastal community of Pescadero, to learn homesteading skills raising goats and gardens in a log house, and finally to the deep forest wilderness of Northern California (Humboldt County), where they lived seven miles off the grid from the mid-1970s until the mid-1990s. There they built a self-reliant organic homestead, planting extensive orchards and gardens, raising goats, installing first-generation solar-powered electricity and a water wheel, and maintaining a self-built solar radiotelephone.

The resilience of nature deeply influenced Sommer's outlook and work as an author and journalist, drawing his interest to the human capacity to transform adversity into opportunity and ultimately a gift. From the late 1970s through the early 1990s, his research focused on preventing nuclear war, curbing the arms race, peace research, and conflict resolution. Projects included his proposals-turned-pamphlets Beating Our Swords into Shields and Qualitative Disarmament. After three months speaking with peace researchers in Western and Eastern Europe, he co-founded ExPro (the Exploratory Project on the Conditions of Peace), a mobile think tank of leading American peace researchers, and wrote two books on the subject, Beyond the Bomb and The Conquest of War: Alternative Strategies for Global Security (the latter with Harry Hollins and Averill Powers).

During the late eighties and nineties, Sommer was a Research Associate at UC Berkeley's Peace and Conflict Studies Program. With support from the Ploughshares Fund he became a guest on hundreds of local and syndicated radio shows as a commentator on global security and U.S. foreign policy. In 1990 and 1991, he travelled extensively in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in its final year to gather material and conduct interviews with Czech dissidents for his book about the Velvet Revolution and its aftermath, Living in Freedom: The Exhilaration and Anguish of Prague's Second Spring. From 1984-1994, he wrote frequent commentaries for The Christian Science Monitor, and from 1992 to 2014, he served as an American correspondent for Inter Press Service in Rome, which syndicated his columns in several languages to more than a hundred countries.

In 1993, after 22 years of marriage, the Sommers welcomed their first and only child, daughter Maya Serena, into the world. Parenting, particularly later-in-life fatherhood, added another dimension of experience to Sommer's life, becoming a new focus of his personal and professional quests and reflections. With his daughter now an essential part of his story, the family moved from their remote homestead two hours north to the fishing village of Trinidad, California, where they built a home overlooking the Pacific. Sommer continued work from there and the Bay Area. He continued to travel widely both with family and on assignment for "A World of Possibilities," to encounter and commune with new people, cultures, and environments. Many travels would return Sommer to places from his past, such as Prague to visit old friends and for a new edition of his book. In 2015, 47 years after his first visit, he returned to Hanoi and filmed some of the same locales from his 1968 visit. From these two journeys he produced a feature-length film, The Healing Heart of Hanoi and a written memoir. Both were informed by his contemporaneous 1968 journals and photographs.

In 1995, after a decade as a frequent guest on commercial and public radio as a commentator on world affairs, Sommer founded and for many years directed the Mainstream Media Project, a foundation-supported interview placement service scheduling leading-edge thinkers and social innovators for extensive interviews on public, commercial, and community radio nationwide on a range of global and national issues. In 2001, Sommer founded and for a decade served as host of the internationally syndicated, solution-centered one-hour radio program, "A World of Possibilities." For a decade the show was heard weekly on 200+ stations in the U.S. and abroad, winning six international awards, including one from the United Nations.

With his three books, hundreds of op-eds and articles in major newspapers worldwide, and syndicated radio programs, Sommer has been a tireless storyteller, social change advocate, and explorer of inner and outer worlds. He continues to work between homes in Humboldt County and the San Francisco Bay Area, and to travel internationally for personal reflection and communal connection. Current projects include writing a series of book-length memoirs, producing short and movie-length films crafted from his photographs, videos, interviews, and experiences, promoting community-generated renewable energy, and writing and recording stories and insights about the true sources of wealth ("True Wealth") and the richness of life beyond fame, fortune, power and prestige.