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Mark Sommer typing on front deck of Salmon Creek, CA home, while seated in full lotus, May 1984
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
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
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
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,
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.
Chronicling over five decades of creative and journalistic output of a life-long explorer and progressive advocate, the Mark Sommer Papers are an unusually comprehensive and extensive collection, covering Sommer's entire career and personal life from the late 1960s to the present. As a journalist, researcher, and activist, Sommer's main interests include foreign policy and international relations, social change, peace research and conflict resolution, the anti-nuclear and disarmament movements, environmental sustainability, renewable energy, wilderness and back-to-the-land experiences, Buddhist spiritual practice, and later-life fatherhood. The collection is organized into four primary areas: Sommer's professional writings and published works; a varied personal collection including journals, correspondence, and school materials; photographs documenting home life and trips abroad; and audiovisual material, including tapes of interviews and personal audio-journals.
The bulk of the collection is comprised of Sommer's published works and professional endeavors going back to 1968. Articles written for the
The collection includes Sommer's personal effects and writings, particularly his journals from trips abroad to Prague and Eastern Europe, Mexico, Guatemala, Thailand, and other international destinations (including a unique trip to North Vietnam in 1968). Accounts written from his Salmon Creek wilderness homestead in California, as well as personal audio journals are also present. There are a series of audio journals on the topic of parenthood, where Sommer investigates the impact of being a father later in life. This section also includes personal correspondence, curriculum vitae, and various notes and materials from college courses.
Within the audiovisual portions of the collection are taped interviews with subjects for articles Sommer wrote, including a series of interviews conducted on Amtrak trains. Revealing Sommer as an avid, and skilled, documentary photographer throughout his life, the collection houses numerous photographic prints, slides, negatives, and digital photographs, documenting Sommer's life, family, the self-reliant organic homestead in California, and international travel.
Sommer's materials from Mainstream Media Project (1995-2014) have been separated into the
The collection is open for research.
Gift of Mark Sommer, May 2017.
In addition to his published books (noted in the collection inventory), books that came with the Mark Sommer Papers were removed from the collection and will be cataloged separately. These books include:
Processed by Devon King, and Blake Spitz, 2018-2019.
This series is primarily composed of Sommer's writings for various news outlets from the late 1980s to the early 2000s. Articles, correspondence, and notes concerning his writings for the
The majority of this series is journals written by Sommer while abroad in Thailand, Prague, Eastern Europe, Mexico, and other international destinations. Journals written at his homestead in Salmon Creek, California as well as a series of audio journals recorded over the course of his daughter's birth and early years can be found in this series as well. Various other documents include biographical material, notes associated with several college courses, and personal correspondence.
Prints, slides, negatives, and digital photographs illustrate Sommer's lifelong passion for photography and visual documentation. Images range from Sommer's family and home life, including coverage of decades on their wilderness homestead, to his wide-ranging travels and varied interests. Of note are photographs of Sommer's unique 1968 trip to Vietnam, depicting visits to urban areas, communes, and witnessing a "Women's Drill Day." This series of photographs also documents a 1968 student demonstration in Tokyo, Japan.
This series is comprised of taped interviews, audio diaries, and films produced by Sommer. Interviews include those Sommer conducted on Amtrak passenger trains, and personal journals have several reflecting on parenthood.
Original manuscript produced ca. 1970-1971, recounting Sommer's travels through Canada, and his physical, mental, and psychological tribulations in an attempt to find himself through meditation, drug use, and an ascetic wilderness lifestyle. Having decided to meditate until a breakthrough, he pushed himself to near-madness, and had an enlightenment experience.
Manuscript recounting a summer 1967 trip to Europe, where Sommer fell in love and traveled for two months.
See also:
Three portfolios of roughly forty-five 18.5 x 24.5cm art reproductions each, published by Liberation Publishing House in Vietnam. Each sketch includes title, artist, and date in English and Vietnamese. A preface explains that in the "people's war" a "no less effective weapon is art with its colours and melodies," and concludes, "The sketches by six artists of the people: Co Tan Long Chau, Le van Chuong, Huynh phuong Dong, Thai Ha, Le hong Hai, Nguyen van Kinh, that you find herein will perhaps help you to form a more thorough view of embattled Vietnam."
Conversations with philosopher and economist Kenneth Boulding in the last months of his life.