Polypsyches

It’s a wide, wild, vast world out there, and it only gets bigger once it’s inside your head. The human imagination has room for outer space and epic battles, for dragons and robots, aliens and elves. It has room for Angels, and Demons, and every imaginable Pantheon, with enough space left over for human gossip.

My actual name is Gregory Roberts-Gassler, but I’ve always found that cumbersome and volatile, which is why I write as Polypsyches–pronounced Paul E. Psych-Ease or Polley Sigh-Keys, Greek for “Many Minds” or “Many Souls”. In my case, “many approaches to storytelling”.

I was born in the US, but grew up in Brussels, Belgium. I went to a Dutch-speaking school in a French-speaking city and took Latin and Greek all through high school. Within hours of graduating thence, I returned to the US, where I majored in Literature (concentration in Creative Writing) and Drama (Concentration in Acting and Directing) at the University of North Carolina at Asheville, with a minor in Greek. I also hold a Master’s in Western Literature from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and an MFA in Dramatic Writing at the Savannah College of Art and Design.

I am a fiction writer and a scholar, an actor and director (also occasionally singer and dancer), an American and a European; so I try to see things from a variety of perspectives. As an actor, I play the parts of all my character even in prose, as a director I envision alternative ways my plays can be performed. As a writer, I think of myself as a storyteller first, and only later as a novelist, playwright and screenwriter. And, I suppose, Blogger.

And I write about everything–comedy and tragedy, Fantasy and fact. But my main passion is for the speculative fictions. The world I write ranges from the beginnings of the Universe, the Big Bang of the Dragon-God bursting through the face of Creation, through every iteration and incarnation in the mirror-hall of the imagination, to the final blinding apotheosis of the Universe.

From planet-annihilating epics to quietly life-changing moments to the lives of the wild and the worried and the weird, the cycle of my stories seeks to humanize the superhuman and bring the exceptional into the domestic, to paint the largest possible picture with the greatest possible detail.

So who’s with me?