Judging by the character that made him famous, Dwight Schrute, one may not think Rainn Wilson is a purveyor of deep thought and profound ideas.
The Office actor’s debut book, SoulPancake, once again reminds us that characters are merely roles actors play, especially because the book is a decidedly un-Dwight-like endeavor.
SoulPancake is a book also written by three other authors, Devon Gundry, Golriz Lucina and Shabnam Mogharabi, that attempts to answer “life’s big questions.” These include: Why is talking about God so awkward? What single experience has most transformed you? Why do we hate?
The book is based on a website created by Wilson, Gundry and their friend Joshua Homnick. The site allows users to pose questions for others to answer. Users can also post ideas for lists and ideas for “creative challenges” — such as, “Go one day without any web connection.”
The website eventually spurred the idea for the book. Although it doesn’t have the same aspect of intercommunication and user generation, it can be thought provoking in its own way. The book similarly has creative challenges, as well as art, quotes and trivia.
When putting together the book, the authors considered every question that had ever been asked on their site. Eventually they narrowed the list — which Gundry approximated as “40,000” — to the 180 that make up SoulPancake.
“[The book should be] a little artifact, a little tool, that anyone can carry around with them to read wherever they are, whether they’re in line at the bank, sitting on a subway on their way across the city or sitting alone and decompressing at the end of the night in their dorm room,” said Gundry of the goal for SoulPancake in a conference call with The Diamondback.
Wilson’s beginnings could explain his affinity for the spiritual. He grew up in a “Baha’i household in suburban Seattle with a father who was a sewer truck dispatcher/abstract painter/science-fiction novelist,” according to a press release.
The actor spoke of his frustration at the lack of discussion of spiritual matters.
“I always talk about this stuff,” he said. “And people look at me so weird if I’m at a party and I’m just kind of like ‘So, do you think that we have a soul?’ And people look at me like ‘Huh?’ … And people make a lot of jokes like, ‘Oh, that’s the type of conversation you have when you’re stoned.’ Well, why are deep conversations only for when you’re stoned? Why can’t you have a deep conversation with people just in the real world?”
Wilson said one of his goals of publishing the book is to revive such discussions.
“Spirituality is pretty lame in our culture today — it’s either really flaky and New-Age-y or else it’s kind of born-again fundamentalist,” he said. “And there’s no kind of in-between.”
Gundry explained the book’s way of getting people to open up and really think about such topics was through creative expression.
“We found that if you can infuse these kinds of topics with creative approaches to looking at them and if you infuse them with art, if you infuse them with creativity, we found that people are actually interested in talking about them,” he said.
wildman@umdbk.com
