International Writers Inspiring Change featured book: From the Cyclops Cave: a Braided Memoir
- IWIC Admin
- May 2
- 6 min read
Updated: May 17
“As epic in scale as the Greek tales of the land this story is ultimately built upon, Don Schofield’s saga of growing up is a bildungsroman writ large.”—Liz Stephens, Director, Mojave Desert Arts
“Poignant and profound. From the Cyclops Cave looks backward and inward—and isn’t this something we should all do?”—Sharman Apr Russell, author of Standing in the Light: My Life as a Pantheist
A braided memoir of resilience, self-discovery, and the search for home.
From the Cyclops Cave: A Braided Memoir intertwines past and present, weaving a turbulent childhood in 1950s California with an adult life shaped by solitude on the Cycladic islands of Greece. Abandoned by his father and raised by strangers, the author grows up yearning for connection; decades later, in a primitive hut locals call the Cyclops Cave, he finds both refuge and reckoning. Through braided chapters moving between memory and the immediacy of Greek island life, this poignant memoir explores resilience, identity, and the lifelong journey to belong.
Reviews...
"The Cyclops Cave moved me through time --between childhood and adulthood, California and Greece. The dialog with self and others creates a tension between the need for love and solitude."
"Don Schofield's new memoir, "CYCLOPS CAVE" is terrific. It is a profound excursion through a complex, sometimes difficult but full life."
"I’ve never read a memoir like this one. This is a braided story, one that switches back and forth between the poet’s harrowing childhood in California, and the other which follows him one solitary summer on an island in Greece, where he truly faces the way his childhood colors his present life."
"A finely detailed, enveloping look at life in two disparate countries."
- See full review at Kirkus Reviews
"The American poet, who has been living in Greece for 45 years, has just
published his first prose work and, on this occasion, recounts his life
story." - Macedonia (Greek Newspaper) See full review (in Greek) HERE
See review at Open Letters Review HERE
See review by BookGlow.net
From the Cyclops Cave: A Braided Memoir, by Don Schofield, is a biographical adventure, a memoir, the true life story of the author, but presented in two very different worlds. The author deftly takes the reader through his early childhood years and flips to his later life in Greece, near a small village where he lived in a rural cottage. Back and forth, we ride the train through his years, a tumultuous upbringing, where he bounced between two different homes and placements in a facility for children, years of separation, rejection, disappointment - where a young boy responded with recalcitrance and a troublesome attitude, even small acts of criminality, all of which one could surmise was the result of his protest against the world he endured. Throughout the story, the author takes us back to Greece and his time there; where solitude, the friendly support and kindness of the locals and the utter beauty and simplicity of the Grecian coast, helps him to reconcile, to some degree, his past and his relationship to his father and those whom he grew up with. It's a very personal story, related with incredible detail, and while it is a slow-burn, it resonates with the truth of what it is like to be a child growing up with uncertainty, insecurity and rejection and the lasting traces it leaves on one's soul - pain which must either be faced or escaped from - and in this regard, the author shows us which path he took and why.
Review by International Writers Inspiring Change
Born in Nevada and raised in California, Don Schofield has been living in Greece since 1980. During that time, he has been writing, traveling extensively and teaching at various universities—Greek, American and British. Fluent in Greek, a citizen of both his homeland and his adopted country, he has published several poetry collections, including A Different Heaven (2023), The Flow of Wonder (2018), In Lands Imagination Favors (2014) and Before Kodachrome (2012), as well as The Known: Selected Poems [of Nikos Fokas], 1981 – 2000 (2010) and Kindled Terraces: American Poets in Greece (2004). He is a recipient of the Allen Ginsberg Award (US), the John D. Criticos Prize (UK) and a Stanley J. Seeger Writer-in-Residence fellowship at Princeton University. His first book, Approximately Paradise (2002), was a finalist for the Walt Whitman Award, and his translations have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and the Greek National Translation Award. His first memoir, From the Cyclops Cave: A Braided Memoir (2025), is just out from Open Books Press. Currently he lives with his companion Aleka in both Athens and Thessaloniki.
Our interview with the author...
iWIC: What inspired you to write?
I first started writing in my twenties, at university, when I discovered that through poetry I could go deep into my own experience—instead of running away from it, which I’d done up until then—and make meaning out of a childhood of abuse, abandonment and fragmented emotions. Writing gave me the freedom to explore myself and others, especially those priests and nuns and parental figures who’d impacted my life so intensely. What’s more, I discovered that through writing I could play again. Writing gave me permission to frolic with language, with memories, and with the voice of that abandoned, angry boy inside me. Later, after I moved to Greece, I discovered that writing could also be a way to explore this new, modern yet ancient world I was living in. And, more recently, in writing the memoir, I discovered writing, especially narrative, could bring in more voices, and could weave them and all those earlier discoveries into a meaningful, more revealing whole.
iWIC: Who or what most inspired you in life?
There have been numerous sources over the years—nature, mythology and biblical stories, the complexities of familial and romantic relationships, the charm and quirks of language, the terrors of war and domestic violence, works of art—the list is long. But at the heart of it all were the inspiring teachers I was fortunate to have. My first mentor, poet Dennis Schmitz, taught me the many possibilities of poetry, the freedoms language can open up, and the need for precision. My second mentor, Richard Hugo, taught me the importance of place (mine turned out to be California and Greece), how meaning comes through the music of language, and how, in writing, emotional truth is far more important than literal truth.
When I turned to memoir, I took two online workshops through UCLA. I learned a lot from the participants in both courses, and even more from both instructors. Though she wouldn’t say it like this, Liz Stephens taught me basically what Michael Jordan had to learn when, for a year, he left the NBA to play major league baseball: if I wanted to go from poetry to book-length narrative I had to change my entire writing “musculature.” And Barbara Abercrombie taught me to trust my instincts, especially regarding form, and to pay close attention to the boy in my memoir. “He’s the interesting one.”
iWIC: What do you hope to inspire with your writing?
My writing in the memoir speaks mainly to two different kinds of readers—to those who have experienced trauma in childhood and, as adults, are still struggling. And to those who feel the impulse to change their lives but, for whatever reasons, never actually made the move.
To them, and to all readers, I hope to instill the value that Socrates held most deeply, that “The unexamined life isn’t worth living.” And I would add, with humility—Nor can it be fully lived.
iWIC: What is the backstory to your book? How did it come about?
From the Cyclops Cave came about precisely as the title suggests—from living, in my mid-forties, in a hut built into the rocks of a remote Greek island, experiencing a place that had no road, no running water, no electricity. But it had two wells, one for good water, another for bad. The cliff face, whitewashed, was one wall of the Cave. Sheep grazed on the slope above it. The sea lapped at the rocks below. Easy to see how a Cyclops could live there. And easy to see how that primitive abode was, for me, both very real and incredibly mythical. Over the years, the urge to write about my time there kept pushing at me.
That Cave became a sanctuary of sorts, a place to write and so dive deep into my past, a place of solitude, where I could go for days without seeing or talking to anyone, just me, with the sound of the sea by day, the cloak of stars by night. As a poet, and as a loner since childhood, I longed for solitude. That’s what being in that cove, that Cave, gave me: the chance to be alone, and to immerse myself into the elementary, sun-stunned terrain of a Cycladic island.
But the Cyclops Cave also meant connection—whether I wanted it or not. All but one of the ten or so families residing there lived in a cluster of small houses on the opposite side of the bay. Yet those neighbors, curious about the American, and worried that he was alone, made a point of passing by now and then. So a handful of locals befriended me and showed me a whole different way of life.
Being alone in that Cave also meant confronting my demons. So much tranquillity surrounding me, yet the Cyclops within me found ways to hold forth. And, like it or not, I was there, in that remote cove, to at last come to terms with him.
And so, thirty years later, I returned to my journals from that time, and wrote From the Cyclops Cave.
Visit author website HERE
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