Award Winning Songwriter Peter Himmelman Shares His Spiritual Journey in 'Suspended by No String'

In Suspended by No String: A Songwriter’s Reflections on Faith, Aliveness, and Wonder, Emmy and Grammy-nominated musician and writer, Peter Himmelman, presents a collection of essays that touches on topics that both inspire and reflect on everyday life. While his book includes some personal recollections, he doesn’t consider it to be his memoir even if it may appear to be. He explained, “I wouldn’t think that that’s too far off in a certain way. I once started working on a memoir and just thought, memoir requires that somebody had a horrible experience… I do recount in some detail some very tragic things that happen to me, but I was raised by a beautiful family, I have loving friends, I didn’t have a horrible addiction or anything, so writing a memoir just didn’t make sense. I don’t think that I’m that interesting to write about, but this could be said to be like that, like here’s my accounts of some reckonings that I’ve had.”

Filled with profound and insightful poems, reflections, and stories, Himmelman’s book comprises of pieces that not only vary in different ways, but also draw upon a number of emotions. He said, “Since there’s no linear form, it’s not a novel by any means. These are pieces of various lengths. I sort of say in my introduction, they’re similar to my songs with different tempos and different colors.” With regard to the structure of the book, Himmelman remarked, “I thought it would be a good idea to arrange them, at some moment, I just thought I’m going to make them into 3 or 4 parts. The first part is ‘astonishment,’ which I think these are things that I recall that really changed the way I see things. The other is ‘shadows,’ which is some of the really sad parts that I recall… and the other technical category is ‘teachers’ and that’s not only the human beings, there have been many, have really changed the course of my life whether they know or not, but also just tiny little experiences that I was taught something very fundamental by. There was another fourth section called ‘notes to self,’ which I’d written in the third person… and it was decided, my publisher and I… she said it might be best to think about peppering those somewhat randomly through those other sections. I think it adds a nice texture.”