01
The Eleven Directions of Kansas
Winner of the 2025 Coffin Memorial Award for Non-Fiction.
Jim Gilkeson
Author Lawrence, KansasStories of place, memory, healing, and the unexpected.
Jim Gilkeson writes literary nonfiction, memoir, short fiction, and books exploring energy healing and spiritual process.
WriterStorytellerExplorer of the inner life
Published work
Five published books
Honors
Two Coffin Memorial Awards
Three Lost Worlds, 2024 · The Eleven Directions of Kansas, 2025
Selected publications
Memoirist Quarterly · Invisible City · 105 Meadowlark Reader
Published cover · Tenacity Press
Winner · 2025 Coffin Memorial Award for Non-Fiction
The Eleven Directions of Kansas
Fifteen imaginative stories moving from the Flint Hills to Costa Rica, Germany, and the Highlands of Scotland.
Evocative, wistful, unexpected, and funny, the collection follows a wild variety of one-off characters through questions of home, discovery, and the directions a life can take.
- Publisher
- Tenacity Press
- Published
- 2025
- Edited by
- Denise Low
A life in books
An editorial shelf spanning stories, memoir, healing, and inner life.
Literary work
02
Three Lost Worlds
A memoir of life among mystics, healers, and life-artists. Winner of the 2024 Coffin Memorial Award for Non-Fiction.
03
Bonsai 100
A working-title collection of short auto-fiction currently in progress and under submission with Meadowlark Press.
Healing & inner life
04
Energy Healing
A Pathway to Inner Growth. Translated into German and Portuguese.
05
A Pilgrim in Your Body
Energy Healing and Spiritual Process.
06
When Energy Healing Meets Meditation
Meditation, energetic healing, and creative nonfiction.
What a gem of a book! These deceptively simple, well-written, and evocative stories—part musing, part essay, part memoir, part flight of fancy, all heart—carry the reader to all the directions, from Kansas to Germany to Scotland to California, inward, outward, and beyond.
Writer · traveler · observer
A writer attentive to the visible world—and what moves beneath it.
Jim Gilkeson is the author of five published books spanning memoir, short fiction and auto-fiction, creative nonfiction, energy healing, and spiritual process, with new work forthcoming.
After lengthy periods in Europe and the American West, he now lives in Lawrence, Kansas, with his partner, Diane Tegtmeier.
Forthcoming
Late 2026
From Mammoth Publications
Upsurge of Light
A Reader for Healers
A forthcoming reader for healers, expected in late 2026.
One body of work,
two ways of seeing
I
Stories & memory
Memoir, short stories, travel, place, characters, and imagination—work that follows the strange routes by which experience becomes story.
II
Healing & inner life
Writing on energy healing, meditation, spiritual process, and the development of the healer—without losing sight of the human story.
Begin a conversation.
For author inquiries, rights, or information about Jim’s work, write directly.