"Writing is the most true to myself that I can be."

"To me, it's just exhilarating, the notion that you can have a seed of an idea and then the only way to find out where the plot is going to go is by inhabiting those characters and the situation and just writing it and finding out. And that's pretty much how I do everything when I write."

-Nathan Slake, writer, scientist, dreamer

Occasionally, I'll discover a writer whose prose tastes like food—nourishing food, delicious food. Phrases that slow me down, descriptions to savor, sentences that land in my body like sun-warmed blackberries: complete and whole, yet always leaving me wanting more.

Nathan Slake is one of those writers. While his professional life is spent within the walls of academia, teaching and researching immunology, his soul resides in storytelling. I've found a kindred spirit, a brother-from-another-mother, in Nathan. I nodded throughout our conversation like a bobblehead as I related to his experiences of being a "slow bloomer," his love for "slow reading," and the not-so-slow exhilaration of creating and writing without a map, where deep listening precedes strategizing.

Nathan is someone to keep on your radar, friends! His imagination and craft are already captivating the minds and hearts of many readers. And while he humbly admits to only "discovering his soul" in his 30s—largely due to a deliberate cultivation of attentive presence and deep conversations with his wife Josephine—this soul is already a mosaic of memorable landscapes and characters, all grappling with poignant themes on the nature of consciousness and what it means to be human.