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New Book

Maritime Magistery

by Lucy Daniels

At 82 years old, writer and psychologist Dr. Lucy Daniels has published another book. Maritime Magistery is a collection of linked stories, which take place on North Carolina’s coast, and reveal how the environment can impact both one’s spirit and the workings of the subconscious.

Here’s what others are saying about this book:

Lucy Daniels is a consummate storyteller. Each story in this collection carries the reader to places so vividly described, it’s hard to believe that you have not really been at the beach, or walked through the remarkable Maritime forest of live oak and Gingko trees. By drawing vivid characters motivated by their hopes and fears, Daniels invites readers to better understand the dynamics of their own family relations, loves, and losses.

–Laurie Wilson, faculty member, Psychoanalytic Institute, New York University School of Medicine; author of Alberto Giacometti: Myth, Magic and the Man (2003) and Louise Nevelson: Art is Life (2016)

Lucy Daniels’ stories have the emotional intensity and psychological sophistication of a mature writer at the peak of her storytelling powers. This fine collection is gripping, funny, sad and poignant, a living testament to one of Daniels’ core beliefs, that we can turn our problems into the roots of our power, and I would add, into works of literary beauty.

–Kerry J. Sulkowicz, MD, Founder and Managing Principal, Boswell Group LLC; Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, New York University School of Medicine

Lucy Daniels intertwines the magic of the North Carolina coast – the mysterious forest, the moody beaches, the warm salty wind, the changing skies – with a troupe of players engaged in the small dramas that make up real life. Her characters illuminate the grip of our past, the pull of our feelings, and the resilience of our spirits. Lucy’s writing elicits my empathy beyond the page and reminds us of the power and brilliance of Mother Nature’s cycle of life.

–Elisabeth Haviland James, filmmaker

An enchanting blend of personal memories, depth psychology, and old-fashioned Southern storytelling, Lucy Daniels’ collection of maritime tales is a remarkable gift to all those who know, enjoy, and celebrate creative transformations of psychic trauma and subjective anguish!

–Salman Akhtar, MD, Professor of Psychiatry, Jefferson Medical College; Training and Supervising Analyst, Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia

About Lucy Daniels

Lucy Daniels is a writer and clinical psychologist in private practice in Raleigh, North Carolina. Daniels wrote her first novel, Caleb My Son (1956) while hospitalized with anorexia nervosa. A best seller published in several countries, it earned her a Guggenheim fellowship—at 22, the youngest recipient ever—that required the writing of her second novel, High on a Hill (1961) about life in a mental hospital. But after that Daniels stopped writing. Instead, she raised her four children, went to college, and became a clinical psychologist. Only then did she receive, through psychoanalysis, the assistance she had needed for more than 25 years. This resulted in her memoir, With a Woman’s Voice (2002) and her first novel in over 40 years, The Eyes of the Father (2005) and a chronicle of her psychological journey back to writing, Dreaming Your Way to Creative Freedom (2005).

Daniels is the founder of the Lucy Daniels Foundation and the Lucy Daniels Center for Early Childhood both located in Cary, North Carolina. The LDF has carried out extensive research focused on creative writers undergoing psychoanalysis, the data of which is now also utilized by Emory University. For the past 20 years Daniels has conducted an annual seminar, entitled “Our Problems as the Roots of Our Power,” for individuals in pursuit of creative and emotional freedom.

In 2013 a new documentary, “In So Many Words,” based on the life of Lucy Daniels was released by Oscar-shortlisted documentarian Elisabeth Haviland James at the Full Frame Film Festival. In the same year, Walking with Moonshine (2013), a collection of stories written across her life, was published.

Lucy Daniels has four children, eight grandchildren, and a dachshund named Maggie.