Daniel Clarkson Fisher

A new article of mine, my first for Political Animal Magazine, is now live on their website. It’s entitled “A People’s Buddhism?”, and in it I argue that it is high time Buddhist Americans took a second look at the dharma of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar.

You can read the whole thing here.

As you can tell from my “About” page and the content I’ve been producing, I’m currently transitioning out of the world of Buddhist Studies (in which I used to work) and into the world of nonfiction cinema (as a new student in Ryerson University’s Master of Fine Arts in Documentary Media program). That being the case, this will probably be the last major piece of written work I’ll do on Buddhism — maybe ever. It’s possible I’ll touch on the subject in a future film, but this article represents the last holdover from my “past life” in the Dharma. I hope readers get something out of it.

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[UPDATE, 4/7/2017: I was honored that my old pal Justin Whitaker shared and commented on this piece at his wonderful Patheos blog American Buddhist Perspectives. Thank you so much, my friend.]

As I mentioned a while back, I wrote an article entitled “The Teacher Racket” for the Winter 2016 issue of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. The piece generated quite a few responses, some of which appear in the brand new Spring 2017 issue of the magazine.

Tricycle invited me to respond to the responses as well, which I did. If you’re a subscriber, you can read what I wrote online here. If not, a snapshot is below:

I’ve got a new article, my first for Bright Lights Film Journal, at their website. It is entitled “The Problem of Access: Weiner (2016) and the Limitations of the Fly-on-the-Wall Documentary”. In it, I observe that “the response to Weiner shows us (yet again) that the greater the access to a subject, the more likely a documentary is to be lavishly praised…no matter how questionable its politics.”

You can read the whole thing here.

I’ve got an interview with Thom Powers over at Nonfics. Thom, who has been called a “kingmaker for documentaries” by the New York Times, is host of the podcast Pure Nonfiction, documentary programmer for the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), Artistic Director of both the Stranger Than Fiction screening series and the documentary film festival DOC NYC, co-founder of both the Cinema Eye Honors and the Garrett Scott Documentary Development Grant, curator of documentaries for Sundance Now, and the host of WNYC’s “Documentary of the Week” program.

Check out our conversation here.