Ari Berk
The decades surrounding the turn of the twenty-first century saw a growing scholarly and creative interest in folklore, comparative myth, and the cultural histories embedded in storytelling traditions. Ari Berk, born in Los Angeles on March 7, 1967, emerged from that broader intellectual climate as a figure whose work moved across several disciplines at once.
Berk's formal education shaped the range of his practice considerably. He studied at the University of Arizona, where he earned a B.A. in ancient history, before pursuing an M.A. in American Indian Studies and a Ph.D. in comparative literature and culture at California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt. His doctoral dissertation was directed by N. Scott Momaday, a connection that placed Berk within a serious tradition of inquiry into Indigenous narrative and cultural expression. That academic grounding extended into institutional life as well: he was appointed to the committee that developed the first American Indian Studies doctoral program in the United States, a concrete contribution to how the field was organized at the graduate level.
The scholarly work runs alongside, rather than separate from, his creative output. Berk has worked as a novelist, a children's writer, a screenwriter, a journalist, and an artist — a breadth that reflects his scholarly interests in iconography, folklore, and comparative myth. These are not parallel careers so much as overlapping ones, each informing the vocabulary and concerns of the others. As a folklorist and scholar of literature, he has brought to his writing an attention to the deep structures that myths and images carry across cultures and centuries.
His appointment to that doctoral program committee stands as a marker of the regard in which his expertise has been held by those working to establish American Indian Studies as a rigorous academic discipline at the highest level of university education.
Quotes by Ari Berk
Of course, not all journeys are undertaken for sacred purposes. Some people may undertake journeys for the simplest reason of all: curiosity. They wish to see what there is to see just beyond the next hill, or over the far river, or at the end of the long trail leading towards dawn...
Maybe love just felt that way, like a kind of fever dream, making things seem both frighteningly close and unbearably far away all at once.
I am a book also, words and thoughts and stories held together by flesh. We open and close ourselves to the world. We are read by others or put away by them. We wait to be seen, sitting quietly on shelves for someone to bother having a look inside us.
Each of them had been looking for a way out of their own black midnights, and each of them still had a long way to go until they found some kind of dawn.
...that heaven might be no further afield than the hearts of those people who remember us with love.
In life, a person will come and go from many homes. We may leave a house, a town, a room, but that does not mean those places leave us. Once entered, we never entirely depart the homes we make for ourselves in the world. They follow us, like shadows, until we come upon them again, waiting for us in the mist.
Or maybe a ghost was only a thing that endures, like the furnishings of this room, like the chairs or table; a little worse for wear, but still here because someone cherished it, or because it was made of such hardy stuff that time couldn't wear it down fast enough.
He passed his hands over some of the fine embossed bindings as he thought, I am a book also, words and thoughts and stories held together by flesh. We open and close ourselves to the world. We are read by others or put away by them. We wait to be seen, sitting quietly on shelves for someone to bother having a look inside us.