Roger A. Straus

I'm one of those late 60s types who was never really a hippie (they came a few years down the pike)... Traveled a lot of the roads available down the years. Ended up here, which is not a bad place to find oneself. Been there, watched it happen, even lent a hand. Generally you'll find me at the margins. A professional dilettante who does not understand the phrase, "mind your own business" (synonym for "sociologist"). When I was finishing up graduate school, I started a self-hypnosis clinic to support myself and my family. That inspired "Strategic Self-Hypnosis," a trade best-seller that went through 10 printings. A few years later ,my publisher asked for a follow up: "Creative Self-Hypnosis." They sold a Japanese translation (which is absolutely beautiful) and a Spanish translation (which I have never seen) and put out a second edition of "Strategic." I am thrilled that people are still reading these works, sometimes writing me to say great things about my books and how they have helped them. As a graduate student and child of a Holocaust survivor, I became interested in doing something with sociology other than academic research and teaching. Making it useful to human beings. So I cofounded what is now the Association for Applied and Clinical Sociology (of which I am 2021 President-Elect) and put out a textbook designed to turn on students to the possibilities of "Using Sociology: an Introduction from the Applied and Clinical Perspectives." More recently, I co-edited a follow-up text of case studies, "Doing Sociology." In 2019 I published "Mastering Focus Groups and Depth Interviews: a Practitioner's Guide." This represents my "masterwork," sharing what I have learned over the decades about doing qualitative research, down to the pragmatic nitty-gritty of designing and doing in-person and online research. It is written for both those who commission qualitative research and those who design and perform it. In 2021, I brought together a collection of my poetry, "From Prime to Prime: A Marginalist Manifesto." Early on, I realized I could not make a living as a poet in today's America, but I have doing poetry since the mid-60s. It is simultaneously a poet's memoir, reflecting my personal journey from age 17 through 71 ("prime" to "prime," get it?), witnessing American reality from the margins. These poems run from the sacred to the profane, inspirational to satirical, humorous to eulogy, published and unpublished, with a dash of sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll, from the San Francisco scene to all the here's I've been. NSFW or children or the easily offended, cuss-allergic, or fans of prosody. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll maybe wonder, "What the hell?".