Alan Clements has been on a quest for freedom that’s taken him to Burma (now Myanmar), Yugoslavia, Australia, Bali and even to Santa Cruz. He’s been a Buddhist monk, a performer and an investigative journalist in areas of war and extreme conflict. Clements’ books, stage performances and World Dharma meditation retreats have always grappled with the challenge of living open-hearted and authentic in a world of suffering and violence.

His latest book — Extinction X-Rated — was written during the pandemic and according to Clements was “LSD inspired.” He describes the book as part autobiography and partly an “auto-fictional dark satire about good and evil.”

Since the 1970’s Clements’ life has been intertwined with the Buddhist country of Burma/Myanmar. Clements was a monk there for four years and then alerted the world to a modern genocide when he wrote Burma: The Next Killing Fields? (1990) He did a series of interviews with democratic leader Aung San Suu Kyi who has often been imprisoned for her activism and those conversations later became the 1997 book Voice of Hope. Clements was kicked out of Burma and banned from traveling there until 2012. In recent years he returned to interview hundreds of activists, teachers, artists and lay people about on-going resistance to authoritarianism, chronicled in a four-volume set, Burma’s Voices of Freedom. (2020)

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