John Yu Branscum

One day in a Kentucky public library, a young John Yu Branscum picked up a collection of “Zen Tales,” thinking “Zen” must be an alien planet like Gor (immortalized in the B-movie “sword and planet” novels of John Norman). By the end of the first koanesque tale, he realized that the book he’d picked up was not science fiction. But by then it was too late. Eventually his reading of the Zen tales, and the cognitive rewiring that ensued, led decades later to his teaching college in the small Pennsylvania town of Indiana and reading Ji Yun stories at night.