last updated: 2 October 2024
About the author
CHARLIE ALICE RAYA
Who am ? // What does it mean? // Snippets of a life // Feb 2022 – Aug 2024 // easy town books // More insights // Edinburgh & me // How I came to photography // Who will be the publisher? // Legal delights
Who am I?
Honestly, I’m still working on some of the details.
But this much I know: I am Charlie Alice Raya, a thinker, an explorer, a creator, an author and a photographer – in all areas a skilled autodidact.
There is this thing about traumata. If you know about them, you can mostly find a way to deal with them. If you are not aware of how traumatised you are, you are bound to get a lot wrong. That was me, and probably still is to some extent.
For example, that I am an insistent autodidact has its roots in several traumata. But I didn’t know that, I just kept pushing on – and stumbling.
There is that period of twenty years (2003-2023) that is sort of veiled, like something in me was dead, like I wasn’t really present. I had some successes, some memorable experiences in this period, and I started the amazing and enjoyable work on the easy town books. And yet, it is only now that I feel like I am finally unfolding, that I’m finally returning to who I was all along. Ah, not sure that’s precise enough.
I am not a friend of the thought that everything is good for something. Nonetheless, I can say that with the easy town books and projects, all the mess, all the traumata, all the zigzagging I did in my life, all the pondering and creating, it all finally falls into place, and I can potentially use everything in my work that made my life in the past fifty-two years.
After this heaviness, it might surprise you to learn that I am by nature a happy and playful person, also reckless at times, and occasionally blunt. I think that and the stories I invented was what saw me through a lot.
One of the things I love about my work is that it encompasses the whole planet and every being on it.
That I care about nature is maybe not surprising. I love long walks along coasts, I love to soak up the energies of a thunderstorm, I have recently discovered a magical lake that’s perfect for floating, and the animal world fascinates me.
Why I care about humanity is not that straight forward. I am not motivated by altruism or kindness. It’s more that my mind gets very nervous when things don’t make sense. And to my mind what we do to each other, small scale and large scale, makes no sense at all. My mind doesn’t stop there, it wants to know all the whys and from their it embarks on the What-would-it-take-to-deal-with-each-other-in-a-way-that-makes-sense? journey.
People have said to me: But why don’t you just do one thing? Why the whole world and everything at once?
Because everything is connected. And my mind relaxes when it can get glimpses of the bigger pictures.
What does it mean
to be a thinker, explorer and creator?
thinker = I analyse whatever doesn’t make sense or doesn’t work.
explorer = I explore what alternatives might make sense.
creator = I create visions of alternatives and along the way, I invent stories, businesses, business models, and such fun things like lunch trees and ingbars, to say nothing about my two amazing libraries, the many towns and gardens with a purpose and a lot more.
Some more insights
snippets of a life
Origin: born in 1972 in the then divided city of Berlin; a Berliner who doesn’t do nationalities but acknowledges European roots
Childhood: on both sides of the Berlin Wall; we moved from East to West Berlin in March 1984, which makes me a migrant in the city of my birth, according to my former health insurer.
Having grown up among artists, there are several paintings of me. My favourite is Elli auf dem Pferd, an oil painting by the artist Annemirl Bauer.
Youth: I juggled four worlds: a strict evangelical Free Church, a dysfunctional home, a forbidden relationship, and an elite secondary school – and some worlds in between those. I failed.
Though, I do have some happy memories: immersing myself in playing the cello, seeing the Milky Way on a hill in Sardinia, and some good times with other religious people who were close to me at the time.
Breaking: In 1995 I broke with my faith, part of that story is told in a scene in book 3/1, shaping. I was twenty-two and lost everything: my world view, my purpose, my aims, my friends who were as close as family to me.
Emerging: When I finally found a spark of defiance which allowed me to get back on my feet, I decided to go back to school and get the degree I needed to be allowed to study. Plus I needed to prove to myself that I am not stupid, after having been told all my youth that females are naturally less intelligent than males.
I graduated at the top of my year with a 1.2 grade. The next best student had a 2.1. You can imagine that I had no friends, despite the fact that it wasn’t about competition for me. I just had to know.
Education: five primary schools, two secondary schools, a social year with deaconesses, including work in prisons, another two schools and two universities; studies in business and economics, in Berlin (HWR) and Bristol (UWE), UK
The title of my thesis submitted for diploma: The Wealth of Nations by Globalisation? An Inquiry into the Positive and Negative Potentials of the Globalisation Process by Assessing the Free Trade Theory Critically
Jobs: Still a student, I took a look at the theatre world and brought Familie Floez to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2001. After graduation, I did business jobs, wrote, filmed and worked for TV and film in assistant jobs. Then I deciding to take a less crowded road to focus on my own ideas. I partly financed my explorations through photography and web design.
For more details on my job zigzagging click here > or fast forward to 2022-2024 in the next section.
February 2022-August 2024
2022 saw me build nine websites to give some of the easy town ideas space for a detailed introduction. The same year, I accidentally wrote the dot.story and did some nine or more additional photo series.
After launching the websites towards the end of October 2023, I was absolutely convinced that with a few emails and letters, the projects would soon get all the attention they deserve. Not so.
Unfortunately, I was so on overdrive by that time that I couldn’t stop working. But I could stop fretting, and so I allowed myself to write book 3, shaping. I’ll be honest, I made the most of it and kept allowing myself more time for writing instead continuing to push to make my work known.
In mid-February my body rebelled. I had a brief upwards time, four weeks in March/April, in which I prepared my next push and allowed myself to write the Christmas chapter over Easter (yes, it was strange). And then after a shoulder injury (while working in bed), my body had enough and went on strike, and I couldn’t work any more.
On top of that, I got an early stage breast cancer diagnosis, at the end of July, and had a double mastectomy at the end of October. Luckily, I’m very happy to be breastless (for more see gender & breastless).
Despite all of this, I return with a bag full of additional material: book 3, shaping, is close to being completed. Book 4/1, building, is making great progress and will be a fun blueprint for campaigning for our future. The end of all wars was published on 28 September 2024, and then there are the new websites for the next steps of doing my bit for humanity and the planet.
It is strange, funny and wonderful, but I think I’m finally okay. Mind you, there is still work to do, and I have to be careful not to slip back into the old oblivion. But I feel alive, strong, ready – and excited to share my work.
easy town books
My main work are the easy town books. The idea started as a non-fiction idea in 2012 in the aftermath of my friend’s coma. I used stories to test my ideas, and in 2016, one of these stories turned out to be so intriguing that I eventually decided to write it.
You can find an overview of the books here >
For more about the easy town books and also more insights into my life and work, you can visit the easy town books website.
more insights
There are fourteen Charlie Alice Raya websites by now, most of them focusing on one idea or topic.
By now, all of them also have some About the author comments, usually with a connection to the website.
You can find an overview of all websites here >
Edinburgh & me
The Edinburgh Fringe is so special to me that it was only a question of time before it would pop up in one of my stories. In fact, it will play a small role in the easy town book: book 6, Lewis.
But it couldn’t wait that long and so it smuggled itself into the dot.story where it serves as a backdrop for an extraordinary story which set out to illustrate how an international clothing company could work with an empowering business model, and which has turned out to be so much more, with over twenty-nine stories, many of them intertwined.
The dot.website also offers a post on my connections with Scotland, Edinburgh and the Fringe >
How I came to photography
If you still want to know more about me, then I recommend the article: How I came to photography on the Charlie Alice Raya photography website.
Who will be the publisher?
Rethinking the way we do business, and that internationally, is part of my work for the easy town books.
Consequently, it makes sense to have a publisher who tests those ideas and will be able to further develop them.
So far, there are ideas for two such publishers: ripples publishing for stories which could be opened to other writers, like the easy town books or the The end of all wars books. And pepper books for stories by authors from around the world who create stories to shape the future of our planet, to sensitise us for what needs to be done, who expose who and what is harming us and similar publications.
For more see ripples publishing >
legal delights
I finally got around to registering my name for an ISNI number (International Standard Name Identifier). This is what the beauty looks like: 0000 0005 1772 4360.
All published and some upcoming books are now registered at the German VLB (Verzeichnis Lieferbarer Bücher).
The easy town books
ISBN 978-3-00-060915-2, book 1, beginning and drafting a town experiment
ISBN 978-3-9821289-6-2, book 2/1, travelling and we need to talk about sex
ISBN 978-3-9821289-9-3, book 2/2, travelling and we still need to talk about sex
ISBN 978-3-9821289-7-9, book 2, travelling and we (still) need to talk about sex (both parts)
ISBN 978-3-9821289-3-1, book 3/1, shaping, arrivals & shaping
ISBN 978-3-9821289-8-6, book 3/2, shaping, entanglements & silence
ISBN 978-3-9821289-2-4, book 3/3, shaping, where do we go from here & decisions
ISBN 978-3-9821289-4-8, book 4/1, building, campaigns & getting started
The easy town projects book
ISBN 978-3-9821289-1-7, dot.story, Edinburgh, Tunis and the world, A story illustrating the ideas for dot.
The end of all wars book
ISBN 978-3-9821289-0-0, The end of all wars, planet one, the roots of war
