Amory Patrick Blaine

Drawing upon a vast range of personal experience, travel, and distinct philosophical perspectives, Amory Patrick Blaine's writing weaves a fascinating tale of raw discovery collected from the realms of espionage, foreign policy, mystery, and true crime. Questioning and weighing in on everything from how Western identity evolved to how AI and the IOT are changing our planet’s future economy and the cultural legacy we will pass on to the next generation of leaders. Raised in a U.S. Foreign Service family with a lifetime experience in international travel and graduate cultural study, Amory Patrick Blaine holds an MFA in Art Criticism and Writing. He attended Marine Corp OCS in Quantico, Virginia, in the 1990s, after which his military record was expunged without characterization. The complete story of American Renaissance comprises Book 1: Missions Dangerous (December 10, 2024), Book 2: An Identity Left on the Rue de la Clignancourt (2025), and Book 3: A Theocratic History of Lost Peoples & Romantics (2025), all set in Paris. American Renaissance Volumes 1, 2, and 3 were completed in several stages while the author lived in Europe and New York City.

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Are there particular films that have influenced your writing?

Yes, so many countless films. Both in terms of their dramatic dialogue, characters, story arc, and obviously the poignant cinematic composition of their scenes. Or – perhaps better said their mis-en-scenes. Very early in my writing career, I would say in the very developmental stages as a poet feeling the lure of the silver screen, of writing for Hollywood - or becoming a film director before tackling the solitary challenges of writing a novel – I took a class on “creating great scenes” given by the night school of continuing education at Georgetown University. We studied basic movie scenes from some of the most iconic films – movies like 48 Hours with Eddie Murphy, Back To The Future, Scarface, and Full Metal Jacket - about how a writer must always start the scene late – and closest to the action - because there must not be any wasted dramatic tension or seconds before the action takes place. I can’t say I remembered all the movies we studied, but that basic class I think has always been at the back of my mind, both in writing and watching the films I most enjoyed. Often directors will excel in one area of filmmaking but slightly lack in the other. It is extremely hard to be both an amazing cinematic director as well as a writer. Getting both – along with so many of the other magical things that go into making a movie happen – is a treat for the senses on so many levels. But some of the great films and directors to have influenced my writing – both visually in terms of sketching a scene on paper with words – and the dialogue – and overall mood – are A Clockwork Orange, Scarface, Bladerunner, Pulp Fiction, Eugeny Onegin – a masterpiece in composition starring Ralph Fiennes, The English Patient, Thelma & Louise, Goodwill Hunting, Pulp Fiction, Dr. Strangelove, The Godfather movies, The Warriors, Goodfellas, and Ripley’s Game are even better than The Talented Mr. Ripley, No Way Out, An Officer & A Gentlemen, A Few Good Men, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Star Wars – The Return of the Jedi - The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Marathon Man, Patriot Games, The Remains of the Day, Munich, Saving Private Ryan, The Motorcycle Diaries, All the Cohen brothers movies, including Raising Arizona and Miller’s Crossing, Ghost Dog by Jim Jarmusch, The Hurt Locker, The Jason Bourne Series, Eastern Promises and A History of Violence by David Cronenberg, and the incredible “Bitter Moon” by Roman Polanski. And I should mention Brokeback Mountain and Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and The Butterfly. I feel these movies are mostly American, and I have left out many good foreign films, but I should stop here because I could go on without end.

Have you ever experienced Imposter Syndrome?

This is an interesting question because maybe writers become writers on account of feeling like an imposter at doing anything else. Writing a good novel requires wearing many hats in life, gathering vastly disparate amounts of information from all walks in terms not just on a purely intellectual level but on a sensory level. It requires trying to do many things and probably failing at most of them, if not all of them, and being an imposter even at those in which you succeed. Whether it is as a cook, a boyfriend or girlfriend, at your first o_ice job, or at the most important job you’ve ever had in your life and on which you and your entire family depend. It is this failure at belonging, at being in agreement with the dysfunctional state of the world and its lack of inherent meaning, that fuels this nagging imposter syndrome that necessarily drives the writer to compile all these fiction threads in a lifetime and weave them into a narrative of truth. To extract the wheat from the chaff of many failures and striving for ambitious ideals that are almost impossible for any human to achieve – this is what the task of writing is about - to show our hard-won early knowledge gained from the school of hard knocks in words that sculpt the meaning out of a failed world and give it some sort of recognizable form and beauty, after all. Like Oscar Wilde said – experience is the name we give to so many of our mistakes – all writers are likely imposters of some sort because they see through the make-believe and the charade that so many men and women take to be a world of fact. Lile Plato who taught about the reality of forms and falsity of the sensory world, writers may at first try to fit in – but then see reality for the ephemeral game that it is – rare is it to find anyone who is not an imposter or making up their own shit as they go along. Faking it until they make it and so on. The only difference is that some professions have a formal name for what they do – a politician, diplomat, marketer, lawyer, scientist, priest, policeman, teacher – all of these professions rely on the reality of the world they have been given and go to work with nearly full acceptance or little questioning of the invisible reality on which their world and profession relies. Be it the laws or treaties or facts or myths upon which the history of their profession has marked the rituals of its tradition. However, a writer – a truly creative writer and poet who sees in between the words of the language and the invisible walls behind which people hide – a writer sees the gaping holes in the history and meaning of the world and questions everything. And so, this writer has no choice but to be an impostor, faking it as if he or she is a part of this same charade – but keeping the truth to themselves – the truth one day they will figure out a way to harness and summon the power to reveal - as others go about their business in a world made of lies. I believe this is only partially true in some cases with some people. But in some cases, it is the absolute truth.

What’s the difference (at least for you!) between being a writer and an author? How do you shift gears between the two?

Another interesting question that is hard for me to make a distinction without seeing much of a difference. But if there is to be a difference of me being a writer – on the one hand – and an author on the other – I would say that a writer (and writing) is merely the action that we writers do and can always do without necessarily having to do it in the guise of being an “author.” It doesn’t take an author to write a journalistic article or write a diary of one’s, so to speak. These are tasks any writer can do – but to do them as an “author,” then it is as if this mundane letter or that freelance article written on spec is now to become subsumed into a greater body of work. This kind of writing – “authorial” writing - brings to bear not just the immediate contextual relationship of a transient experience a writer is transmitting in a few pages or correspondence of the moment for whatever publication which he writes...

Now, being an author, the task of writing instead becomes an entire representation of an author’s brand and worldview. His past letters, books, experiences, loves, political opinions, educational accomplishments, famous public outbursts, or failures of judgments that may have been made in youth or haste. There is, of course, the luxury and ignominy of realizing that no one cares or gives a damn. Not the slightest bit and no one is even watching a silly writer, no matter how much potential there is for public failure and disgrace. If a writer ceaselessly insists on embarrassing him or herself in public but nobody really reads them – most people just keep going about their daily lives – and there is nobody to witness their fall from grace – have they even failed? Alas, like if a tree falls in the woods but nobody sees it – nobody really cares – but to hold oneself out as an author is perhaps to live by the vain and presumptuous notion that everything, every word, every action is being recorded at all times for posterity and the evening news. Almost like if it was on video camera. And that people really care about words, literature, and truth. But on the other hand, knowing that in some place, somewhere, there is a printed record of what you did as a “writer” – some shit you wrote – some stupid thing you did – as an author, the goal is to completely shift gears, to distance yourself and leave that young innocent writer fool behind. To let others know that they got it all wrong – that shit I wrote when I was young and stupid? No – you don’t get it – that shit was meant for you as a test – can’t you see the difference between a bunch of random words taken out of context and me the famous author I am today?

Do you have another artistic outlet in addition to your writing? Do you sew? Paint? Draw? Knit? Dance?

An outlet? An interesting choice of words. As if art indeed were the safety valve for the preservation of bourgeois society. And do you have another safety valve to keep this great bourgeois society of ours and upstanding civilization going? You know, do you knit socks for kittens, do you play music or sing and dance on TikTok, anything at all to make sure you don’t take us and our faltering civilization one step closer to Armageddon? Yes, I like to paint in a visually beautiful and seductive way. But, alas, I don’t get around to doing it. Almost never.

If you could create a museum exhibition, what would be the theme?

A most difficult question. And one that has probably taken me more than one book to write. So, how would I sum this up? An ideal museum exhibition for me would cover the entire span of the evolution of art history. Not just across the highlights of our Western civilization but going back to ancient Rome, Greece, Egypt, and the Sumerians when the first cuneiform writing on tablets and mythical stories of legend came forth and informed our own. This would be a necessary span of perspective for me to show how much is borrowed and built from the heritage of our human memory going back to places older than time or when time was not even something that was being recorded. For me, if we are talking about museum exhibitions about art – which is a record of the expression of the human soul and spirit- it would make sense to even take this museum exhibition back to the first humanoids before the cavemen and the discovery of fire. Roughly around 700,000 years ago, when our first ancestors were known to have discovered cooking and perhaps began to shed the animal fur that first covered the bodies of the early versions of our species. It is roughly from this date that fossil records show we can approximate the diminishing size of ancient humans’ canine teeth and jawline, along with the increased size of the human skull and the power of our brain activity, as well as the obsolescence of the human appendix; an organ which in horses is used to digest grain but for us seems to have become completely superfluous once we began to pre-digest our food by cooking it over hot fires.

Ever since, like Prometheus is said to have stolen fire from the Gods, so human beings, through their art and the paintings drawn on the walls of a cave to the sunset drawings of celestial gods in the tombs of the Pharaohs and the pyramids depicting a nether world beyond, have expressed the manifestation of the human spirit. In each evolving civilization, artists have sought to give visual life to the nature of God – have sought to define his/her existence or nonexistence – and have been the primary creators of our religions that shape the entire traditions of our relationship with the divine. It was not God himself or herself who wrote the Bible, painted the Sistine Chapel, or told of the story of Jesus and the idea of resurrection, after all, but it was the poets and writers of the Old and New Testaments who sought to record these mythical traditions that have formed the foundations of our belief in Western civilization itself. It is said that new art – true creativity - can only come from a new dawning in consciousness. And in pursuing new heights of consciousness, so human artists have played the most central part in our spiritual transformation and the way our cultural traditions have developed.

So, the proper museum exhibit would capture the changing nature of what painters painted, what writers wrote, have written, and continue to write, and how the words of poets have influenced painting, movies, photography, and all visual art throughout the great technological and political as well as socio-economic transformations over the centuries. And if one looks closely, I believe there can be patterns and cyclical movements of knowledge that can be discerned amidst these shifts in perspective. It is in analyzing the evolving visual art of these different historical ages and the sensual breadcrumbs that the artists, the poets, the painters, and the sculptors have left for us to appreciate that perhaps we may be led to discover the truest nature of the divine as it exists in our own time. So, the ideal museum exhibition for me would not be about the same empty Post modernist deconstruction of narratives that prevails in the museum exhibits of today - but rather try to show the essence of a common spiritual thread running through all that we know and have learned through artistic expression - and that our ancestors would have wish to have known. Threads of meaning that may be studied to better understand where artists of the past and their creative and artistic intuition was leading them. Because in the greatest art, one gets the sensation of something universal that has been retained, irrespective of the centuries that have gone by. So, there is – in a sense - a sort of spiritually prophetic dimension to art, given how much it can still move us and resonate despite the complex changes we tend to think make us so much more advanced or knowledgeable than those who lived in ancient times. But ours is the same exact world in which they too, lived. The soil they tilled and the land on which they fought and bled, and the geography they inhabited is the exact same world, albeit without the “new” discoveries only the passing of time has revealed. And so - without the benefit of museums – time would also vanish and leave the knowledge we have gained from our human predecessors lost and buried in the sands new artists would one day have to rediscover again. But there is no guarantee this would ever happen. So, it is one of the functions museums must serve: to preserve this little-known knowledge and the connections between the moment in which we live and those of our past so that the spiritual truth so many artists have struggled to pass on may continue to live on.