William Everson was the first American poet to explore the living link between shamanism and poetry, between the shaman’s call and the vocational archetype in the dreams of contemporary students. The book builds upon Everson’s contributions to the field of American poetry as an emergent field and augments his research into dreams of destiny when I was his teaching assistant in “Birth of a Poet” from 1981-1982. In the book, I draw upon my own personal experiences as a Jungian writer and psychotherapist to question Everson about the central purpose in our life: our calling to charismatic vocation. Since the conversations with Everson were conducted in 1992-1993, when the poet “called” me to down to his home to interview him, I have included an introduction and commentaries to aid the reader in places where psychological or religious terms are introduced and the words or notions are now clarified in the transcripts, or in footnotes. William Everson The Shaman’s Call is organized around fourteen Chapters that center on themes such as Everson’s hypothesis of a vocational archetype, the Native American vision quest, Christ as shaman, Walt Whitman, the God-image in American poetry, Robinson Jeffers, and Everson’s stunning poems, October Tragedy, Black Hills, and The Blood of the Poet.  The poems selected for discussion are evocative and known to students of American literature, but not widely familiar to practitioners of analytical psychology, or our general readership. Prior to these last interviews with one of America’s greatest living religious poets the shamanic themes in American poetry had never been deeply mined for their richness and depth of meaning. Our collaborative work is to illuminate the meaning of shamanic poetry by letting the images and rhythms of the poetry breathe in the text to reveal their own natural beauty, and hopefully, lead readers into states of mind and emotion that can transform consciousness utterly (Herrmann, 1998). The book is written with an Introduction by the author on the topic of shamanism in American poetry and he provides commentaries from a Jungian analytical perspective that elucidate how the archetype continues to operate in the American psyche as a pattern of personal and social transformation. The author provides a personal inside view into the way the calling to shamanic poetry emerges from the unconscious by way of dreams and ecstatic experiences. Everson brings the transcendent awareness of the archetype up front for readers through the powerful inflections of his voice and his invincible mastery over language. The conversations themselves form an empirical and aesthetic bridge between shamanism, analytical psychology, and American poetry. The conversations on the culminating influences of the shamanic archetype on the American West are written from the author’s personal discovery of his life’s meaning at his home bordering Joaquin Miller Park, where he lives with his wife, in the wooded hills of Oakland, California.