Trolling with the Fisher King started with the author's fascination with Amfortas in Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival, whose mission was to protect the Holy Grail, the container that unites suffering and love, his inevitable distraction by the outer world and subsequent betrayal of the mission after sustaining a wound in battle that would not heal. Paul Pines uses the tools Jung employed in his confrontation with the unconscious in The Red Book, gathering symbolic patterns and inter-disciplinary connections to interrogate his personal experience and what he finds in the world within and around him.

As a fisherman/seaman touched by war zones and wastelands in Viet Nam and the Bowery, a poet/therapist who has worked with his own wounds, and those of others, author Paul Pines believes that the Fisher King's wounding can be understood as a function that speaks to our post-internet condition on the border of survival and extinction.