WORKING BEHIND THE SCENES

For me, one line of career growth involved a growing recognition of the importance of working behind the scenes. As I watched the conductor Max Rudolf eschew stardom and New York for music-making in Cincinnati, I perceived something quite different from Leonard Bernstein or Herbert von Karajan’s being in the celebrity spotlight. Similarly, Glenn Thompson, the first editor to hire me, had a knack for giving other people credit for his own ideas and visions, and then pushing them forward to completion – including the new Wright State University I attended my first year and a half of college. Glenn, too, was the one who impressed upon me the importance of keeping a personal journal.

Another line stemmed from the illustrations accompanying profiles of serious authors that showed intensive revision of a single page of work. This was much more complex than daily deadline writing, even when the copy desk had finished its round on the text itself. Extended interviews, such as those in the Paris Review, demonstrated how vastly different individual writers functioned, too: fastidious Nabokov, for instance, contrasted to runaway Kerouac.

Still another line reflected economic changes. A few months before my graduation from college, the Wall Street Journal, which had expressed interest in hiring me, instead laid off several hundred reporters and editors. Rather than moving to a big city, as anticipated, I wound up laboring in out-of-the way communities, which presented me with other experiences and insights. As my career grew, I worked largely behind the scenes, editing other people’s writing and presenting the day’s stories and photos for our many readers. I was fortunate to have a series of bosses I admired and respected, and making them look good was also one of my priorities. Again, it was working behind the scenes, an approach I later realize had also been my father’s. In the long run, the economic changes have continued to buffet the publishing industry, from books and magazines to newspapers themselves, all struggling against decline and marginalization. Over the years, we’ve watched the declining importance of reading and writing among the general populace: the term “famous novelist” going from Hemingway and Faulkner to Mailer and Heller to Stephen King and Anne Rice, for instance. Or who now can name a newspaper editor or publisher, after the likes of Scotty Reston, Ben Bradlee, or Vermont Connecticut Royster? Or a major poet, after Ginsberg or Plath?

From my college years on, I’ve taken a route tempered by the hippie influence, which initially challenged many of my assumptions and goals and led to the yoga ashram instead of graduate school – or even law school, which had once appealed. The ashram practice worked to crush much of my ego, instilled a degree of humility, and opened me to spiritual awareness and discipline, before sending me forth again on a journey that eventually brought me into Quaker circles, or the Society of Friends, which I much later discovered was the faith of my Hodson ancestors. Crucially, the practice of meditation – first as a yogi, and then as a Quaker – also opened an appreciation and understanding of poetry for me in ways the classroom could not. Maybe it was just the silence as a breath of light.

In my personal writing, what has unfolded is more a practice of meditation, reflection, collection of otherwise random thoughts and feelings, and inner playfulness, than a quest for any “finished” product. Not that a set of poems or a polished novel in hand does not also give pleasure.  So here we are, backstage, as it were. Or, with the blog, in the loft. Not a bad place now, is it?