I am one of the few poets and novelists who has spent the bulk of his career editing daily newspapers, rather than teaching literature or creative writing. Still, when it came to creating a contributor’s note for a literary journal, I had to think of myself in the third-person.
Here are some of those contributor’s notes I don’t think were published … until now.
- In a typical year, Jnana drove enough miles to circle the globe, yet rarely ventured far from his relatively small state.
- Jnana admits there’s something quite frightening in any occasion of encountering a dragon, much less being carried off by one. He’s been scorched more than once.
- In his lifetime of writing, Jnana has found himself addressing issues of PLACE as much as character or social conflict or even religion and ethnicity. Place, of course, intertwines with history and the natural sciences. In examining where he lives – where we live – and have lived – he also examines movement, change, home, and community.
- When Jnana graduated from college, the economy was in a tailspin. The hippie movement was flourishing. He was too skinny to be drafted for Vietnam.
- Jnana once spent a week at an ecological workshop in Port Worden, Washington, where Barry Lopez, Gary Snyder, and Howard Norman were joined by biologists and anthropologists. It’s as close as he’s come to a writing seminar.
- As copy desk chief, Jnana was a glorified secretary rather than the top grammarian.
- Jnana began his professional journalism career as an Action Line research assistant.
- As a homebrewer, Jnana handcrafted more than 2,500 bottles of fine ales and lagers.
- Jnana’s elder daughter wanted to raise chickens, ducks, and bees at their small-city homestead. He wondered about the neighbors’ dogs and cats, as well as the possums, groundhogs, and skunks. He didn’t want the misery of another henhouse raid.
- His wife thought Jnana would have fit the mid-1800s better than contemporary America. She wondered how someone engaging an Anabaptist religious line could be so unorthodox in his art.
- As a daily newspaper editor, Jnana sensed he was among the last to uphold a vital blue-color trade. He wondered how democracy could survive without independent reporting or clear writing.
- Considering the brevity of New England summers, Jnana had hoped to launch a line of Hawaiian sweaters.
- Jnana hates onions but loves a good martini. (Gin, not vodka.) With or without olives.
- As a journalist, Jnana lived in the trenches of community life – in the tensions of industry and finance, retail commerce, social inequalities and prejudices, and reactionary politics. He admires the progressive activists who have maintained their optimism in spite of it all.
- In management and as an editor, Jnana had his head and heart handed to him on a silver platter more than once.
- He hopes he never has to load or unload another U-Haul as long as he lives.
- Jnana is quite grateful his younger daughter gave up rugby for crew as her first college sport.
- Jnana senses rural values are rooted in his soul. His dad was born on a farm.
- Jnana’s mother was born in St. Louis. She loved taking him to the zoo.
Jnana's Red Barn 