Author: Jnana Hodson

In downsizing to a remote fishing village in Downeast Maine, this eclectic writer feels everything's coming together.

As for Shackford Head

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

While the 100-acre Shackford holdings along Water Street underwent subdivision and real estate development, the 100 acres at Shackford Head remained intact. So far, I’ve been unable to locate the original title that would have been bestowed by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to Captain John Shackford senior, but the documents for the adjacent Coney or Cony Farm repeatedly refer to the land held by John Shackford, during his life, or later, “land formerly of John Shackford.”

In 1837, when Joseph Coney leased his 40-acre farm to his son, Samuel May Coney (1812-1895), the rent was recorded as one cent a year.

Samuel soon came into full possession. By the time of his death, he had added the Shackford property, too, as was noted in the sale from the estate (attorney John H. McFaul) to Charles O. Furbush in 1896. That transaction included an 1895 Plan of Shackford Head by surveyor H.R. Taylor.

All of this would become part of the controversial attempt of Pittston Company’s attempt to build a massive oil terminal and refinery on the site in the 1970s.

I can see why Shackford heirs living in Eastport would have held onto the rugged land. A house could go through 40 cords of firewood in a year, and with seven homes or more at times, having a large wooded reserve would have been useful. Depending on the proximity of a sawmill, the wooded land could have also supplied the Shackford shipyard or even the wood in our house.

Do you use storyboards and photos?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

While these weekly Arts & Letters postings have been focusing on the writing life, at least as I’ve known it, some of the insights do spill over into regular life more generally. (I’ll leave that redundancy for emphasis.)

I am visually oriented, more so than many writers, and I did have four intense years of art training in high school. As a newspaper editor, I was regarded for my design layout skills and photo editing and presentation. I credit my high school teacher for much of that.

As a writer and designer, I’ve collected magazine photos, art books, postcards, and stray photos that happened my way. Use of a personal camera was more sporadic and problematic.

And then came digital photography, for me about the same time I started blogging.

But first, to back up.

Memory can carry you only so far, and even good notetakers miss much at the time. A story or poem can become vivid through a detail that pops a character or a scene. A sensitive writer might find that specific in a scent or a taste or motion or a particular word that’s voiced or sensed, but in many more instances, it’s something visual, the sort of thing you might find in examining a photograph or a painting. I’ve learned how those saved magazine photos as well as later images found online can be valuable that way. You or I can even build memory boards to support certain characters or locales, even a room in their house, to assist in our thinking. Some might use a website like Tumblr to do that, too, though I’ve found much more’s available more openly.

Much of my revision of the novels Daffodil Uprising and Nearly Canaan greatly benefitted from such prompts, as did the drafting of “Miller at the Spring” in The Secret Side of Jaya, and especially some books I won’t tell you about.

Some of these photo archives have become albums I’ve posted at Thistle Finch editions, should you be interested. Others you’ll find there, more recent, are images I’ve been taking in my new setting at the easternmost fringe of the continental USA. They’re more of what I’m considering an adjunct kind of journaling – impressions that might have spurred poems back when I was without a camera. I’m even finding a similar stream in what I’ve posted on my Facebook profile, where the images are more likely to be video. (Yes, today’s author is supposed to be active hustling everywhere.)

I hate to admit this, but the ubiquitous digital camera is greatly reducing my on-paper journaling.

Besides, just what are all of those people out there holding up their cell phones wherever they go planning on doing with all of those digital shots? It’s like they’re trying to confirm their own existence. Note the selfies. Or that what’s in front of them is actually happening.

Not that I’m trying to say I’m somehow nobly above that. (Well, maybe?)

As for photo inspiration? In my household, the collected images are impacting our thinking in the ongoing renovation of our historic old house. At this point, the kitchen, especially.

I am trying to be more selective in what I post here at the Red Barn, even if the subsidiary blogs are picking up some of the overflow. Maybe you’ll enjoy them there, too.

~*~

You’ll find my novels in the digital platform of your choice at Smashwords, the Apple Store, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Scribd, Sony’s Kobo, and other fine ebook retailers. They’re also available in paper and Kindle at Amazon, or you can ask your local library to obtain them.

A half-dozen unrelated quips

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

Everything is theoretical until it happens to you.

Usually, everyone I see with a tattoo made a mistake.

In my eyes, my grandparents were always old. But now I’m so much beyond where they were.

Everybody’s fucked up. At least consider that as a starting point of observation.

Trying to deal with death before you’re really beginning to understand the mystery of life is out of sequence.

In the meditation of Quaker worship, a place I call the deep water. Only these days, I would also be concerned about sharks below.

When’s the last time you went bowling?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Well, the sport does figure prominently in the movie The Big Lebowski and the TV series Surreal Estate, a device that slyly dates the both stories.

That said, here are ten factors to consider.

  1. A realization that parking lots outside bowling centers were largely empty in sharp contrast to their crowded condition only a few years earlier prompted a landmark study by Harvard political scientist Robert D. Putnam. His 2000 nonfiction book, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, expanded on his 1995 essay, “Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital,” examining the steep decline of in-person participation in group activities pf all kinds by adults across the nation. It wasn’t just bowling but civic clubs, social lodges, churches and synagogues, labor unions, political meetings and campaigns, even neighborhood parties.
  2. In America, the sport usually refers to indoor ten-pin bowling on polished wooden lanes, although lawn bowling is popular in across much of the rest of the world. Think of the places named Bowling Green as a referent. Bocce and curling are close relatives.
  3. The pins themselves come in differing sizes, which then have matching balls to be rolled at the targets. The most common in the eastern United States and Canada are ten-pins – tall, fat, and the heaviest, matched with a large ball about 8.59 inches in diameter, weighing between six and 16 pounds, and having two or three finger holes. Duckpins, invented in Boston in the early 1890s, are shorter and like candlepins, invented in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1880, are played with balls that fit in the palm of the hand and have no holes. Other varieties include nine-pin and five-pin.
  4. At its height of popularity in the United States in the years after World War II, hoards of players – men and women – participated in weekly leagues, wearing customized team shirts and their own bowling shoes and playing with their own balls. Non-league players could, of course, on a lark rent the shoes and balls, if they could find an open lane. For many, it wasn’t a bad date-night option.
  5. I won’t get into the intricacies of scoring – I never did figure that out, much less those for tennis. But I can admit that candlepins are tricky.
  6. Traditionally, the balls are constructed of blocks of maple glued together and then lathed into shape and covered with plastic, paint, and a glossy layer. Synthetics are now also allowed, depending, and rubber pins were once even in use.
  7. The sport has a long history in antiquity before some action moved indoors, as best as I can tell, in the mid-1800s. In 1875 in the U.S., rules for ten-pin play were standardized by the National Bowling Association in New York City, superseded in 1895 by the new American Bowling Congress.
  8. Chicago-based Brunswick Corporation was already well established as a maker of billiard tables when it began making bowling balls, pins, and wooden lanes to sell to taverns installing bowling alleys in the 1880s. The company became synonymous with bowling.
  9. The arrival of automatic pinsetter machines in 1952 eliminated the need for pin boys, a precarious and dangerous job for males who sat unseen above the pins to clear them and reposition new ones after each frame of play. (As I was saying about scoring?) The machines made by American Machine and Foundry of Brooklyn, New York, speeded the game and sent the sport’s popularity rocketing.
  10. The Golden Age of Ten-Pin Bowling took off around 1950, including weekly television coverage. Some professional bowlers earned as much as their colleagues in baseball, football, and hockey. The era ended in the late 1970s.

More bits from one writer’s journey

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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.