Author: Jnana Hodson

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

Who are they besides their latest book?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Contributors’ notes at the back of a literary quarterly or toward the beginning of a glossy magazine can sometimes be among the most entertaining reading in the entire volume.

Or they can be among the most deadly, as I’ve been thinking while scanning those in the Paris Review, where they run along the line of so-and-so is the author of the new insert-title-here book of poetry or fiction. It’s so one-dimensional.

Don’t know about you, but I definitely want to know what makes a writer tick – unique details help. Hopefully, something more than where they’re also teaching.

Yes, I know as writers we’re all hustling our books, but ultimately, we’re the brand, like it or not. (God, it hurts to admit that, but it’s true.)

The celebrity Proust Questionnaire at the closing of Vanity Fair magazine issues is a great prompt.

So here I am, pushing a whole lineup of volumes while hoping at least one of them jumps out at you and makes you get it, free or at a price – yes, I’m shy about asking for money – but still!

This matter of self-identity came into play with my poetry collection Hamlet, a village of gargoyles, which built on exercises where I found it much easier to say who I’m not than who I am.

So here I am, with a few potential contributor notes I may have sent out:

  • As a youth, Jnana admired crystals grown from supersaturated solutions. Deep blue copper sulfate was his favorite.
  • Jnana has found landscapes evolving into an awareness of spirituality and space, as well as settlement and wildlife.
  • In addition to reading and writing, Jnana enjoys hiking and camping, birding, New England contradancing, classical music, opera, jazz, visual arts, genealogy and history, theology, Quaker practice, homebrewing, and a cappella part-singing. If there were only more time, he contemplates.
  • Jnana Hodson never expected a film literature course under Harry Geduld would influence his poetry as much as college writing class under poet Dick Allen. But it did: the clash of thesis and antithesis producing an unanticipated synthesis in reaction.
  • When Jnana first began reading contemporary poetry (for pleasure, independent of classroom assignment), he sensed that often the poem existed as a single line or two, with the rest of the work as window dressing. Now he reads the Psalms much the same way, for the poem within the poem, or at least the nugget he is to wrestle with on this occasion. Psalm 81, for instance, has both “voice in thunder” and “honey from rock.”
  • Elk move through Jnana’s mind, its memory, more as emblem and ideal than creature. He has not tasted elk flesh or stroked the fur. What he’s known has appeared only on the forest floor as track and scat – no ticks on the neck or patchy summer skin. That, and the winter encounters viewed from a distance.

While we’re at it, let’s ponder the faces on back dust jacket or cover.

How few seem like people I’d like to meet. How much anger, hatred, envy, darkness – brooding – comes through? How little serenity, how little joy? Multiplicity of personality. Just who am I? Who are you?  Empathy. Discomfort. All the rest.

Who are you in relation to all this?

Sometimes it was like talking to yourself, without the ‘Dear Diary’ label

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Here I thought I had thoroughly gleaned these for the fiction and poetry. In my keyboarding and review, I skip over those passages, though there are far fewer of them than I would have predicted.

Instead, here’s a rapid-fire sampling from one early volume.

~*~

Love? Every treasure is guarded by a dragon.

Man’s need to play is justified, and should be. [A revelation for oh-so-serious me, one I would have to rediscover post-Clara.]

Handbook in identity: focusing upon one partner, reaches deeper – seeks rewarding depth, dealing with another self.

Just what novel were we discussing? As for me, my needs were simple: she must be beautiful, intelligent, and younger than me … and available. In reality, she also needs to know how to steer me, which is why an older girlfriend might have been preferable. Speaking of what-ifs, I keep returning to my psychology lab partner at IU: how beautiful and, what I never saw, how available! But what did I have to offer her? [Boy, did I blow that one!]

Jobs relieved of personality: the sexual side is the only side of life where intimacy exists. Yet sex doesn’t deliver the goods.

Sex used to be one of the few places where you could make a mistake. Today, however, competitive force and efficiency are entering the bedroom …

Don Juan vs Tristan: you can’t have both.

“The last time I was at a Playboy Club, I found the same type that you’d find at a Mantovani concert.”

To the family in Mexico: Dad, Mom, 24 kids. “And since you don’t have TV, radio, movies, books, what do you do for entertainment?” Or now that they do?

Round characters have many qualities that don’t quite fit together.

“I didn’t mean to knock your dress. I like it.”

“What’s that you’re muttering?”

Comedy depends upon distance.

Always remember protagonist and antagonist in story summary.

Symbol goes beyond metaphor.

Reason is impotent to deal with the depths of human life.

Alienation.

League of Freshman Voters.

(Some bad stabs at poetry / song lyrics).

Irving Kolodin re Music Hall in Cincinnati: “I find the sense of emptiness around the orchestra” … ditto, the hall, too. Not that I noticed it in the second balcony, where the acoustics were incredibly clear.

The volume?

[Incinerated]

~*~

From Spiralbound Years with commentary from now.

As a stab at transplanting a sensibility

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The Four Noble Plants [and a quest for American equivalents]

  • Bamboo, bends but never breaks in a storm = Oak, with its acorns
  • Plum blossom = Apple
  • Orchids = Sunflowers
  • Chrysanthemums = Dandelions
  • Now, to play with those starting with classic Japanese or even Chinese poems and substituting the equivalents. This could be weird.

Too bad those book collections are still in storage.

As for “noble,” in America? Even that needs an equivalent.

 

The past doesn’t have to be haunting

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

It’s a good thing I backed off from my nearly impetuous move last June to simply burn the spiralbound notebooks unread in the face of so much dross. Instead, I plodded onward, surprised by a few gems as well as how little I had gleaned from these pages in drafting my poetry and, especially, fiction. Perhaps I had much more than I thought in my long-vanished correspondence.

Do we ever, truly, escape our past?

~*~

One thing I’m noticing is how often my journals review corrects timelines from the way I’ve constructed them in memory.

As do the facts I recorded versus details as I’ve recalled them.

It’s like seeing a photo in full color rather than out-of-focus black-and-white.

Or, as I find, God exists in the details. As does the devil. Knowing the difference can be crucial.

~*~

One thing I’ve learned in the years since is the importance of composting as a gardener.

Combine that with the joy of tasting fresh food – say, strawberries – when the season rolls around again.

The past can enrich the present.

Maybe even turn grief into gratitude.

Why we really dig Fedco seeds

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

In my household, like many others in northern New England, the Fedco seed catalogue and ordering from it are something of a fond ritual this time of year, even a devotion.

Here’s some background.

  1. The company is a co-op founded in 1978 by back-to-the-earth followers of self-sufficiency gurus Scott and Helen Nearing, who had moved to Maine from Vermont in the mid-‘50s.
  2. At first, it functioned as a resource for food coops and sold to no one else.
  3. Heirloom apple trees were added in 1983 and autumn bulbs the following year. Seed potatoes came next,, and in 1988 Fedco took over the organic supplier role of the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association. (Many people know MOFGA for its big, hippie-infused Common Ground Fair every September. You may have read about that here.)
  4. In its first year, with a one-page mail-order page in a food-coop newspaper, Fedco and its part-time staff handled 98 customer requests. The initial list had 81 items, mostly vegetables, some herbs, liquid seaweed fertilizer, and no flowers. These days it handles more than 38,000 orders from all 50 states for an estimated $4 million revenue.
  5. The catalogue is funky, black-and-white on newsprint or similar stock, rather than the glossy photos of big commercial garden retailers. The illustrations lean toward sketches and 19th century printers’ images. It carries more than a thousand seed listings alone, along with a host of other things gardeners and small-farm operators find useful. The descriptions reflect careful study, helping buyers make reasoned decisions, especially regarding what’s new. It’s inspirational. You can also order online, using a catalogue that does have color photos and is easy to navigate.
  6. Legalization of cannabis has generated new business, even though Fedco has so far resisted selling its plants or seeds. Much of the business is in organic fertilizer, especially for home growers.
  7. Rather than growing the seeds itself, Fedco repackages from 100 to 150 seed growers, and other suppliers, mostly in Maine. Other products are more widely sourced.
  8. Fedco concentrates on a unique niche, mostly in the Northeast, and deliberately stays small, out of direct competition with large corporations.
  9. Its 60 full- and part-time employees own 40 percent of the company, while the consumers own the remaining 60 percent and get small discounts on their orders.
  10. The company’s charter aims at pay-level equity, preventing wage extremes between high and low.

Details from the company’s website and from Jeffrey B. Roth in Lancaster Farming.

Let’s start with ‘my problem,’ meaning love

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

My journaling erupted as an attempt to record my failings in attempting to connect romantically after the flight of my college lover, the one you’ll know as Nicki.

As I’ve learned since, the difficulties ran much deeper than just her. It would involve questions of how I saw females, or didn’t, in looking for a lifetime mate. As I’ve come to see, that’s not necessarily “partner.” Candidly, I was looking for an accessory more than a fitting true equal.

Instead, I had a morbid desire for Nikki and previously Fay, who was a passionate girlfriend. As I see now, I’ve been prone to a pathological loyalty for good times together.

~*~

The sweep though the post-college great dark period when I started journaling greatly revises my perception of that time. I was meeting young women, sizing them up, but not connecting sexually because, as I now sense, I was so morbidly hung up on Nikki and, to my surprise, Fay from two years earlier. Fact was I didn’t see any of them deeply, as feeling and emotions: only as factoids: that’s how I spoke too! Fact, fact, fact. Not passions.

~*~

Another part of “my problem” was simply in not fitting in easily with so much around me. So the entries become an exploration of developing a better sense of myself, often through the reflections of people close to me.

There will even be some astrological perspectives I encountered along the way.

~*~

Leap ahead a bit more than a half century. To set upon this review, I had to extract 20 or so milk crates from the storage confines in a former chimney cavity in our new (though historic) home. In my previous settings, those crates were set up on their sides and stacked as impromptu bookcases. We really didn’t have the luxury of doing that here. As I was saying about downsizing?

In revisiting the earliest notebooks, expecting to find hidden gems, an immense heaviness engulfed me. These were conditions I had left, for good reason. These were individuals and groups who long ago went in other directions than mine. Do I even know their names – full names – anymore?

Most of the volumes had been heavily dredged in my writing sabbatical of 1986-87 for details to distill into my novels. Others had been mined for poems. These journals were mostly spiralbound notebooks – some in my favored 8½-by-14 dimension.

By late spring last year, I was leaning toward disposing them without further examination. They cover the years from my college graduation through Upstate New York and then the yoga ashram in the Poconos of Pennsylvania, small-town Ohio, Indiana University as a social sciences editor, and the interior Pacific Northwest – and that’s just the first decade. Next came a river city in Iowa, Rust Belt, Baltimore, and New Hampshire.

~*~

The volumes do provide of trove of my interactions in my post-Nikki round of lovers in Binghamton, and then my first marriage and divorce, as well as the subsequent engagement and later relationships leading up to my remarriage in 2000.

Curiously, beyond my sabbatical, meaning the second half of my life, i.e. New England? I see nothing that promises fiction. What I had assumed the great passion of that broken engagement would have inspired now appears banal, even tawdry.

For now, I’m finding enough gleanings to do something along the lines of Rorem’s Paris Journals, though maybe mine become Spiralbound Binghamton, Spiralbound Yoga, and so on, acknowledging the earliest volumes. I didn’t splurge on hardbound pages until Clara was no longer sleeping with me – volume 77. Clara? She’s a dozen years ahead. Still, there would be a few more spiralbound notebooks – six – plus 13 spiralbound sketchbooks and softcover sketchbooks to come.

Back to the Baskervilles

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Working downward in time for our old house history meant starting with Anna M. Baskerville, the subject of a Dec. 4, 2002, post here.

We finally met her son, Reggie, and learned much more than we had already gleaned.

He and his mother came from Yeadon in Delaware County, Pennsylvania — suburban Philadelphia. Landing in Eastport was nearly accidental. His first wife had a friend who skied in Maine, and on a lark, they visited the coast, including Eastport.

That led to buying the property in rundown condition, as he says, in November 1996 to use as a vacation house. As he notes, the house wasn’t habitable beyond that but you could buy homes in town dirt cheap. His words.

Somewhat of a handyman, he set to work. The cellar was prone to flooding, two to three feet, and its sump pump, like many in the neighborhood, fed into a line that had been cemented shut on the other end. The city finally corrected that. So it wasn’t a septic problem, exactly, but definitely storm infiltration, with water shooting dramatically through the cellar walls. Somebody definitely curbed that problem before we took over. Reggie also installed covered the cellar floor with plastic sheeting topped by gravel to reduce water infiltration and make walking easier. By 1999, the house was improved enough that his mother could move in. He and his wife and their two small children also lived here a few months before moving to their own home nearby. Like ours, it was old and needed lots of work. Credit Reggie for learning to do better work than many of the local tradesmen.

As he tells it, Anna had worked hard from age six in the South, where a Black child could be hired out. From that point on, she was always at the service of others, including a large family. Once Eastport came on her horizon, she declared this would be her house. For once in her life, she could sleep as late as she liked, eat whenever she wanted, and come and go as she willed. And she pretty much did.

Eastport’s the kind of small-town community where people know where you live not by your address but by the last name of a previous owner. Give them a street and a number and they take a moment to try to determine which house you’re in., even when you tell them it’s on the corner and briefly describe the exterior. Give them the family name, though, and they immediately light up.

To everyone we’ve met, ours is the Baskerville House and likely to remain so.

I love the literary allusion, of course, to Sherlock Holmes and The Hound of the Baskervilles (and the fact it takes place largely in Devonshire, which plays into so much of my history of Dover, New Hampshire, where we previously lived.). Hound/house are, of course, nearly homonyms. Beyond that, there’s also the fact that Baskerville was a basic serif typeface back in the letterpress days when I entered journalism. The high school newspaper I edited used it for the body type. It’s an old style that largely didn’t make the leap to digital, though I see it has recently joined my Windows options. (Not so for my beloved Caslon of the same era.)

What we liked about the place, besides its location and TLC potential, was the fact it felt good inside. Close-your-eyes good, even when the room’s chilly. I’ve certainly felt comfortable in extended solitude and all the writing that’s come within it.

Something that struck me after moving to New England was how often people — even highly rational professionals — calmly asked new homeowners if their place had ghosts. I’m not kidding. And Maine seemed especially prone to that.

Nobody’s asked us, though. Instead, they confirmed that ours always felt good to them, too.

The Baskerville at the heart of this period of ownership was Anna, arriving in Eastport as a retired Black nurse.

From what I’m told, she was stout, had red hair, and loved to sing — especially in all of the churches, where she was always welcome. And she, too, found this place hard to heat but stayed in it and loved it.

When I said we’ve sensed no ghosts but the place feels good, others piped up that’s likely Anna’s presence or spirit. I’ve known similar imprints elsewhere, especially in old Quaker meetinghouses.

Naturally, we want to know more about her.

~*~

One story I heard was about her introduction to the town. She had a longstanding fear of deep water, and because her new residence was only a block from the ocean, the family arranged for her to arrive after dark and get used to the house first. Maybe they figured they could deal with any distress better in the morning.

So, as I’m told, when Anna M. Baskerville awoke and opened the blinds and saw the expanse of water, she inhaled and, as she proclaimed later, “I knew I was home.”

Yes, we know the feeling, too. And we still want to know more.

She was fond of sitting in front of the wood fire in the kitchen cook stove and singing gospel songs and spirituals. In warmer weather, she’d open the front door and sit behind the storm door, basking in the sun.

She had raised a large brood, ruling with what Reggie calls a firm hand and a low tolerance of nonsense. She was also a woman of few words. Typical was the time the Commons gallery was opening. During an open house, when the guests were conversing and eating, she began singing without any preamble. The room fell silent as she delivered “Bless This House” in her rich, deep voice. She was described as warm and supportive.

She was also a very devout member of the Congregational church in Eastport, as a fellow parishioner told me.

Everybody we’ve met who knew her has had only positive things to say. That in itself is a rarity.

In the meantime, we’re trying to keep our renovations in line with what we hope she would have approved. There are good reasons to respect the past.

~*~

So, at Registry of Deeds in Machias, I found the most recent entry by using the property plot number, the one to us in December 2020. No surprise there.

It led to the Baskervilles, of course, but before them, the Tennesseans.

Hello, campers!

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Some of my notebooks predated the start of my journaling. One, for instance, covered day camp policies, program guidelines, songs, good storytelling guidelines.

All of these song titles, the words and tunes I’ve long forgotten.

We had so much responsibility! (And life itself was still so fuzzy. Largely a blur, I’d say now.)

“Any injury multiplied 10x by the time it reaches mother or father. Injury may be word or action.”

Taste buds: sweet, salt, sour, bitter … just four.

“All right, kiddies. If you get lost, stay there. I’ll come and find you (I hope).”

The most innocent looking kid bit another in the eye, tried opening the emergency door on the bus, hit kids over the head with a tote bag, waits for the counselors to look away, lies, swimming (?)

(Last time I was “home,” meaning my father’s funeral, I tried locating the camp along country roads, to no avail. No clue to its site on satellite maps, either. Summer camp as one more victim of shortened summers off for kids, as well as economic realities facing families.)

Those were two summers I had a remarkable tan. My hair turned nearly blond, too.

~*~

From Spiralbound Years with commentary from now.

As my poetic voice took shape

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The odd syllable counts of my poetry lines: quite female! And quite flexible. Contrast to “maleness” of iambic pentameter or other club-feet.

The luxury of wasting a whole notebook, an entire sketchbook. [Oh? Did I pitch that out already?]

Good poetry takes leave of tight meaning … pointing to “lunatics” as “originals” … the way flames do.