NOT WHAT YOU THINK

August 26, 2014July 5, 2014 ~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

I’ve always been a visual person. Had even considered a career in art before the writing took over. As further evidence, remembering a story or argument I’ve heard has always been more difficult to recall than one I’ve read. As for names, I’m hopeless unless there’s been a name tag.

Somehow, though, I can remember a musical line much more than I can any lyrics, including those we’ve been working on in chorus. So I’m not memory deaf, exactly.

As a visual person, I’ve found the point-and-shoot digital camera entries you’ve seen posted in my blogs to be a wonderful way of sharing the way I look at the world and many of the details that catch my attention.

But there’s another range of experiences I can’t begin to describe. Often, especially while watching people, my vision shifts from photo-realism to real-life cartoons. I hope I’m not staring, but the transformation is incredible. R. Crumb had nothing on me, other than technique. Sometimes they’re squiggling black-and-white line drawings. Sometimes, baroque etchings. Other times, wild blobs of color.

Even before they start moving.

SABBATICAL LESSONS

August 25, 2014July 5, 2014 ~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

As I said at the time …

When I was 38, several developments occurred in a way that allowed me to give myself a year of unemployment, drawing largely on savings. Rather than travel the world or undertake some related activity, I hunkered down in a writing spree [that resulted in the novels now (finally) being published]. The sabbatical meant that for the first time in my life, I had a period of uninterrupted concentration on this work. The writing itself. Three fast novels, now to be revised, and thud! skidding to a crash or whatever. Enough to expand to a dozen, in the hours of revision after I went back to the paying work. Looking back, I know it had to be done. And done then.

Nevertheless, in my struggle between practicality and art, there’s been a longstanding sense of guilt in spending time on myself. To my surprise, a resolution came through a workshop on prayer, when we were divided into smaller groups and then asked to write out a prayer request. Not for what others might need or a social issue, but for something we needed individually. “Ask for something for yourself,” which the others would then pray for.

Of course, each of us works differently. I’m not one for the blank sheet writer’s block syndrome: I’m usually springing from notes jotted down earlier. (Pacing is another matter: just where is this going? And why?)

In contrast, I recall a poet friend who was also a public school teacher; he was quite prolific during the busy school year, yet during the summer, could produce little, though he could never quite figure out why. (He could also stare at a piece of paper for five hours and then turn out a sharply focused gem.) The other friend, having all the leisure in the world, could produce only disconnected flashes. Could it be some juggling or resistance is also essential to the practice?

MOCKINGBIRD, ESPECIALLY

August 25, 2014August 17, 2014 ~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The amount of wildlife in our yard continually impresses me, especially compared to my childhood home. The abundance of squirrels, of course, and (yuck!) the winter rats we occasionally see but also skunks, opossums, the groundhog (woodchuck) can be added in, plus garden snakes and a rainbow of insects. We must be doing something right, or just be in the right location. (Once, a fox trotted atop my ladder stored over snow, right here in the city.)

A first: amid a throng of blue jays chasing a crow, a mockingbird: was its nest raided or threatened?

But remember, never mock a mockingbird. Like the one singing lustily from our neighbors’ when I’d drive in from work at midnight. They’re quite remarkable musicians.

~*~

The influence of the animal kingdom shapes my newest collection of poems, In a Heartbeat, on tap at Barometric Pressures.

GODDESSES IN SUBURBIA

August 23, 2014July 5, 2014 ~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

As I mentioned to her sometime back, I’d spent much time in a recent year reflecting on the jagged pathway that landed me here. Often I’ve felt I took one took many turns somewhere back there, and on some mornings after we moved into this house – well, some moments in my homes before that, too – I’d find myself wondering just where the hell I was, after all. In a bigger sense, I’ve been trying to envision how it all adds up. Guess it’s another version of the old “What is the meaning of life” conundrum. At least I finally figured out what I wanted to be when I grew up … retired! Meaning free to concentrate on the Real Work. (Now that I’m there, I’m finding more questions.)

In the round of reflection I’m discussing, I concentrated on high school and college – the emotional side, especially – meaning the time before I actually started keeping a journal, and a period that’s largely been a fog in my memory. I uncovered some wonderful prompts for revisiting this, especially letters from the sophomore high school English teacher who put me on the writing/strict grammar path, as well as a confession that despite all the contrary efforts, high school was a bummer. Unlike yours, my public school system was geared largely toward instilling conformity and retarding the growth of gifted students, unless you were a male athlete. Still, much has come back, making me wonder how I survived at all.

This round, I kept asking “What if” … for instance, one of those I saw as goddesses in high school had swept me away (or, more realistically, if I’d been able to say something close to what was really on my heart, or hormones, leading to some, shall we say, quality time together). Would I have continued at Wright State, rather than transferring to Indiana, and eventually stayed in Dayton, maybe even as a Republican? Or if either of my two girlfriends through the college years had led to marriage and home … both of them from Dayton, though neither ended up dwelling there, from what I can tell. Most of those goddesses wound up settling into mundane adult suburban lives, as I find from the class website and Internet – including our online class reunion site. I’m not kidding. (Who are all those old people in those silly photos? The ones holding beer bottles, especially.) (Note to self: Do not allow yourself to be photographed holding a beer bottle. Ever.)

On my part, what I keep finding is a sense of inevitability. Or, as Friends say, “As way opens,” if we’re faithful. There are good reasons I’m where I am, and for that I’m grateful, after so many seasons of sojourning. Even so, when your note arrives, there’s a tinge of sadness or gentle envy, as you live out what appears to be so close to what I had desired when I dreamed of being an independent writer living in my Promised Land, with a house full of my children and visiting friends and a quiet studio hut on the ridge behind. (My wife finds that vision humorous, by the way – finds holes in it all the way around, beginning with who’s going to clean up after the big parties I intended.)

Still, looking back, there are many things I don’t understand, and too many points where I’ve looked away or accepted a glib answer, rather than probing. I’ve always been prone to seeing what I want to see and overlooking the rest – usually, the warning signs and difficult details. (Again, my wife is good at bringing me back to the wider range of questions.) I’d say that trying to answer the inquiry of why you and I didn’t wind up together would be one of those. The astrological answer that you and I would never wind up together but remain prime friends fails to ask why. I believe there’s far more to be uncovered there, if we’re willing. Just why have you always made me feel better, for starters. Or feel special and elated.

SOCCER MOM, RUGBY DAD

August 22, 2014July 5, 2014 ~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

As I said at the time …

So here we are. Who would have thought we’d be attending kids’ soccer and rugby matches? Not us!

Or dealing with declining parents. Your mother’s dementia must be difficult. You mention that she still remembers people and is in a wheelchair, which makes me wonder if she’s afflicted with Alzheimer’s or something different. My wife and the girls talk fondly of Grandpa Marion and how his Alzheimer’s brought out a sweetness in him, while another, with episodes in the past years, turns mean and paranoid. Parkinson’s is rough, too, with its long decline; I lost a dear Mennonite mentor last January, in Virginia, and one of my best friends here is in the early stages – so far, controlled by medication, when they get it right.

Galapagos? My elder girl will be very envious. At age 11, she went on a big Darwin kick, a passion that has never abated. A few years ago, we went down to the Boston Museum of Science for a special exhibit they had, and it was quite impressive. In all of the historical debate over his insights, I’m surprised we don’t hear more about the religious roots of his work – most of his encouragement and support seemed to come from clergymen. Me, I’m quite fond of his later affection with earthworms. Maybe it has to do with my monster composting.

Now I still want to hear how you distinguish between mystery and magic. I have a few ideas, but I doubt they’re as expansive or insightful as yours.

In the meantime, I’m hoping to get back to poetry by early fall. Why can’t I stick to just one kind of writing? Or be somehow easily identifiable? A good friend’s son, who is a successful serious novelist, seems to have the same problem. He, too, wants every book to be unique, rather than a continuation of or variation on his others.

Gotta run … time to commute, again. And tomorrow, another birthday. How can that be?

ATTUNED TO THE PULSING

August 21, 2014August 17, 2014 ~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Back in the late ’70s I attended a weeklong interdisciplinary conference at Fort Warden State Park on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, an event that remains a potent influence on my work and thinking. Organized by Sam Hamill, then of Copper Canyon Press, the Power of Animals seminar spanned biology, literature, anthropology, mythology, and more. Presenters included the writers Barry Lopez, Gary Snyder, Howard Norman (then just the author of a chapbook of poems called Born Tying Knots), David Lee, and an equally impressive slate of zoologists and botanists in an interdisciplinary examination of the dimensions of the animal kingdom. One highlight was a stage production from Reed College that relived some of the glorious Coyote tales of the Pacific Northwest.

Now, with the release of my chapbook In a Heartbeat from Barometric Pressures at Kind of a Hurricane Press, I hope to return the favor. This set of poems runs playfully with wild and domestic animals of all sizes and influences as they impact our lives in real and imaginary ways.

To join in, simply click here. And remember, it’s free.

ONE LIBRARIAN’S TAKE

August 19, 2014July 5, 2014 ~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

Perhaps you’ve heard someone tell another, “You should write a book about that,” relating to some personal experience they think would become a bestseller.

Neither of them, however, actually reads books, even if they expect others to do so.

Sometimes one of these individuals actually does crank out the manuscript and even self-publishes it (not that self-publishing is intrinsically wrong, mind you – just that one needs to be aware of the perils that route takes, whether it’s in the traditional bound paper editions or in the newer digital ebooks).

A neighbor came across one of these paper versions a few months back and decided to ask a librarian acquaintance for her reaction. After reading a page or two (often that’s all it takes), she sniffed: “This reads like somebody who doesn’t read books.”

How telling. How telling, indeed, even before we get to the swollen ego.

WATER SIGN OR ELSE

August 18, 2014July 5, 2014 ~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

It’s hard to think 17 years have gone by since this correspondence! As I said at the time …

Your first letter had me repeating to myself, “She has to be a water sign — or at least have a lot of water influence prominent in her chart.” Now you blithely inform me you’re a Pisces. Ah-ha! Figures! Could that be why you’re so alive in your emotions, as astro-informed friends from my past would insist? (For Aquarian me, meanwhile, aloft in encyclopedic data and logical constructs, staying alert to my own emotions can be a real challenge — especially when retreating into my brainiac self became my way of surviving some pretty intense emotional abuse way back when.) So, in some wonderful ways you help me tap dance into some chambers of my soul. (Molto grazie!) As for the writing skills: do the nuns at dreaded Mother Theodore Guerin get any credit? (Mother … Theodore? And I doubted your age?)

And you wish you look older? Na-na-na-na! Listen to Swami Jnana, kiddo. Do you have any idea how … thoughtful you appear in that photo? It doesn’t get any better than that. Why can’t any of the women I know/have known appreciate being they way they are — which inevitably is much, much lovelier than they presume. (Assignment for future edition, probably when you’re ensconced in that high suite overlooking the Loop and Lake Michigan — I know that view, having been in Jeff MacNally’s eerie in the Chicago Tribune tower a time or two: interview Cindy, Nicky, Cristy, and the rest of the supermodel cult and see if you can find anyone truly satisfied with her looks; bet, deep down, they aren’t.) Ergo: enjoy your current condition while you can. (And may that be for a long, long time!) Most women I know would kill to have the body or the looks of an eighteen-year-old, or so they say. You have the rest of your life to look older. (And may you age gracefully, like Sophia Loren or Joan Collins.) Maybe it’s not really a matter of age, after all, but of self-confidence. Those who are radiant, no matter what, versus those who are wrapped up in their misery. Watcha think?

As for feeling one’s chronological age, you’re an excellent writer: that automatically makes you middle-age. (I know: part of me’s always felt old, too. Maybe it’s just ancient soul.) (My age, by the way, is ninety-two.) But, because you’re an artist, you’re also going to have to find ways of remaining fourteen or fifteen forever. I wouldn’t recommend adult orthodontics as a strategy, although it is an interesting trip and seems to be an good way to open conversations I wouldn’t otherwise have. (And you said something about rambling? Heavens!)

So here I’m looking through some Diane Wakoski volumes for a great insight on adolescence and find instead: “My search for the perfect man, the perfect love, Romance, sexual life, has always been emblematic of my search for something else, you know. In Pretty in Pink, a wonderful character played by an actress who must be thirty but still looks like she’s eighteen, the wise older woman in the film is nostalgically wearing her old high school prom dress and dancing to some golden oldie with the star of the movie (Molly Ringwald) and she says, ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could start old and get younger every year?’ I recall my elders always saying that ‘youth is wasted on the young’ … “

I very much enjoyed both the batch of poems you sent along. Do you write as effortlessly as it appears? You have some real knock-‘em-dead connections here: “sometimes she’s a ballerina/hanging by her neck/from the rafters/of some wretched dollhouse//sometimes she’s a little girl/with treasure chest eyes/and a bowl-of-pudding smile” is astonishing. Brava, brava, brava! (Envy, envy, envy!) Ditto: “the sky is pink lemonade.” And the line, “trees singing,” keeps triggering to my ears Isaiah 55:12b, “and all the trees of the countryside clap their hands.”

I, too, prefer direct language — although in my writing, it sometimes seems that by creating a deliberate short-circuit, I’m more able to get down into that painful raw nerve you talk about. I wonder if some of the “trying to hide behind huge words and flowery language” you object to (rightfully so) has more to do with a lack of a real emotional underpinning/experience. A few days before your big package arrived, I received two hardbound prize-winning volumes by those “professional poets” we’ve already defined—and I found myself annoyed. You’re right: there is a lot of hiding going on. And it feels like WORK, both the creation and the reading of it.

Then your latest edition came, and I found myself often laughing aloud with delight, because the pieces were coming from another place in the psyche. (Pieces I checkmarked: “Dead Horse,” “Yes, There Still Are Some Good Ones,” “Sam I Ain’t,” “I read a book about a woman …,” “Sardines,” “The Painkiller,” [hey, is that true about the Walibri???], your centerfold [sick! heh-heh!], your on-going adventures [really fine line: “my feathers are slowly being replaced by rocks … being covered by cold, gray cement”] — and the insights in the paragraph beginning, “i have always been on another planet.”

Please, please, please, send a copy of your chapbook. (What a marvelous title — I can almost taste it. A turnabout on Psalm 34, “O taste and see,” which Denise Levertov uses as a title for a wonderful collection of her own poems — so delicious it opens your eyes.) Watercolor nights, what a vivid linkage, almost a micropoem itself … softness, yet I wonder if night scenes can be done in watercolors: now you make me ask a watercolorist I know.

Was kinda curious about where your neighborhood is — thought maybe it was around Hyde Park, or some other brainy neighborhood. Was surprised to find it on my road atlas as being out toward Mother O’Hare instead. So I asked my boss, who says he’s spent a lot of time in Chi’town (he’s from western Michigan), and he said he thought it was mostly duplexes and bungalows out that way. And then Sunday night I was zoned out in front of the tube, not quite watching some dumb detective story set in Your Fair City, and there they went, ripping onto — you guessed it, your fair street, which may have been filled with some fair number of criminals by then or a fairly high-speed chase. Is life weird or what? Looked like ‘50s ranch houses, mostly. Some trees. Short front yards. Many bathtub Madonnas? (Couldn’t tell.)

I’ve done a lot of travel on maps. Some places I’ve never been I seem to know better than some people do who have actually been there. As Howard McCord has written: “A chest of maps/is a greater legacy/than a case of whisky.//My father left me both.” Another quote: “or what my father said/‘go along the coast as far as/you can without getting killed’/my saint is Hsuan-tsang/who got _ back.”

Well, hope you’re still enjoying that big old Dodge Diplomat (go along as far as you can and then come back). Assume college has started. Took me three-and-a-half years to figure out how they rig the game against you: the moment you walk into a classroom, you’re already a hundred pages behind. (Wright College? I went to Wright State University, then transferred to Indiana University in Bloomington.)

So here’s to a rewarding and eccentric friendship. None of my other editors get long letters like this. Actually, they’re lucky to get cover letters. But then, they rarely reply with more than a marginal scrawl, either. I wish I were having as much fun with the newspaper as you’re having with Indigo, but, hey, we don’t have centerfolds, either.

Good thoughts to you, always.

Your midnight rambler.

NATURALLY, AT LAST

August 16, 2014August 16, 2014 ~ Jnana Hodson ~ 6 Comments

The Barometric Pressures author series at Kind of a Hurricane Press has just published In a Heartbeat, a set of 20 of my poems arising in the animal kingdom. As you can imagine, I’m delighted. Let me roar and crow, if you will.

The set occupies a much different tone and style of my writing from what you’ve previously seen. It ranges from television cartoon characters to ancient mythology as it traces our interplay with our fellow animals across the earth, under the sea, into the air, and throughout our imaginations.

This 35-page echapbook is available free from the Barometric Pressures author series at Kind of a Hurricane Press.

If you decide to print yours out, you might even want to select a fancy paper to make your copy unique.

Let me add, that way I’ll be even happier to autograph yours when we meet. But first, for your copy, click here.

IN THE MIX

August 14, 2014July 5, 2014 ~ Jnana Hodson ~ 7 Comments

I’ve heard it said at both ends of the Society of Friends that it takes three committed families to plant a new Meeting. So even with a pastor, a healthy mix of talents is required. This is probably true of other congregations as well, but I’ll continue to use “meeting” here because I think much more is involved than just seeing each other on Sunday morning.

In envisioning an ideal Meeting, let me ask if having six committed families or if having sixty not-so-committed members would be preferable. That is, a smaller group that is highly responsive to each other in their daily activities, or a larger, more loosely knit group that is more widespread through the surrounding community. I’d say there are pros and cons both ways.

The question becomes less abstract when we consider our own expectations of our local family of faith. First, what do you require from a faith community, and then how willing you are to work toward achieving that? Second, how do your personal expectations and participation differ from others in that faith circle? And third, considering the future of the Meeting, what would you hope for? (These, by the way, might be good queries for the annual State of Society Report answers.)

Planting a new Meeting is, of course, only a start. Nurturing it is another matter. My guess is that three families form the minimum requirement because of the range of vision they engender and can pursue together – a microcosm of what we already have here where I worship.