Category: Arts & Letters

Let’s catch up on recent releases

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

My weekly offerings at my free digital bookstore, Thistle Finch editions, include some remarkable new entries gleaned from our ongoing journals review.

There’s the Chronicle, Antiques Dealer, profiling a woman who saw deeply into the landscape she adopted. I do miss her.

Another Chronicle, Shakers and Me, has me now reflecting on a late friend who had held extensive conversations with Eldress Bertha, one of the last Shakers; I urged him to set the exchanges down on paper, to no avail. Yet a few he mentioned still echo. What I present here could be a prelude.

Still another Chronicle, On the Rock Wall, underpins the petroglyphs and petrographs I would later see firsthand in the Pacific Northwest.

I am fond of Scenes From a Life, prose sketches of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s.

And then there’s Sue’s Bread Recipe. Yes, learning to bake loaves was one of my lessons in the yoga ashram, one that led to hundreds or maybe thousands later. Here’s what Little Sue introduced to me.

If that weren’t enough, there are the poetry broadsides Within a Bigger Order, Kansas and Kyoto, and Bronx to Brooklyn (about someone I’d still love to talk to once more).

Put them together and I think you’d have a great magazine. Well, I am open to letters to the editor.

 

Along with a sunny apple ranch

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

While my novels Nearly Canaan and Secret Side of Jaya contain many details from my Yakima Valley years, the experience also prompted a proliferation of poetry.

Works available as free PDF downloads at my Thistle Finch editions site include the poetry broadsides Whistling Jack (a common name for a high-country marmot) and Just Like That (regarding elk) as well as the poetry chapbooks Grilled Salmon, Sagebrush Diamond Hitch, Turquoise & Silver, and Universal Range.

The orchards, mountains, forests, rivers, and Pacific currents all astonished my Midwestern sensibilities.

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Dreams of publishing poetry bigtime

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

In the Far East there is a vital, well-read proletariat literature – speaking for a people.

Here, we have intellectuals playing games. Along with populist idiots.

Still, how much of the Far West book scene I knew revolved around poetry-conscious, well-stocked bookstores that were also patrons to readings, broadsides, and small private volumes.

Suppose, now, a poetry journal allied with a bookstore where its authors’ books could be purchased …

This was pre-Internet, which has opened new opportunities, or before I knew of radical publisher and bookseller Giles Calvert and his Black Spread Eagle on Ludgate Hill near St. Paul Cathedral in London, the voice of many early Quaker tracts and volumes.

 

I’m delighted to know Indigenous petroglyphs are found here

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Previous posts this year have presented my curiosity in petroglyphs and petrographs even before I relocated to the Pacific Northwest and saw them in the wild. That time in my life was accompanied by a growing appreciation of tribal mythologies, which I believe enhances an understanding of the region’s unique biosphere. Living at the edge of the Yakama reservation meant the ancient stories I was reading were local news.

The Indigenous spirit was something I missed in my dwelling-places since in my moves eastward across the Midwest, Baltimore, and then New Hampshire.

Eastport, however, with its Passamaquoddy legacy and presence, has revived that. The tribe somehow survived oppression and is rediscovering and reclaiming much of its culture, thanks to the pioneering efforts of individuals like the late Wayne A. Newell, who wrote more than 40 books in the supposedly dying Passamaquoddy language before his first book in English in 2021, Kuhkomossonuk Akonutomuwinokot, Stories Our Grandmothers Told Us.

The late Fredda Paul was doing something similar within herbal medicine and healing lore, while also continuing the storytelling tradition. They are both deeply missed.

Tribal historian Donald Soctomah has furthered their work. These days, he’s part of a circle documenting and preserving the local petroglyphs in the face of rising sea levels. His online presentation earlier this year with the Border Historical Society in Eastport had me realizing I may have been overlooking impressions here – many are stippled into the rock surface in a way that they’re visible only early in the morning or late afternoon, especially if the stone is wetted. A video, A Song of the Drum, and several short YouTube videos from Machiasport can be found for free online.

This petroglyph depicts a woman giving birth. It was chipped into rock using smaller stones, a style different than the long incisions made by sharper instruments.

Another wonderful video, Rhythm of the Heart, on the life of birch-bark canoe maker David Moses Bridges, is also available for free online. It’s a moving testimony. He passed way too early.

 

If only I had owned a digital camera back then

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

In revising my novels Nearly Canaan and Secret Side of Jaya, I created several lookbooks slash storyboards from images found online to sharpen details in some of the passages. It’s a great writer’s hack, by the way. You pick up bits you overlook at the scene.

I do wish I had my own photographs from the decade of journals we’re sampling, but often I had no camera, much less training in how to use anything except the simplest point-and-shoot.. I did, however, work with some of the best photojournalists and knew some outstanding fine arts photographers as well. It would have been wonderful to work with them on these posts, but time has intervened. Well, I still have memories, faded as many are. And with a camera, I wouldn’t have worked so devotedly on writing, no doubt. There’s only so much time in a day, even without a paying job to attend to.

For a sense of my visual encounters in the Pacific Northwest, take a look at these free PDF albums at my Thistle Finch editions site: Apple Crates, Glorious Mount Adams, Know Your Salmon, Reflecting the Coast, Unexpected Northwest, and Yakama Beadwork.

Not that I haven’t attempted to re-create that world in immortal words.

Pick one or pick these booklets for your armchair travel.

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So clear it could shatter a heart

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The first three cuts on my first Joan Baez album (acquired in ’62 or ’63) were classic folksongs – “Silver Daggers,” “East Virginia,” and “Fare Thee Well.” Along with a few others, like “Wildwood Flower,” they exhibit a very moving quality that comes not so much from directed words (as in “calf with a mournful eye”) but from a sum that arises outside of the text.

The lyrics themselves are dry, compressed. The songs are best sung emotionally flat, with a childlike beauty and comprehension (or lack of it). Above all, there is a kind of detachment that makes the whole thing even more touching or eternal.

From Maynard Solomon’s album liner notes: “A remarkably compressed love story. … In its four short verses loom enough tragic characters to populate an 18th century novel … the haunting and mysterious opening verse, with its claim of historical authenticity and its foreboding of personal bereavement. … Perhaps its beauty comes from its biblical connotations, for the imagery of the closing verses is related to New Testament descriptions of the Last Judgment, and the song ends with a quotation from Mark (XII,20) – ‘Till all these things be done.’ … The seemingly obscure and disconnected text is emotionally fused. … Like many another favorite from North Carolina and its neighboring states, [it] has the strange quality of rejoicing as it laments, exulting as it weeps …”

I did not yet know my family roots in North Carolina, but I have taken this, internalized, as an ideal in my own writing that has followed, not that what’s followed has manifested that way over the years. Think, too, of how her material changed.

 

Right under our feet or the hill

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

As my journals record, my return to southern Indiana took me well beyond the college campus. I’ve already mentioned my explorations of the wooded Leonard Springs and its cave system just beyond our house at what was then the fringe of the college town. Let me remind you that my Thistle Finch editions blog has free PDF downloads of the related chapbook of my resulting poems as well as a photo album I put together from online gleanings to refresh my memory.

Related photo lookbooks slash storyboards are Ghost Towns, Iconic Farmers, Mills by the Springs, and Wonders Under the Ground, assembled to assist in my revisions for what is now “Miller at the Springs” in my novel Secret Side of Jaya.

Poetry chapbooks originating in this period include Cornflower Eye, Blurring Into Smoke, and Green Wonder, all available as free PDF downloads,

I did encounter a lot in a short year-and-a-half, even beyond my paying employment. I do would how my writing would have evolved if I had been able to remain in place.

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Back to a personal refuge

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

A recent post here told you of my early encounters with the Leonard Springs. The then largely unknown wooded ravine soon served as a kind of personal refuge for me just beyond our house. It became a microcosm of something much larger in my emerging awareness.

For the chapbook of poems originating in those explorations as well as a supporting photo album, go to my Thistle Finch editions free digital bookstore. Do take a look.

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Plowing and planting what I could

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

While much of my Great Black Swamp residency has been distilled into my novels Nearly Canaan and Secret Side of Jaya, it also infused an outpouring of poetry. By the time I arrived, the land had long been drained and turned into some incredibly rich farmland. Something, apparently, had been drained from the people as well.

Among the free PDF poetry broadsides available at my Thistle Finch blog are Toward Tiffin, Farmer Disking His Fields, and Prairie Wind. Once again, I must confess to being quite fond of micropoems as well as “found” poems. Poetry can be a state of mind as well as craft, wherever you are.

In addition, you’ll also find a free poetry chapbook, Furrow, and two photo albums, Prairie Depot and Vast Plains. It is hard to envision such a landscape if you haven’t traveled across the American Midwest of Great Plains.

Do take a look.

Welcome to another Rabbit Hole on the Internet.