Category: Arts & Letters

How much interest would there be in my new book?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

The literary great Samuel Johnson once quipped, “No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money,” but he also ascribed to the  pejorative term of “hack writer” for those who set down words as an income. It makes for an impossible bind. After all, he was a stickler for quality literature.

That perspective could generate guilt among some of us who did our best to defend the language in what Johnson would have considered grub work – in my case, daily journalism, with its effort at an anonymous style and universal voice. And yet, for me, at least, there remained an aspiration for something loftier, more lasting, more artistically and intellectually demanding but which, as I’ve found, had no monetary value.

Do I regret the effort? Not when I sit down and reread the published but largely neglected fiction and poetry. Pointedly, it has come at a heavy personal cost in time and foreclosed opportunities, no matter any satisfaction I feel.

CURIOUSLY, I DOUBT that anyone has felt the pain of this dichotomy more than novelist Stephen King, even though I’m certain he’s never heard of me. He has, though, articulated the gap between the writing for wide readership and for critical acclaim better than anyone else. Writing under pseudonyms, he has demonstrated a mastery of the craft, and under his own name, some deep insights into the art of crafting a novel. He deserves great credit for getting a public reading books, against all odds.

MY CURRENT QUANDARY comes in trying to decide which course to take regarding my latest – and likely last – manuscript. I’ve found researching it to be exciting; my findings, provocative and original; and the current voice that’s resulted, lively and entertaining. I get animated just talking about its content, and the listeners catch on. The problem is that it’s still a niche product, as far as marketing goes.

I mean, a history of the Quaker Meeting in Dover, New Hampshire?

Yes, it has the freaky potential to break out, but that’s a gamble.

The book moves novelistically. There are some big villains, a contrarian take on New England itself, a long period of frontier violence, historical surprises, a look at a subculture something like today’s Amish, and political dissent. What a volatile mix!

I’ve approached a couple of regional publishers but heard nothing from one. Not that I’m surprised. They survive by being conservative and cautious. Still, it would relieve me of a lot of effort in production and distribution that I just don’t feel up for. I’m more optimistic, cautiously, about the other. As I posted earlier, I’m ready for a break. Let them keep some of the change.

Plan two would be to issue it as an ebook, like my novels, and via Amazon’s KDP, where it would also be available as a print-on-demand paperback. I’m not sure how to include the maps in those formats, though, and the work wouldn’t be available in bookstores. Much of the sales of the paper edition would be, as they say, from the trunk of my car – after readings and talks, essentially. As for libraries? Marketing of an ebook remains, from my experience, very difficult. People want something physical to examine, even if they buy otherwise.

The third option is through one of several self-publishing programs that distribute to bookstores. (The stores won’t touch the Amazon editions, since they would have to sell at a higher price to cover their added costs.) For reviewers, it’s more respectable than Amazon. You might even pick up some book clubs. The bigger problem is that this route would require me to invest some big bucks. At this time, I have no way of knowing whether the investment would be offset by sales in bookstores, mostly in New England. Or, put another way, I’m feeling way out of my league or field of expertise. Yes, I would have a product I could feel proud of. But could I make the numbers add up? My wife advises me to consider it like joining a country club. Hmm. One involves dropping balls into holes.

A fourth alternative is to shelve it altogether, maybe even taking the money I would have spent and finally traveling off to Europe. Let myself be content with the overview I’m presenting in weekly installments here at the Barn.

One thing I’m not doing here, contrary to Johnson, is being mercenary.

What course would you suggest pursuing?

Darling Ilene

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

perhaps you remember the one whose moon-eyed lovers were reflected within the ringing gravel } none of them yet the maid of honor or a best man’s cattle, hogs, goats grunt in discomfort, sniffing the usual rounds without any drum healing wounds at least only to burn away { somewhere in the distance

Before leaving

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

discard piles of weekly magazine employment classifieds . dirty dishtowels, need replacing . ditto, the car . boxes stuffed with working papers, political reprints from college and later stint as academic editor . one more career detour, Swami . save file folders for reuse . don’t need any extra expenses now . former jobs, like former loves . what can you do at the moment? rat out pigeons from under the eaves, their smell of warm barn rot . dust and mop . Ajax or Comet the bathroom sink, tub, bowl . remake the bed after slippery sheets expose toes to night chill . clean the parakeet cage, heart yearning for its owner . how I’d love to trade that old English bicycle, with its flat tire and second gear that strips out, get a sleek ten-speed . instead, you need new blue jeans and pour a fresh motor oil in the Subaru . indoors, lay a wood fire but don’t ignite kindling, the coy display to signal a homebuyer . not all of the ash of this failure is mine

If you’d clean up

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

forget it’s a voluntary parade what the window discloses or opens depends on the wind from the economy to extramarital animation collapsing into finicky provocation some ascribe to deranged exactitude erupting as interlocking torches in the hallway night yet they all blame Washington insisting everything’s a mess let me tell you indeed yessiree

Hola Orlando

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

talk of spiced sausage all you want or the angelic art of seduction all come clean in the springing but circle the wagons or your ways if you will sometime when riders approach, demanding their due we’ve no cavalry to the rescue what runs on the line honestly, not since the divorce have we sensed any mid-afternoon vehemence comparable to that blazing dirty bird union . let me tell you of the plagues of Moses . invest the rest wisely

In and out of fairy tales

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

does he ever have a name other than “the handsome young prince” or is he merely an anonymous provider of wealth, comfort, and status, a male figure, nonetheless, out of range of any rival, consequential to fallopian tube roulette which is, of course, a fate we all share besides, to say “they lived happily ever after” is the greatest irony in all literature so read the story over again and again to those in the throes of childhood as our own cruel joke or empty promise awaiting our own crown or at least an electric guitar with the drums, bang, bang, bang

On relating to some special place you’ve explored in depth 

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Tourists may get a taste of a distinctive natural wonder in a particular landscape during their brief stay, usually in prime season, but it’s not the same as dwelling there through an entire year. A winter night or storm, for example, is a much different cosmos than a summer day.

I’ve been fortunate to have experienced some remarkable destinations through all their varying weather, thanks to my career moves, but never to the degree of living largely alone, as Henry David Thoreau did at Walden Pond or Henry Beston along the dunes on Cape Cod.

I’ve come to know both places firsthand over the rotating years, and so reading the two classic books that emerged from them evoked personal awareness of scenes that likely struck the general reader as exotic or even confounding. I never would have appreciated them the same way had I still been in the Midwest or Pacific Northwest, for certain. Quite simply, the encounters provided a stronger foundation for revelation of so much I had missed.

One of the fringe benefits of my second marriage was that my stepdaughters’ Grandpa Jim lived in Wellfleet on the Lower Cape, or what Beston more clearly calls the Outer Cape. (Understand that the Upper Cape is south of the Lower Cape, much the way Downeast Maine is really up the coast. Welcome to New England.) So we got to visit throughout the year, making me a big advocate of visiting popular travel sites in the shoulder season. There’s no way to describe walking several miles along the surf below the bluffs and having the expanse totally to myself – in perfect weather the week after the normally crowded Labor Day.

There’s a reason it’s called a Cape, or more technically, a full Cape. Here’s how ours in Eastport looks before the renovations begin. It was likely built more than a dozen years before Henry David Thoreau retreated to Walden Pond.

My wife used to gaze on the few remaining gray cabins atop the bluffs and voice a dream of living in one of them – the National Parks Service has been removing them piecemeal – noting that you wouldn’t want to have anything there you wouldn’t mind losing to a hurricane or nor’easter.

Beston’s 1928 The Outermost House tells of spending a year in just such a house only one town south of Grandpa Jim’s, and so I could envision and even smell much of what he describes.

At first, I was put off by the feathery, slightly Victorian language, as well as the affectatious British spellings rather than American, but once Beston presented some sharp, detailed observations of wave and wind motion and sound, I was captivated. His examination of waterfowl and other birds, especially, is admirable, but the range of shore and sea life he portrays is also encyclopedic.

Here are my luxury accommodations the first months in town. I essentially lived in two rooms, spilling over into two more.

He writes from a time when the Cape still retained an older character that was being overlapped by newer ways that included telephones and flashlights, both unlike today’s suburban feel, and his book is credited with inspiring the creation of the Cape Cod National Seashore to protect the wildlife and geology he treasured – as many of us do today, thanks to the protections.

My reading came a few months after moving into my own equivalent of Beston’s cabin, albeit it much further up the coast and in a fishing village – still in view of the ocean.

You’ll be hearing a great deal about it through the coming year.

Are there books you’ve especially enjoyed because they’re rooted in places you know?

With pigeons

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

such gain, left to carry the rubbish after this unsettling and upheaval, all crashing down, the lonely conflagration increasingly desperate for a phoenix in some dawning how often one begins over, take the bookshelves, reorganize religious literature, find that ten-year-old letter initially appearing unopened sent just before the marriage with its Far West a nebulous daydream now I continue in the opposite direction rebounding perhaps keeping time as pigeons return quietly that’s all Thanks and g’day

My wife has long insisted I have a face made for the 19th century

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Among the artists-in-residence the Tides Institute invited to town last year was tintype photographer John DiMartino from Brooklyn.

He was certainly the most visible, with his big camera and tripod everywhere and his workaholic hours. He was enthralled with the place, its light, and its people.

John DiMartino at work in downtown Eastport last summer.

Curiously, his medium gave everything he shot a back-in-history quality, as well as reversing the subject before him.

Here’s what he did to me.

There’s no retouching of a tintype and no cropping, either. It’s all in the camera.
As a model, you have to hold the pose. And don’t blink for six or so seconds.

For more of his portfolios and other characters he captured in town, check out his website, johndimartinojr.com.

Hey, there, Dexter

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

ream the medicine cabinet, fill penny rolls for the coffee exchange, throw out old prescriptions and that old slide rule, already obsolete, then it’s off to the office supply store for carbon paper and metal bookends, return editions and LPs to the public library before the art stack goes to my ex-wife’s aunt where I’ll hear how her latest opening went screwy . back home, have a beer, phone my lover, take a call from the watch repairman warning if I don’t pick up her metronome they’ll sell it off, so once more out I go, how ’bout you?