thinking the cleaner bag full I discovered the rubber drive belt had snapped meaning a trip to the shop and the next day was Sunday as she had left it all the same, dust and sweep, wet mop, and rinse, move tall stacks about, sort items but what if we don’t? refill the trash can, love, after all, would expose this . honestly I won’t quit so simply whatever past is mine . pay dearly, of course, for these revelations. so make room for more labor . brush and chop, returning to the same spot rather than scurry onward
Category: Arts & Letters
It’s the book I didn’t want to write, but it wouldn’t let go
I thought we Dover Quakers – or more formally Friends – had our long history covered. I had even helped Silas Weeks, way back, in some of his research for his definitive volume on New England Quaker meetinghouses and burial grounds.
Frankly, after revising and republishing seven novels after the appearance of my eighth, I wanted a break.
A big break.
These are supposed to be my retirement years, OK? Admittedly, I had long imagined devoting myself to the writing as a big part of that dream, but really!
But then a casual request for an overview of Dover Friends history changed everything. It came indirectly, through someone in another denomination who was active in our Sanctuary movement. But then, going back through my filing drawers, I came up empty – couldn’t even find my folders of notes. What we did have was mostly about our three meetinghouses over the years – especially the structure where we’ve worshiped since 1768 – along with a few prominent events.
This left me unsettled.
Unlike many other denominations, the Society of Friends, or Quakers, is first and foremost about its members. Our definition of church is the body of believers – not the building or the polity and definitely not the ordained clergy. It’s why we call our building a meetinghouse and why we organize as Meetings, reflecting the times and ways our church-people come together. Church can happen whenever and wherever we are, even over dinner in our homes or chance encounters on the street or in the midst of social activism. And vitally it’s not just us – we’re meeting God, too.
~*~
WHAT NEEDED TO BE TOLD was the lives of the individuals and families who were the essence of one of the oldest Quaker Meetings in the world.
I resisted as long as I could but finally succumbed. Who were they? Why were they so willing to risk severe punishment and persecution imposed by the Puritan authorities? And in the face of that, how and why did a third of Dover’s population quickly become Quaker? And several generations later, start fading away?
With the 400th anniversary of the settling of Dover – and thus New Hampshire, too – coming up next year, the timing for our side of the history felt right.
Now that the book’s written and revised, I’ll be sharing some of my findings with you as well as news of publication itself as that nears.
~*~
WHAT EMERGED IS A PARTIAL HISTORY, as in partisan, with my focus on a radical religious subculture that thrived in a unique, out-of-the-way, locale. Partial, as well, to the independent streak of New Hampshire against more powerful Massachusetts authorities to the south. Partial even in being incomplete as well as lacking footnotes, and not even the work of a professionally trained historian.
The story is also partial in being biased toward a sequence of unusual, sometimes roughhewn, figures and their families – not all of them Quaker – and inclined especially toward the narrative they shape.
The roots, as you’ll see, arise in the very beginning of English settlement. Forget what you’ve assumed about New England before Paul Revere and Sam Adams and the American Revolution and Boston as the Hub of the Universe.
A lot had already happened before the first Puritans sailed into Boston Harbor. Let’s look instead to Dover, which lays claim to being the seventh-oldest continually inhabited European settlement in the United States.
In the standard telling of the founding of today’s city of Dover, New Hampshire, two brothers arrived from England in the spring of 1623 and settled at the mouth of Great Bay on the Piscataqua River, upstream from the Atlantic Ocean. The brothers were fishmongers, members of one of the oldest and wealthiest guilds, or great companies, of London.
Except, as it turns out, one of the brothers didn’t arrive until a few years later.
Instead, the cofounder of the new settlement was a fishmonger apprentice who would be an important figure in the early years of the colony.
~*~
YOU’LL PROBABLY BY AS SURPRISED by this alternative take on New England history as I’ve been. It’s not just Quakers. There’s much more to New England’s past than a Thanksgiving dinner and a riotous tea party followed by a midnight ride and the shot heard ’round the world or even the notorious witch trials.
Here at the Barn, you’ll definitely be hearing a lot more about this big project through the coming year. Believe me, some of the findings will be startling.
My work, as I see it
highly compressed
economy of expression
vivid imagery
an acknowledgement of mystery of the universal seed in the particular
if only I’d been able to uphold it in the newsroom
~*~
Yes, clean lines, stripped-down materials, and elegant craftsmanship meeting a love of the baroque in a quirky, inimitable style
Which way, the music or dance?
at last, reducing the list drawn into this homestead with the ash of that upbeat tone of previous years, a forced smile, wishful thinking, or pure resolve no longer the Yule Letter, high school classmates, even college . ashram . Binghamton or teachers . other writers . Iowa. Western Reserve . Baltimore . former loves . Old Order elders . what do these people mean now in context? So, sincerely
Not to get too sentimental, but …
What is life without memories?
The most tragic part of Alzheimer’s is what happens when one crosses that threshold and leaves the connecting memories behind.
Quite simply, stories – and storytelling, one way or another – are essential. Stories are, after all, ultimately memories within human existence, no matter how fanciful or mythical.
How else do we remember where we are in the universe? Or even why?
There are good reasons we swap stories, from pillow talk on.
Under cardboard
still wondering why I’m amazed what one discovers in each move, why, unpacking is almost like Christmas, even the delights of discovering the workings of another’s mind, like Evelyn’s neat way of wrapping electrical cords to appliances (Mennonite heritage appears in curious ways) moving forward, rather than sideways or backwards on ice, your friend who made it thus far and nothing much broke
Return to sender
still owe you that tango but don’t know if you were a better cartoonist than editor or publisher all we have is that moment of dancing between the line we’ve drawn on the beach defying the tide where we swim more freely than birds in flight, then before the last note Zippers
Manifesto or perchance confession
Fellow workers in the field know the practice is not easy. They notice movements and deft accomplishments as well as slips and defects the wider public doesn’t. They’re also rarely moved by easy though flashy flourishes and scorn the con-artist and cheat.
I’m not referring solely to other writers or artists, either. Watch a gymnast evaluate a meet or a figure-skater a competition. Even a software writer or electrician. Or a surgical nurse.
That said, when I’m drafting and revising intensely, I’m also more appreciative of qualities in the writing of others. At the best is an admiration of something I lack, a time for humility and gratitude rather than jealousy or envy.
It’s work, after all. Which is why published pages are called “works.”
Given a choice, the rational decision would be to browse through great pages already given to us by others. Browse, as sheep or cattle – OK, I joke, but the fact is I seldom find what most calls me.
Writing is work, especially when you’re already working a regular full-time job somewhere else. Why else where there those periods in my life where I rose at four a.m. to write and revise before going in to the office? How many others do likewise? At what personal cost to their lives and growth?
Real work, I’ll contend, is the practice of being fully alive. Aware. Totally there, at times.
Some people charge up and then release it in an extended explosion, as Kerouac did in his fiction.
I, in contrast, see it as a balance, between inspiration – breath within – and exhalation – the atmosphere without.
Creativity? No, God creates.
Man discovers, cultivates, nurtures, at best.
Practicing an art (and likely much more) means wrestling with power – including, in the Apostle Paul’s phrase, the “powers and principalities.” Powers of destruction, on one hand, and sustenance, on the other. Destruction that can, as seen too many times, include the artist. Hence, the fascination with Faust. With madness. Alcoholism. And on.
Self-absorption and inflated self-importance. We hazard much, often without the slightest awareness of the risks afoot. In Satan’s dominion over “the world,” which is the realm of the arts, or in Eastern thought, the traps of Maya, that spider web of worldly attraction and deadly illusion. Either way, cause to be wary.
~*~
Self-discipline, route to true freedom, strips away false attachments, barriers, chaff.
Writing involves observing my own shifting mind while opening to manifold living energies around me. It means simplifying, following unexpected leadings and openings, sometimes to dead ends, other times to unanticipated ranges.
~*~
Some of my fellowship at the time would have argued that’s not where I should be. Some were praying for me through this period. The kind of work that once would have had me read out of Meeting. Is this acceptable activity for a free Gospel minister? All I can do is explore the Truth given to me.
“We Quakers read only true things.” Distractions from worship? Traps of the flesh? So where does fiction fall?
The piece goes its own way: a living organism: readers, editors see it differently from you. What you would cut they love. What you love they see as sore thumb.
Versus becoming so rarified we lose all sense of joy and delight. The danger of Plainness or strictness, that it suffocates personality, makes us so humiliated we cannot move forward in the Holy Spirit to perform bold action.
~*~
My poetry has been influenced by the craft of headline writing and news reporting more than I care to admit. The trade paid the rent, provided a point of resistance in my personal endeavors. The Political Science Fiction I once envisioned has since come together in real history as a horrid reality.
Not that we’re anywhere near done yet.
How do you doodle?
Some of my Kinisi postings feel to me like mathematical equations, with words instead of symbols.
Not that I could say what they “mean.”
Fits a lot of lit or math, for that matter. A poem or an equation simply works – or doesn’t – while dwelling within its own beauty. Both are flights of imagination plus a little doodling. Some of these could even be prompts for a longer work or serve as a title.
What ways does your mind wander … playfully?
Do we see the sound of the ringing bell in our ear?
guys generally do the old zip in, zip out, knowing what we want before setting forth, grab only that, where most women look and look and look maybe even find a great bargain so the rare day I actually enjoyed being waited on, asking questions, getting directions from clerks who sensed they weren’t even going to get any income from me but what the heck, gave them something to do and someday I might even be back even though I didn’t find that much of what I was looking for who knows . authentic India incense (sweeter, more potent than the others), so it’s grins
Jnana's Red Barn 