Every writer has to face the question of knowing when a particular work is done, as in finished and ready to release.

The problem is that there’s always more that could be added or refined. Writing is, by definition, imperfect. In fact, the vaster the ambitions of a novel, for instance, the more imperfect it will be. Visit the critical examinations of the great novels Huckleberry Finn and Moby-Dick as prime examples.

The decision finally comes down to the line where the work releases the writer. The obsession burns out. You’re exhausted and feel you need to move on. You’ve said all you can say. You’ve discovered just about everything of relevance you can on the subject. For some writers, I suppose, it’s like the end of an affair.

For luckier ones, it’s when the editor or publisher demands the manuscript, ready or not.

~*~

I’ve previously posted on how my novels percolated over time. There was the sabbatical year I gave myself in Baltimore, where I lived off my savings and armed myself with a new personal computer with 5½-floppy disks (for you high-tech geeks with a knowledge of now ancient systems) as I poured myself into keyboarding rambling manuscripts in the search of publication.

When my savings ran out and I returned to the workaday world, I kept picking at those seminal drafts, usually on vacations and holidays. Other efforts at more marketable books also got attention and even a few nibbles, but in the end, none of them panned out. Working full-time, I simply didn’t have the additional open periods required for successful self-promotion.

I’m glad I didn’t wait until retirement, as so many others I’ve known did, to start writing those novels. The details and intensity would have evaporated. Instead, retirement played out in a different way and the novels did finally find publication.

My one fully new book was the one that grew into What’s Left, though it did start with piles of outtakes from the earlier novels as well as other material.

As I’ve also previously posted, it did eventually lead me to thoroughly revise and reissue those earlier novels.

The result is that I have eight books of fiction available today, and I am proud of them, even if they haven’t found wide readership or critical acclaim. Not that I wouldn’t welcome either.

~*~

I am struck by how much has changed for me in the seven years since then, some of it a consequence of the shift to digital writing and publishing. I don’t require as much space for files, for one thing, or for research materials and correspondence. What can be found online with little effort is amazing, as I discovered while writing Quaking Dover. I hate to admit I no longer keep a dictionary or thesaurus at hand.

Downsizing to our remote fishing village at the far end of Maine four years ago meant that I no longer needed a studio in the attic. A corner of a bedroom sufficed for some pretty heaving writing and revision.

It’s a far cry from the dream I once had of remodeling the top of the red barn into a year-‘round studio that included a custom-build semi-circular desk with me sitting in its center – something like the copy desks that were common to many newsrooms.

No need for that now, not even at newspapers.

~*~

The task for me now turns to cleaning out remaining files, both digital and physical, that are no longer needed. I don’t want to leave that mess to my wife and kids later.

One thing I’ll confess is that I doubt I have another novel up my proverbial sleave.

~*~

You can find my novels in the digital platform of your choice at Smashwords, the Apple Store, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Scribd, Sony’s Kobo, and other fine ebook retailers. They’re also available in paper and Kindle at Amazon, or you can ask your local library to obtain them.

I doubt that I’ll ever get back to New York City in my remaining years. Even Boston seems like a rarity, though far more likely. Yet let me repeat my fascinating with subway trains and their tunnels.

And Manhattan was, after all, the center of publishing, including best-selling novels.

Tackle that from the perspective of where I live now, where the year-round population would fit on a single subway train. Add the flush of summer people and vacationers or even the cruise ships that visit and it still wouldn’t add up much more. Some of the visiting cruise ships would be like three or four trains arriving and totally discharging for a stroll around the village. A hiccup, then, in comparison to a Manhattan underground station.

My playful novel Subway Visions, grew out of my encounters in the Big Apple way back when.

As I once noted, growing up in a Midwestern city that was too small for rail mass transit, or maybe it was from an intellectual awareness of underground as a conduit of counterculture and spiritual wisdom, subways came to define a Big City for me and to symbolize the range of possibilities present therein. A subway transit system separates cosmopolitan from lesser cities. The trains are filled with real people – a cross-section of the populace between many diverse origins and destinations. As an underground, subways also present counterculture and surrealistic currents many of the riders fail to consider. Here, then, were snapshots from that route.

Later, with my wife and kids, came our outings in Boston and its MBTA.

Or my favorite Dover lifeguard’s revulsion and disgust after relocating to Beantown for college and having a drunken passenger vomit on her sandals on a hot, crowded platform.

So much for my perception of a carnival air.

Still, I think of subways the way I think of rollercoasters, even with our small downtown of boutiques, less pressured than the subway station settings of much of Boston.

Just how do those cruise ship passengers view our village, anyway?

You can find Subway Visions in the digital platform of your choice at Smashwords, the Apple Store, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Scribd, Sony’s Kobo, and other fine ebook retailers. It’s also available in paper and Kindle at Amazon, or you can ask your local library to obtain it.

Working in the thralls of daily newspaper journalism in the heartland was not my dream. Literary fame was. Of the critically acclaimed sort, as if bestseller status would follow.

Whoa, expressing that so boldly feels harsh, yet true. Even so, I did plod away on both fronts.

And now? I’m a survivor wondering what would have resulted if I had narrowed my focus.

I had no idea how crassly market-driven the shrinking book-publishing world was. So much for idealism.

~*~

Still, I pursued, working on my own into the wee hours.

These days, I have the luxury of revisiting my earlier work and wondering just who wrote it. The pages are so unlike what I’d venture today – wilder, for sure, and more profuse, often leading to an Oh-Wow! of admiration. The dross, fortunately, has been stripped away.

That’s been my reaction in presentations at our monthly open mic night here in town even when I’ve veered toward the edge of embarrassment yet still being warmly applauded.

Passages in both my prose and poetry make references I no longer understand but trust to leave untouched, perhaps for others to reconnect.

Writing? It’s like talking to yourself, ‘cept sometimes you have to get up to allow the rest of you to reply.

~*~

Another recent experience has come in assisting a friend to create a remarkable novel, one he finally presented to a literary agent whose thoughtful response seemed quaint, actually – the perspectives of three people in the agency, even though no. Somebody actually has time these days for such reflection?

It really did feel like an earlier era. I was rather envious.

~*~

I’m also recalling another experience after I had returned “back east” and was reading an essay about Snyder, Whalen, and Kerouac in the North Cascades, I felt sharp pain, knowing the lookout stations and High Cascades were so far behind me and the rest of my generation.

~*~

Add to that the fear of being discovered once your early book approaches publication. How strong are you in its potential storm?

Except, that you instead encounter indifference.

~*~

It can lead to bitterness, considering all the years and lost potential.

As for inscriptions at book signings?

Keep the faith!

Share your Light, too!

That image seems especially appropriate as we celebrate the appearance today of my newest collection of poems, Ocean Motion, now available in the ebook platform of your choice. Yes, let’s envision a book floating on the water like a boat.

For much of the first half of my life, the concept of an ocean was incomprehensible, even more so than mountains.

As I’ve noted earlier, I grew up far from the seashore or even craggy ranges like the Rockies or Alps. The Great Smokey and other Southern Appalachian glories were a bit closer. I didn’t encounter the ocean until I’d reached adolescence and we visited Florida on a camping trip with some of Dad’s old Army Air Force buddies. I next saw surf my senior year of college, with my then-girlfriend and her parents. From there, my encounters went to a few times on the Staten Island ferry or other points in New York City or Long Island, and then the ferry rides in Washington state, a few days camping along the Pacific (recorded in my American Olympus book), a jaunt along the Oregon coast, and then Maryland, New Jersey, and ultimately New England, plus a few returns to the Gulf Coast of Florida.

In all of those, I faced an enigma, a recognition that I didn’t quite grasp its appeal. Something was missing. It was like a gray Lake Erie looming with whitecaps I had seen around age seven, except that there was something else called tides. It was water with nothing else but sky on the horizon.

The pace of my encounters picked up, especially once I moved to New England, nearly half of my life ago now. Having a boss who owned a 32-foot sailboat fostered some of that, especially when we ventured forth once or twice each summer from Newburyport, Massachusetts, or once from Portsmouth, New Hampshire – both notoriously treacherous harbors.

As I describe in one poem, my first time of being in a sailboat was also my first time out on the Atlantic and my first time of seeing whales (including a minke that surfaced only feet away from me) and my first time of setting foot on an island, one that was now a Unitarian and Congregationalist churches summer retreat.

Those experiences all infuse these poems.

Moving to Dover, as I remarried, picked up the pace. The tides reached downtown, after all, and Great Bay along one side. Plus, with the kids, we got to visit Maine beaches and Cape Cod at their grandfather’s. And later, picking up one after her work at a coastal motel, I had repeated exposures to the ocean at midnight, another world altogether. I wouldn’t say it was romantic, even with a full moon.

The resulting poems eventually appeared in small-press literary venues around the globe as well as a series of PDF chapbooks at Thistle Finch editions.

As these poems demonstrate, the more I’ve gotten to know ocean as the North Atlantic along New England, the more in awe I am. Other writers can express the ocean from their own locale and nuances.

Still, I have come to love lighthouses and do treasure opportunities to climb up within them to savor the view from the top. But don’t get too romantic, it was a harsh, often dangerous, life for the keeper and his family. I hope these poems reflect that reality and more.

Do note that New England thrived on seafaring, designing and building distinguished vessels along its forested shores and sailing them around the globe to Asia and elsewhere and then back or out to hunt whales. The memories are imprinted in the muscle and soul of its people.

Remember, tides rise and fall dramatically in New England. You learn to be alert, even wary. And, do note, I’ve learned so much more since I first expressed that.

One of the ocean chapbooks included in the final collection was titled “Land Overlaps Sea,” an outlook that still impresses me, considering that it’s actually the other way around. The poems in the collection reflect places close to where I lived at the time and ways they interact with the Atlantic. It has been quite instructive over the years, even for an old landlubber like me.

Meanwhile, bits of sea shanties – the chanted or sung work ditties of sailors over the years – muffled and muted by the wind, flit through background, even if you don’t quite catch their words.

While the poems reflect a period of my life before moving to a remote fishing village at the far end of Maine, what I’ve encountered since confirms my impressions.

Maritime historian and sea chanter Stephen Sanfilippo and his wife, Susan, have definitely added much to my comprehension, as have my new friend, Captain Robert J. Peacock, and my times out on the waters, especially week-long cruises aboard the historic schooner Lewis R. French, as you’ve been seeing here.

~*~

So here we are, with my thought that each new volume is akin to the space within a vessel:

a book launch
rather than release

BOOK
BOAT

the connection floats for me
my experience on the water flows everywhere

For my poems of the sea, check out Ocean Motion at Smashwords.com. You can find also find it at the Apple Store, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Scribd, Sony’s Kobo, and other fine ebook retailers. Or ask your public library to obtain it.

After a couple dozen or so years that have been focused largely in the revision of fiction and then the roots of Dover Quaker Friends Meeting, itself a challenge to conventional New England history, I’ve found myself revisiting my trove of poetry.

It’s part of a big cleanup project that’s accompanying our downsizing move from New Hampshire to the far end of Maine, and I’m at a point of trying to discard everything I no longer need and put in order anything else I feel is of value.

As a result, several central full-length collections that had been presented piecemeal as chapbooks at my Thistle Finch editions blog are now released as ebooks at Smashwords.com and its affiliated digital bookstores. You’ll be hearing more about those as the year progresses.

In their place in the Thistle Finch lineup are new chapbooks of sets of my more recent poems, meaning ones from this century, though their origins go back further.

The task has come as a revelation, watching the evolution in my style and underlying voice. Each stage, reflecting geographical moves in my life and the upheavals of my closest relationships, edged me away from narrative-driven content to increasingly image and confetti centered clusters. Don’t ask me to explain them, they just are, whatever.

For me, poetry is a kind of mysticism – one foot in the inexplicable wondrous, the other in everyday life. Prose, of course, is more secular.

My newly released chapbook Aquarian Leap leads off the new run at Thistle Finch. Frankly, looking back over these, I’m not sure what to make of them other than the wild energy they inhabit. I certainly wouldn’t – or couldn’t – draft them today.

These poems, in some manner, still reflect the working of my multi-layered, mercurial thought process. (Never mind my heart, all the more elusive and often contradictory!) I love those lucid moments – sharp, brief – when everything, including thought and emotion, is centered, full, and stilled. Rarely, however, does my intellect flow in such a focused narrative. That requires more effort.

More typically, it flashes on something and then leaps to another, seemingly miles away. Some say this is characteristic of my natal sun sign. That is to say, the typical Aquarian will hear one subject and shuffle through fifty-two logical connections in a flash, and then blurt out something that will leave everyone else in the room wondering, “Just where did that come from?” (Except, perhaps, for another Aquarian, to whom it will seem perfectly logical.)

Often, my writing was constructed and amplified and then distilled from notes, many of them scratched out on a daily commute or on a hike in the woods, or sometimes even a twist while journaling. Curiously, when I assembled these into collage-poems, I was conscious of an underlying logic. That is, many snippets did not fit the emerging sense and must be laid aside. But a few others did, leading to what I hope is an internal thesis/antithesis/synthesis that’s ultimately beyond any surface or attempted cleverness. I prefer for my work to discover and uncover rather than invent.

The result in this set and a few ahead feels more like confetti. So there!

Something similar happens in disciplined meditation, such as traditional Quaker worship, where routine thoughts are patiently laid aside while one’s awareness clears and sinks to a more intuitive and integrated state. Perhaps some of that also infects these pieces.

I should confess to a few works by two poets, G.P. Scratz and Aram Saroyan, I’ve long admired, poems that defy explication or understanding yet spring from the intuitive burst that takes us beyond apparent meaning – and closer to a jewel-like condition.

Or even the freedom of dancing, which I find in a similar vein in the work of Philip Whalen, especially.

Consider the linguist’s Wolves and Consonants. (My reading of “Vowels” in a book title my elder daughter was reading.)

The growling of wolves adds a whole new way of following the Voice here.

As for any effort to define poetry itself? I guess I prefer the wilder side. Go figure.

You can find Aquarian Leap at Thistle Finch editions.