FACING AN OBSESSIVE LOSS, A VOID TO FILL

November 15, 2018September 7, 2018 ~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

Central to my new novel, What’s Left, is a painful awareness that something crucial is missing from her life. In her case, it’s the physical loss of her father when she’s 11. For others, that sense could be prompted by a divorce – which also figures in my novel – or the rejection by a lover, as happens much earlier to her father. Or even drive one to suicide or self-destructive behavior. (No suicides in the story, in case you’re wondering.)

A comment by one woman whose father had died when she was about Cassia’s age prompted a key change in the voice of my novel in its ninth revision. “I still talk to him,” she said, nearly 40 years after his passing. That perspective opened a whole new dimension for me in developing Cassia and her relationships. It’s changed the voice and tone of the book, resulting in far more intimate dialogue, I’d say. Just take a look at the finished novel.

~*~

This didn’t quite fit on the platter:

What Baba and Manoula shared is an awareness of some loss or suffering the illusory surface we view might be masking. For Baba, the ultimate rejection by Diz opened a pit for him to fall into – nothing he’d assumed quite held, either, as far as he could see. (Never mind Nita’s role – he wanted a lover.) For Manoula, the fatal crash of her parents did something similar. From a Greek perspective, suicide makes perfect sense – as does, I might guess, sin. The convolutions only thicken the engagement with life itself.

~*~

Well, this was an early stab at the issue. In the finished novel, we never get around to asking if Manoula winds up frequently talking to her deceased parents, the way Cassia does throughout the story. Or whether her husband, Cassia’s Baba, somehow fills the void.

For me, the conversation’s often invoked certain long-gone lovers.

Do you find yourself talking to someone who’s not present? Have you ever felt a loss like Cassia’s? Has one of your close friends? What insight would you have?

~*~

Cassia’s family restaurant has me looking more closely at the ones around me. (North Berwick, Maine)

I STILL LIKE THE GREENHOUSE

November 4, 2018May 5, 2018 ~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

How far can a restaurant extend its business base? Its “brand,” as they say. This passage is prompted by meals at restaurants that expanded into new revenues, even though I cut this from the final version of my new novel, What’s Left:

Still, the playful concept feeds into what emerges around the corner as an elegant multi-purpose restaurant, plus a bookstore, art gallery, gift shop, and even a small greenhouse.

And that’s before the bakery or brewery comes into sight. For whatever reason, though, I shied away from launching Carmichael’s own brand of bottled products.

This has me thinking of a couple of specialty food markets on the tourist trail that include a cafe featuring their products. Turns the concept I’m discussing around, in effect.

The identity, of course, is built on something that makes us go gaga. Something that makes us want to return again and again.

What’s someplace that features your favorite comfort food or special treat? Would you wear a T-shirt proclaiming it? What do you think of restaurants that have a gift shop attached? Does it add or detract from the mission?

~*~

Bloomington, Indiana, by Marelbu via Wikimedia Commons.

Her hometown may have been something like this.

GOTTA LOVE THOSE APRONS

September 30, 2018May 5, 2018 ~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

In my new novel, What’s Left, there’s one thing you can say about aunt Yin: she adds another fashion touch to the family. I love the aprons she introduces to Cassia’s aunt Pia, Yin’s brother-in-law’s wife.

Oh, those two form quite a contrast!

And yet? They play off each other perfectly.

~*~

I’ve never been a suit-and-tie kind of guy, although I do have a wild tie collection for use, when needed. I’ve been more known for my Converse sneakers (before they were “in”), my Hawaiian shirts, or even my scarves back when. (Scarves were a writer’s thing in some circles.) These days it’s more likely to be turtlenecks, by the way, with my ponytail.

What’s your most distinctive fashion flair or statement? Something simple? Or do you like to go quite elaborate?

~*~

Traditional Greek Easter lamb and kokoretsi. I do wish the cook was wearing an apron. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

In the family, Cassia may have had food like this.

NORMAL? YOU MEAN LIKE FITTING IN?

September 20, 2018May 5, 2018 ~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Though she’s grown up in an extended bohemian family, Cassia’s able to cope with being different from many of her classmates – up to the point her father vanishes in an avalanche halfway around the globe. The other kids have fathers – that’s normal, or so she thinks. And then, in a flash, she and her home aren’t normal.

To see just how atypical they are, check out my new novel, What’s Left.

~*~

I just couldn’t pour this down the drain. It needed to simmer much more:

Her father was also a dreamer – or at least an idealist – a dimension that often inhibited him from asking hard questions or anticipating a full range of obstacles in a course of action. And he had an innate aversion to conflict.

What Thea Nita has confirmed is that Baba carried a sense of not quite belonging in the consumer culture of America. He had rightly concluded the ultimate flatness of his birthplace had nothing to do with its landscape and everything to do with a wider loss of stimulation, imagination, and inventive discovery – all further inhibited by social conformity rather than any acceptance of eccentricity. He recognized the potential for more, much more – something he encountered first in science and the fine arts and later in direct spiritual experience.

~*~

And then there’s her mother’s side, where they live – where he, too, has chosen to place his life.

Reflecting on the emotional cost of an upbringing like that in my own life has me realizing just how debilitating it has been. Like him, I found ways to escape and still somehow “fit in.”

Let’s get back to the basics. Would you say you’re “normal”? What would you like to change about yourself or your situation?

~*~

A large Queen Anne-style house with a distinctive witch’s hat tower something like this is the headquarters for Cassia’s extended family in my new novel, What’s Left. If only this one were pink, like hers. (Manchester, New Hampshire.)

SUGGESTING A CREATIVE TENSION BETWEEN INSPIRATION AND TECHNIQUE

September 16, 2018May 5, 2018 ~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

In another of the grandiose outbursts I surgically excised from the final version of my new novel, What’s Left, her uncle Dimitri and her father-to-be are engaged in a heated late-night debate.

While their dialogue springs out of a consideration of photography as a fine art, it could extended much broader – perhaps even onto the plates served in the family restaurant.

Here’s how it stood:
Any fine art of the future cannot be an end in itself. It must reflect a much more comprehensive spiritual current. It must instill an awareness of a community. You, of all people must have noticed the only thing the university can teach is technique. The profs can’t instill the leap of psychic thunder. They may encourage a few people to take up vital self-discipline and daily practice.

~*~

Surgically excised? Looks like I actually used one of Barney’s super-sharp chef knives!

The dynamic of formal teaching and learning ultimately fell outside the parameters of my new novel anyway. The important thing is that Cassia’s Baba finds a true home.

I’d say her uncle Barney, the chef, practices a fine art, in his own way, and he’s never attended college. He just has an active curiosity and a place to engage it. Maybe that’s why he and her Baba get along so easily.

Do you practice an art or a craft? Have you ever tried to define your “mission”? How do you explain your motivation or activity? Who gives you the most positive feedback?

~*~

This Victorian house, with its witch-hat tower and roof, was erected in Allentown, Pa., around 1891. It is shown here in 1926 during construction of the New Pergola Theater next door. The house was torn down in 1960, replaced by Van’s Diner, a glass and aluminum structure. (Photo via Wikimedia Commons.)

In my novel, the family home could have looked like this.

BE AMONG THE FIRST TO GET MY NEWEST NOVEL

September 15, 2018August 26, 2018 ~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Join with me in celebrating the publication today of my newest novel, Daffodil Uprising, at Smashwords.com.

A thorough reworking of my 2013 release, Daffodil Sunrise, it’s a tale of radical awakening in the 1960s now told from his daughter Cassia’s perspective a generation later. Her voice is snarkier than his, for starters, and she’s more willing to view the events with more grit than he had in the previous version. Oh, yes, the characters are definitely more colorful, vivid, and varied. Besides, there are now strands of Goth and the paranormal. What else?

You’ll have to see for yourself.

The ebook is available in the digital format of your choice at Smashwords and other independent digital retailers.

I’VE COME TO ENVY HER OUTSPOKENNESS

September 9, 2018September 1, 2018 ~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

As Cassia took on her own voice in the later revisions of What’s Left, she seemed to be dictating her lines, leaving me with the task of taking dictation. There were many times I could barely keep up.

It was a weird sensation. Wasn’t I supposed to be in charge here? It was like I was channeling her from somewhere in the spirit world.

Weirder yet was my envy for her ability to speak as openly and directly as she does. As caustically, too.

Well, she does bear a resemblance to an older woman I know of in the next town, one fondly called simply as Auntie with an outrageous fearlessness in speaking that way.

In contrast, here I am usually censoring myself or at least editing my utterances.

Of course, I also envy Cassia her close-knit family with its well-defined purpose and supportive network. Her Squad, especially, and the way it, too, evolved in the revisions.

And I am grateful for the ways she’s helped me recast the earlier novels leading up to her appearance. That, too, has felt weird, having her sit beside me, in effect, while we thoroughly reworked them. She trashed a lot of material, I’ll admit, and then added a lot more new stuff of her own.

This time, I was all ears.

Authors are advised to know their readers – their target audience – but this takes it one step further.

Any of you have a similar experience?

ALTERNATIVE ECONOMICS

August 26, 2018May 5, 2018 ~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

At one point in earlier versions of my new novel, What’s Left, I envisioned her family using their financial resources to drive an alternative local economy. The concept survives in the final version of the book, although this passage was boiled way down and many of the details changed:

Dimitri admits our enterprises will operate at the fringes of the economy.

He anticipates other extensions. We’ll encourage other friends to open a bakery. A guitar maker will join in a folk music shop. Rural skills like chair-caning and quilting will find a market here. Not everything we encourage will be quaint, as we’ll discover. Technology might include not just Baba’s darkroom and cameras but recording studios, computer designers, and solar entrepreneurs as well.

~*~

Or, as I noted in another now-deleted passage:

With patience, we’ll assure our dilapidated neighborhood just off campus undergoes rebirth.

~*~

Money issues – especially of an emotional, theological, and personal nature – are a topic I believe worthy of deep discussion. Just look to my Talking Money series archived at my Chicken Farmer I Still Love You blog for inspiration. Admittedly, they’re too big for this novel, though now I’m beginning to wonder about another, maybe as a series of telephone conversations? Please, somebody talk some sense into me!

(Oh, my, now I’m recalling that “financially secure” line in the old personals ads and still wondering exactly what the women meant by that – a guy who has a regular job with benefits or a seven-figure portfolio instead?)

Thinking of operating at the fringes of the larger economy, though, good things can happen. Where do you imagine an infusion of “greenback energy” might empower you or your friends to better the world as we know it?

~*~

The town of Fira on Santorini photographed from the roof of the Archipelagos Restaurant. (Photo by Rennett Stowe via Wikimedia Commons.)

Cassia’s roots included inspiration like this.

SEEMS SHE’S ALWAYS BEEN THERE

August 19, 2018May 5, 2018 ~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The evolution of my character Nita Zapitapoulos through my four Hippie Trails novels was a fascinating creative process. At first she was a faint reflection of a friend’s hot infatuation, and then she grew into something else.

In the storyline, she and a photography student meet through a mutual acquaintance. Nita soon takes him under her wing and, over time, becomes his guardian angel. By the time we get to my Hippie Love novel, she’s speaking almost exclusively in questions, a characteristic that continues in my newest novel, What’s Left.

~*~

Well, by the time I got to the final revision of my new novel, the cousins were too busy for this, too:

When it came to work, as kids, we weren’t always at the restaurant. Sometimes Thea Nita hired us to vacuum and dust her place and help her reorganize her shelves and drawers. Sometimes, when we were older, she’d even have us sanding and repainting her apartment. And that’s before she picked a few of us to help her with her newspaper column.

~*~

In the end, it wasn’t about money – it was about a deeper connection. She wasn’t shy about asking for help, either, but I don’t think she’d take advantage of anyone.

Have you ever had a friend or relative like Nita? How so?

~*~

Dan Kuzoff, a Macedonian immigrant, opened the Majestic Restaurant in Hamilton, Ontario, in 1933. It was a 150- to 200-seat operation serving good food at good prices. It was a middle of the road restaurant with no liquor license. Frequent diners there including politicians such as Lloyd Jackson and Vic Copps. As with all the other businesses in the area, the restaurant was expropriated for the construction of Jackson Square in 1969. Hamilton Public Library via Wikimedia Commons.

In my novel, the family restaurant could have been like this.

ONE KIND DEED INSPIRES ANOTHER

August 16, 2018May 5, 2018 ~ Jnana Hodson ~ 7 Comments

When she begins her investigation in my new novel, What’s Left, she may think her generation’s quite different from her father’s.

But her family does run a family restaurant, and that gives her a different insight:

We can always count on someone looking for a handout at the back door. We’re happy to oblige them. And they’re happy, too – the word spreads.

~*~

Restaurants are often staffed by an underworld of their own, or so I’m told. And some of the characters aren’t that far removed from the folks looking for a handout.

I’m surprised to see how many people in my own community remain invisible, especially when your eyes look instead to “normal” society.

Have you ever gone to a “soup kitchen” or charity food pantry? Have you ever worked in one? What was your experience?

~*~