Category: Personal Journey

The DLQ adds up

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The Q in my DLQ acronym doesn’t stand for Quaker, though it’s not that far off, either. Instead, it’s from Dedicated Laborious Quest, a concept I constructed from Gary Snyder’s Real Work, or life mission. It usually differs from daily employment or a career. Maybe the middle term should have been “labor-intense” or “labor-filled,” we can discuss the subtleties later.

As poet Donald Hall pointed out in his memoir Life Work, our labor falls into three categories: jobs, which we do to earn money; chores, necessary tasks that pay nothing; and work, which can be energizing. In his own case, he realized that when your work coincides with a job, life’s good. For most of us, work is a money-losing activity. More of his thinking along those lines could be found in the Talking Money category at my Chicken Farmer I Still Love You blog.

In one draft of what would become my novel Nearly Canaan, DLQ was the core of Jaya or her earlier figure’s life, a blend of yoga spirituality (only at that point it was Sufi), an arts engagement, and the altruism of her career. It also came to reflect Kenzie’s journey in the hippie stories, though not so overtly.

It may even be an expression of an individual’s magnetic center in the esoteric philosophy of P.D. Ouspensky. If I interpret this correctly, you have to have something you do with a sustained passion, such as an art or a sport, something that requires daily practice and discipline. Without that foundation, you cannot advance spiritually. Checking up on that, I’m seeing a whole literature on magnetic center in mechanical physics, making me wonder if it’s applicable to Ouspensky’s metaphor, if at all.

This goal isn’t for everyone. As the Bhagavad Gita says, only one in a thousand – or maybe one in a million – pursues it, and out of that, only one in a thousand – or a million – arrives at the summit.

Whatever it is, the yogis at the ashram, Kenzie and his Buddhist buddies, and Jaya all craved it.

~*~

The practice of writing is a big part of my own DLQ, but for a long time I felt vaguely guilty about the amount of time I devoted to it, as if it was a selfish endeavor when I should have been doing something more productive or even more worthwhile. Only after the prayer workshop at New England Yearly Meeting of Friends that one summer, when I was told that writing was a spiritual gift I needed to nurture, did I feel the permission to type away as needed.

My job at the time had me on a four-day workweek, which gave me a three-day weekend after a double-shift on Saturday. Following a suggestion from the workshop, I dedicated one day a week, usually Tuesday, to my writing and revision efforts.

It didn’t seem like that much, frankly, but looking back, I now see that added up to ten weeks a year, plus another two or so of my vacations. For perspective, consider how many people manage to draft a full novel in the month of November as part of the NaNoWriMo challenge.

For me, that time was allocated among fiction, poetry, and nonfiction projects – one of them resulted what became the Talking Money series at the Chicken Farmer blog after a book publisher backed away when a potential coauthor with financial counseling creds failed to mesh into the proposal. Submissions and queries also occupied some of that time.

~*~

It was also time taken away from other parts of my life: from my spouse or significant other, family, travel, hiking or camping, physical exercise, service on city council or a school board, friendships. Even reading got slighted.

From another perspective, I could have devoted it to an overtime shift every week, at time-and-a-half pay, which would have more than covered the mortgage.

~*~

What becomes apparent to me in these reflections is that the DLQ was essential for my sanity. My moves across the country and, for a while, up the management ladder, kept uprooting me, leaving much uncompleted in each place or, at a gut level, undigested. Writing was not only a means of recording highlights and depths before I lost them but also of releasing and letting go of self-imposed obligations to my past, freeing me to more openly face the present.

Letters from a retired hippie

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

I’m sorry about what you’re inheriting. I’m sorry about the parts we’ve messed up.

It’s not all our fault. We were too trusting, for one thing. And so green, as in naive.

Looking around, we see too many old losers and the sense of hippie as essentially a girl thing.

A sense of betrayal, futility.

It was a youth movement. That’s what you need to know about it.

As for the other options?

A schooner is not a sloop, pay attention

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

A sloop has only one mast, for starters.

There’s a whole new vocabulary to learn.

It’s a way of looking through the eyes of others.

Those things on the ropes, er, lines are called baggy wrinkles. They protect the lines and sheets, i.e. sails, from harmful rubbing. That is, they’re a furry cover for rope sphering.

Deck prism is another term. It’s a small round window. Here’s how it looked from my bunk. Overhead, people were walking on it.

Hatch is the opening between the deck and the hold below. This one connects by a ladder (not stairs) to cabins (aka staterooms).

Another leads to the galley, which includes what others would call a kitchen.

How ‘Pit-a-Pat High Jinks’ came into play

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Indiana wasn’t the only thing bogging down my original subway manuscript. The dude’s life off in the countryside after college was another big complication.

Well, that and my grounding as a journalist, meaning focusing on facts as I observed them, in contrast to writing as a novelist, meaning putting feelings and some imagination first.

Head for the hills, then, as I did by default to upstate New York. I didn’t get there quite as I describe Kenzie’s journey, but the route wasn’t that far off, either. In the story, I’ve kept the location rather vague. It could as easily be pockets of western Connecticut or the Berkshires in Massachusetts or even southern Vermont. Let them blend together.

I was pretty lost in my first year-and-a-half after college, the period leading up to my embrace of yoga. It was a wild ride for me, at the margin of general society; my highs punctuated deep depression. Most of my friends – including housemates and girlfriends – were from The City or its wider orb, and that included short trips with them when my work schedule permitted. (I rarely had two days off in a row, much less three.) And, my, was I green.

For much of that period, my own journalism slash writing career and dreams were going nowhere and paid next to nothing. More troubling, my love life was non-existent, even considering how I had a housemate who came back every night with a different bedmate, all of them delectable in my sight. What was my problem? What was wrong with me? What was I missing?

And then I found yoga and everything changed. Even the romance.

What could possibly be wrong with that story?

Well, it had fed into Subway Hitchhikers, but most of what I had drafted there was eventually excised to focus on the urban dimension of the story.

~*~

During this period, my social life revolved around two locations.

The first was a once luxurious apartment building turned slum at the edge of downtown. I later moved it to Daffodil along the Ohio River far to the west for the college-years novel. Well, many but not all of the renters were college students.

The second encampment was what many people would consider a hippie commune out in the hills, a very rundown farm high in the hillsides along the state line. As I explain in what’s now Pit-a-Pat High Jinks, we shared the expenses but not our incomes. I now think there were some freeloaders anyway.

Both dwellings, from what I see in satellite photos, have been torn down.

And I still believe my two-ring circus there (three, if you include the newspaper where I was employed) was a richer source of characters than, say, Bonanza or the Friends sitcom.

~*~

I’ll have to revisit my journals for clues about how the lode from this period evolved during revisions. When I heard about Smashwords a dozen years after the subway novel had been published, I must have already had two versions of the experience in hand, both drawn from the earlier outtakes augmented by journal entries and correspondence.

They differed sharply in tone and focus.

Hippie Drum was closer to a memoir that focused on the general hippie scene around me. Hippie Love paralleled the chronology but focused on its erotic encounters, with the added twist that our protagonist had far more success in the love department. One was gritty; the other, free-wheelin’ trippy.

In these parallel accounts of the same story line, the first focused on Kenzie’s overall adjustments to being out on his own, adapting to the workplace and his new housemates and a wider underground, freaky community. He was desperate for love but rarely connected. Frankly, much of the hippie life was drab and impoverished. The other, an R- or X-rated version, was more fanciful, examining what could have been if he had possessed a bit more finesse. Both books ended at the same point.

Making sense of what happened in my outwardly dull life in goofy counter-culture times included what happened out in the sticks were nobody seemed to be looking, that is, where I had landed or even taken refuge. It was just up the road from Woodstock, only on the far side of the Big Apple.

~*~

I originally envisioned the two books kind of like the three-show play The Norman Conquests, where a line of conversation starts in one room and of finishes a night or two later on the other side of door he had passed through. Not that I was that meticulous in my crafting. I was just trying to run with the material at hand.

Alas, the “love” book was wisely deemed “adult” content, invisible unless you checked your filter.

~*~

As for related input? Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers, Jack Kerouac’s spree narratives, Anais Nin’s sexual frontiers, Robert Crumb’s stoned cartoons, and Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant” can be seen as touchstones for what finally came back together as a single volume, Pit-a-Pat High Jinks, in its current incarnation. There may even be some Hunter Thompson in the mix.

~*~

Hippie Drum was the first book I published at Smashwords.

Hippie Love came out the next month.

Both, in the autumn of 2013.

I do love daffodils, by the way

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Having Subway Hitchhikers come out first did throw a ringer into the sequence of what would emerge as a kind of series. For one thing, it was out of print when the ebooks came along.

For another, I needed to tone down some of the hippie excesses.

As I’ve said, it started out as a nice, thin book. I completed the first draft shortly after leaving the ashram. But somehow, before I could land a publisher, it started growing. And growing. It gained a sizable back story as well as a parallel out-in-the-sticks hippie existence.

Getting to what would be published as Daffodil Sunrise leaves me in somewhat of a fog. Chronologically, it’s the earliest part of the story, detailing the transformation of a straight young photographer from Iowa into a hippie on a state university in Daffodil, Indiana. OK, no secret, it’s an abstraction of Bloomington and Indiana University, embodied the emergence of the character who started out as Duma Luma but now goes by Kenzie.

From what I’ve seen, very little fiction has been published about today’s American Midwest, at least in contrast to Manhattan or Los Angeles or even the South. Who’s speaking up for that part of the country, relating a viewpoint its natives might feel is theirs? It is vastly misunderstood.

Within that, Indiana stands as a crossroads, one with a strong Southern influence as well. I’ll argue it’s even a kind of symbol of middle America. It’s the only Midwestern state, by the way, not to carry a Native name but rather the generic Indian-a. It also is largely farmland with big cities at its corners: Chicago, Detroit, and Cincinnati.

Kurt Vonnegut strongly resonated with me as a missing voice, a straightforward one with biting humor. As I turned to drafting and revising, he definitely felt like a clarion in the wilderness. Especially his novel, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. Do I have do explain what growing up as a Goldwater Republican was like?

To get closer to the hippie vibe, add Tom Wolfe, definitely not a hippie but someone I first read when he was a columnist for the New York Herald Tribune, my favorite newspaper of all time. His supercharged prose fit the sensation of the surreal and vibrant new world the Revolution of Peace & Love was unleashing. Or so we thought.

Other influences I might throw in are Abby Hoffman’s Steal This Book, though I didn’t buy any of it, or Jerry Rubin’s political entreaties, or Herman Hesse’s shining ideals. As for love, though? I’m drawing a blank. At some point Richard Farina’s Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me caught my fancy, along with Thomas Pyncheon’s V, which finally made sense under an altered state of mind.

Perhaps Genji and Monkey, too?

Bloomington was seen as a wild and somewhat threatening place throughout the rest of the state, yet seemed to be so backward compared to, say Yellow Springs and Antioch, which in turn would seem so far behind the radical curve once I got to the East Coast.

I didn’t want to see any of what I was writing as a rite-of-passage tale, not even for an entire generation of my contemporaries in a Vietnam era. And yet?

I wasn’t seeing the experience, mine or that of those around me, anywhere in the public eye. What was appearing in the spotlight was San Francisco, the Manson cult, the Kent State shootings, and the later circle that abducted heiress Patty Hearst, which originated in Bloomington after I left.

Activist Saul Alinsky, among others, was right in his criticism of hippie political and social action, by the way.

Back to my story. What we think of as the hippie movement really revolved around university campuses. Think about that. It was no longer destitute runaways in San Francisco but legions in enclaves around the country.

Here I was, writing furiously in 1986-87, wondering where it had all gone. Or, I should say, is going.

The big issues still remain, bigger than ever, from climate catastrophe on down.

How could we have gotten this so wrong?

Well, Flower Power did have a lasting impact, though it’s largely taken for granted. The best I could hope for, then, is a reminder or better yet, to rekindle the flame in a younger generation.

Food along the way

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Every night, the canopy is spread
every morning, stowed away

how he manages a wood cookstove
eludes me
the galley’s tight and must be a hot space
on a hot or humid day
regardless, he starts at 3 a.m.

and there’s coffee by 6:30 all the same

 

blueberry pancakes, slice of melon
cod chowder, a biscuit
roasted chicken drumstick, asparagus,
a risotto, Boston cream cake

lunch an excellent beef stew
and a great, crunchy sourdough bread

feeling like I’ve been here forever
in a good way
knowing it’s rarely this perfect

“no matter how much I eat
I keep losing weight on this ship”
sez male crew member

the cook’s apron
a variation on his overalls

the cook never learned wood-stove cookery
in culinary school
‘cuz he never attended one

in lighting a cook fire
the secret’s you have to stack
the firewood in tight

the galley’s quite crowded

the French burns four cords in a season in summer

Zen temple abbot and head cook
two most important personages

the cook also helps with the crew
mans an oar
hauls line, as needed

Breaking my literary logjam was a godsend

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

For readers and for writers, the emergence of Smashwords.com revolutionized the publishing world. It also made self-publishing a much less risky investment for those of us who are indy authors, and let readers purchase books by unknown writers at low cost. It consolidated the platforms so readers of Nook or iPhones could read the same offerings as those coming from Kindle. It also offered an alternative to Amazon, which countered with Kindle Direct Publishing, meaning we could appear in both venues. Real competition can be a good thing, right? Essentially, it’s free for those who follow a few formatting guidelines and can design our own covers.

Since I’ve posted previously about the pros and cons of digital books versus paper, both for readers and for writers, I’ll focus today on my personal reflections on the development.

Getting my books “out there,” rather than collecting dust in a filing cabinet, provided a huge emotional relief. Twenty-three years had passed between the publication of Subway Hitchhikers and my Smashwords debut. And now the novels were available at the Apple Store, Barnes & Nobel, and other ebook retailers, as well as public libraries.

First out of the gate was Hippie Drum, drawn from my subway story outtakes, at the end of May 2013.

At the beginning of September came Hippie Love, using other outakes, and then Ashram in October, reissuing what had been Adventures on a Yoga Farm.

Daffodil Sunrise, developing more of the subway story outtakes, appeared in November.

Subway Hitchhikers was republished in January 2014.

So I had something along the lines of Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet before the public or maybe a string of Jack Kerouac tales.

I then turned to my other big pile of drafting to extract Promise, which appeared in April. I intended to follow that one with two related novels, but the royalties weren’t covering the cost of having a designer create fronts for those volumes. Instead, Peel (as in apple) and St. Helens in the Mix would eventually appear as free PDFs at my Thistle Finch imprint.

That left Hometown News, my newspaper-based novel, for September release.

Getting noticed, however, was a different matter. Nobody was reviewing digital editions, or at least nobody of note. You can’t sign copies at readings or bookstores, either. What was left was largely social media.

And that’s where it stood until the beginning of 2018, when What’s Left joined the lineup. I’ll tell you more about that one and its impact on the earlier volumes in an upcoming post.

As for marketing and self-promotion? It’s still an uphill struggle. Do most users of Facebook even buy books?