Category: Personal Journey

Write about what you know, but best if it leads into what you don’t know

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

I’ve spent a lifetime writing – well, from my senior year in high school on.

I rather fell into a career as a newspaper journalist who worked mostly on the copy desk or a few steps beyond, with titles like news editor, lifestyles editor, makeup man (working closely with the production crew in what was called the back shop or, more politely, composing room).

My real dream was to have something more permanent as my legacy – books with my name on the cover and the spine. The fact was that as much as journalism engaged me, I yearned for a bigger picture than the daily deadlines usually reflected.

And so I spent much of my “free time” writing things that would never appear in a newspaper – poetry and fiction, especially, or even lengthy letters to friends and other writers. And, more recently, there’s been the blogging, which I hope you’ve been following.

Many of those years I despaired that my “serious” work would never appear as printed books, especially once I discovered how much effort was required to land even one poem in a small-press literary journal.

The persistence has resulted in eight books of fiction to my credit plus more than a thousand published poems and a few chapbooks.

The most successful entry has been Quaking Dover, a history of one of the oldest Quaker congregations in the New World.

~*~

As my diamond jubilee year wraps up, I’m reflecting especially on those eight books of fiction and the life that’s produced them.

You’ve heard the adage, of course, “Write about what you know.” But I’ve come to see how important it is to also write about what you don’t know, especially where it’s at the edge of your existing knowledge. I am among those who write as an attempt to make sense of something personal, which means being something of an explorer or discoverer or laboratory technician. A good writer, I’m thinking, wears many hats, at least of the proverbial kind. Let me confess I rarely wear a hat of any kind, though I should, considering the balding and sunlight and many skin cancers.

Drafting a story is work, even on those rare and exhilarating flashes when it seems to write itself and you’re flying too fast to worry about spelling or grammar or other details. But it’s not the most difficult part of the practice.

Revisions, I should emphasize, are everything. Or at least the hardest part, and the more essential part of writing in the hope of a readership. I find that in hard revisions I discover more of what I’m coming to know.

With my focus on Quaking Dover for the past three years, I’ve neglected my earlier books. Returning to them this year feels like a good exercise, for you, dear reader, and for me.

One of the regular weekly features here will be on things behind my books. The stories themselves already speak on their own.

Please stay tuned and tune in.

Finally, the goddess Kali

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

I awaken to a horrible surprise, the feminine face of death.

Well, at least in the dream.

 

I’VE BEEN DIGNOSED WITH a terminal illness. Suppose what or who was on my mind was the retirement or “brand-value” issues. Somehow Ohio was in this or related sequences as someone was trying to reconnect with me or seduce me … while I kept moving on to my own lover and eventual wife and projects.

I’ll label this part Disturbing.

Like those Christmas shopping receipts piling up

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Now that our house renovation has begun in earnest (you’ll be reading about that in upcoming posts), the delivery order invoices are creating a file.

I do wonder if I’ll be able to make sense of them at some future time. They’re more cryptic than many of my poems.

Consider “¾ T&G Advantech 4×8.” What? That’s tongue-and-groove plywood. Forget the price, per unit or all together. They do make those martinis in Manhattan look cheap. Not that I’m going there.

Reflecting on ‘people from away’

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

That is, PFAs, as we’re known among the locals.

I haven’t encountered the negative reaction some report, but feel myself among those warmly welcomed.

Part of it is, I believe, an openness to approach what’s here without wanting to totally “improve” it. I mean, if you can’t stand the smell of cow manure, you shouldn’t move into farm country. Or, for much of Maine, the stench of a paper mill.

That doesn’t mean we don’t have a lot to contribute, but we need to be respectful in acknowledging what’s attracted us as well as the dirty work that needs to be done. You know, the equivalent of washing dishes.

Or loving someone warts and all.

Along with a dirge

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Touring a Roman Catholic church that’s known for its graves, the ones inside around the sanctuary and in chambers off to the side and, presumably, in the basement. The ceiling is relatively low and the dominant color a light yellow. Feels something like a Mount Auburn Cemetery and may have been surrounded by the like.

Noticing a man who’s obviously perplexed (he may have even been in clerical garb, I now sense), I approach and offer my help. He has a map that may simply have some directions, but he’s looking for such-and-such Avenue. Together we circle the inside of the building and come upon a stone wall that’s been painted black and both agree that’s where we should have found his destination. We’re both baffled.

We then join a small group in a chapel or, considering the slanted floor, lecture hall auditorium where a nun’s doing an end-of-tour kind of Q&A session. She keeps overlooking any questions hands up from either me or the man; I’m three rows back and in the center, he’s at the back about four rows behind me. Finally, I shout out my question about the black wall. “It’s the Williams family,” she answers, as if everyone should know they owned the property long before the church was erected.

We scatter to make way for some kind of ecumenical program in the sanctuary that evening.

Our Greek Orthodox priest is already there, sitting on the floor, his back to the wall, with his family.

Some useful advice for awkward social settings

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

To counter the effects of a boring conversation from the get-go, be the more interesting person by asking questions like:

  • What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever eaten?
  • What’s on your bucket list? (ask a follow-up question about how you can help them accomplish it).
  • What new skill are you learning?
  • What’s your personality type?
  • What’s your calling or purpose in life?

By taking the initiative and making the conversation about the other person, this selfless act of shining the spotlight on someone else first gives you the edge – making you the more interesting person in the room.

Gee, I am wondering where I copped this.

 

Missing my ‘tinis …

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

We’re well into the annual Nativity Fast now, and that means going without alcohol.

I’m not bound by Greek Orthodox discipline, even though one year we did try to follow the Advent diet, which is largely vegan. It will be a while before we do that again, admirable as it is.

For me, the big challenge is in admitting just how much I enjoy martinis. Very dry, gin, with an olive. Some fellow Quakers would definitely look askance at me on that count, though I did have a good Friend who was a definite exception.

Alas, he passed over before I ever got to sample one of his legendary concoctions.

Growing up in a teetotaling household does throw a curve on my outlook. I’m repressed enough as a result, even after hippie liberation. But then came the yoga, which frowned on both meat and alcohol even before any tipsiness.

More recently, here on Moose Island, I’ve found myself indulging come late morning rather than closer to bedtime. OK, I’m usually up and working on the keyboard before sunrise, too, so there are some adjustments in the daily schedule, especially when I get an afternoon nap in.

So, to keep me in control of my imbibing, rather than the other way around, I haven’t touched a drop since November 16, apart from a glass of Cotes du Rhone on Thanksgiving, a nod to the Orthodox relaxations on designated feast days.

Drinking is, after all, something that can become habitual, and there are good reasons to break certain habits or to strengthen one’s self-discipline.

But still, I am counting those days till Christmas.

Cheers!

Spanning both coasts and much in between

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

IN SEATTLE, LATE AFTERNOON in a modernist house with a view of the twinkling bay. Think my ex- is in there somewhere, too. Or perhaps in a now-forgotten earlier sequence.

Then there’s a trailer of some sort, touting the movie along with a kind of genealogy that mentions me among others and “the books yet to be written.” I start screaming at the screen, “But the books are written! Nobody’s reading them!”

Scarface, up till now politely distant, begins taunting. I wind up overturning him in his curvy laminated wood folding chair, the kind we used to own.

A few words are exchanged, and we leave. That’s it.

 

MAYBE I WAS A REPORTER … or just working with one. Somehow, the Washington Post was involved. The subject we were following, though, was sentenced as an incorrigible offender – one of those three-strikes-you’re-out type felons – and placed in a large prison behind three big sets of gateways, each with a different password, and five smaller ones. The unspoken message was that if you failed to remember them, this person was lost in the maze – there would be no contact from you, on the outside.

 

ALL SET TO VISIT FRIENDS IN CUBA, I discover three days before departure I have forgotten to obtain my passport and visa. Had tickets and was already packed.