You never know what we'll churn up in cleaning a stall
Looking at someone on Facebook who had been a hot-but-not-quite girlfriend (meaning wife material) way back when but am thinking now, it never would have worked out.
Take a breather, that’s really heavy.
Whew!
As my younger step-daughter said of something else way back when, “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
Around here, this can happen well into spring.
Long, thin wedge in the bay
Hollywood stars summer palaces
Somebody’s mansion and grounds all alight
Phosphorescent water
stirred up into tiny fireflies,
sparks
plankton summer
a summer home
on an island in Maine
is here
and there, too
Since coming among Quakers, I’ve known the last of what my grandpa called the old-order sort. Almost all of them, in fact. The ones who dressed in Plain-style clothing and used the thee-thou everyday speech.
My, that seems like a long time ago now.
that was the ferry in front of us
miles ago
that’s the ferry
heading back
The ‘80s hit me with a couple of hard setbacks. First, Mount St. Helens blew up, as did my job in what I had seen as my Promised Land. I went bouncing back east, first to a stint along the upper Mississippi in Iowa and then three years in the Rust Belt of Ohio, where my shirt-sleeve management position ate up 60 hours or more of my life every week. Shortly after my first marriage fell apart there, my job was eliminated. At least I had a hot love going, with an engagement to be announced once I could relocate to Baltimore, where she had moved for her studies.
Somehow, I landed a field representative job with the Chicago Tribune’s newspaper features syndication service, one that allowed me to move anywhere I wanted within the 14 northeastern states I would be covering. Baltimore was perfect.
Except, once I ensconced in the top floor of an 1840s rowhouse in a gentile in-town neighborhood, my beloved wasn’t. If only I could get a straight answer from her.
Complicating matters was that I was out on the road three weeks out of four, home only to unpack and repack on the weekends. The job introduced me to a world many American men know: frequent flyer lounges, taxis and limos, hotels and motels, expense and mileage reports, quarterly sales meetings, three-piece suits custom made at Joseph Banks, a company car, bonuses. Newspaper management, especially on the smaller papers that I had known, were nothing like that. You might get a nice note from your boss or someone up the ladder thanking you for a particular job well done.
Getting from one sales call to the next gave me a lot of time for thinking as I drove or even reading, if I was flying. The time allowed me to decompress from a decade that had included 11 addresses in seven states. I could journey at ease or read or revise earlier manuscripts at night in my room, whatever its number.
My personal life included some of the loneliest nights ever but also led to my best friendship ever, a Plain Quaker who worked as a supermarket meatcutter when he wasn’t working as a nurse. I also had a circle of Mennonites who introduced me to four-part a cappella part-singing, a step that would lead me to the excellent choirs I would join in Boston and Eastport. I also visited among Friends, aka Quakers, and sometimes managed a few hours for genealogical libraries and archives or walking through cemeteries where my ancestors are buried. I even revisited the ashram and my old stomping grounds in upstate New York.
None of this apart from the newspaper world has entered my fiction directly. I thought she would be a fine character to build on, except in retrospect it turned out all too banal. What these experiences did feed was my poetry later.
Thanks to my best friend from my junior high and high school years, who was now living an hour south – unlike the previous decade, where we kept landing on opposite ends of the country – I obtained my first PC, something some of his buddies were building. It had 5¼-inch floppy disks, which would be ancient history to so many tech-savvy youths today.
In my travels, I saw much industrial wasteland. Not just Pittsburgh and western Pennsylvania or Sparrows Point outside Baltimore, but also around Philadelphia, across upstate New York, in Worcester and Buzzards Bay and the Merrimac/Merrimack River in Massachusetts and New Hampshire.
The newspaper industry was also taking hard hits. As manufacturing jobs disappeared, so did readership for afternoon papers, which were read by people taking the bus home or waiting for dinner. That greatly reduced the opportunity to place new features in their pages. As I was told, only a few years earlier, I would have had no difficulty selling to editors. Now, the challenge was keeping them happy with what they were already buying. I also saw great turnover at the helm of papers. I would curry an editor and have promises for a sale once the new annual budget was approved, only to find that he was no longer there in a year. The position I had aspired to and been groomed for was now revealed to be something less than desirable.
What became clear to the five of us out on the road was that the business was in trouble. One or more of us would be cut. I was the one. Besides, I really never was much of a salesman.
My observations of visiting other papers did augment my actual newsroom experiences that would emerge as the novel Hometown News.
Wooden sailing vessels traditionally had only one fire onboard, the cook’s stove. I can’t imagine how cold sailors, much less passengers, were through most of the year.
Windjammers hew to that tradition.
a wooden sailing vessel
with a wood-fired cook stove
and kerosine lanterns
two iceboxes
Smoke from the cookstove goes
into a T-shaped chimney vent
don’t get too close
“Smokestack,” not “chimney”
maybe “noble Charlie”
When I sat down to my personal writing, I felt an ongoing tension between the daily grind of newspaper editing that paid my bills, contrasted to my ambitions for something more permanent, more confidential, and more creatively advanced than the anonymous work that went into the next day’s trash. The pejorative “hack writer,” often applied to newspapermen from the early 18th century on, was what I aspired to rise above. The term has haunted me ever since reading Samuel Johnson’s derision.
In my private labor I aimed for something unique, thoughtful, sophisticated, meticulously developed, complex, and even challenging for both me and the reader. If news stories limited attribution for a quote as the neutral “said,” I nearly banished that colorless word from my prose, relying instead on everything from “answered” or “asserted” to “cried” or “swore“ to “wept” or perhaps “whispered,” with a wide range of variants in between. Do note, I’ve come to treasure a thesaurus for ways in can enrichen a text and sharpen the underlying thought and feelings, even though doing so requires additional time and consideration.
My journals, on the other hand, sought mostly to catch up on my life from the previous entry, often in cryptic terms I might get back to and fill in later, though that rarely happened.
~*~
Hemingway could write for a sixth-grade level reader because he was no longer in a newsroom. It could kill you, believe me, if it’s all you got to do.
I needed to foster my literary ambitions simply to keep my editing skills sharp.
It did make for tension in my private work, though. I still love a good 250-word sentence.
~*~
Let me also say something of the ethics. Being told not to wear a politician’s campaign button. No appearance of partisanship. Leonard Downing of the Washington Post even refused to vote in an election for fear it would taint his neutrality or objectivity.
Were we, as one girlfriend taunted me, ethically castrated? My first editor, Glenn Thompson, worked behind the scenes to get progressive things in motion and did urge us interns to have causes.
By the way, I have worked for some very conservative papers and also some very liberal ones. It didn’t affect what I did for them.
cruise ship off Rockport
glare against haze of blue
Camden Hills a thousand-plus feet
other schooners out of Rockland
Eagle Island light
Mark Island light
Saddleback Ledge light
too far off to photograph
American Eagle
full sail
after a nap
While living in the small industrial city that’s the setting for Hometown News, I began exploring my genetic roots, at least on my father’s side. It involved a lot of correspondence, especially with a cousin of my dad’s generation, as well as probing whatever records we could dig up.
By this time, my spiritual practice had recentered in the Quaker stream, or Society of Friends, where it turned out my ancestors had been active from the early 1660s until my great-grandfather moved from North Carolina to Ohio and “married out” in 1893. I now had access to historic minutes, correspondence, journals, and other resources that proved helpful.
My findings are presented on my Orphan George blog, should you be interested.
What fascinates me in regards to my fiction is the fact that so many of my ancestors were essentially countercultural in regard to the broader society. They were pacifist, for one, and wore distinctive garb and used distinctive language. (Sound hippie?) In North Carolina, their community had the first manumission society in the state, buying freedom for slaves and transporting them to safer lands. This was not the Deep South of popular culture.
These findings, and the research methods, proved quite helpful when I drafted my nonfiction New England history, Quaking Dover.
The techniques and insights also played into my novel What’s Left, where I took Cassia’s lineage on both sides back to her great-grandparents, including their quite different faith traditions.
I am intrigued by the values and practices from one generation to another. What is rejected and what is embraced?
In my case, I discarded the mainstream Christianity and lifestyle of my parents and grandparents only to find myself later reconnecting with much of the radical Christianity and countercultural outlooks of my great-grandparents. Well, most of them on my dad’s side. My mother’s were an entirely different matter.
As I’ve found, genealogy often presents a much different history than we’re taught in the conventional versions, especially when our focus is on everyday people rather than the political and military leaders and the upper class. The lives can go ways we wouldn’t have plotted. For instance, my family in North Carolina had a gold mine.
Jnana's Red Barn 