You never know what we'll churn up in cleaning a stall
Thinking of my own time living in the foothills of upstate New York as well as Kenzie’s situation in my novel Pit-a-Pat High Jinks, there’s a big question:
If we loved mountains so much, why didn’t we go climbing? The Adirondacks weren’t that far away, and the Catskills were closer.
For me, anyway, there were so many other fronts to explore, which I did, leading on to the ashram at the edge of forest in the Poconos.
No regrets, then. Besides, what emerged is a better story.
Many days when I enter the Red Barn, I find myself amazed at the amount of work I’ve created. I can get dizzy just touching on the places I’ve lived and loved, or the friendships that have blessed me in those many moves. Or all of the painful losses as well.
Even though I was employed full-time in other pursuits, I set aside time for writing, revising, and submission to literary journals and publishers. These days I keep asking, How did I do it? Or more accurately, just what else did I fail to do?
Still, for perspective, a new poem a week for 50 years comes out to 2,500 pieces. And some poets consider themselves satisfied with a lifetime collection of 400 to 500 poems. Perhaps they’ve lived a more fruitful and balanced life than I have. You’d have to ask the people around them, though, for their perspective.
~*~
On a related note, I’m wondering if those who invaded my journals and expressed disappointment were expecting juicy gossip. In all of the upheaval and daily scheduling, I was usually pressed simply trying to record a trail of where I’d been and what had been happening. Without that, forget the emotions or gossip. Those just might fall into place later, perhaps prompted by the notation that the event had even happened.
My, it’s been a long trail!
~*~
So here we are. My novels are available at the Apple Store, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Scribd, Smashwords, Sony’s Kobo, and other fine ebook distributors and at Amazon in both Kindle and paperback. Let me suggest starting with Cassia.
I got out before I was axed, but the next three interludes weren’t so fortunate. All ended with my head and heart served up to me on a plate, in terms of my career, yet somehow I always landed back on my feet.
The least time was when I allowed myself a self-imposed sabbatical in Baltimore in the mid ’80s, one of the smarter moves in my life. Putting those savings into a solid investment would have made much better sense than using them for a year of poverty existence writing, but I hoped if I could get published, my shift over to being an author full-time would be assured. I knew too many others who had put off their big dream till retirement but never been able to manifest it.
So I hunkered down over my keyboard, kept to a strict schedule, and amassed the bulk of two major fiction projects that now stand as Daffodil Uprising, Pit-a-Pat High Jinks, Yoga Bootcamp, Nearly Canaan and parts of The Secret Side of Jaya. There were also a few other blueprints that remain undeveloped. (As novels, the two boxes of manuscripts were truly too unwieldy, no matter how vibrant their contents.) “Subway Hitchhikers,” now embedded into Subway Visions, was already in place.
That year wasn’t all work, rest assured. I underwent some crucial personal growth and recovery. There were close friendships and time for reading. Mennonites and Brethren added to my Quaker practice. A writers’ group hosted upcoming Tom Clancy one evening, with his first book then being turned into a movie. I was learning to part-sing a cappella. We walked to Orioles games from one couple’s third-floor quarters.
Alas, my money started running out before I could land an agent or see a volume lined up for publication, and so it was time for me to move on. At least I had those precious drafts in hand – or more accurately, on computer diskettes. Even as raw material, they were full of details I’d never be able to recollect a decade or two later, much less in the distance of retirement. And with that, I was off for New Hampshire and a new life.
What became painfully clear was that newspapers weren’t the only part of the publishing world in serious trouble. So was the book trade. A few hot-shot agents replied that the book I’d pitched them deserved to be published but they couldn’t take on anything new, they were utterly baffled by what was happening as the number of houses handling fiction kept shrinking. Most agents didn’t even return the self-addressed stamped envelopes. (The jerks.) Even so, I kept revising, leading to the publication of “Subway Hitchhikers” as a trade paperback in 1990, followed by the hard reality of being “backlisted” and out-of-print when sales failed to materialize.
Still, I was hooked. All along, there was a flood of poetry that found its way into circulation and a few projects that seemed commercially viable, if only I could add the right co-author, one with creds. My years since Baltimore also included book-length new writing, mostly Quaker related, but again, print proved elusive – it is a small market, and the faith as a whole is filled with active writers.
So I was caught in a limbo until the emergence of ebooks, starting with my “Ashram” in 2006 as a PDF from pioneering PulpBits in Vermont and then my Smashwords entries beginning in 2013.
What I now realize how much free time and focus fiction demands. It is, as I’ve learned the hard way, so different from journalism, and not just in the ways I’d be confronting. When I was employed, I could deal with deep revisions of my Baltimore lode during my vacations and holidays, and do the routine polishing of its prose on my free days, but generating entirely new novels was out of the question until retirement, when I turned to creating “What’s Left.”
In short, most of the books of fiction now available under my name are the result of 35 years of labor, more or less. I’m glad I’ve lived long enough to push them on to completion.
I’ve been accused of being unable to understand because I’m a man. It was tempting to respond that she couldn’t understand my need to have a God the Father to relate to as a man who needs a role model and a complete positive (for the most part) male authority figure, and she couldn’t understand because she’s a woman. We are in a bind. But that cheap shot would have accomplished nothing. I still say that Biblical language is not exclusive, if rendered correctly.
The irony here arose in the case of a woman who was being criticized by a man for using Biblical language. Who should know more whether she felt excluded by its masculine nouns? As she said, it’s his problem.
~*~
Oh, my, this was all before some of my most important fictional characters were women.
Despite growing up in the flat country of the Midwest, I’ve always been attracted to heights. The top of the tree in our backyard was mine alone. I remember taking the speedy express elevator to the top of the Carew Tower in downtown Cincinnati as a child and looking down on the ant-like people on the streets far below. And mountains have always loomed large in my imagination, later abetted by a few early visits to the Appalachians in Kentucky, Tennessee, and North Carolina. I even backpacked a week on the Appalachian Trail at age 12 as a Boy Scout with my primitive-camping troop.
By the time I returned to Indiana in the mid-’70s, I had also lived in the Allegheny foothills to the west of the Catskills in New York state as well as the Poconos in eastern Pennsylvania. I’d even ventured into New Hampshire to climb Mount Washington, the highest point in the Northeast. I thought I had a familiarity with mountains.
My next upheaval sent me west. The drive across the Great Plains and Rockies was a revelation, and the entry into the environs of my new employment came frankly as a shock. Neither my wife nor I was prepared for the arid, open desert where nearly everything, including its famed apple orchards, required irrigation. Forefront in my mind was Swami Lakshmy’s observation from her first visit to India, that every place she visited had its own unique vibration.
And yes, there were mountains, including the barren heights defining our valley as well as the eastern flank of the Cascade Range to our west and glacier-clad Mount Adams looking down on us from 50 miles away.
As I adjusted to the realities, everything was filled with wonder I came to love, as you will see in my novel Nearly Canaan, which started out being more about the distinct landscape than about fully considered characters.
My employment situation, meanwhile, provided its own fodder for what would emerge as Hometown News back in the Rust Belt. I never wanted to leave Pacific Northwest, for sure, but a new publisher at the newspaper made the situation intolerable. As I bailed out, along with the most of the rest of the management team, I entered a difficult period that added much to the newspaper tale, plus a divorce and broken engagement.
It’s always hard to come down from a mountain. A part yearns to hang there forever.
OK, I lied. Even to myself, as honesty is so central to my values.
Yes, I lied. In fact, as my wife recalls, when we jumped into our little city farm 21 years ago, I quipped that my next move would be in a pine box. Last I checked, I’m still breathing and my heart readings are falling within an acceptable range. Whew!
Oh, yes, back then my new stepdaughters informed me I’d better be nice to them because they’d be choosing my next home.
Skip ahead to now and the plot definitely changed. I’m not yet in a nursing home or eating those institutional meals, either. In fact, I’m enjoying relearning to cook, spoiled as I’ve been.
There were a couple of truck-rental actions where I helped our younger daughter (note the change of degree) and then our future son-in-law as well as a few younger members of Quaker Meeting, but that’s hardly the same of facing all of your own stuff. And I mean ALL.
And in our recent move, like my earlier ones, once more, we didn’t call the movers in but determined to do-it-ourselves.
Not that professional movers could have handled this one.
We were way behind in our sorting, for starters. Or, from another perspective, the move came upon us much earlier than we really expected. So much for the drama queen.
There was no way all of it could possibly fit into our new address in Eastport, even once we get some serious renovations done, so that meant a lot of redirection. (As I once remarked, after settling into Dover, I couldn’t imagine how people could live without a barn – yes, this Red Barn. But here I am.) Some of the mass has gone into our elder daughter’s Antique House and adjoining barn down in York, Maine, but there’s only so much space available there, and I can affirm that it’s jammed pretty solid. That led to renting and quickly packing two storage units, where I sense we’re buying time as much as anything else. Some intense triage will be done there. And the remainder has come up to Eastport with me, including one run with a small U-Haul truck itself. Along with more triage. And the dump, or “transfer station,” is nearly an hour away.
This move – my fifteenth address and ninth state since graduating from college a tad over five decades ago – has differed from the earlier ones, even if I had forgotten how heavy those boxes of books are, as well as the LPs, or vinyl, as cognoscenti like to say. Just noting that makes my lower back ache.
For one thing, this move’s been sequential, rather than a single burst. Each of my dozen trips between the two homes has allowed more goods to come east. In many of the earlier leaps, I hadn’t even seen the town until my job interview, and at least once I filled a truck, drove across many miles, got in town, and started looking for a place to live only afterward. (OK, a few times it was only my car, back when I had really focused.) Sure seems foolish to me now, but funds were limited. I’m grateful things worked out in the end, and it did provide some interesting fodder for my novels. And, oh yes, I was VERY single.
For another thing, my wife and I were moving from only the second home either of us had ever owned, and having a Realtor definitely helped, even in a hot real-estate market. Our new destination, meanwhile, connected to dreams I thought I had abandoned in leaving the Pacific Northwest, as well as some other activities I’ve added in New England. My wife, for her part, had come close to living on an island, and technically, she’s finally achieving that dream after a heartbreaking disappointment.
Emotionally, leaving a location you Barn readers know I truly loved was eased by being already socially distanced, thanks to Covid. Hey, I’m still getting together with those folks via Zoom, and I know I’ll be with many of them through New England Yearly Meeting of Friends even before considering the release of my next book, which is all about Dover’s unique roots. (Please stay tuned, as they used to say on TV.)
I’m also grateful for my goddaughter’s reaction to seeing our old place on Zillow and proclaiming, “Sheesh, the house certainly does clean up well! And that kitchen is truly a dream. I always loved feeling the warmth, whimsy and charm of that house, though I am sure your new place will have all of those qualities and more once you’re through.” We can hope.
She has her own connections to our relocation to Downeast Maine that I’ll skip for now.
So that’s where things stand. Maybe, as a result of all this, my survivors will have less to deal with when I “pass over,” in the old Quaker phrase.
What have your adventures in moving entailed?
We writers or artists, at least some of us, push ourselves as far as we can, coming to a point where we no longer know if a piece is any good or not, only that we’ve done everything in its pursuit that we possibly can at this period in our life.
Either it gets published or whatever as is or gets pushed aside, maybe to be picked up later and reworked, maybe to go in the trash. Or maybe Death intervenes.
Was surprised to realize my weekly drives from Eastport to Dover and back – essentially one end of Maine to the other – came to only a little more than my weekly total in commuting to and from the office, back was I was duly employed.
But coming in a five-and-a-half to six hour stretch each way, rather than one, was another matter.
How much of my life has been behind the wheel!
How do your commutes add up in time and miles?
The second of my three times of stepping out of the news business came when Vincent and Elinor Ostrom invited me to return to Indiana to become the social sciences editor in their new Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis. Vincent had been a wonderful mentor through my undergrad years, and the opportunity to work with them again was truly exciting. Besides, I was newly married and the move would allow my wife to continue with her college studies. It was a pretty heady undertaking all around.
We settled in at the edge of town, pretty much as I describe in Nearly Canaan. But having Indiana show up so much already in my fiction – Daffodil Uprising and What’s Left, especially – as I revisited this stage in my life, I looked around for a landscape with similar features and people, which I was surprised to find arising in the Ozarks. Now you know. In full candor, I have to admit I’ve never been in Arkansas or that swath of Missouri, even though my mother was born in St. Louis.
Two important things emerged for me personally during this sojourn. First was my shift from yoga to Quaker as my spiritual path. Second was my emergence as a poet, largely through a lively off-campus circle that was surprisingly free of academic influence. As a research associate, I could borrow books from the graduate library for unlimited periods, and so I had a shelf of small-press chapbooks at hand – what a luxury! And my interludes in the renowned Lilly rare-book library remain treasured, where I handled rare editions of Samuel Johnson’s Ramblers (1750-52, including a few coffee stains and pencil marks, presumably from their first readers) and Audubon’s original luxurious prints (all birds presented life-size, as if stunningly pressed into the pages) and fine-arts broadsides of Gary Snyder’s poems from the 1950s onward.
I found the academic life to be much to my liking. I’ve been asked since why I didn’t go on to graduate school and a professorial direction. My answers are muffled, beginning with the personal finance situation and the glut of doctorates already looking for tenure, at least in my fields of interest. I would have chafed at the internal politics, naturally. And then I came across Snyder’s reason for not continuing his own post-graduate degrees (at Indiana, when he made the decision) – he realized he could be a good professor or a good poet, but not both. I would later arrive at something similar when it came to the management track I pursued through the first half of my journalism career, as you’ll see.
Those of us in the Workshop had barely celebrated our getting the second phase of our major grant renewed, meaning I’d be staying in Bloomington another four years, when we were hit with the devasting news that the amount had been drastically slashed during an unanticipated realignment of the federal agency’s priorities. What it meant for me and my wife was packing up and moving on again.
The next opening felt like a ticket to Heaven.
I promised to leave the door open
no matter what
vainly hoping a pearl would appear
in the rusting lock
as if she would ever again wear it
~*~
yes, I left it open
but don’t live there anymore
Jnana's Red Barn 