ONE WAY TO NAME A CHARACTER

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Those highway signs can often take on whimsical readings.

One poetry journal, for instance, took its name from an exit marker of the Interstate crossing from Pennsylvania into Maryland: Northwest Rising Sun. It was for two different towns. Everybody knows the sun rises in the east, not the west. Still, a great name. It pays to be alert.

Likewise, orchestral conductor David Zinman was recording with humorist P.D.Q. Bach (in real life, Peter Schickele) but found his contract with another label prohibited him from using his own name on this project. What could he use instead? Inspiration struck when he was driving on Route 128 outside Boston. That exit sign read Newton Wayland.

More recently, while updating and seriously revising my previously published novels, I set about renaming many of the characters for a better fit.

I’ve passed this sign hundreds of times and often thought it sounded great as a possible character, if only I had the right situation. And then, as I reworked the volume that now stands as Daffodil Uprising, I had the perfect guy to go by the name: LEE MADBURY.

The sign along U.S. Route 4.

 

 

TAKE A SELFIE WITH WILLIAM PENN

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

If the weather is fair, Dover’s annual Apple Harvest Day today will attract a crowd twice the size of the city’s population to the downtown.

Since there are no commercial orchards within the city limits, I’ve always been baffled by the festival’s name, but it does come a week ahead of the Columbus Day holiday, when most of the other communities in the state host end-of-the-season blowouts. It’s nice to beat the competition.

For several years now, Dover Friends Meeting has been among the nonprofit organizations that have participated. Our canopied booth offers a meet-and-greet opportunity to let people know that Quakers do indeed still exist and to invite folks to join us in reflective worship on Sunday mornings.

We’ve heard that as a nonprofit, we need to make 17 positive impressions, on average, before anyone responds, so we’re not discouraged if people don’t show up in our meetinghouse later.

It’s a two-way street, frankly. Answering questions can be a big way of getting a clearer view of the way others see us.

I was startled, for example, when one woman asked if you have to be a protester to be a Quaker. (Answer: No!)

And when some confuse us with the celibate Shakers, we now respond, “Shakers made beautiful furniture. Quakers make trouble.”

And last year, many folks told us how much they appreciate our “Love Thy Neighbor, No Exceptions” banner across the front of our building.

This year we’re setting out to have fun. Period.

You know, take a selfie of yourself standing with William Penn. Well, someone dressed as a not-too-accurate impersonator. Or you can make your own real Quaker rolled oats using one grain, a hammer, and an anvil. (Watch your thumb, please!)

Or here, have an oatmeal cookie or take a recipe for granola.

That sort of thing.

We’ll still have a bowl of water out for passing dogs and, as a new touch, a small changing station for parents or grandparents with infants.

It’s still a work in progress. Will probably always be, I hope.

TIME TO BLOW THE DUST OFF A FEW STACKS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 5 Comments

As my wife and I started listing what’s keeping us busy these days, we were both surprised to find that one thing – one important thing – was missing.

What we both realized is that regular reading … as in books … had been pressed out of our schedules.

Instead, we’ve been doing bits and pieces of reading online. It’s just not the same as luxuriating in a deep volume.

How about you?

TEN THINGS I LIKE ABOUT OCTOBER

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments
  1. Foliage. This is New England, after all.
  2. Cool evenings. You snuggle under the blankets, sleeping with the windows cracked slightly open.
  3. Apple Harvest Day outreach. Meet a Quaker’s our pitch.
  4. Mums in pots everywhere.
  5. Butternut squash soup.
  6. My annual survey of Charles Ives symphonies and then George Whitefield Chadwick’s.
  7. Pumpkins as décor … and as crisps and pies. Although we’re rather appalled by its spread into coffee and beer.
  8. Fresh unpasteurized apple cider.
  9. Sitting in the loft of the barn again, reading.
  10. Intense full moonlight.

~*~

What do you like about October?

~*~

Historic company housing for mill workers in Manchester, New Hampshire. I used to enjoy walking through the millyard this time of year.

 

GOTTA LOVE THOSE APRONS

~ 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.

REWORKING A TEXT

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When several of our lifeguards were complaining about their high-school term papers and having to meet the length requirements, I decided to show them a couple pages of my novel in progress, the book that’s emerged as What’s Left.

They were blown away.

It wasn’t any different from what I’ll assume all serious writers do. Just look at the examples in the Paris Review’s acclaimed author interviews. I remember my own shock at the first few I saw – what, we don’t write flawlessly the first time? Oh, the folly of youth!

Well, nowadays we don’t always work from typescript or even printouts – what I showed the teens-to-whom-I-fully-trusted-my-life had now become the exception. I should have photographed some for posterity but instead trashed them during a purging of my studio under the rafters.

Few readers imagine how thoroughly a serious writer or editor will rework a text – major sentences, even paragraphs, are struck out, new words and notes are scribbled everywhere, even fresh pages of inserts are taped to one side or the other of the page.

Tell them this is from the fifth or seventh revision of the manuscript, they’re even more incredulous. The discarded material is a flood compared to the drop or two they struggle to compose.

As the saying goes, inspiration goes in the first draft, genius comes in the revisions.

As we might add, if one’s lucky.

TEN WAYS THIS ‘DAFFODIL’ IS NEW

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

My newest novel, Daffodil Uprising, is a thorough revision of the earlier Daffodil Sunrise. Nearly half of the original book has been excised and replaced by twice that amount of new material, for good reason.

Here are ten of the big differences.

  1. The events and characters are now seen through the eyes and snarky voice of Kenzie’s daughter a generation later. They are Cassia’s discoveries about her father’s college years in the turbulent 1960s, pro and con.
  2. As the subtitle says, the focus is on the making of a hippie. The college and its good-old-boy network of abusive power and greed earn much of the blame.
  3. Kenzie’s growth as a budding photographer gets fuller attention, along with his artistic advances. It’s his basic reason for coming to Daffodil, after all.
  4. His girlfriend is a much more complex and troubled creature. She has good cause to be chafing in her relationship with him. And he, in contrast, is so truly naïve. Something’s got to give.
  5. Most of the characters have been renamed and are more uniquely defined. They and their actions have new grounding in everyday life.
  6. Kenzie’s buddies are no longer a pack of emerging radicals in action but rather a lineup of widely varied boyz stumbling along in a confounding environment. His dorm’s underground traditions are handed down through a band of quirky seniors and juniors who serve as wise elders and guides to neophyte freshmen like Kenzie. It’s a colorful crew – one that teaches him as much or more than his professors, in fact.
  7. The narrative’s giddy, upbeat, and sometimes sophomoric youthful optimism is now countered by darker forces of oppressive greed, violence, and despair. Bad drug trips and protest bombings accompany the scene.
  8. There’s now an element of Goth. This is a college campus, after all. Why should Hogwarts be all that different?
  9. There’s also a strand of the paranormal. You ever live in a creepy old apartment building or have the subject of a term paper start talking back to you?
  10. The work now stands in fuller correlation with What’s Left, a generation later, and the two other novels that follow him after college.
Daffodil Uprising

For details, go to Smashwords.com.

THE IMPORTANCE OF SMALL TOUCHES OVER TIME

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

From our perch today, it’s hard to believe that a Broadway musical like “South Pacific” could have been a bold statement on behalf of racial tolerance a half century ago.

I’m encouraged, of course, to see a Quaker connection.

First, even though the novelist James A. Michener, whose book was the basis of the show, had served in the U.S. Navy during World War II, he was raised by a Quaker adoptive mother and attended Quaker-affiliated Swarthmore College. In other words, he had been exposed to both pacifist and racial equality values.

Second, as Vanity Fair writer Todd S. Purdom notes in “The Road to Bali-hai,” is that librettist Oscar Hammerstein’s wife’s niece Jennifer attended the George School, another Quaker institution, one where Michener also taught briefly. The Hammersteins’ own son Jimmy also went there, as did a young family friend named and future Broadway great Stephen Sondheim. (And to think how vigorously earlier Quakers denounced theater as vain entertainment!)

Purdom’s article contains another telling point. The hit song “I’m Gonna Wash that Man Right Out of My Hair” was originally a flop. In the preview performances before the Broadway opening, director and co-author Josh Logan was perplexed to see it wasn’t connecting until he realized that star Mary Martin had the women in the audience so abuzz about whether she was actually washing her hair onstage that nobody ever heard the lyrics themselves. He fixed that by having her belt out the first stanza before working her hair.

I wonder about how many other small changes in any art form spell the difference between boffo hit and mundane shelving.

A similar tweak in “Wonderful Guy” changed the song to a soliloquy with the word “you” substituted for “they.” As Logan recalled, “That night they tore the house apart.”

As I was saying about small changes or a simple touch? Never underestimate the importance of revisions in art. Or maybe life itself.

~*~

Michener, by the way, wrote of his experience on the Electoral College elections with the telling title on his political science volume, Presidential Lottery: The Reckless Gamble on Our Electoral System.

He was so prescient there.

MAKING MUSIC TO WELCOME THE EQUINOX

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Once again, I’ll be in the choir along the Charles River as part of a free concert to welcome the autumn equinox and to praise the extraordinary cleanup of the once noxious waterway on its way to Boston Harbor.

For its 15th annual RiverSing, Boston Revels is moving the family-friendly event upstream from Cambridge and into the Allston section of Boston on the other bank.

We’ll be performing on a Saturday night, rather than Sunday, and it is part of an ongoing series of performances the park hosts, so we’ll have more publicity support than usual for a one-off event in what’s otherwise simply a good place to sunbathe in season.

But the change also means we won’t have our usual gaudy parade down a congested street from Harvard Square to the makeshift stage beside the John W. Weeks Footbridge. That procession has always been glorious and joyfully chaotic, but greatly annoying to any number of drivers waiting to continue on the busy thoroughfare we were blocking. Not all of them are amused, believe me.

On the other hand, free parking won’t be scarce, either, and we’ll be on a permanent stage at the Herter Park amphitheater, which also includes seats for the audience rather than bring-your-own-chairs or blankets on the ground.

For me, it’s always been memorable. Imagine looking down from the back row and watching a pianist in the guest group with us and thinking, “He’s an incredible keyboardist” – and then hearing he plays in the Boston Pops Orchestra. Or singing behind Noel Paul Stuckey of Peter, Paul, and Mary. That’s even before the sunsets, which we get to see from the stage but are behind the audience. This year, it will be off to the side of everyone. Get the picture?

Join us tonight, if you can. For details, go to the Boston Revels website.

COMING OUT OF SEMI-SECLUSION AFTER BEING IMMERSED IN REVISIONS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Writers work in many different ways.

Some sit down and write two hours a day. When I read that in interviews, I used to think, “What slackers!” Only later, when I realized how much other work needs to be done to sustain that, did I revise my opinion. Research, reading, and correspondence are also crucial parts of the job. For many professional writers, you can add teaching to the list – it can be what really pays the bills.

Others charge up and then lock themselves away for an orgy of keyboarding. Say, two weeks to two months of doing nothing else. There are tales of some writers in the old days who would rent a hotel room for a week or so to do that – they must have had a very nice advance and known exactly what they were setting out to do, it seems too short a time for me these days.

When I was working full-time, my method was rather piecemeal. I’d plunge into writing heavily one day a week – it helped when my four-day workweek allowed me three days off in a row, though I paid for it with that double-shift each Saturday. The rest of the week I put in a couple of hours each day for keyboarding and the supporting labor.

That schedule, in fact, led me to concentrate on poetry much more than fiction, though the budding novels typically got their attention on my vacations and holidays. Looking back, it was a rather schizoid existence.

Since retiring, a major shift has happened, and I’m just now seeing its impact. I’ve been able to immerse myself in drafting and deeply revising a work, to live with it more thoroughly.

I’m going to blame Cassia, the voice of What’s Left. Working with her was unlike anything I’d attempted before. The focus shifted from her curiosity about her father’s past to a close examination of his photos and the family he discovered to, finally, Cassia herself and her siblings and close cousins – the Squad. The spotlight went from being on what happened to the individuals themselves. It was no longer action-driven but character-driven.

That, in turn, led to a similar reworking of my other novels, often with Cassia in effect sitting beside me. Again, unlike anything else I’d done before.

Doing this, though, has involved a lot of semi-seclusion. I’m definitely ready for a change.