Drafting a manuscript is just the start

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

These perspectives apply to far more than NaNoWriMo, but they just might give a needed push to those of you trying to get a novel written within this month.

  1. “The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.” – Terry Pratchett
  2. “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at the typewriter and bleed.” – Ernest Hemingway
  3. “If you wait for inspiration to write, you’re not a writer, you’re a waiter.” – Dan Poynter
  4. “Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.” – Natalie Goldberg
  5. “On first drafts: It is completely raw, the sort of thing I feel free to do with the door shut – it’s the story undressed, standing up in nothing but its socks and undershorts.” – Stephen King
  6. “Get through a draft as quickly as possible.” – Joshua Wolf Shenk
  7. “Write the first drafts as if no one else will ever read them – without a thought about publication – and only in the last draft to consider how the work will look from the outside.” – Anne Tyler
  8. “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” – Maya Angelou
  9. “I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.” – Douglas Adams
  10. “In the planning stage of a book, don’t plan the ending. It has to be earned by all that will go before it.” – Rose Tremain

Acid test novelist: Russell Banks (1940-2023)

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Another of the novelists to enter my elite circle of influences recently, Banks addressed the working-class lives of northern New England and upstate New York. He included also darkness, despair, and grit that feel real, rather than at a bit of distance. There’s a heft I found missing from some others, like Carolyn Chute’s Beans of Egypt, Maine or Ernest Hebert’s Darby Chronicles of New Hampshire, not that they aren’t informative.

The Sweet Hereafter is my favorite so far in that vein, though I should also mention The Darling, which shifts the action to Liberia and the focus to failed political activism.

With 21 volumes of fiction to his name, my TBR pile gets deeper.

He also has me recalling Richard Russo’s Empire Falls, which I had thought was his.

Pumpkin Isle light

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

marking entry to Eggemoggin Reach
below Castine

the free lighthouse guide I brought along
2013 edition I see now
newsprint
has no mention of Saddleback Ledge light
not to be confused with Saddleback Island
other than a listing
no photo or description
nor does it list Eastport as a harbor
nor Lubec
though Calais somehow counts

buoys: green have flat tops
red, coneheads

Which Buck stopped here?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The Buck family had its own prominence.

Several branches of the family originating in Haverhill, Massachusetts, arrived early on in Eastport.

The most celebrated and traceable line descends from Revolutionary War Colonel Jonathan Buck (1719-1795), who came to Maine and gave the Penobscot Bay town of Bucksport its name. He is best known through a questionable story of a witch he supposedly sentenced who then cursed him at her execution.

His son, Captain Ebenezer Buck (1752-1824), born in Haverhill, built the first framed house in Bucksport, but because he was captain of the local militia, the British burned it during the Revolutionary War.

So much for broader historical importance.

Ebenezer’s son Jonathan (1796-1843) brought the line to Eastport. He was a member of the Eastport Light Infantry in 1818 during the War of 1812, as was a John Buck.

Beyond that, Jonathan’s “business life was passed at Eastport, where as a merchant, he was associated with a Mr. Pillsbury, of Portland, Maine,” as one account noted, while the Eastport Sentinel in October 1839 reported,

“Died, in this town, on Wednesday last, Jonathan Buck, Esq., aged forty-three years. Mr. Buck belonged to that class of men who may well be called the creators of the wealth of a community. To an untiring energy, which enabled him to accomplish more than most men, he added an enterprise, energy, and intellect well fitted to direct the exertions of others. In every relation of life, he will be missed and lamented. To his family the loss is irreparable. Those whose labor he has for years directed will miss their guide. The community loses one of its leading men and little at this time can it bear the loss. He rests from a life of severe labor, and when such a man dies, we feel that a part of society has gone.”

The account was signed by Seth B. Mitchell, editor.

Another line in the Passamaquoddy area came through Captain Eliphalet Buck. The 1820 Census for Eastport includes an Eliphalet Buck, who wed Mehitable Vose in 1818 in Robbinston, Maine, and drowned in 1836.

None of this, though, pointed toward our house.

Only later, after learning that Fisher Ames Buck had once owned our house, could I sense a different route going back to Jacob Buck, half-brother of the Bucksport founder. Jacob’s wife was Hannah Eames, a surname that evolved into Ames. They had six sons, four of their fates unknown, as far as I can tell.

That line led through Canada and the Loyalists who left the United States at the end of the Revolutionary War. You probably weren’t taught about them in your American history classes, but they were a significant factor around here, as I’ve learned in this project.