Tag: Books

Acid test poet: Frederico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936)

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

When surrealism hits the mark for me, there’s something natural rather than forced about it. The juxtaposition of images connects organically, without need for the intervening steps.

That’s why Lorca is among the writers who serve as a touchstone for me. Besides, I can more or less follow his Spanish in the original, not a given with other Spanish masters I’ve admired and enjoyed – Jorge Borges, Garbriel Marquez Garcia, Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, for instance. His volumes are the first I pull from the shelf in that direction.

I love the way he saw New York, by the way – did it influence my novel Subway Visions?

Add to that the tragedy of his life being cut short by Nationalists at the outbreak of the Spanish civil war.

Wandering through a personal wilderness without Moses or Miriam

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Nothing was holding me Baltimore, as much as I loved it. And so, getting back into the American workforce in my mid-30s, I wound up in New Hampshire with the equivalent of a basket of wet literary laundry on those 5¼-inch floppy diskettes.

Although I had called on newspaper editors throughout the region, New England was largely unfamiliar to me. Apart from one couple in Boston, I knew no one. Beyond that, my love life was in ashes.

Thus, I unpacked in a new life along the Merrimack River in New Hampshire, the first of three addresses I would have in the state, fully intent on revising the lode I had mined and finding a literary agent or publisher once I got settled into my new job on the night shift.

What intrigues me looking back is that nothing in my life after my move to Baltimore prompted new fiction. Some details got woven into the revisions, but my literary output during the next three decades was mostly poetry, a more manageable format considering my hours of paid labor. Writing fiction demands the luxury of immersing yourself fully in the lives of your characters. It takes more than a full day once a week.

Besides, unlike my previous settings, New England has been thoroughly mined as far as fiction goes. What could I add to the picture? It had more layers and nuances than my previous locations, and many of them remained cryptic. Besides, I had enough to contend with in my existing manuscripts and the rapidly changing, increasingly confounding, commercial book world. Fewer publishers were accepting fiction, and those that did kept merging. More ominously, they weren’t nurturing promising authors with the hopes of getting a hit five books down the road but rather expected a blockbuster right out of the starting gate – if you could get in. It felt a lot like I had encountered as a newspaper syndicate field representative.

I was, however, appearing widely in the small-press literary scene, mostly with poetry but also chapter excerpts from the lingering novels. It kept me going.

~*~

My persistence finally paid off. After collecting the proverbial stack of rejections and a more widespread snubbing in which agents didn’t even bother to return the self-addressed-stamped-envelope, I finally got a nibble to co-publish with a Santa Barbara press of some distinction. Three years after my move to New England, Subway Hitchhikers appeared in print, right into what became the worst bookselling season in memory, thanks to the First Iraq War. Just my luck.

I did get one extended – and favorable – review, but that was it, no matter how much I pushed the self-promotion. My job schedule, which included a double-shift on Saturday, didn’t help. I couldn’t go to book fairs or author workshops.

My copies to sell appeared shortly after I had moved to a small townhouse atop the highest point in town. Moving them into the hands of readers and reviewers was the next challenge. As I said about the book market?

What did change was my self-image. Publication, for me, was the equivalent of a Master’s degree. I had something to show for my work. People respected that, even if they didn’t buy a copy. As for my personal life? There was a second Summer of Love! I was back in the euphoria of the early ‘70s, only better.

The swirl also had me thinking I could solve the tangle of my Pacific Northwest tale, so I kept revising, usually on a vacation week or holiday weekend.

And then, in 2005, Adventures on a Yoga Farm was published – as a pioneering ebook at PulpBits in Vermont. Again, it went nowhere as far as recognition, though several incarnations later, it’s Yoga Bootcamp and a much better book. As for timing? The yoga movement hadn’t yet rebounded and PDF books never really caught on. There I was ahead of the curve.

Somewhere in that stretch, my PC’s green screen went dead, already obsolete, meaning forget finding a replacement. Instead, the option was to upgrade to a new computer, one with a hard disk and telephone access to an online browser. Email was still somewhere off in the future. And I had to convert all of my keyboarded material from WordPerfect 4.1 to Microsoft’s Word. I wasn’t happy.

Are you one of the folks who recognizes these steps? Or are they all way before you came along?

And who sez the writing life is glamorous or that it runs along the lines of the movie plot were you’re suddenly rich and famous?

As I look back on this period, I see myself in a kind of wandering in the Sinai without a Moses or his sister Miriam to guide me. At least I developed an active social life, largely through contradancing and Quakers, and I was regularly riding Boston’s Green Line in underground tunnels.

Acid test translator: Everett Fox (1947- )

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

His gorgeous large volume, The Five Books of Moses, leaves the reader agog that the Hebrew Bible wasn’t written in King James English. Fox’s rendering instead sticks close to the original tongue and has a rough-edged, field-research vividness where many of the characters come in unfamiliar names – Ish  and Isha for Adam and Eve, for starters. Familiar quotations sometimes differ so sharply that they pass unrecognized.

The translation evokes the sounds of reading the text aloud and hews to puns, word play, word repetition, and alliteration – with detailed notes and footnotes, as needed – that give a sense of what’s been stripped away in conventional translations that polish and soften the action.

It’s my go-to version these days, augmented by others to context to my earlier readings. I wish we had more of the Bible rendered along the lines Fox pursues.

Was avoiding a genre a mistake?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Introduced to contemporary Inuit art by professor who had been in Alaska as a consultant for the drafting of state constitution, I was told of one artist who never did a similar piece twice. If he carved an image of a standing bear, that was it – not even a painting or print would follow in that vein.

Apart from working in a series, which feels more like developing a single long piece, I’ve tried to avoid any sense of getting stuck in a vein of seeming repetition. I mean, if I do another bear, it’s going to be sitting or stretched out or even nursing cubs.

I have taken the thought to heart. I’ve wanted each of my books to be distinctly different.

Most readers, though, are different. Not just from me, but from art collectors, too. When these readers enter a bookstore, they want to know which way to head and then which shelves are most likely to produce pay dirt. In addition, publishers want to invest in sure-fire hits, even of a modest sort. Beyond that, librarians and literature teachers want to have labels to ease the handling of authors and new books.

And that’s why genres proliferate.

My, how naïve I was, setting out to write fiction. What’s the story? How well is it told? What’s it’s style?

First off, I don’t read in a genre. I’m not shopping for sci fi, per se, or romance or mystery or detective or fantasy or historical of any kind or young adult or even erotica aka pornography. And bestseller status means nothing for me, a veteran of the small-press scene. Nope, I’m fishing in what’s now called literary fiction, especially of the contemporary vein.

And, as I’ve learned, that label can be the kiss of death.

~*~

I object to genre mostly because it leads to stale, cliché ridden cookie-cutter commodities produced for mass consumption. I find them too predictable, formulaic, and jargon-filled. A genre comes with the requisite tropes, after all.

I write and read to discover, to make sense of life as I’ve known it, especially, no matter how far afield that goes. Haven’t I wandered across the Arctic or Sahara in some form, after all? I don’t need to go into interstellar space or an alternate reality to get away from everything. In fact, I doubt I can go anywhere without taking my personal baggage along. How about you?

 ~*~

As for conflict?

When Mrs. Hines, my senior-year high school English teacher, said that all fiction is based on conflict, I piped up, contrarian that I am, “Oh, no it’s not!” To some degree, I’ve been trying to prove my case.

Nor would anything I’ve done fit Kurt Vonnegut’s advice, “Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them – in order that the reader may see what they are made of.”

There are no murders or bear attacks or invading armies in my stories. Well, maybe off somewhere in the distance. They never get personal. think most of my characters are nice folks.  Daffodil Uprising and Hometown News have the most outward conflict, I’d say, while Subway Visions has almost none. The most recent revisions have added some layers of darkness but not enough to alter the overall direction.

Stepping back, though, I see something that surprises me alone these lines. Almost all of my novels are countercultural, by definition in conflict with the surrounding society. In addition, the central conflicts are usually internal or small scale. In the Secret Side of Jaya, she sees and hears things others don’t. Tell me that’s not a conflict. Nearly Canaan examines the consequences of times and places a promise falls short, one after another, in the characters’ lives.

~*~

Still, I have to ask if my resistance against genre or commercial publishing has really been another fatal flaw in my ambitions. Would Subway Visions been more successful if I’d recast it as fantasy, for instance?

Was it foolish of me to avoid genre?

My genre, such as it is? Experimental fiction? It fits me but does little to attract a book buyer.

How about “contemporary history,” which is not an oxymoron. So much that’s happened in my lifetime is ancient history to the majority of the population. My daughters listen amazed at the era – did this or that really happen? Yes, I reply, and you take it all for granted. (Or granite, as I prefer.) So much of it runs counter to the mass-media stereotypes. Yes, my focus has been counterculture, as I’ve encountered it.

~*~

I do like the term genre-bending, which I’ve recently encountered. It’s something I was already exploring in the final round of revisions, especially once Cassia went goth.

Acid test novelist: Ernest Callenbach (1929-2012)

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

I’m not big on sci-fi, but the 1975 utopian novel Ecotopia looks rather prescient in that vein considering so much that’s happened in the years since.

The book came out just before I relocated to the Pacific Northwest for what turned out to be four years, but it springs from a recognition of how much the region stands apart from the rest of the nation. It’s a state of mind as much as watersheds and mountain ranges.

As an expression of hippie mindset, I find it more expansive than, say, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Haunted by a big bad Wolfe in a white suit

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 5 Comments

“You’ll be the next Tom Wolfe,” one creative writing prof promised me. I loved the guy’s flashy writing and, for the most part, his subject matter.

Where he eventually rubbed me wrong was his consternation that no big novel of the hippie era had appeared. There, he kept ringing as a prompt for me.

Part of his hook for me was the fact that my dream job in the newspaper world would have been as a columnist, especially one like Hub Meeker’s State of the Arts in the Dayton Journal Herald. Arts journalism was, alas, a shrinking field, along with the more general community columnist, like that paper’s Marj Heydock or Binghamton’s Tom Cawley.

Wolfe had briefly been one of those, at the New York Herald Tribune.

The bigger part, of course, was about that novel. He was dismissing Richard Brautigan’s unique voice altogether and others, like Gurney Norman, John Nichols, Tom Robbins, who rode the vibe.

Wolfe was also snidely suggesting that he had been the one exception, with his Electric Acid Kool-Aid Test, which really wasn’t a novel and predated the blossoming of the hippie movement.

His idea of the Big Hippie Novel reeked of the misguided quest for a Great American Novel.

Quite simply, there were too many strands of the movement to fit into a single book. Political or social action, anti-war witness, civil rights, gender equality, environmental awareness, organic and vegetarian foods, intentional community, group housing, alternative education were all part of it, even before the sex, drugs, rock’n’roll, hair, fashion, or slang.

These other factors would come more fully into play when I revised Daffodil Sunrise into Daffodil Uprising, and Hippie Drum and Hippie Love into Pit-a-Pat High Jinks.

I’d like to think of those books as nominees for the Big Hippie Novel distinction.

Wolfe’s charge also overlooks the outstanding nonfiction books that reflected the experience, such as Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Moreover, I still feel that many of the difficulties in the current political scene arise from a failure to clearly understand the demons raging from the Vietnam conflict, both for those who fought in the army and those who fought the unjustified war itself.

So here we were, struggling through disco without having faced the lessons of either the hippie outbreak or the Vietnam disease. Hippie had become a dirty word, and many who had been happy to be one were no in psychological denial. It was something nobody wanted to relive either, apart from maybe Woodstock.

As others have observed, an ignorance of history carries a heavy price.

Some sterling libraries I’ve encountered

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

No, not the Library of Congress or Manhattan’s flagship facing Bryant Park, though I’ve been in both, or even Boston’s impressive Copley Square hub. Two of those were unable to put their hands on the volumes I was seeking and had no idea where they’d gone.

Instead, let me praise some other collections that have given me joy. Unless otherwise specified, they’re public libraries.

  1. The Lilly Library at Indiana University in Bloomington. It’s one of the premier rare book compilations in the New World, with impressive rotating displays in the front gallery and, for the more adventurous, access to original materials in the reverential reading room. Samuel Johnson’s Ramblers, John Jacob Audubon’s bird books, and Gary Snyder’s poetry broadsides are a few of the treasures my fingers and eyeballs explored there, along with a lingering fondness for African violets that graced its sills. The earliest books published and the much earlier manuscripts are often breathtakingly beautiful, even when you don’t understand the language.
  2. Indiana University graduate library. On a much bigger scale, it was a wonder, opening in my senior year. Hard to imagine just how much came into my purview there, back before the Internet, especially in regard to esoteric sides of contemporary poetry as well as the pioneering field reports from the Bureau of Ethnology in the American Far West. When I returned to campus as a research associate, I had faculty access and borrowing privileges.
  3. Dayton’s classical record collection and librarian. As a youth, I wasn’t the only one she guided to fantastic discoveries. Not just classical and opera, either. I still recall a very early Bob Dylan album that supposedly never existed.
  4. Case Western Reserve Historical Society. Sitting near the Severance Hall and the Cleveland Museum of Art om University Circle, the society’s genealogical collection is justly acclaimed and proved to be a great help when I set out to research my own roots. Much of the material was donated by the Trumbull County public library in Warren, Ohio, where I was living, and while that meant driving an hour away, I still have to admire the wisdom in assuring that the materials could be more appropriately curated and made more widely available. The local library, I should add, was solid – it even had a hardbound copy of John Kerouac’s first novel – the one before he became Jack.
  5. George Peabody Library, Baltimore. With its visually stunning ante bellum or art deco atrium (what I remember could be either), the collection itself was once part of the adjoining Peabody music conservatory. Its genealogical collection was impressive but didn’t match my areas of research. Still, it was delightful just to sit in that airy space.
  6. Binghamton, New York. There was something timelessly proper about this institution fronting a green.
  7. Fostoria, Ohio. Its straight-shooting director, Dan (if I recall right), cut back on the number of best-sellers on the racks and invested instead in paperback copies of more timeless books, which he then had turned into hardbacks. The savings in cost added up. For a small blue-collar town, 16,000 population, the collection had surprising depth. For me at the time, the range of the Tibetan Buddhist volumes was unexpected. Somehow, one donor had even presented a beautiful translucent marble wall for a big part of the front of the building.
  8. Camden, Maine. The picturesque town of 5,200 year-‘round residents triples in the summer, including a large dose of old-money wealth. The town was one of the few did not have its building donated by philanthropist Andrew Carnegie in the late 1800s. When, over time, its celebrated 1927 Colonial-style brick home demanded expansion, the result was a much larger space underground in the neighboring park. The 1996 result is quite striking and delightful, almost an homage to hobbits, in fact, with the older building still sitting like a hat overhead. As one measure of the town it serves, I’ll point to the opera section of the CD collection, much of it donated by patrons. It seems to have everything and then some.
  9. Needham, Massachusetts. The large paintings by N.C. Wyeth overlooking the tables in the periodicals room was reason enough to stop by.  He called the town home.
  10. Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania. Being able to access William Wade Hinshaw’s filing-card drawers of typed extracts from Quaker Meeting minute books is a genealogist’s dream come true, as is the ability to examine historical microfilm pages from Ireland and England without having to leave the country.

Oh, my. I could add more. The North Carolina Quaker Meeting minutes archived at Guilford College, for one. The Chester County Historical Society’s library in West Chester, Pennsylvania, for another. The community outreach in Watertown, Massachusetts, or Dover, New Hampshire, or the Peavey Memorial here in Eastport, Maine, for yet more. Meanwhile, what do we do a digital library? Consider Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, with its online historical trove of Quaker writings presents both the original page and a readable transcription to flip among. As a researcher, it’s quite amazing to be able to read these books and tracts in the comfort of your own home rather than having to fly to London or some other distance for the only available copy.

Or complaints about some others where I’ve lived.

In my estimation, a good library is an essential component of public social vitality.

Acid test poet: Diane Wakoski (1937- )

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

When my poetic focus shifted in the early ‘90s from nature to romantic love as I had known it, Wakoski hit home for me. Hers were love poems but far from the sunlight, chocolate, and roses “I can’t live without you” stereotype of the hopeless/helpless romantic.

Hers were alive in an admission of the continuing impact of adolescent awakening and desire, no matter your age, and the imagery was unmistakably American with a rock’n’roll plus Hollywood warp.

The title Motorcycle Betrayal Poems captures the energy, and her fine volumes from Black Sparrow Press fill a stretch of a shelf in my library.

She was a kind of guardian angel in a stream of poems I produced in the decade. For a sample, see my Blue Rock ebook collection.

Everybody should get a sabbatical

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Shortly before finding myself officially unemployed, I engaged a typist to prepare a clean draft of Subway Hitchhikers for submission to literary agents or book editors. At least that would be moving forward.

And then, when the ax fell, I was surprised to find that after arriving in Baltimore, in debt from divorce and selling a house at a loss in a recession, I had saved up a bundle in just two years. Having a company car and an expense account covering my meals during the week added up. Rather than return immediately to the workforce, I decided to give myself some time off, a sabbatical, as it were, to concentrate on the writing I had always wanted to do. The kind that would put my name on the cover and the spine. Something more lasting than a byline on a daily paper or even, more prestigiously, a magazine.

Watching a colleague who was waiting till retirement before he could tackle the children’s book he always wanted to write nagged at me. I had heard a few similar dreams – wait for retirement. Except that a heart attack felled Russ shortly after he got that farewell cake.

In my job-free spree, I hunkered down to hard writing, up to 12 hours a day. By this point, I was pretty proficient with my personal computer and its dot-matrix printer. And so, while she was typing up Hitchhikers, I turned to keyboarding other material.

What I see as I look back on my sabbatical was that I entered the year more prepared than I’ve assumed. It wasn’t like I was sitting down and staring at a blank page and waiting for inspiration to strike. Besides, I had journal notes, correspondence, even maps and photos to draw on.

Every writer works differently, as interviews in the Paris Review demonstrated. The one with Jack Kerouac had inspired to use the end rolls of teletype paper for drafting, freeing me from having to keep inserting new sheets into the typewriter. Using a PC was like that, only instead of having to replace paper I had a 5¼-inch flopping disk that filled up. If only I had an editor waiting, like he had.

As I awaited word on my query letters to agents and publishers, I began examining my life from college to the present through the eyes of fiction. Keyboarding large sections from my journals gave me a foundation for following my moves from the East Coast back to Ohio, on to Indiana, again, and finally the Pacific Northwest, events that included my first marriage. Making it work as fiction, though, was the challenge.

My primitive PC was still a huge advance over typewriters, in my case, an Olivetti Editor 2. And here I had been seeing the ubiquitous IBM Selectric as an enviable sign of a successful writer? The thought is rather amusing today. Gee, and there was no Internet yet, hard as that is to believe now.

In my sabbatical I concentrated on a single manuscript and then put it aside as I awaited feedback from potential agents or publishers or maybe just for a space to season until I could come back to it afresh. That opened a window to start drafting another. I was a fiend, having waited years for this opportunity.

My hunkered down life? I got the deepest tan of my life by taking a midday break at the pool, at least through the summer. And did get out for hikes, especially in nearby pine barrens that had lead mine remains and a waterfall. Spiritually, I was connecting with Plain Quakers, liberal Mennonites, former Amish, and a small circle from the Church of the Brethren – all in the pacifist tradition. There was even a writers’ group that Tom Clancy addressed just as he was on the cusp of celebrity.

What I see now when I look at my earlier writing is that I could never have created those pages later in my life. Too many details would have vanished, along with the urgency and originality and even the voice.

The sabbatical was also a period of heavy reading for me, including the brat pack being edited by Gary Fisketjon at Vintage Contemporaries, Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, and George Eliot’s Middlemarch.

As my savings ran out, I still hadn’t found an agent or publisher. Realizing I’d need at least another year clear to achieve that, I reluctantly headed back to my career in newspaper journalism, this time in New Hampshire. There was a crucial shift, though. The archconservative Union Leader had a unionized newsroom where I could go back into the ranks as an editor and still earn more than most small paper managing editors across the country. I even had job security and a 35-hour workweek that allowed me time for a real life.

I packed up with the first rambling draft of what would become Promise, released via Smashwords in 2013, and two related novels, plus Hometown News and all of the outtakes from the subway project. I could continue to revise those drafts in my free time, but the book publishing world was changing in ways that baffled even the most celebrated literary agents.

Looking back, I must admit how much risk I took in my year off. I had no health insurance, for one thing, and no guarantee I could return to the shrinking ranks of journalism. I was also perceiving the pace I was working at could not be sustained.

I had been appalled in reading interviews with famed authors who boasted that they worked four hours a day – what slackers, I thought. Now I see that as a rather lavish amount of time, considering the additional hours of research, related correspondence, submissions, reading, and basic home-business demands (yes, writing is a business). Gee, how did I overlook all those hours of lunch conferences or cocktail hours in the lives of the literati, which were essentially business? Or even their hours in psychotherapy?

Acid test novelist: Diane DeVillers (1956-2023)

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

While Tom Wolfe charged that no great novel sprang from the hippie counterculture, a challenge akin to the holy grail of the great American novel, his quest overlooked some fine stories that reflected any of its many dimensions.

Among the gems are the three self-published novels of DeVillers’ Eve Chronicles, grounded in the author’s experiences in moving from her native Wisconsin to the Pacific Northwest, where she spent several years – harsh winters included – with a crew in the rugged mountains of eastern Oregon replanting forests in the wake of clear-cut logging. I had heard of the legendary Hodads in the western part of the state (they took their name from the short-handled pick/spade they used), but DeVillers’ case gently probes the realities of the marginal existence and the varied types of people it attracted. Though this was not the Haight-Ashbury stereotype of the era, it was one of the counterculture’s many flavors. She was definitely back-to-the-earth throughout the span of the books.

Another was the holistic health-care work she took up in what she called a nomadic life before settling down in the Willamette Valley, where the Chronicles continue, again reflecting the conflicts of living out deeply felt values.

She began writing the novels after being diagnosed with MS and drew on her spiral-bound notebooks as source material. (Fortunately, those had survived her many moves.) I love the fact that she’s not inventing stories or characters but distilling what she’s known firsthand. She presents scenes – even aromas and lighting – I’ve experienced, too.

I was going to say her tone is reminiscent of Joni Mitchell but now see the singer was an inspiration. How right, then.

She was working on a manuscript about the health care industry and big money and big politics set in the Covid pandemic, but I don’t know how far she had gotten with it.