Tag: fiction

Acid test essayist and poet: Kathleen Norris (1947- )

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The Dakotas, as I encountered them driving a U-Haul to Washington state, are a starkly open, even disturbing space that contrasts sharply to the expanses on either side of them. Much of my writing has included unique places as an essential element, sometimes approaching the role of an actual character.

Norris’ Dakota: A Spiritual Journey came to my attention after I had relocated to northern New England and was attempting to comprehend its unique landscapes and peoples. Her insights, with all of the directness of Midwest expression, proved helpful.

The friend who recommended – or perhaps even gifted – Dakota to me had lived as an Episcopal nun, and my ashram residency was a monastic experience, so Norris’ The Cloister Walk, following up on her introduction to a Benedictine community, was more like a dialogue. Yes, monks and nuns can be prankish and have a sense of humor, and as mystics, they’re often unexpectedly practical.

Norris was welcomed as an active Presbyterian to participate in the Roman Catholic convent without any pressure of conversion. Rather, her exchanges were mutually enhancing, akin to what both my friend and I repeatedly encountered in our own religious streams.

Building on that, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith has been a helpful guide in translating key Christian words and expressions – jargon, if you will – in ways a wider contemporary audience might more clearly understand. I find it helpful to have at hand when writing directly about Biblical terms and thoughts.

Poets do make some of the finest prose writers, in my humble observation.

Now, for standing on my head

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

I’m not sure when or where I began drafting my yoga novel or where, but I know the bones were in place before I began my self-declared sabbatical in 1986-87. Perhaps it was during my month of unemployment before landing in Baltimore. For one thing, I had revisited the ashram in the year before my big writing spree and perhaps even driven past it the previous year. I was hoping to get some answers for questions regarding my manuscript must say the encounter was unsettling. I wasn’t even allowed inside the center, and the woman who had taken over as guru declared herself too busy to say hi. A deputy was dispatched for that, with tea, while I sat beside Swami’s grave.

Well, that was a perk of being “on the road” as a newspaper features salesman, otherwise known as “field representative.” I even got my name in brochures and full-color ads in the industry magazine Editor & Publisher.

My ashram residency a dozen or so years earlier had been life-changing, but the connection broke completely when I relocated to the Pacific Northwest in 1976. Swami had demanded a large chunk of my meagre salary, and besides, I was newly married with a wife in college. The upshot, quite simply, was that I felt ostracized. I was certainly shunned it that social call. In the bigger picture, the yoga movement itself had gone into eclipse and my own spiritual journey had resettled in the Quaker vein.

Still, the yoga life in America was a largely untold story, even if it had put “karma” and “om” into the American vocabulary and mindset.

When I began drafting the book, I had no idea where everyone had scattered and had no way of contacting them. I mean, if I was ostracized, what was the point of contacting the headquarters? Did I even know that Swami had died? Perhaps, though some communication I had with someone who had been a regular guest and went from being a rock-band manager to a Messianic Christian comedian. I managed to make that connection through a wire-service news story I came across before my leap to Baltimore. So now I’m thinking the yoga novel originated even earlier than I’d thought. (I really do need to sit down with my journals for a very deep dive.)

I do see that some of the outtakes from Subway Hitchhikers were woven into what became my second published book, Adventures on a Yoga Farm, which came out as pioneering PDF ebook from PulpBits.com in 2005.

~*~

What do you do with a rogue outfit like ours? I definitely wanted to avoid the sticky sweet guru worship I’d seen in other books, and I definitely wanted to avoid a scandal-mongering expose, though I would later find that nearly all of the religious imports from Asia would face financial or sexual embarrassment. Michael Downing’s 2002 Shoes Outside the Door: Desire, Devotion, and Excess at San Francisco Zen Center would cover that reality in one of the more prominent and, up till then, respectable organizations.

When I sat down to write my novel, I decided to stick to one day in the community’s life. I created a composite of eight young yogis and their woman swami guru. Each resident student represented a different stage of development. It also involved compressing the two years of my experience into a single day. I’m guessing the one-day focus reflected the Greek theater ideal.

And I do stand by my original structure of eight disciples within a single day.

The book was republished via Smashwords in 2013, this time with more popular platform choices than PDF. My, have times changed.

What I really wanted, I think, was my own version of Be Here Now.

I don’t think I could have adequately presented the inner turmoil of a charismatic leader without a college degree now having a tiger by the tail much less uncovered all that got covered up in the frenzy.

Would anyone really care?

Acid test novelist: Jonathan Lethem (1964- )

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Another of the circle of novelists I treasure who began writing after I graduated from college is Brooklyn-born Lethem.

“Genre bending,” used to describe Lethem, is a new term for me, but hardly a new concept. It’s something I’ve long pursued, if only in resisting genres outright. His multigenerational Dissident Gardens, especially its unconventional structure, even gave me a key for redirecting the material I had been gathering for what emerged as my novel What’s Left.

His essay describing the underground Schemerhorn station in Brooklyn is my nominee for the finest writing about the New York City subway station, period. Remembering, this is coming from the author of Subway Visions.

Some of my friends had resided near his locations in Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude, so the novels had some familiarity for me in addition to his takes on growing up in a hippie environment. I was especially intrigued by his treatment of his father, an outstanding contemporary painter and personal friend, as an eccentric videographer.

Now, to add Lethem’s earlier books to my TBR pile …

Poetry has been an influence, too

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Through much of my adult life, I’ve spent more time writing and distilling poetry than I did with fiction.

Part of the reason was that poetry fit my once-a-week time for sustained “butt time” addressed to my literary efforts. A novel, in contrast, requires a bigger window, at least for me. I have to admire mothers who put something good together while toddlers and family meals gave little respite.

For me, the practice of poetry, both as a writer and reader, springs from the practice of meditation I took up as a yogi and continued as a Quaker, though now it’s once or twice a week rather than daily.

Prose simply feels more secular and aimed more at a general reader. And even there, I’ve come to see that writing hundreds of thousands of headlines for a living had a poetic component in its brevity. My personal writing was one way of staying sharp there. As for the hundreds of thousands of newspaper pages I designed? They did fall back on that intense visual art training in high school.

Like my fiction, my poetry originated in trying to remember and make sense of what was happening around and within me. Sometimes, when I got around to a manuscript of fiction, I would cannibalize a poem, especially if it hadn’t yet been published in a journal. That was especially true when it came to Nearly Canaan and the Secret Side of Jaya.

I wonder if any of this goes back to my childhood interest in chemistry and then being stymied when I wasn’t taught algebra when I needed it, back in fifth and sixth grades. Freshman year of high school was too late, my line of inquiry had shifted to classical music and visual art.

Poetry is a kind of equation, even geology, rather than the Friday night football game a novel can play.

~*~

My juggling act between the daily journalism that paid my bills and the literary aspirations that I hoped would finally free me did result in what I’ve come to see as literary graffiti – flashes written on the run, even when they then underwent much distillation and refining. I think that’s most obvious in Subway Visions, Nearly Canaan, and the Secret Side of Jaya but also befits everything except What’s Left, and even there may have crept in through the earlier outtakes I wove in.

~*~

Shortly after my books were up at Smashwords, a fine writer I know told me over coffee that I was more of a poet than a novelist. Ouch! He may have even said a better poet than novelist.

I hope I’ve improved since then and have arrived at a better balance in the revised books.

Now, for some ‘Bodoni-Bodoni’

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Hometown News is the one novel Cassia from What’s Left didn’t press me to revise, but it got the treatment anyway. At least the title stayed the same, though the subtitle “Reports from Trump country” was added.

Political novels rarely work, so I’ve heard. And I didn’t pitch this was as dystopia, though casting the book more along those lines might have been more successful.

The book still stands apart from my others.

In the time since its first draft and my big round of deep revision, much that I had investigated only worsened. The once powerful newspaper industry was a ghost of itself, and many of the once legendary nameplates were owned by hedge funds whose owners or managers were among the world’s top billionaires. The Rust Belt communities like Rehoboth still hadn’t rebounded – their lucrative unionized manufacturing jobs were never coming back, either.

~*~

Unlike my previous newspapers, the final one I served had job security and decent wages, thanks to our Newspaper Guild representation. I finally made it to median income, even.

Socially, its newsroom broke down into three distinct circles with little overlap. There was the daytime staff, an echo from the days when we still had an afternoon edition; it was the crew that did the features and opinion pages. The nightside staff produced the next day’s daily editions right up to 1 a.m. And the Sunday News staff worked a four-day week culminating in a double shift on Saturday. We got to know each other the most through union meetings revolving around contract time.

At my first paper, where we worked into the night, the staff usually gathered at the bar next door after their shifts and stayed till closing time.

At another, where we were mostly young and without kids, it was on Friday afternoon – the POETS society, as our divorced city editor dubbed it: Piss On Everything, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

Usually, everybody lived at a distance from the newspaper plant. Few could afford the rents or mortgages in the city of publication.

I can’t speak for other office situations or professions, but I did find that close friendships were rare. You knew your coworkers more by a phrase or two they repeated or a favored style of clothing they wore or, as some of the guys seemed to do, by the kind of car they owned.

Still, things came up at parties. Consider the quip from one generally naïve woman regarding the allegator-skin cowboy boots one of the sportswriters once appeared in: “Hey, you look like a pimp. What’s up?” And then the shock we felt a month or two later when he was arrested, having procured women and motel rooms for men in the car racing circles he covered.

At these gatherings we usually huddled around the share our war stories and talk what one spouse dubbed “Bodoni-Bodoni,” after a widely used headline typeface.

Most of the papers I worked at were the smaller operation in a broader market. And I usually was part of a news team with a competitive, aggressive mindset. That part was exciting.

In the revisions, I did have a new paper to draw on, not that it was of the progressive mold I was pursing in the book. The daily interactions, though, could be just as rich.

~*~

From what I’ve seen, the situation of low-level, “shirt-sleeves” managers has only worsened across the board. Perhaps the Covid pandemic work-from-home option has eased the pressures on white-collar jobs, but that happened after my final revision.

There was little job security in working for mass-media companies. When I was with the features syndicate, I’d spend a year nurturing a relationship with the top editor, who promised to buy a certain comic strip or opinion-page columnist or weekly business report from me when the next annual budget was approved – only he was gone by then. Turnover was high, often blamed on “bad numbers” like shrinking circulation or advertising revenue. Or, in one case, because the company headquarters decided to buy a radio and TV broadcast chain.

I do wonder what happened to several of the family-owned papers I called on. They’re top editors didn’t feel a need to attend the usual annual conventions where networking occurred.

I should also mention that several of the papers I worked for did bring in management consultants, giving rise to the team in my novel. Give credit to the one that threw up its hands halfway into the projected year of monthly meetings, declaring that the news business just didn’t fit any of their models.

The Dilbert comic strip touched on many of the office realities, but at a superficial level.

Best-selling management books – Tom Peters’ In Search of Excellence, for example – were exciting but didn’t reflect the everyday realities we faced meeting hourly deadlines leading up to the big, final deadlines. The ones you didn’t dare miss by more than a few minutes.

~*~

So I made tweaks to strengthen the focus on central characters and acknowledge the big hit from the Internet.

~*~

I should say something about public misconceptions of journalists and their papers.

One colleague, who lived a block from me in the town I call Rehoboth, told of a neighbor who complained to him every time the met around the driveway. There was always something wrong with something we’d done. Finally, my buddy fired back. “What do you think the reporter of that story is paid?” The man, a steelworker, fired off a figure. “Less than half of that,” my buddy said, “and she has a Master’s degree.” The man was shocked. After that, he always had something good to say.

As for the right-wing perception of liberal bias, the reality was that many of the biggest papers were unabashedly conservative: Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Phoenix Republic, Boston Herald, Cincinnati Enquirer, Columbus Dispatch, Indianapolis Star, and probably the majority in the smaller markets. And that was before Fox.

If there’s a bias, it’s for facts rather than presumptions. The Louisville Courier Journal’s Pat Siddons, who covered Bloomington, once said. “I know I have a controversial issue right when I get complaints from both sides of a story I’m covering.”

The fact that journalists are largely low-paid, working nights, weekends, and holidays, did nothing to incline them toward big business, though. One thing we hated was injustice. Another was the lies that accompany it.

~*~

Trying to locate Rehoboth?

It was a composite, drawn mostly from the Rust Belt that extended from Philadelphia and Baltimore west to the Mississippi or so. While my book describes the steel mill that dominated the town, similar communities may have had auto assembly plants, appliance manufacturers, parts makers – the list would be long, like the empty factories they left behind. I observed large swaths of devastated industrial zones in Youngstown, around Pittsburgh and greater Philadelphia or upstate New York or Detroit – places that resembled arial bombing scenes from World War II Germany and Japan. Similar scenes existed along the Lake Michigan shoreline of Indiana, and across Wisconsin and Michigan.

I could now add to that the former papermill towns of Maine.

The fact that there’s personal breakdown as well, as I present in the story, is more than symbolic.

~*~

As for authors and books percolating through me during the final revision and later, the culture J.D. Vance describes in Hillbilly Elegy is one I knew well. Our high school basketball team played his, for one thing, and I had toured its steel mill twice as a Boy Scout. His Middletown could be one more nominee for my Rehoboth.

Add to that Ben Hamper’s Rivethead: Tales from the assembly line, David Foster Wallace’s The Broom of the System, Charles Bukowski’s fiction, a shelf of business case-studies, Kenneth Patchen’s poetry, E.F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful. And Brian Alexander’s Glass House: the 1% economy and the shattering of the all-American town is high on my TBR pile.

~*~

Seeing the loss of status and influence of an independent press has been personally painful, as has the breakdown of communities despite the opportunities of small is beautiful, especially in the Midwest.

Since the final revision, one of the figures in my book, the major scumbag, really, died in a horrific late-night car crash. And pneumonia took out Major Bohroh a little over a year ago.

If I were to tweak Hometown News yet one more time, I’d intensify their evil nature.

Acid test essayist: Joan Didion (1934-2021)

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Her dry, acerbic approach to the subjects in Slouching Towards Bethlehem and other writings were invigorating at the time, especially when they reflected the hippie counterculture. I didn’t especially consider it New Journalism, much less its use of novelistic techniques. Tom Wolfe and Jimmy Breslin were already there, ahead of her, in my reading.

I didn’t keep up with her output, though, and returning to the early work I now see much that strikes me as dated and shallow. Maybe that’s a consequence of seeing national reporters come briefly into a locality and then write of it as if they have some authority, in contrast to what I know after longer residency.

More recently, reading Where I Was From, the account of her upbringing in central California, I felt her telling was more novelistic than actual nonfiction.

I used to find ‘sale prices’ puzzling

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

In my mindset, a product or service has a fair-value point. You know, it costs so much to make and distribute, even before factoring in a profit. If you’re selling it at a lower price, why don’t you keep it there all the time? Maybe my outlook reflects the one-price for all practice of Quakers who objected to the upper class who expected to get a discount over the poorer masses.

Beyond that, the concept of bargaining or haggling found in many cultures absolutely repulsed me. I still feel like poor artisans and farmers in those countries are getting cheated or at least cheating themselves.

Either way, I rarely buy much and usually shy away from the more expensive range of items. Quite simply, I’m just not a shopper.

In my two years working as a field representative for a newspaper syndicate, I did finally come to appreciate the need to have something special to motivate a potential buyer. We couldn’t offer “specials,” and in most markets, we no longer had competing newspapers vying for our latest product. It was frustrating. There was nothing to make an editor jump onto our latest comic strip or columnist or game feature, no matter how excellent these were.

In the book publishing industry, free advance reading editions and review copies were sent out in the hopes of creating a buzz, but for digital books, that is a more challenging effort. Giving somebody a coupon to order online just ain’t the same as handing them a paper book.

So just what can an indy author do to get reviews or, better yet, a word-of-mouth buzz?

Welcome to Smashword.com’s big July-long ebook sale, where writers opt to present titles at sharp discount or even free.

Remember, this year I have two recent works available for free and two other new works at half-price.

Check them out at my Jnana Hodson author page! And then look at many of the fine offerings by others, too.

Acid test essayist: Jim Corbett (1933-2001)

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Multilayered and deeply personal, Goatwalking: a Guide to Wildland Living is a rich blend of social activism, clandestine adventure, wilderness survival, political resistance, witness for justice, and spiritual growth and grounding.

It’s all based on Corbett’s experiences as a founder of the Sanctuary movement for persecuted Central American refugees. He escorted many of them on foot through the desert from the border to safety within defiant congregations across the Far West. On the trail, he was accompanied by milking goats who provided needed nurture – hence the title.

The book is as a much a journal as a history or social philosophy. As I found related elsewhere, when Corbett first came among Quakers, he knew more about Buddha than Jesus. But then, waiting for his next party to arrive at a remote chapel, he meditated on the crucifix on the wall before him and realized that if anyone could possibly know the terrors his charges had suffered, it was Jesus. Later, working with a dedicated priest, he was treated as an equal in everything but the serving of the eucharist – “I’m a Jesuit, a member of the Society of Jesus,” he was told, “and you’re a member of the Society of Friends,” or Quakers. “What’s the difference?”

His insights are as relevant today as they were when first published.

Consider that bold ‘John Hancock’ on paper

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

As a writer, I love what alphabet letters and words by themselves can do on paper, apart from any meaning. Just look at one man’s intrepid signature on the Declaration of Independence and try to imagine that document without it.

I used to love visiting a friend who was a professional calligrapher and type designer. This was her life’s work.

Are other writers also inspired by such visual artistry?

The Lilly rare book library at Indiana University puts on exhibits of historic volumes, not just their typography and inside pages but also their bindings, endpapers, and spines. This is part of a legacy every serious writer is indebted to.

In its reading room I delighted in periodicals from the 1700s as well as contemporary poetry broadsides, limited edition prints intended to be framed and displayed on walls or preserved in rich patrons’ collections. Who wouldn’t aspire to see their own work presented as such a creation?

And then there were the psychedelic rock concert posters for the Fillmore back in the 1960s. If words could dance, they certainly do so here.

~*~

Most people are baffled by the wealth that gets doled out to acquire a painting or even a bottle of very old wine. I’m not in their camp, either a collector or a scoffer.

I will, however, declare what some people spend for trendy items they assume will be valuable someday – baseball cards included – is utter folly.

What I will defend is those individuals who spend a fortune to preserve an exalted example of inspiration – and I worry about those who might use possession as an opportunity for ostentatious destruction. Consider the lost Buddhist statues in Afghanistan for the latter.

I raise this out of gratitude for those patrons who preserve examples of excellence.

~*~

While I lament the loss of the craftsmanship involved in the letterpress printing of my early days in journalism, I am recognizing that online design has come a long way in even the last decade. Much of it is truly striking. Still, even as an ebook author and a prolific blogger, I still hold a special place in my heart for fine paper that’s attuned to the words entrusted to it.

That said, what else do you know about Mr. Hancock other than his signature?

Acid test translator and poet: Jerome Rothenberg (1931- )

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

My encounter with Technicians of the Sacred: A range of poems from Africa, America, Asia, and Oceana came about the same time I was taking up yoga in the early ‘70s. This sampler of so-called primitive peoples had a freshness I found stunning. Many of the translations were fragmentary, giving the sense of having just been excavated from an archeological dig. Others reflected my sense of discovery arising from the practice of meditation. These were unlike any poems I had previously encountered, and they altered my writing direction.

Thus, I was immersed in what he called deep image and ethnopoetics before I’d ever heard the terms.

I know it’s not his only book in my library, and I am anticipating looking for the others when we move many of our goods out of storage.