Tag: Hippie

And then ‘What’s Left’ came into focus and changed everything before it

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

By the time the ebooks were published, I had remarried and settled into our little city farm on the New Hampshire seacoast, the one with the red barn that gives this blog its name. My life had stabilized and my job wasn’t devouring me alive, unlike my previous lower-level management positions.

But something kept nagging at me. I wanted to know just where the hippie movement had gone. Many of the insights have been posted here at the Red Barn, and I did draft a series of essays – Hippie Hopscotch – for a book competition that was cancelled after I sent my entry off. My conclusion is that the hippie impact is still around in many varied streams, much of the legacy taken for granted in contrast to the mass-media stereotypes or the current teens’ perception of hippie as being a girl thing. My wife and stepdaughters kept asking about the era and were astounded to hear just how much had changed for the better because of it. They were incredulous at the restrictions I had faced. Were things really as bad as Mad Men presented them? Yes, and the show had me retasting the first newspaper I worked for, the one that came closest to major metro. I mean, I could almost smell it.

Could any of this earlier work be salvaged? And what could I do with the searing childhood betrayal piece published online in Hobart?

My first published novel, Subway Hitchhikers, had ended with Kenzie’s return to Indiana. Intuitively, I had him, as a Tibetan Buddhist lama reincarnated into Iowa, marrying into a Greek-American family in Daffodil. I saw it as a way of blending two streams of ancient wisdom – one Asian, the other at the origins of Western culture. Something still felt incomplete in that ending.

Rather than trying to pick up the story with Kenzie himself two decades later, I decided to shift the focus to the next generation, which led me to create a daughter. This would be her story. As an added twist, I decided to have her lose him, not to divorce but an avalanche in the Himalayas, when she was just 11.

Unlike my earlier fiction, this one was undertaken totally in my retirement years. Yes, I had the ending of Hitchhikers as my prompt – and, based on that, some characters and a setting to work from – but this book would be done with fewer external demands than I’d faced in working on the others in my “spare” time.

Surprisingly, this became the hardest of all to bring to fruition, undergoing nine thorough revisions. In one version, there were no quotation marks. Another changed the tenses.

No quotation marks? Since she was relating the story anyway, including what other people had told her, who knows how accurately she repeated them. Blame Cormac McCarthy as a bad influence there. It was one flash of brilliant inspiration that ultimately proved confusing. Now, how many quotation marks did I eliminate in one sweep and how many did I have to insert as repairs? Both times, it involved a lot of keystrokes.

The focus shifted greatly, too.

At first, it was on what she uncovered about her father and his times. He was a hippie, after all, so we would see the hippie scene through her perceptions of his photographic record of people and events. In the next revision the focus turned to what had attracted him to join her extended family, one so different from his own roots. That led me to questions of just what a family is – a pretty slippery concept in today’s America – and then an examination of Greek-American culture in the Midwest itself. Finally, the focus was entirely on her, period, starting with her stages of adolescent grieving and emotional recovery.

I was a bit spooked when she began talking to me through my fingers as I was typing. She was snarky, too. Talking? She was dictating. Even scarier, she sounded a tad like my younger stepdaughter.

And it wasn’t just when I was up in my third-floor lair. Sometimes she talked to me while I was swimming laps or weeding the garden.

At some point this was no longer about a distant past, in her eyes at least, even when those roots impacted the present and its conflicts. By now, I was watching her grow up with each revision as she gained a snide, seemingly cynical tone and a goth appearance. I wish I had answers or at least advice for where she and her generation of the family wind up at the end of the book, but we do know what their options are.

The book also evolved into a multigenerational affair, reaching back to her great-grandparents and later jumping ahead to her nieces and nephews within a large, tightly knit extended family.

How to structure this baffled me until I came upon the way Jonathan Lethem handled a multigenerational novel that built on four sections of four chapters each, like a mosaic. Mine has five generations at play, once you include Cassia’s nieces and nephews, but the structure holds. Somehow it works differently than the traditional chronology of twenty-some chapters.

One of the 16 chapters, the subway ride to the Brooklyn art museum and its Tibetan galleries, comes from a lengthy outtake from a Hitchhikers draft, this time two or three decades later with Cassia, the daughter, rather than her father.

I should also admit that the title remained elusive. One I liked, Cassia’s Quest, got shot down for sounding more like a space journey. Another, in desperation, Diana’s Daughter pushed Kenzie out of range. What’s Left results as a double entendre, addressing both her situation and the manuscript itself.

Finding a suitable cover image was equally challenging. I liked a failing egg yoke as a reference to her being broken open and to her family’s restaurant. Photos of a grieving child or young woman never quite fit the physical description in the text itself and also failed to reflect the span from early adolescence into her 30s.

~*~

The project also had me reconsidering my own experiences.

Was I really ever a hippie? In my promotions for the novels, I contended that we came in all varieties and nobody fully fit the stereotype. That was, in fact, a central thrust of my novels, even when hippies are nowhere to be found, as was the case in Hometown News.

In the background, the local Greek Orthodox church opened the faith and culture to my curiosity. As I’ve discussed in posts here at the Red Barn, what I encountered was quite different from my Quaker simplicity but definitely enriched it, not just theologically but as in the traditional dancing, music, and food.

It was a good thing that I didn’t encounter the novels of the masterful Jeffrey Eugenides until after What’s Left had been published. I would have been too intimidated otherwise.

In addition to Jonathan Lethem, writers of inspiration during this project included Poppie Z. Bright, Anne Rice, and John Irving.

~*~

Not only was this the most difficult of my novels to writer, with deep revisions, but the central character, the snarcastic Cassia, had me rethinking everything that had gone before. She ordered me to revise the earlier books. Or else?

One of the advantages of ebooks is that new versions can be published rather easily. In this case, as you’ll see, she had my hippie books getting new titles, many characters getting new names, and many of the stories themselves being vastly enhanced.

All from what I jokingly called my culminating novel.

And that was before I returned to the others.

Here I had finally found myself in my goal of being free from the newsroom and having time to focus more fully on my “serious” writing. I just didn’t imagine it like this.

I still held a fondness for the hippie movement and its hopes but could clearly admit I had moved on. That part was liberating.

I’m still looking for that better world, though, as you know.

So here I was, back to the drawing board.

Letters from a retired hippie

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

I’m sorry about what you’re inheriting. I’m sorry about the parts we’ve messed up.

It’s not all our fault. We were too trusting, for one thing. And so green, as in naive.

Looking around, we see too many old losers and the sense of hippie as essentially a girl thing.

A sense of betrayal, futility.

It was a youth movement. That’s what you need to know about it.

As for the other options?

How ‘Pit-a-Pat High Jinks’ came into play

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Indiana wasn’t the only thing bogging down my original subway manuscript. The dude’s life off in the countryside after college was another big complication.

Well, that and my grounding as a journalist, meaning focusing on facts as I observed them, in contrast to writing as a novelist, meaning putting feelings and some imagination first.

Head for the hills, then, as I did by default to upstate New York. I didn’t get there quite as I describe Kenzie’s journey, but the route wasn’t that far off, either. In the story, I’ve kept the location rather vague. It could as easily be pockets of western Connecticut or the Berkshires in Massachusetts or even southern Vermont. Let them blend together.

I was pretty lost in my first year-and-a-half after college, the period leading up to my embrace of yoga. It was a wild ride for me, at the margin of general society; my highs punctuated deep depression. Most of my friends – including housemates and girlfriends – were from The City or its wider orb, and that included short trips with them when my work schedule permitted. (I rarely had two days off in a row, much less three.) And, my, was I green.

For much of that period, my own journalism slash writing career and dreams were going nowhere and paid next to nothing. More troubling, my love life was non-existent, even considering how I had a housemate who came back every night with a different bedmate, all of them delectable in my sight. What was my problem? What was wrong with me? What was I missing?

And then I found yoga and everything changed. Even the romance.

What could possibly be wrong with that story?

Well, it had fed into Subway Hitchhikers, but most of what I had drafted there was eventually excised to focus on the urban dimension of the story.

~*~

During this period, my social life revolved around two locations.

The first was a once luxurious apartment building turned slum at the edge of downtown. I later moved it to Daffodil along the Ohio River far to the west for the college-years novel. Well, many but not all of the renters were college students.

The second encampment was what many people would consider a hippie commune out in the hills, a very rundown farm high in the hillsides along the state line. As I explain in what’s now Pit-a-Pat High Jinks, we shared the expenses but not our incomes. I now think there were some freeloaders anyway.

Both dwellings, from what I see in satellite photos, have been torn down.

And I still believe my two-ring circus there (three, if you include the newspaper where I was employed) was a richer source of characters than, say, Bonanza or the Friends sitcom.

~*~

I’ll have to revisit my journals for clues about how the lode from this period evolved during revisions. When I heard about Smashwords a dozen years after the subway novel had been published, I must have already had two versions of the experience in hand, both drawn from the earlier outtakes augmented by journal entries and correspondence.

They differed sharply in tone and focus.

Hippie Drum was closer to a memoir that focused on the general hippie scene around me. Hippie Love paralleled the chronology but focused on its erotic encounters, with the added twist that our protagonist had far more success in the love department. One was gritty; the other, free-wheelin’ trippy.

In these parallel accounts of the same story line, the first focused on Kenzie’s overall adjustments to being out on his own, adapting to the workplace and his new housemates and a wider underground, freaky community. He was desperate for love but rarely connected. Frankly, much of the hippie life was drab and impoverished. The other, an R- or X-rated version, was more fanciful, examining what could have been if he had possessed a bit more finesse. Both books ended at the same point.

Making sense of what happened in my outwardly dull life in goofy counter-culture times included what happened out in the sticks were nobody seemed to be looking, that is, where I had landed or even taken refuge. It was just up the road from Woodstock, only on the far side of the Big Apple.

~*~

I originally envisioned the two books kind of like the three-show play The Norman Conquests, where a line of conversation starts in one room and of finishes a night or two later on the other side of door he had passed through. Not that I was that meticulous in my crafting. I was just trying to run with the material at hand.

Alas, the “love” book was wisely deemed “adult” content, invisible unless you checked your filter.

~*~

As for related input? Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers, Jack Kerouac’s spree narratives, Anais Nin’s sexual frontiers, Robert Crumb’s stoned cartoons, and Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant” can be seen as touchstones for what finally came back together as a single volume, Pit-a-Pat High Jinks, in its current incarnation. There may even be some Hunter Thompson in the mix.

~*~

Hippie Drum was the first book I published at Smashwords.

Hippie Love came out the next month.

Both, in the autumn of 2013.

I do love daffodils, by the way

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Having Subway Hitchhikers come out first did throw a ringer into the sequence of what would emerge as a kind of series. For one thing, it was out of print when the ebooks came along.

For another, I needed to tone down some of the hippie excesses.

As I’ve said, it started out as a nice, thin book. I completed the first draft shortly after leaving the ashram. But somehow, before I could land a publisher, it started growing. And growing. It gained a sizable back story as well as a parallel out-in-the-sticks hippie existence.

Getting to what would be published as Daffodil Sunrise leaves me in somewhat of a fog. Chronologically, it’s the earliest part of the story, detailing the transformation of a straight young photographer from Iowa into a hippie on a state university in Daffodil, Indiana. OK, no secret, it’s an abstraction of Bloomington and Indiana University, embodied the emergence of the character who started out as Duma Luma but now goes by Kenzie.

From what I’ve seen, very little fiction has been published about today’s American Midwest, at least in contrast to Manhattan or Los Angeles or even the South. Who’s speaking up for that part of the country, relating a viewpoint its natives might feel is theirs? It is vastly misunderstood.

Within that, Indiana stands as a crossroads, one with a strong Southern influence as well. I’ll argue it’s even a kind of symbol of middle America. It’s the only Midwestern state, by the way, not to carry a Native name but rather the generic Indian-a. It also is largely farmland with big cities at its corners: Chicago, Detroit, and Cincinnati.

Kurt Vonnegut strongly resonated with me as a missing voice, a straightforward one with biting humor. As I turned to drafting and revising, he definitely felt like a clarion in the wilderness. Especially his novel, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. Do I have do explain what growing up as a Goldwater Republican was like?

To get closer to the hippie vibe, add Tom Wolfe, definitely not a hippie but someone I first read when he was a columnist for the New York Herald Tribune, my favorite newspaper of all time. His supercharged prose fit the sensation of the surreal and vibrant new world the Revolution of Peace & Love was unleashing. Or so we thought.

Other influences I might throw in are Abby Hoffman’s Steal This Book, though I didn’t buy any of it, or Jerry Rubin’s political entreaties, or Herman Hesse’s shining ideals. As for love, though? I’m drawing a blank. At some point Richard Farina’s Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me caught my fancy, along with Thomas Pyncheon’s V, which finally made sense under an altered state of mind.

Perhaps Genji and Monkey, too?

Bloomington was seen as a wild and somewhat threatening place throughout the rest of the state, yet seemed to be so backward compared to, say Yellow Springs and Antioch, which in turn would seem so far behind the radical curve once I got to the East Coast.

I didn’t want to see any of what I was writing as a rite-of-passage tale, not even for an entire generation of my contemporaries in a Vietnam era. And yet?

I wasn’t seeing the experience, mine or that of those around me, anywhere in the public eye. What was appearing in the spotlight was San Francisco, the Manson cult, the Kent State shootings, and the later circle that abducted heiress Patty Hearst, which originated in Bloomington after I left.

Activist Saul Alinsky, among others, was right in his criticism of hippie political and social action, by the way.

Back to my story. What we think of as the hippie movement really revolved around university campuses. Think about that. It was no longer destitute runaways in San Francisco but legions in enclaves around the country.

Here I was, writing furiously in 1986-87, wondering where it had all gone. Or, I should say, is going.

The big issues still remain, bigger than ever, from climate catastrophe on down.

How could we have gotten this so wrong?

Well, Flower Power did have a lasting impact, though it’s largely taken for granted. The best I could hope for, then, is a reminder or better yet, to rekindle the flame in a younger generation.

Back to the underground inspiration

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

As you’ve probably noticed in other posts here this year, I’ve been trying to recall some of the authors and books having an influence on the earliest drafts and later revisions of my novels. As I’m writing this, most of my personal library is still in storage – or other volumes, purged long ago to make room on my shelves for more – and my journals under wraps during the house renovations. I’m having to rely on memory, faulty though it may be.

Look, I don’t want these posts to be about some poor neglected novelist blah-blah-blah, but rather as one account of surviving in a writer’s life, maybe as a bit of advice or even encouragement for the next generation or two.

That said, I can state that my subway project sprang from Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America as its model. Think short, playful, imaginative with an image slash idea as its central character, like a children’s story for Woodstock reaching young adulthood. William R. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch also cast a spell as a free-floating state of mind.

For me, hitchhiking in subway tunnels was a fantasy symbolizing the hippie experience as I encountered it during my time living in upstate New York. You know, underground with urban roots yet flourishing out in the countryside where you could stick out your thumb and go about anywhere. Yes, though I didn’t fully comprehend it then, that Woodstock crowd was mostly from New York City and its suburbs.

The symbol even implied a degree of freeloading rather than responsibility.

While awaiting publication, the manuscript kept growing from its 1973 first draft, typed while sitting cross-legged at my beloved Olivetti 32 typewriter, through a revision shortly after that and probably another in 1976 before I packed up for the Pacific Northwest, where yet more would be added to the text with quite a backstory in addition to a superstructure out in the foothills somewhere north of Gotham.

This was well beyond the initial Brautigan flash. What I had was, in fact, unwieldy, and nodding toward Brautigan’s other fiction and a lot more. Unlike me, he kept most of his volumes short.

And then, somewhere before reaching my sabbatical in the Baltimore suburb of Owings Mills in 1986, the manuscript was greatly slimmed down, leaving many pages of outtakes I couldn’t trash outright. There was enough to create more novels, or so my inner trash picker insisted.

We’ll look at those as they took shape during my furious year of keyboarding on my new personal computer, however primitive the machine and process appear now.

In that sabbatical, I must say I was highly disciplined, keyboarding for four hours or so before taking a break, eating, even napping, and then returning to the work until two or so in the early morning. I had lived my adult life up to this point awaiting this moment, if it was far from what I had envisioned. Suburbs? Without a wife or soulmate? Heartbroken, in fact?

What drives an artist, anyway?

Beyond the yellow BMW 1600 oil-burning coup I was bopping around in – the one that was older than any of the women I was seeing.

A great deal of material and energy was there to be released, and I sensed this was my make-it-or-lose-it moment. As you’ll see.

Baltimore even had its own subway line under construction, reaching all the way out to where I was encamped.

Not that I would be there when it opened.

~*~

My first hick outpost, the one upstate, wasn’t as small as it seemed. Yes, it was a backwater, but the core was more populous than six of the places I would subsequently live in, if you didn’t count the university students in what I would dub Daffodil.

What my first actual job in journalism did have, though, was proximity to New York City, a mere 3½- to four-hour drive away. Despite the distance, the connection was vital, even vibrant. All of my new friends were from the Big Apple, and many of them were Jewish, as my college girlfriend was, even though she had by now oozed away from my presence, off on what I saw as troubling new places. At least none of them were Jonestown.

Starting with a summer internship before my senior year of college and picking up again after my graduation, a time of great emotional upheaval, exploration, and redirection. As I said, this was in the high hippie outbreak.

I presented the image that flashed before me, the gandy dancer who could have been a hitchhiker, but I should also acknowledge a freaky cartoon a housemate had created and handed me, with a face at a sewer grate mumbling “Duma luma, duma luma.” Those were the two prompts for the manuscript, seriously.

~*~

The inspiration also came from my first jaunts into New York City while living upstate, and later to the west in the Pocono mountains of Pennsylvania. Most of my buds and girlfriends had been from the City, as they called it. My early experiences turned into fascination during a period of great personal upheaval and growth for me.

Hippies seemed to be trying to go in two directions at once: back to the big city while hitchhiking out in the sticks. The original version was, in fact, published as Subway Hitchhikers in 1990 – the worst bookselling season in the memory of many publishers, thanks to the first Iraq war.

As I’ve ready described, in the 17 years between the first draft and the story’s first publication, the manuscript underwent a considerable metamorphosis as I moved across the continent in my day job. While living in the desert of Washington state, I even picked up a 1915 engineering book on the building of the New York subway system while browsing in a very small, small-town bookstore. (How did it ever land there?) Much of my expanding text was backstory on the central character, while the urban transit episodes shifted into something akin to an appendix. The result was an unwieldy epic. But I kept the outtakes, which took on their own life later.

Like speaking to the ghost of my first lover

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Let me explain. After showing my tech-savvy elder daughter a few things about Facebook during a visit, I had one of those “whatever happened to?” moments and chanced upon my first lover’s FB site. That led to what we call falling down the rabbit hole, in this instance this one where her photos and posts made me happy to see what appeared to be a good life … at least until getting to the point where she related that her husband had passed. Forty years together? Impressive. How was she holding up after the loss?

As I continued:

A lot has transpired since we last communicated, but I can say on my end much of it wouldn’t have happened had you not been so much a central part of my life way back when. You really did change my direction. Thank you for the positive things that followed because of that.

Should you want to know more or to just chat, fire back. Or peruse my profile or my blog for a sampling of what’s really been – and continues to be – a rich life, maybe more than ever. Yours, of course, is likely to be more fascinating. Best regards, all the same. Peace … 

Of course, I haven’t heard diddly.

Acid test novelist: Gurney Norman (1937- )

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Returning to Tom Wolfe’s charge that no great novel sprang from the hippie counterculture, it’s clear that he overlooked Divine Right’s Trip, which originally appeared in the margins of the Last Whole Earth Catalog. (Far out, indeed.)

Rather than taking place in any of the celebrated hippie havens, Norman’s pilgrim figure finds himself in Cincinnati, a largely redneck habitation I’ve heard described as a place of perpetual Lent, before heading on into the strip-mined mountains of eastern Kentucky. Yes, hippie did indeed take place in seemingly unlikely locales. It was also often drab and lonely. And then, as Norman illustrates, it also drew nurture from some very unlikely sources.

If anything, there’s widespread lament that Norman didn’t write more. Divine Right’s Trip is humbly beautiful.

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.

Big city, big dreams

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Who was I to think I could say something fresh about underground public transit? Well, the outsider has long had a place in the arts … and in comedy.

I had expected to wind up living in a big city, where I’d have access to frequent symphony concerts and perhaps opera as well. Foreign films, well-stocked bookstores, kindred souls. All the rest. My life journey and my career went another way, but I still wound up as a subway rider, of sorts. I was far from a private jet or even taxi kind of existence.

My introduction to underground transit probably came in a series of big, cartoonish, wildly rendered Subway Riders canvases that received a special exhibit at the Dayton Art Institute sometime in my high school years. I think they were by a hot New York rising star who was visiting Ohio as an artist-in-residence or an arts school guest instructor, though his identity eludes me now. Flash in the pan? Rubes in the sticks?

I wasn’t exactly wowed, but I was intrigued. He wasn’t Rembrandt.

The furthest east I’d been was Pittsburgh. Perhaps the next year my family got to Toronto and Montreal, though I didn’t venture on the subway in either of those cities.

Do families even take such vacations on the road nowadays? We did have our camping gear in the trunk of our red Buick Roadmaster.

~*~

Writing about subways – becoming fascinated by them, their offensive grit, stench, and loud noises included – was about the last thing I would have expected when I graduated from college or even high school. I was a Midwesterner through and through. The closest I had come to what I saw in those Subway Rider paintings was on the City Transit trolleys at rush hour. We definitely weren’t flashing along a dark tunnel or loading by hoards or packed together like sardines.

But people kept telling me I wasn’t destined for my hometown, no matter how loyal I felt. Or was that defensive? The message they conveyed was that I should look to Manhattan or some equivalent opportunity. Even Cincinnati, an hour away, looked sophisticated.

The hippie outbreak, or Revolution of Peace & Love, was still somewhere in the future, though the Beatles were shaking the status quo and skipping around Elvis in what we’d now call the pop culture scene. Culture was, let me emphasize, concerned with things that would raise our vision and intelligence rather than merely mark social norms as in averages, either mainstream or ethnic.

By the time I actually rode a subway train, I was nine months away from earning an urban studies certificate, thanks to my multi-disciplinary college studies. The journalism career that embraced me would instead lead out in the boonies or an equivalent emotional wilderness.

~*~

My book that sprang from those encounters started out short and flashy as its first draft in ’73. Inspired, in part, by Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America, I typed away sitting cross-legged before a converted coffee table and my beloved Olivetti Lettra 22 blue typewriter. The very portable one.

Graffiti, wild splashes. This was going to be my wild hippie book, the essence of it all. It had the Midwest – what would emerge as Daffodil – and it had the Big Apple, where so many of the freaks I knew after graduation had grown up. The movement was a confusing clash of youthful excess.

It was too much – way too much, actually.

By the time I distilled it down into what was published as Subway Hitchhikers, it was more of a lacy collage presented in a strobe-light kind of then/now alternation that I came to see was overly ambitious to be effective rather than confusing.

What I did sense was the way big cities draw on the interior landscape, almost like vampires on the innocent. Not that I ever expressed it that openly, but I am now thinking it fit Gotham if only I were usually trying to look at the bright side of life.

Was it even a novel? Short, and perhaps meta-fiction?

Unlike any other.

Some things ‘Quaking Dover’ has in common with my novels

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Not that I really noticed the parallels until now.

  1. Counterculture is central, leading to an awareness of an underground community or at least kindred spirits.
  2. Both have meant learning to write differently than my neutral third-person journalism. Emotion, for instance, over fact, is the rule in the fiction. And the history opened a similar vein as creative nonfiction.
  3. The role of a narrator in both. In the history, that meant developing the gently laughing curmudgeon as he pored over historical data. In four of the hippie novels, it was the snarky daughter reviewing her late daddy’s hippie experiences.
  4. Both veins are self-published, falling under the shadow of being “not commercially viable” by publishing houses. That places an additional burden on the author.
  5. Marketing is a huge challenge. Apart from Subway Visions, none of my stories take place in a big city or address a big audience. How many hippie novels can you name, anyway. As for Quakers?
  6. Spirituality and religion run through all of them. In the novels, it’s often yoga, though Hometown News runs up against a puzzling array of churches. In Quaking Dover, though, it’s often the clash between the upstart Friends and what I first saw as rigid Puritans before both traditions begin to, uh, mellow.
  7. There’s a strong sense of place, even if these locations are far from the mass-media spotlight.
  8. I go for the big picture. I really would like to have a simple book – something, as Steven King advises, having only one big idea – but that’s not how my mind works.
  9. They’ve all undergone deep revision. Much of the fiction actually got new titles and new characters after their original publication.
  10. They were all labors of love.