Tag: Inspiration

What makes a particular writer stand out?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

More directly, the question comes down to this: What makes my work unique? What makes me unique? (My niche?)

As I once would have answered, somewhere back along the path to here:

“My work largely seeks to map organic geo-history, the overlapping energies of a locale and its spirit(s), as truthfully as I can, however fragmentary the result. Since personal relationships, including marriage, appear as places hovering within this landscape – both influencing and influenced by the larger ecosystem – I investigate them often with a concern for the larger, more timeless harmony (Logos).”

My, my, what can I say about that now? Or:

“This investigation of the invisible vibrations has also led me to cherish alternative cultures that embody healing energies – Native cultures, Amish, Mennonite, Quaker, and so on – in contrast to our increasingly rootless, violent, unstable society at large.”

As for the question, “What do you want to be different after this effort? This project?” Well!

“I hope to renew an awareness of the wonder of the universe and an appreciation for our own unique places within it. Out of that, roots and a radiance of peace.”

Or: “How do you want to be remembered? Then think of your customer (reader). What exactly do you want people to say when they speak of you to others? Are you representing your quintessential self consistently? (Image is everything. Brands need an unchanging core.)”

And so, to continue: ”Jnana – a unique, distinctive name – reflects my originality in bridging of many diverse currents into a larger vision. Compression, clarity, highly polished with a raw edge.”

Or a mission statement?

“I summon others to join our waiting Quaker worship and community. (This is how I got here and what I’ve experienced along the way to Truth … ) (Look for young adults, especially.)”

What have I not asked that people ought to know?

“I am part of a generation that has not come to terms with its hippie past – both positive and negative. While we’ve retreated from the general effort to push the envelope, to advance to Edge City, to demolish boundaries, we’ve also failed to examine what we learned and carry from that experience. Instead, there’s a society-wide state of denial that is bound to erupt in unanticipated ways – likely, without any sustaining wisdom.

“When radical currents from both coasts connected in academic nerve centers in the Midwest, furious confrontations erupted, overturning repressive constraints of institutional America.

“The hippie movement that is usually thought of as the Sixties actually appeared most fully during the Nixon administration, 1969-74, and brought changes that younger generations now take for granted.

“Crucial to the outcome were personal transformations that few today will speak of.”

~*~

Well, that’s some of what I’ve wrestled with in my zig-zag journey to here. Other writers will have to speak for themselves. Some of my responses sound today pompous and airy, but I’ll leave them at that for now.

A writer is allowed to aspirations, no?

~*~

You can find my novels and poems in the digital platform of your choice at Smashwords, the Apple Store, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Scribd, Sony’s Kobo, and other fine ebook retailers. They novels are also available in paper and Kindle at Amazon, or you can ask your local library to obtain them.

As for fireworks

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Let’s start with a pitch I once considered using.

“Hi, my name is Jnana Hodson and I’m a retired hippie. One of millions and, unlike many, I’m not embarrassed to admit it was a time to remember, no matter how short we’ve fallen from its potential. What is often overlooked is that the central element was the hippie chick. My novel, Hippie Farm, celebrates her in her many guises, even if you can’t even use the term “chick” anymore without being corrected. At the time, though, it was a badge of honor and invitation – one leading, in this case, to a rundown farmhouse in the mountains outside a college town. May I introduce you to the full story?”

Well, that attempt has now been woven into what stands as Pit-a-Pat High Jinks. Still, as I also proclaimed:

“In many of my novels, the hippie movement opened their minds. Or at least their horizons. Or even a few hearts. What’s most opened yours?”

That led to these points:

  • Crucial to the outcome were personal transformations that few today will speak of.
  • We’re still caught between two worlds (or) unfinished business. I wanted to present my work as letters from a retired hippie or letters to youth and a call to action.
  • I wanted to tell them I’m sorry about what you’re inheriting. I’m sorry about the parts we messed up.
  • And yet, it wasn’t all our fault. We were too trusting, for one thing. And so green, as in naive.
  • Looking around, there are the old losers and the sense of hippie as essentially a girl thing.
  • It was a youth movement. What you need to know about its legacy is this.
  • Economics:. globalization and digitalization versus small-is-beautiful. As for the tax base? And the kleptomaniac One Percent? How about selling yourself into slavery?
  • Relationships: the restructuring of marriage and family (dare we consider ashrams and similar shared householding).
  • Environment and the earth: Global warming is a reality, despite years and millions of dollars expended in its denial.
  • Justice and equality. Dare I say more?
  • Alternative lifestyle. Think of clothing, the arts (Edge City), food, even basic skills such as use of a broom or hammer.
  • Drugs, alcohol, etc. Legalization is one thing, appropriate usage another. Jail is not the deciding point. Oppressive life situations, however, are.
  • Yup, the whole system of shaping our children.
  • I’m not going there today, other than to say deep readjustments are in order. I hope they get to the bottom rather than enrich the most elite of society.
  • Discipline and self-discipline. For me, that leads to the next.
  • Spirituality and religion. Personal experience of something divine and then holy community.

Now, back to those contributor’s notes possibilities:

  • As an unabashed political liberal, Jnana despairs for public sanity.
  • He knows nothing good can come from a politics of hate.
  • Jnana is a Lincoln Republican who votes Democrat by default.
  • I was UPROOTED, repeatedly. In location, relationship, my career, even faith.
  • The undertow or rip current, pulling me away. I expected to live in large cities, my life filled with opera and symphony performances. Instead, it’s been mostly small cities in rural conditions.
  • My life journey has had little resemblance to what I anticipated from college on. Repeatedly, it seemed I was uprooted – in location, career, relationship, and even spirit – just as I began to address a situation fully. Outwardly, the result has been fragmentary, unified only in the mind and heart that embrace its many facets.
  • In recent years, much of my experience of wandering and sojourn has constellated in an investigation of the metaphors of Light and Seed as they were expressed in the early Quaker movement. I now perceive a semblance between the Dharma bums of Asian religious practices and the vagabond ministry of itinerant Quaker ministers, and find comfort in their legacy, with its parallels to my own movements.
  • After throwing myself into business crusades and tumultuous relationships, I consider myself a survivor. I love classical music and opera, mountaintops and the North Atlantic, Quaker Meeting and New England contradancing.
  • For me, poetry is a state of mind. Its essential element is silence, linking it to sacred (An impossibility, of course, considering the nature of words. And yet!)

Or, to reconnect with Ezra Pound, literature is slow news, something allowing some breathing space and reflection, rather than the minute-by-minute confusion before us.

Which takes me back to Scripture, diving into antiquity for parallels to today.

Now, let’s sit back tonight for some gloriously fleeting pyrotechnics. Something that might inspire and awe almost everyone.

Anyone else taking notes in an art gallery or museum?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

I’m not sure when the practice started in my own life, but somewhere it did.

Typically, in a first visit to an art museum, I’ll move along quickly to get a sense of the fuller collection. In the returns, however, I’ve become more inclined to sit down in front of a particular piece or even a full wall or room and then more fully immerse myself in particular pieces, usually while the rest of our party roves on. Yes, I’m with notebook in hand.

Those scribblings have led to poems, especially those in which Norman Rockwell and Gertrude Stein appear commenting, somewhat like poet Lew Welch’s Buddhist Red Monk who kept popping up at the bottom of the page. I’m not quite sure how they showed up, either, but there they are, as you’ll find in recent entries at my Thistle Finch editions blog.

Let me repeat that I’m generally averse to poems about poetry or celebrating poets or that somehow place artists of any stripe above the rest of humanity, ditto that for movie stars or professional athletes or billionaires or politicians. We do need our heroes, but I’m convinced that it’s healthy to keep their human frailties and shortcomings in perspective.

In that regard, I do believe we artists need to keep our vision beyond our studio door. Anything less strikes me as incest, even for an interdisciplinary addict like me. It’s why I refuse to respond to political pollsters. Go ask somebody on the street, OK?

Still, I made the central character in my Freakin’ Free Spirits novels a photographer. Even having him make a living by working at a newspaper was skirting my taboos.

~*~

The term “ekphrasis” defines poems that describe visual artworks though it can be applied more broadly. Sometimes the results are admirable, as exemplified in music by Gunther Schuller’s “Seven Studies on Themes of Paul Klee” or Modest Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition.”

~*~

Lately, I’ve become quite fond of the Alex Katz galleries at Colby College, not just because he almost collected a painting by my first wife. Rather, I sense something in the plainness of his depicted figures and where I’d like my own work to head. It’s stripping something down to essentials.

We’ll see.

~*~

For Rockwell and Stein, take a look at at Thistle Finch editions. For Freakin’ Free Spirits, look for the four novels in the digital platform of your choice at Smashwords, the Apple Store, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Scribd, Sony’s Kobo, and other fine ebook retailers. They novels are also available in paper and Kindle at Amazon, or you can ask your local library to obtain them.

Working ‘in series’ came as a big breakthrough

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

One of the artistic ideals in my life originated in the fantastic illustrations by Inuit craftsmen as they expressed the world they inhabit. Perhaps you’ve seen some of their calendars exhibiting owls, seals, the sun itself, and the like.

As I was told by the couple who introduced me to the Inuit works, an artist in the tradition does a subject just once, at least in the position or perspective that results. A bear, for instance, might be shown standing, but only once. If a bruin shows up again, it would be fishing or lumbering along or maybe paired. Each appearance, though, must be unique. There were still plenty of ducks, geese, walruses, whales, and other Inuit – hunters, mothers, and children – remaining for close examination, even in their Arctic environment.

The husband who told me this, let me add, was a coauthor of the Alaska constitution who had some acquaintance with the ecosystem. He had grown up at its southern edge, northern Washington state.

After more than two decades with that as a guideline, I faced a conundrum as I tried to assemble my own poems for submission as a competition for a chapbook – a booklet, essentially. A book needs to flow from start and middle to an end with some sense of continuity. My one offering that had that, American Olympus, had a received a provisional acceptance from a prominent press that later rescinded, claiming a cut in their grant funding. And my other pieces hopped, skipped, and jumped from one setting to another – if only I had been able to remain in one setting long enough for continuity in their completion.

Beyond that, my own life had moved on, providing me a lode of new material to draw upon. That’s when I turned to the idea of theme and variations, a major element of the classical music I so love and also big in jazz as improvisation. What hit me, especially, was Ted Brautigan’s sonnets from the ‘60s. They were essentially three poems, reworked over and over, into a full and very stunning collection.

I took that as my springboard into two intense weeks – while working fulltime as a newspaper editor – of reworking raw notes of loved desire that had incinerated into what you can read as Braided Double-Cross – a set that was rejected by the jurors in a competition based in its principal subject’s hometown. Maybe it was too intense. The poems are searing.

The night I finished drafting the 60 poems, I should note, I went out to dinner and have no idea how much I tipped the server. I was thoroughly exhausted, not just emotionally. Not that I remember of the meal I devoured.

Love really can be such a bitch. At least it still is with me, no matter how much she wonders why I still worship the one who continues in my life.

~*~

For now, let’s turn to the question of what makes a poetry collection “hang together”? In contrast to an assembly from my “best work,” however sporadic.

For perspective, also consider my aversion to series in fiction, where I’ve seen too many series as the same book done over and over with a few tweaks, even if that has led to way too many bestsellers. Yet I’ve gone back to my novels and reworked them to create linkage from one to the next, at least in two separate series. What I think now separates mine from most series is that none of my novels is a carbon copy of any of the others. Mine do, in contrast, represent a sequencing of growth from one to the other. In that way, they create one longer epic rather than imitative episodes like a TV sitcom.

Still, what is it that draws you back to a particular author, book after book?

~*~

I think now of the observation that an author’s next book springs from what was left unsaid in the volume published just before it. That point resonates and returns us to the question of how does an author know when a work’s finished.

Regardless, I’ve definitely done much more in the vein of “series” since completing the first.

~*~

You can find Braided Double-Cross and more in the digital platform of your choice at Smashwords, the Apple Store, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Scribd, Sony’s Kobo, and other fine ebook retailers. You can also ask your public library to obtain it.