If it’s not personal, what’s the point? While I am talking about writing, in particular, let’s extend that to religion and politics and life in general, wherever we can.

Please make every effort to see those points where we may connect with mutual respect if we’re to advance the human condition. Period.

~*~

I’m left with the realization that my “serious” writing, meaning literary rather than the quickly perishable daily journalism, originated as contemporary poetry and fiction but now falls into historical.

So much has changed, it’s almost hysterical.

Photography, for instance – the career of a central character in four of my novels – no longer requires film, dark rooms and developers and enlargers, or light meters and F-stops.

As for rotary-dial telephones and thick books of people and their numbers?

Instead, I’ll start with the fact that America has never come to terms with its hippie past – positive as well as negative. At least my cool end of it. I’ll let the uptight ‘Nam side defend itself. For my side, it’s like we’re scared or embarrassed of what opened our hearts and minds. While we retreated from the general effort to push the envelope, to advance to Edge City, to demolish boundaries, we also failed to examine what we learned and carry from that experience. Instead, there was a society-wide state of denial that was bound to erupt in unanticipated ways – likely, without any sustaining wisdom. I’ll insist that’s why the nation is in the state that it is now.

For now, my novels stand as a witness to that era and experience and the root of many changes for the better we take for granted today. I do wish there were more voices to tell of that revolution, thwarted as it eventually was. Histories, whether of the scholarly sort or as the art of its time, sustain societies.

~*~

To that let me note that daily fresh air essential for my well-being. The outdoors counteracts feelings of entrapment or engulfment and depression I’ve been susceptible to otherwise. I need to get a taste of wild nature – my feet on the ground, my fingers in the soil, my eyes on the horizon and sky.

It’s part of my spiritual recalibration, even when I was living in the yoga ashram in Pennsylvania’s Pocono mountains.

In this, every day counts, good weather or bad.

~*~

Personal relationships have certainly changed within my lifetime. My parents’ generation suffered many more unhappy marriages in contrast to today, though many youths at the moment have only an envy of deep connection and commitment.

My love poems of the turbulent ‘80s and ‘90s stand as witness to that transition, as do my novels Daffodil Uprising, Pit-a-Pat High Jinks, and Nearly Canaan.

~*~

I am embarrassed for Ohio and Indiana since I’ve left. They had such greatness and potential.

~*~

You’ll find my 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’re also available in paper and Kindle at Amazon, or you can ask your local library to obtain them.

Fictional characters don’t come out of thin air, as far as I’ve seen. Instead, they’re prompted by real people the author has known and then, to whatever extent, abstracted. Better yet are the figures who emerge when two or more of these prototypes are crunched together.

Not uncommonly, over the years between the initial events and the revisions leading to the published book, I’ll even lose the original names (in part or in full) of individuals who prompted the eventual characters.

Still, I’ll venture that all the people in the worlds of fiction, cinema, and television were somehow inspired by real people. Forget the obligatory denial you view in the credits.

The writer’s job is to abstract that into something more universal and eternally new.

That said, I was recently startled to get a message relating that one inspiration was now 87. Here I had thought him “older” as Wes in Nearly Canaan, but now see he was in his early 40s at the time. And riding high, as I recall with admiration.

Photos of colleagues in the newsrooms that prompted Hometown News or in the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University – details that infuse Nearly Canaan, The Secret Side of Jaya, What’s Left, and likely more – have all elicited the shocking realization of how young we were at the time. Even our leaders.

Ditto for the ashram that inspired Yoga Bootcamp or the ghetto and hippie farm of Pit-a-Pat High Jinks.

The events that propelled the novels came in times of great upheaval in my own life. Like me, I think you would be surprised to learn that most of the Pacific Northwest is desert – that the famed rainy landscape occupies merely a narrow band around the ocean and its inlets. Yet the desert is where the apples – and much more – are grown. It’s a remarkable region, with four distinct seasons and cowboys, Indians, miners, and much more in the mix.

In the broader scene, my professional relocations meant that personal connections from one locale to the next soon ceased, meaning that individuals from one to the other became frozen in time. For me, everybody in high school was frozen in time, as were others in the later leaps.

Reconnecting with a few has felt strange and yet invigorating. As more than one has exclaimed, it’s like nothing has lessened in the gap.

~*~

You can find my 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’re also available in paper and Kindle at Amazon, or you can ask your local library to obtain them.