You never know what we'll churn up in cleaning a stall
Swollen by melting snow and ice, forest rivers in Maine were used to float log booms to sawmills or railroads downstream. It’s hard to imagine now, though the tradition involved extensive preparations and skills. This example is the Mattawamkeag River in Aroostook County.
He promised lower prices. Here are ten you can bet will go up because of his promise of “lower taxes.”
One place prices seem to be going down is stocks.
Winter is when lumber is cut in the forests. The ground is frozen solid and there are no bugs in the air. Load up the trucks, then, and head off to the nearest sawmill.
As the calendar year ends, it’s fair to ask What’s Left in your own life as you move on for the next round.
In my novel, the big question is stirred by a personal tragedy, leaving a bereft daughter struggling to make sense of her unconventional household and her close-knit extended Greek family.
In the wider picture, she’s faced with issues that are both universal and personal.
For me, it’s somehow fitting that my most recent work of fiction returns to Indiana, the place where my first novel originated before spinning off into big city subways. The state is also home to more Hodsons than anyplace else in the world, as far as I can see, not that I’ve been back in ages.
What’s Left is one of five novels I’m making available to you for free during Smashword’s annual end-of-the-year sale, which ends January First.
Get yours in the digital platform of your choice, and enter the New Year right.
For details, go to the book at Smashwords.com.
Ability to take criticism …
an open mind …
humility …
forgiveness …
compassion …
The model in the photo I selected for the original cover of the story that stands today as Nearly Canaan was nearly too perfect. I even had to tweak the description of Jaya on the pages inside to make for a better match. Much later, I came across other photos from the shooting and was appalled.
In yoga circles, it’s what we would call Maya.
Apparently, I had shifted Jaya’s spiritual identity from Sufi much earlier than I recalled. Now that I had a solid backstory for her in my novel Yoga Bootcamp, I could turn my attention to the messy trove that had sprawled into three big books. Thanks to Cassia from What’s Next, I was now intent on distilling them back into one. Trying to compress them into the maximum 120,000 upper limit of a big novel meant having to hone more than one hundred pages of manuscript. And that’s before I decided to add a fourth section for fuller closer.
~*~
At heart, I was trying to figure out just what had gone on in my first marriage. I’m still not sure. And note I had said “gone on,” not “gone wrong.”
But I also wanted to say something about the influence of the landscapes where I’ve lived. In fact, I came to think of them as major characters. If only I could have allowed them to speak? The first was pretty bleak and, for a small town, rather petty. The second had its beauty and its rough spots. The third, their intended Paradise, initially appeared desolate and unforgiving.
Place as a character? How about the Mississippi in Huckleberry Finn? The story wouldn’t have been the same if Twain had started on the Ohio River, even though it was larger than the Mississippi where he did.
Naturally, I had to abstract real people and events and in doing so, I settled on some big flips. Jaya emerged as the older partner in her marriage, for one, which gave a fresh twist on a December/May romance.
Along the way, the story became one of overlapping couples, a contrast of marriages that were close to Jaya’s home. It’s almost like the mirrors in an amusement park house of mirrors, to my way of thinking, not that the story started out that way.
Yeah, we’re supposed to avoid religion and politics. That leaves some pretty big gaps in the meaning of life and, as I’m seeing, in relationships, too.
If you haven’t noticed, changing the novel’s name from Promise to Nearly Canaan is a Biblical nod. Well, I had previously been calling it their Promised Land.
Developing Pastor Bob and his wife, Wendy, provided a big advance for the revised novel. They might have had serious reservations about her as a heathen, but they were still intrigued and at points even supportive. That marriage also had its problems.
I definitely wanted to avoid having southern Indiana in one more of my books, so I shifted the scene of the middle section to the Ozarks of Arkansas. There are a lot of similarities, from what I’m finding.
In addition, I wanted Jaya’s career to be as volatile for her as newsroom management had been for me. She needed to work weekends and nights, too. Beyond that, I did have an experience of being paid from “soft money,” as grants are sometimes called, and having a very good neighbor work as regional director of a social action agency provided me more inspiration.
By the way, the cover photo I settled on for the revised edition did require some tweaks on Jaya’s physical description on the inside pages.
In my parallel universe, my real-life life, newspapers were caught up in technological “advances” that kept setting us back. Those changes had started well before my sabbatical break, but they were speeding up. Back when I was starting, perforated teletype tape meant we really couldn’t edit stories we received from the Associated Press or United Press International or similar services. And then scanning of typewritten pages made improving even staff reports physically difficult. After that came the early stages of computer screens and keyboards, where editing took about three times longer than it had with a pencil – moving that cursor around took more effort, certainly, and computer crashes were commonplace. These were all matters that impacted the emerging story of Hometown News, though I believe anyone working in a large business office would have parallel experiences to relate.
We forget how much reliability our laptops and PCs have gained. Does anyone else remember losing a draft to a static electricity spark that then erased whatever was on your screen? Or, for that matter, when it was a bigger power outage?
I could detail the shifts from letterpress and hot type to pasteup and eventually pagination or from typewriters and linotype machines to early computers to, well, the digital devices we have today or from letterpress to offset printing and now digital editions skipping paper altogether.
Or similar leaps in photography, as we see in following Kenzie.
~*~
Paid work occupies a large part of most adult lives. Even when it doesn’t, how we handle our money, wealth, time, and so on is a highly emotional issue, no matter what the dismal science of economics insists. (For that line of useful inquiry, go to the Talking Money series on my Chicken Farmer I Still Love You blog.)
I just couldn’t create characters without their having jobs. Well, most of them – the hippie farm had some of dubious means.
Besides, so much of a typical male’s identity and life purpose is tied up in his job, especially when he can take pride in it. The job even defines his social circle.
I didn’t want to add another book about a hopeful writer to the literature. What a cliché. Or a musician or actor or even a painter. How about a plumber or fireman or circus clown?
But I still needed a witness figure for the history abstracted to fiction that was before me. I defaulted to using a photographer, in part because I had wished I had taken up a camera, if only I could have afforded the time and a darkroom, blah-blah-blah, and in part because I had been a serious visual artist in high school. You can see those elements developing in Daffodil Uprising and later coming together in What’s Left, but they also play out in Pit-a-Pat High Jinks and Subway Visions. I’m a highly visual guy in my awareness and thinking, OK? The fact he was employed at a newspaper is one part I couldn’t evade.
I still value novelists who manage to set their story outside of the writing world, and that includes universities. Charles Bukowski gets points for me for his novel Post Office. Well, I guess that’s also where genres kick in, too. They’re about detectives and spacemen and billionaires and cowboys and so on.
Photojournalist? At the time of the first draft of Subway Hitchhikers, I didn’t have any models to draw from, but that quickly changed. I wound up working with some of the best in the business.
Over time, photography, the kind that required light meters and F-stops and film and darkrooms, became ancient history. That part I would have to intensely rework and explain as my books underwent revision, thanks to Cassia in What’s Left.
In contrast, Hometown News was primarily about work. I had no problem in this case where everything took place at a newspaper plant, though the economics of the surrounding community also emerged as a central thread.
Jaya became a more difficult case. Her career in the early drafts was drawn from my newspaper offices and hours, now vaguely abstracted to management in general. It would get more specific in the revised titles, where she specializes in nonprofits management. It’s a real job description in a major component of the economy. For that flash of inspiration, I could look to one neighbor in Dover and the impact she had statewide in peace and social justice matters.
It was one of those stretches where nothing seemed to be happening. For me, that translates into stuck, or more accurately, an emotional funk.
And then, in a single day, the dumpster arrived, opening way for the big front of the upstairs demo to begin.
The plumber showed up, after a few months on a big project in the Midwest. He made necessary moves preparing the upstairs bathroom and laundry room for walling, lighting, and flooring to be finished before the toilet, bathtub, shower, sinks, and washer and dryer go in.
He also removed our one outdoor faucet, with its leaking pipe in the wall and no indoor shutoff valve, with three new spigots and lines, all of them closer to our gardens. This was a huge quality of life improvement we do enjoy right now.
Three cords of firewood were delivered, about a month after being ordered. It was our first time dealing with them, and while I wasn’t worried that they wouldn’t show up before the first snow fell, this was reassuring and I’m satisfied with the quality of their product. Now I’m spending an hour or so most days stacking it. (Let’s not overdo it, not at my age.)
We heard from the mason, who was slotting us in with other projects around town. He and a helper were on the scene a few days later to repair the top of the chimney. Added to his work were repairs to the facing on the foundation – something noted in the building inspection when we bid on the property – and several future tasks, including moving the wood stove and metal chimney to another part of the front parlor. This was our first time dealing with him, and I can say he takes pride in good work.
Our contractor installed the flooring on the deck, restoring use of the back door to us. The railing is next.
Each of these lifted another obstacle from the horizon. Each one felt quite invigorating. The deck even has us in amazement.
He’s waiting for the USS Oscar Austin to slacken the heavy line so he can heave the loop into the water as the destroyer prepares for departure during last year’s naval visit to town.
Here’s how it looked earlier in the week with the tide a bit higher. A worker had to haul the thick line up from the water.
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.
Jnana's Red Barn 