Tag: Life

What I’m looking forward to in the new year

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment
  1. A new administration! A new Senate!
  2. A coronavirus vaccine.
  3. Worshiping together again. Even face-to-face committees.
  4. Resuming daily lap swimming. As well as seeing the regulars and lifeguards.
  5. Singing together again.
  6. A Greek festival or two. Oh, yes, let’s not overlook dancing!
  7. Riding the Downeaster north or south.
  8. Visiting museums.
  9. The abolition of ICE.
  10. Dining out, indoors.

~*~

What do you have on your list?

Clean sweep?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Just don’t throw everything on the brush pile and torch it quite yet. Just one item at a time, recalling its place in the journey.

~*~

As for syllables, may I suggest singing, something without words. Just open your mouth and dance with the breeze or still air as it will. Like incense, an offering and invitation to the Spirit.

 

Here comes a string of prose poems

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The gap between well-crafted prose, especially fiction, drama, or comedy, and the art of poetry has long tempted  and then eluded writers. The definition of poetry as “slow prose” further complicates the issue, I suppose, although some see that end of the spectrum as limp verse – many elements make poetry, after all, and can take a piece far from simple conversation or logical progression. Just because something is structured in broken lines doesn’t raise it to music.

Well, that does point to the appearance of rap as standing somewhere between poetry and fully developed music, rather than chanting or a rhythm section … and opera did emerge out of an attempt to recover the tonal nature of ancient Greek language.

So the possibilities of the genre of prose poems stand as a provocation, and the trials can fascinate. As a rule, I’ve found shorter is sweeter – around a hundred words, max, lest you start writing paragraphs and the piece at hand lose its energy.

This year the Red Barn will be presenting a prose poem each Saturday, drawing on a collection published in 2018 at Thistle Finch. I am grateful to the editors of the following journals for giving some of the prose poems their first airing: Bounce Is Bard, Crack the Spine, Jerseyworks, Ray’s Road Review, Red Coral, The Screech Owl, The Singularity Review, Souvenir Lit Journal, Subliminal Interiors, and The Vein.

Most of them arise from correspondence in my years before relocating to the New Hampshire seacoast and thus represent events now somewhere back in my foggy past. The persons they’re addressed to in these whirlwinds are abstractions, more than actual individuals. What I do know is that I could not create these works today, my outlook is so different.

I hope you enjoy them.

Jan as in January

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

and so having examined his cards she shot off fireworks from a waist-high bank of snowy night bottle rockets, the progression silence – whoosh – bang! in some bereavement overcome by momentary pyrotechnics in a furtive event, just once and it’s over who knows how she added fractions to appropriate repeated waves of painters, musicians, singers while he saved five years for some overcast studies prowling the night trajectories into hooting night forest only to detect he has zero bearing as a nightmare impostor posted KEEP OUT and call it quits, entering darkness Better luck next time

A few big things in my life in the past year

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Safe to say, it’s been unlike any 12 months before it.

  1. A hunkered-down lifestyle. Shelter-in-place and other Covid-19 social measures. (OK, we all have that much in common.)
  2. Learned to Zoom. But it’s not the same as face-to-face meetings.
  3. Tripped over my wife more than usual. More likely, found myself appearing unintentionally in her Zoom meetings.
  4. Appreciated a six-hour Smashwords writers’ conference online back in April. Those folks are amazing. Which leads to …
  5. Saw my novels become available in paperback at Amazon. Eight of them! Alas, book signings are still on hold, as are public readings.
  6. Missed having weekly choir practice, my daily laps swimming, and in-person Quaker worship and committee work together.
  7. Watched a lot of Met opera streaming. A different performance every night (or sometime during the following day, depending on my schedule). More than a hundred different works, in addition to the same pieces in different productions or castings.
  8. Returned to the workplace, part-time, as a Census enumerator. We were supposed to start in May, but that got pushed back to August before being cut a month short. Don’t be surprised if it has to be redone in two years.
  9. Missed the Greek community, Orthros and the festival, especially.
  10. Drank too many martinis.

~*~

I’m not counting the big move, which really fits more into the coming year. For now, it’s feeling more like acquiring a summer home, except that our adventure starts in winter.

What’s been big in your year?

What are your favorite Christmas hymns and carols?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Frankly, I can do without all of the secular holiday music, or at least most of it. I want something less contrived and commercial. Even Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker score wears thin.

I’m not entirely insensitive, though. Here are ten I enjoy singing, especially in a choir.

~*~

  1. People, Look East: this 1928 Advent carol by Eleanor Farjeon is a joyous accompaniment when making preparations ahead of Christmas.
  2. In the Bleak Midwinter: I want to think of this as a plaintive folksong, but the words are by Christina Rossetti and the music’s by English master Gustav Holst. It catches the blue side of the approaching winter, but also the hope and comfort to be found therein.
  3. Once in Royal David’s City: If you can, go for the fully celebrative midnight mass with a full pipe organ and all five verses sung in the Anglican style that alternates soft and loud.
  4. There Are Angels Hovering Round: It’s an old call-and-response hymn that seems to have hundreds of verses, if you want to keep going. There’s no escaping the sense of togetherness when you’re singing.
  5. Fairest and Brightest (Star of the East): I first heard this in a recording by Kentucky folksinger Jean Ritchie, but it also works in formal arrangements. The text is a protest song befitting the suffering classes of the story.
  6. Nouvelle Agreable: by Swiss composer Jean-Georges Nageli, the bouncy music almost sounds like Mozart though even Native Americans near the Arctic will sing and dance to it, too. (Check it out on YouTube.)
  7. La Valse Cadienne de Noel: words and music by Jeannette V. Aguillard. What, you don’t waltz during the Twelve Days of Christmas?
  8. Traveler’s Carol: A traditional Catalan carol of coming together for the holiday. We use English by Susan Cooper in an arrangement by George Emlen.
  9. The Coventry Carol: a haunting sense of Herod’s slaughter of the innocents and of the crucifixion to come infuse this lullaby.
  10. The Old Year is Dying: a cheerful Welsh piece to welcome the New Year. Again, New Year’s Day falls in the Twelve Days.

~*~

What are your favorites?

Among my greatest accomplishments

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Not to toot my own horn.

  1. Remarriage after years of wandering. Not that I’m anywhere near a mastery of intimacy yet.
  2. The novels and poems. They really are a record of my pathway to here, as well as my deepening skills in the craft of writing.
  3. A week on the Appalachian Trail. I was 12 and survived under a heavy backpack, unlike the lightweight gear available these days.
  4. Making it to retirement in a shrinking profession.
  5. Becoming a Friend, building on my ashram experience.
  6. Working with future Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom.
  7. Landing a job in the Pacific Northwest. I got to explore a dream landscape, including the trek to Camp Muir on Rainier and the mountain’s ice caves in the mouth of a glacier.
  8. Singing in an extraordinary choir. There were times in rehearsal where just listening to the others would blow me away. Public performances were always a revelation.
  9. Genealogy, connecting my line back to North Carolina, initially, and then all the way back to 1500s Cumbria, England.
  10. Blogging. It’s simply been personally satisfying. I never expected to be communicating with readers on six continents.

~*~

But who am I to say? What are you especially proud of in your own life?

You better be good to toads

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

If you’re a writer, you no doubt know the dictum, “Write about what you know.” It remains sound advice. Another side, though, is equally valid — write about what you don’t know. It’s a means of exploration and discovery.

What’s Left takes that approach more than any of my earlier works. As an 11-year old, Cassia’s living in a financially secure extended family quite unlike any I’ve known intimately. She suffers a tragedy that prompts the action of the novel, again quite different from my own experience. Cassia tells most of the story in her teen years as she investigates the central questions in her life.

For me, this also required constructing a back story beginning with her great-grandparents and moving to the present. What do I know about running a restaurant, managing a family business, being Greek-American or Greek Orthodox, for that matter?

Well, as she advised me (and you readers) at one point, “You better be good to toads.”

I simply recorded what she dictated to me.

Read the book and you’ll see why.

~*~

I thought about “correcting” that to “You better be kind to toads,” but my sense is that it’s closer to what an 11- or 12-year-old may say under the circumstances.

To be honest, I don’t remember much from when I was that age. There may be good reasons I keep blotting it out.

Give me some help!

What do you remember of being age 11?

~*~

Ribbit!

~*~

 

Ten ‘First World’ problems

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

So many modern annoyances seem minor when you look at a more global perspective. I know, it’s become a cliché over the past few years, but it’s true.

For instance.

~*~

  1. My refrigerator is too full but there’s nothing I wanna eat.
  2. I lost the remote. How do you turn the thing on?
  3. My wallet’s too small.
  4. Why does my favorite take-out close so early?
  5. None of the ten outfits I tried on for the weekend quite do it. I’ll have to buy something new.
  6. There’s no dip for the chips.
  7. I can’t decide whether to take the trip to Paris with my sister or Hawaii with my mother. They’re both the same week.
  8. My Fitbit doesn’t have a heart rate monitor.
  9. The cleaner couldn’t make it last week. My bin’s almost full.
  10. My toilet paper roll is too big for the holder.

~*~

My, aren’t we spoiled. What would you add to the list?