You never know what we'll churn up in cleaning a stall
I have no idea anymore which tribe or tribes these notes reflected, but the list still stirs something in my imagination.
In revising my novels Nearly Canaan and Secret Side of Jaya, I created several lookbooks slash storyboards from images found online to sharpen details in some of the passages. It’s a great writer’s hack, by the way. You pick up bits you overlook at the scene.
I do wish I had my own photographs from the decade of journals we’re sampling, but often I had no camera, much less training in how to use anything except the simplest point-and-shoot.. I did, however, work with some of the best photojournalists and knew some outstanding fine arts photographers as well. It would have been wonderful to work with them on these posts, but time has intervened. Well, I still have memories, faded as many are. And with a camera, I wouldn’t have worked so devotedly on writing, no doubt. There’s only so much time in a day, even without a paying job to attend to.
For a sense of my visual encounters in the Pacific Northwest, take a look at these free PDF albums at my Thistle Finch editions site: Apple Crates, Glorious Mount Adams, Know Your Salmon, Reflecting the Coast, Unexpected Northwest, and Yakama Beadwork.
Not that I haven’t attempted to re-create that world in immortal words.
Pick one or pick these booklets for your armchair travel.
Welcome to another Rabbit Hole on the Internet.
Here are ten more confessions on being a published author.
With their many different species, jellyfish are found in every ocean in the world, including very cold waters of the Arctic and Antarctic. Some are even found in freshwater. Some species live in shallow, sunlit waters near the surface, while others live in the deep, dark, cold or somewhere in-between. Here are a few other points.
Who? A 250 area code, British Columbia. Don’t know anyone there,. Still, my curiosity nearly got the better of me.
Lew Welch (1926-1971) was a Beat-era poet I’ve enjoyed very much. He was influenced by Gertrude Stein early on. At Reed College, he was a roommate of Gary Snyder and a friend of Philip Whalen – what a Trinity of fine poets! William Carlos Williams certainly thought so after meeting them in Oregon.
Here are ten insights gleaned from Welch’s take, “How I work as a poet.”
Welch left a suicide note, but his body has never been found.
As my Bloomington/Daffodil entries in this presentation became grouped by subject, rather than chronological order, we lost a sense of the progression of the notebooks themselves. Take a look now.
This does have me wondering if you saved any of your college notebooks or the like in your life journey to wherever you are now. What souvenirs have you kept? Or what have you intentionally discarded? Perhaps even with regrets later? Photos, letters, cards as well?
By the way, I hate to think what a spiralbound notebook costs nowadays.
Do you require getting out in nature when it comes to maintaining your sanity and soul? I certainly do. In fact, one of my struggles living in Fostoria was the relative lack of that exposure, even though the small city was surrounded by some very productive farmland. I wanted something a little wilder and freer.
Here are ten perspectives:
Reporter Jerry Handte, someone I saw as a grizzled old-timer. Threw the word “hardscrabble” at me in a story, one I didn’t know. Changed my perception of him.
AP’s middle-class conformity.
Contrived news stories, with formulated sentimental reactions: hippie story, Agnew story, dog or handicapped child story, medical/scientific breakthroughs, etc.
“Chimes,” the Evansville Courier’s wrap-up of church activities.
The Press won’t hire anyone else as long as it can slide by as it is.
~*~
The tug toward middle-class: security: keep job, get a degree, build retirement, home, house, and family. It’s gonna be so hard telling Mom and Dad I’m splitting.
I’m becoming like them: Don’t rock boat, don’t do deep fixes on stories, let it slide, why bother with better headlines and layouts, etc.
After reviewing old clippings: “How close my writing has come to greatness … or to babble.”
At the RT, how much our photography carried us, especially considering how thin, until the end, our local coverage was – how important our Saturday front-page feature was in setting us apart and giving the staff a fairer schedule. .
Morning on long-distance calls to Bordner, Aldrich, Swaisgood, L. Nighswander.
Other fronts, Russ called back, said Larry Hale expected an “editor’s position” in several weeks … So much confusion, would I really want to go back there?
And the letter from Tacoma, $20,000 arts and entertainment, if they get the opening … What do I make of this? McClatchy upswing versus Gannett versus a fighting crew at the foot of Pike’s Peak?
Imagination still reeling with thoughts of the Rockies. A place to be at peace? Low pay may be an incentive to freelance or grow.
The West may spur a novel. I’m too boxed in here.
On the brink of Colorado. A time of despair, anxiety, and waiting through the layoff.
Early May, Colorado Springs, round-trip ticket, $189.
On flight out: half of southern Indiana is forest. Region defined the sudden shift to farmland where the hills give way to flatness.
Contrasting smoothness of disked fields next to rougher plowed.
Strip-mine lakes outside Terre Haute.
~*~
Colorado Springs Sun: Don’t feel there’s much I can do here – to many “trained incompetencies,” exhausting and routine-work hours. B.B. [the editor who was to hire me] is leaving for Detroit after eight months here.
No local color in the paper. Newsroom looks and smells like RT. Computer (VDT) may help – question is, how much?
Upon seeing first UPI lead, realized how clear, precise, and simple my own style has become. Newspaper work may destroy that – at least, I feel it slipping away.
No sense of nuance, of grace, of individual voice – that is, true style – in this news writing, which exists as stilted and artificial as any literary style. It is divorced from the human voice and from American speech.
All along during my stint as a research associate, I was reading technical material on Indigenous artwork. Here are some sample entries from my Bloomington journaling.
~*~
Indiana feels too thick, too green and wet in contrast. My sinuses are acting up again. I’m out-of-place in America.
Horoscope says a month or two before big change. We’ll see.
Looking at the cons: long hours (nine to ten hours a day), ending at 2 or 3 am; low pay, publisher interference, no investigative reporting, and someone named Dana …
I’m having to admit that not getting that job was a blessing. I would have been engulfed. The trip was, though, at my own expense, devouring half of our savings.
Doubts about “where I want to go.” Should we make the plunge into NYC? Find an agent yet? (I’d rather wait two more years.) I feel the necessity of steady income, yet also feel “duty to yourself” calling. Turned down music critic position at Herald Telephone. Hard for me to say No to any job, even with low pay. ($10/review; negotiate on features, say $50/page.) Don’t think I really want newspaper work. That’s hard to admit.
Copy editors are a kind of janitor and paid accordingly. Hence, I should concentrate on power-writing. (Like advertising?)
My own failings coming home as nobody wants to hire me, not yet, free me from the damn suspense/suspension with half of our goods packed in crates and warping corrugated boxes, the general feelings of inutility accented by this ungodly heat and humidity
Late June, returned yesterday from two days [of housesitting] at Dietz’ … and found a letter waiting from Yakima. Very exciting prospect, work split between copy editing and general assignment reporting. A nice balance, good pay, exactly where I’d like to be – the dry side of the mountains. And Kat’s very excited. Hope everything works out. (Received a formal job application to fill out and return.) Getting anxious to get the address situation straightened out and new pieces into the mail. …
Wherever we wind up, I’d like to publish a few chapbooks of my work, for free distribution to friends and critics (and some for sale). Would also like to get a typist to do final drafts of potential freelance pieces. Will need to arrange more office-type space … we need Kat’s extra income …
Already, we’re anticipating spending that extra income … new car, furniture (that’s her idea), new clothes, bigger place, airfares …
A call today from Center for Law and Poverty in Indianapolis, a job I’m not too crazy about but one that might be the springboard for the southern Indiana magazine/tabloid I’ve been pondering.
Other calls to/from Yakima, which sounds better and better but less and less likely, like an impossible dream.
Nancy Neubert saying Yakima is a very nice, good place: agricultural, wealthy, conservative, hydroelectric cheap electricity, good produce abundant and cheap, Spanish and English …
The m.e., there since March, Steve Kent, from Albany, New York, thus appreciated my Binghamton angle. A good phone conversation.
Located Snyder’s lookout towers on the map, though Sourdough was not shown. Some of the other sites he relates, though, were.
Spicer: “West Coast is something nobody with sense would understand.”
Good place to end this journal. 10:20 pm, night of new moon, unseen through the haze
~*~
From Spiralbound Hoosier, with commentary from now.
