Tag: Life

Layer by layer of discovery

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

In preparing this weekly series about things that were behind my novels, I wasn’t expecting to see how much of what was happening in my own life during a revision could also impact a manuscript based on much earlier events. It’s not something I’ve seen mentioned in author interviews.

One of the writing adages I’ve kept at hand is this: “Steer into the pain.” I’m not sure where I found it or perhaps adapted it, but it has been helpful in reminding me not to take the emotionally easier way out when facing a situation, whether personal history or fictional abstraction. The pain is where the higher-level energy is as well as the revelation.

So add to the advices, “Write about what you’re discovering.”

In a way, it’s a reminder to write about what you don’t want to know but with the added kicker, “What you don’t want to admit.”

For those of you doing the NaNoWriMo challenge this month, may you add that insight to your energizers.

More recently, I would add to that something else that motivates me: The magic!

Or, in my case, pure wonder. Again, what do I know? And celebrate?

I’m finding they’re both essential currents in my life’s work.

~*~

Let me say I rather miss Cassia from my novel What’s Left. After prodding me to that round of big revisions of my previously published fiction, she’s gone off on her own. She was even remote when it came to my nonfiction volume that more recently demanded my fullest attention. Well, she did earn her own category here at the Barn – Cassia’s World, based on the research and many outtakes from her novel’s drafting.

As for the real-life inspiration for many of my characters, let me repeat: Where are they all now? Or more accurately, where did they go? I don’t mean the aging rockers. I can think of social activists who kept the faith and marched on, largely out of the spotlight, though they’re aging, without replacements in line. But as for the others? I’m unsure of most of their names. And let’s forget the boilerplate disclaimer regarding all persons living or dead, even for futuristic space journeys or fantasies deep into the past.

~*~

As I look back on the history underpinning my novels, I have to insist the potential was there. I must also ask, what if we had a more solid social structure and tradition, with something akin to elders? The dorm I lived in, the core of the opening half of the revised Daffodil novel, has today become something of the center I envisioned, without the radical political edge.

I suppose I could have told these stories time after time after work in a bar, but to me they seem to address a different collective experience. Besides, journalists have their own “war stories” to compare.

Just where were we gathering now, anyway? And where have we gone to get here?

A few have found a progressive faith community – church, synagogue, sangha, or perhaps a masonic order or fraternal lodge. But for the others?

Should I point back to the posts on the breakdown of community?

And here we had thought we were creating tribe.

As an extra point of emphasis, I’ll add: I’ve never returned to many of the locations where I’ve lived.

Regional differences in America’s sweet tooth

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

While Reese’s will probably still be the favorite., followed by M&Ms, when it comes to trick or treaters, other top choices may vary depending on where you live.

For instance:

  1. Twizzlers have a special popularity along the East Coast. (Guess I’ll have to look closer.)
  2. Starburst is tops in Texas, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Iowa, and North Dakota.
  3. Airheads rule in Florida and Colorado.
  4. Blow pops, in Ohio, Maryland, and Tennessee.
  5. Dum Dums, Indiana.
  6. Runts, Arkansas.
  7. Hot Tamales, New Mexico. (Not to be confused with a traditional Central American dish that’s sometimes spicy.)
  8. Whoppers, Kansas.
  9. Smarties, Alaska.
  10. Is Crunch bar even a brand – popular in New York, New Jersey, North Carolina, and California? Oh, I see, it’s what we’ve always called Nestle’s Crunch! Kinda like Kit Kat.

The rest of the country goes for more traditional brands – at least ones I’m familiar with.

I’m still not sure about that candy corn, which is supposed to be universally loved this time of year.

Make way for ‘The Secret Side of Jaya’

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

As a third book involving Jaya shaped up, I reflected on ways some people perceive things most folks don’t. The angels everywhere, as Hassidic contend, perhaps matching the dakinis of Tibetan Buddhist circles. Some of my fellow yogis saw auras around people, although I’ve seen just one, quite black, surrounding the Reverend Pat Robertson when he and his handlers walked through the newsroom for a conference with the editor-in-chief and the editorial writer.

Since moving Way Downeast, I know of the small rock people some of the Passamaquoddy observe.

You might add elves or gnomes or other creatures to the list.

The concept did give me a threat to unite the three novellas into one.

~*~

What was needed was a third novella, reflecting the place Jaya lived between Prairie Depot and the Pacific Northwest. It would have With a Passing Freight Train of 119 Cars and Twin Cabooses before it and Along With Kokopelli’s Hornpipe following. It would be like an adagio in a symphony or sonata or the middle panel in a painted triptych.

I decided to draw on a wooded alcove I loved to explore during my return to Bloomington. It was a largely unknown tract that had included a city water reservoir as well as several caves and springs that had fed two gristmills.

In the years since I moved on, the site has been cleaned up into a city park that even has a stairway down one of the steep slopes.

It had inspired a set of Leonard Springs poems you can find as a free chapbook at my Thistle Finch blog. As I revisited those pieces, I realized that the hollow’s scene and history just beyond the duplex my first wife and I rented on my return to Bloomington as a research associate would transport well to the Ozarks. Especially the part about grist mills at the foot of the sharp hillsides slopes where springs poured out from cave formations.

The story took off from there, especially when I chanced upon the woman miller. I must confess being especially fond of the result. Was this Cassia from What’s Left whispering in my ear once again?

Researching details for this story was a delight. Grist mills had run for a while in my ancestry; the Hodgson Mill in the Ozarks, for one, reflects one side of my family – they even spelled their surname for a while without the G, like mine. (They descend from one William while the other William, also a miller, was my umpteen greats-grandfather.)

Caves were another thing the Ozarks had in common with southern Indiana.

And, speaking of things some people see and hear that others don’t, we had the American Shakers whose spirit drawings and writings wandered outside of the normal artistic constraints. That gave me one more element to play with, especially when I turned to the artistic projects that Jaya had relied on to replenish her own soul in her spare time. I didn’t want her to be writing poetry, as I had, but to be creating some blend of art forms beyond that. Think of Joseph Cornell’s boxes or Emily Dickinson’s bits of paper constructions as possibilities. While I touch on Jaya’s legacy on that front toward the ending of Nearly Canaan, I felt freer to explore it here.

Just what was Jaya’s off-hours creative activity and spiritual practice leading to? Or what prompted them?

Miller at the Springs became an ideal forum for their consideration. Here it was, the final piece of writing in my range of fiction, and it was the most joyous to draft, the least ambitious in its art, and perhaps the most down-to-earth.

~*~

These three novellas presented a private Jaya much different from the one in the public eye. Titling the book the Secret Side of Jaya came naturally, along with the subtitle, Three surreal and fantastic encounters.

The book rounded out my Living Dharma series.

I was ready to kick back and relax, intending to enjoy the role of an author.

What makes me mad

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Injustice of all sorts. Whiny diatribes and mud-slinging, character assassination.

TV/Rock obsession. Illiteracy. Consumerism.

Loud sound systems in cars. Drivers who think they bought the highway. Drivers who ignore changing lights.

Clutter and pollution.

Senseless regulations, corporate, not just governmental, let’s be fair.

Being put on hold while I’m present in a store.

Presumptuous artists.

The super-rich.

Some road names have a poetic twist

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Country roads sometimes carry imaginative monikers.

Here are some ones that stand out in my encounters:

  1. Bellsqueeze (Maine)
  2. Cat Mousam (Maine, named for Catherine Mousam)
  3. Clay Lick (Indiana)
  4. Diamond Mill (Ohio, named for the pattern on the mill’s label rather than little gems sparkling in the pavement)
  5. Feedwire (Ohio)
  6. Indian Ripple (Ohio)
  7. Labor in Vain (Massachusetts)
  8. Needmore (Ohio)
  9. Snakeroot (Maine)
  10. Sweet Potato Ridge (Ohio, in some truly flat terrain)

Charles Ives saw music ‘as the lens through which we can glimpse the divine’

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

For him, that also shook up the universe.

The 150th anniversary of the birth of the American maverick takes place Sunday, the 20th, and despite his relative obscurity, he was a giant as an uncompromising modernist classical composer and as an innovative executive in the insurance industry.

Born in Connecticut and a graduate of Yale, Charles Ives’ musical transformation was certainly one of the most extraordinary cases in history, made all the more remarkable by the fact that he was forced to compose largely without hearing many of his adventurous works played by an orchestra or soloists until a half-century or more after their composition. Even the sonatas, songs, and chamber music suffered from widespread neglect.

As a matter of confession, I am quite fond of his music, from the wonderfully rich late-Romantic scores of his youth to the craggy, thorny modernist fireworks of only a few years later. I am among those who feel scandalized by the fact that this season orchestras aren’t playing even one of his symphonies in celebration, much less all four. Two of them did win Pulitzers, by the way, once they were finally aired, and riotous cheers often break out at the conclusion when the works are performed.

For a biographical overview of this American original, turn to my post, “Thoughts while listening to Charles Ives,” of November 5, 2013, at my blog, Chicken Farmer I still love you.

Today, I’m offering a Double Tendrils. Let’s start with ten quotations about music.

  1. You goddamn sissy… when you hear strong masculine music like this, get up and use your ears like a man.
  2. It is more important to keep the horse going hard than to always play the exact notes.
  3. Please don’t try to make things nice! All the wrong notes are right. Just copy as I have – I want it that way.
  4. In “thinking up” music, I usually have some kind of a brass band with wings on it in back of my mind.
  5. The possibilities of percussion sounds, I believe, have never been fully realized.
  6. There is more to a piece of music than meets the ear.
  7. Music is the art of thinking with sounds.
  8. Beauty in music is too often confused with something that lets the ears lie back in an easy chair. Many sounds that we are used to do not bother us, and for that reason we are inclined to call them beautiful. Frequently, when a new or unfamiliar work is accepted as beautiful on its first hearing, its fundamental quality is one that tends to put the mind to sleep.
  9. The beauty of music is that it can touch the depths of our souls without saying a single word.
  10. Good music is not just heard; it is felt with every fiber of our being.

~*~

And here are ten Ives quotes about life itself.

  1. The word “beauty” is as easy to use as the word “degenerate.” Both come in handy when one does or does not agree with you.
  2. An apparent confusion, if lived with long enough, may become orderly … A rare experience of a moment at daybreak, when something in nature seems to reveal all consciousness, cannot be explained at noon. Yet it is part of the day’s unity.
  3. Awards are merely the badges of mediocrity.
  4. Every great inspiration is but an experiment – though every experiment, we know, is not a great inspiration.
  5. Expression, to a great extent, is a matter of terms, and terms are anyone’s. The meaning of “God” may have a billion interpretations if there be that many souls in the world.
  6. You cannot set art off in a corner and hope for it to have vitality, reality, and substance.
  7. The fabric of existence weaves itself whole.
  8. Vagueness is at times an indication of nearness to a perfect truth.
  9. The humblest artist will not find true humility in aiming low — he must never be timid or afraid of trying to express that which he feels is far above his power to express, any more than he should be in breaking away, when necessary, from easy first sounds, or afraid of admitting that those half-truths the come to him at rare intervals, are half-true; for instance, that all art galleries contain masterpieces, which are nothing more than a history of art’s beautiful mistakes.
  10. Most of the forward movements of life in general … have been the work of essentially religiously-minded people.

Reclaiming Passamaquoddy

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Living adjacent to the tribe’s Sipayik reservation opens new perspectives in my awareness. It’s not quite osmosis, but perhaps a willingness to listen.

One of the big breakthroughs for the tribe has involved access to 36 wax cylinders from 1890, the first field recordings ever made, when anthropologist Walter Jesse Fewkes came to Maine to test the Edison equipment before he headed off to Navajo and Hopi lands.

For decades, the recordings were kept in museum vaults, unknown to the tribe. And then, slowly, they came into consciousness, first through taped copies full of scratchy static and more recently cleaned up into digitalized files that tribe historians are carefully gleaning.

As a writer, I believe in the power of stories and the importance of language itself.

Here are some of the insights I’m hearing from my neighbors.

  1. Dwayne Tomah’s reaction on hearing the recordings the first time: “I wept. These were my ancestors speaking and singing to me.”
  2. The language has only two genders – animate and inanimate.
  3. Its wider family, Algonquian, features prenouns, a form shared only with Japanese and Korean.
  4. Translations from a tribal side, rather than a nontribal institution, can be revealing. For instance, rather than “Trading Song,” it’s more accurately “Let’s Trade.”
  5. The recordings preserve more than the language itself. There are also the stories, songs, and advices, sometimes with context.
  6. The Tides Institute’s latest map of our region portion of Maine and New Brunswick includes the Passamaquoddy place names. Tribal historian Donald Soctomah has used that to explain hard-to-translate subtleties, such as those describing qualities of water encountered in canoeing in a specific location.
  7. A Passamaquoddy-English dictionary, still growing, is available online. It has a range of expressions for anger that are totally missing in English.
  8. The language is being taught in elementary schools. (For generations, it was banned, even in homes.)
  9. The recordings are helping the tribe’s branch in neighboring Canada in its quest to gain First Nations status. One song, for instance, refers to what’s now the location of Saint Andrews.
  10. Even a few commonly understood words spoken among the tribe are rebuilding identity and pride, even when the rest of us watch on.

It’s as close as I’ve come to a romance novel

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

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.

How to tell if you’re becoming a gnome

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Ever have one of those days? You may have some serious reasons for concern if it includes the following symptoms.

  1. Feel like you’re shrinking in size? Down to two spans high?
  2. Suffer deep embarrassment or shame?
  3. Have a desire to retreat underground?
  4. Get hot-tempered? Irritable?
  5. Find gold-diggers offensive?
  6. Sense a reluctance to interact with humans?
  7. Sympathize with prudish women?
  8. Have flashes of innovation or cunning?
  9. Wild hair?
  10. Ugly?

And here I had thought these were simply symptoms of aging.