In my novel What’s Left, Cassia’s great-grandfather and his brother marry two sisters. One is named Athina.
How do people in your circles discover each other as couples?
Tag: Life
Where would science be without this?
A revolutionary ideal
one God, one Truth
rather than this or that, by whim or willy-nilly
~*~
The mystery of the big bang, something out of nothing, a scientific paradox, all leading to human consciousness. A honeybee cannot be an accident, nor can a human.
Only a divinity could create such a mishap!
With the element of chance in tie-dye or batik
you no doubt recall a cheery visit in Rhode Island or a ferry trip to Block Island an hour-and-a-half each way in gray eight-foot swells (we, too, rent a Mo-Ped to zip around on while out there) or a smoky Cog Railroad to the top of Mount Washington, a strategy that beats hiking to the 6,288-foot-elevation’s windy sub-alpine summit
What you should know about Dungeness crab
In my novel Nearly Canaan, Joshua and Jaya settle into a place unlike anything they would have imagined. It’s desert, for one thing, where nearly everything has to be irrigated, for another. Quite simply, it’s a lot like Yakima, in the middle of Washington state. But it’s also close to fresh Dungeness crab, a shellfish with a heavenly taste all its own.
What you should know.
- It draws its name from Dungeness, Washington, on the Olympic Peninsula.
- It’s not King Crab, mind you, an Alaska specialty, but it is threatened by ocean acidification.
- It has five pairs of legs. (I haven’t counted the ones on a lobster.)
- It is found largely between Alaska’s Aleutian Islands and Santa Barbara, California. But don’t overlook that Washington state connection, right in the middle.
- About one-quarter of the crab’s weight is meat. One crab usually satisfies one person, though sometimes it will be shared by two.
- It has a delicate flavor and a slightly sweet taste. Don’t ask me to compare it to chicken or anything else. Not even lobster. It’s as different as cod is from salmon.
- It’s the State Crustacean of Oregon. What else do they have?
- If you go out at night trying to find one with a strong light focused in the water, you can likely rake up one right next to a decaying starfish.
- You really can’t get it here, wherever that is, outside of the Pacific Northwest.
- If you haven’t guessed, I really do miss them. They don’t travel well.
When it’s finished enough for the reader
These days some of my favorite daily encounters come at our city’s indoor pool, where I swim laps. In addition to the familiar faces of fellow swimmers, there are the interactions with the lifeguards, many of them still in high school. When they’re not actively watching us in the water, they have rounds manning the front desk, where they might also be doing their physics homework or working on a paper. In other words, they were the right age to help me with my novel What’s Left, not that I’m ever that direct. No, just a wild question or subtle ear’s enough to keep me grounded in their direction.
In revising a manuscript, I sometimes chance upon a “zipper” that seems to run along the entire piece and releases something trapped within it. Tugging along page after page is an amazing experience, when it happens, which is not nearly as often as I’d hope. Mercifully, that’s what’s happened in the ninth revision of What’s Left, my novel thanks to comments from some of the early readers. The key this round came in having her talking to her father throughout, at least in her head and often in the midst of other people, rather than simply about him. It gives the work a whole new dimension and makes the story far more intimate, especially when she makes irrational leaps that match her emotions.
This, in turn, allowed her to relate much of her investigation as it happened as a young teen, rather than looking back on it from her early twenties, and had her aunt Nita and her best friend, cousin Sandra, present as co-conspirators.
Note that none of these revisions changed the way I saw the novel as an author — I knew how it begins, develops, and ends — but they change it entirely for the reader.
Yes, the changes were extensive. When one of the lifeguards remarked, “What? You’re not done yet?” I came back the next week with two pages from the hardcopy I was working from — half of the sentences containing crossed-out words and phrases, several moved to new locations, and a taped-on flap of new notes to add in, all needing to be keyboarded. It’s typical professional work, as you’ll discover reading the Paris Review or any number of writer-oriented magazines.
Still, they were astonished. I doubt they’ll look at a 500-word assignment quite the same again.
The point is that all of these changes are for the reader. Curiously, the very shift of having Cassia speak directly to her father throughout soon has the reader stepping into his shoes, hearing through his ears in a new intimacy.
And now I trust the story’s ready for you, as its reader.
~*~
It’s not always simply a coincidence, is it?
Have you ever started out on your way to one place and wound up somewhere quite different? Somewhere that turned out to be right? Tell us about what happened.
~*~
A baroque twist runs through my distilled expression
Samuel Johnson and his baroque constructions gave a big push to my literary ambitions after high school. Let me just say I’ve loved the clarity of Mozart from my adolescence on, and Bach and Handel have risen in my estimation in the years since. The brash English master fell right into that, though I now see again just how irreverent he was, despite all of his professed orthodoxy.
What it means it that I’m comfortable reading and writing certain kinds of complex sentences that are foreign to modern readers. Perhaps I should apologize? At least it’s not the only way I put sentences in line. Still, there’s a richness that’s missing in Hemingway and his progeny.
And here I am, drilled in the newspaper journalism Papa Ernie claimed was his inspiration. Think again. (Ernie? Makes me think of Pyle, and his big desk at the Indiana Daily Student, where I once worked.)
My wife has noted the dichotomy between my fondness for many Old Ways and the rule-breaking, experimental edge of my writing and thinking. She can point, for instance, to my fascination with the fiery writings of early Quakers in the mid-1660s placed in contrast to wild hippie extremes.
Are they really that different, though? I feel they enrich and deepen each other.
Mottoes to live by
Dunno if this counts as a motto, but I still like it: “Duma Luma!” From a private cartoon to me, evolving into an earlier incarnation of my novel Subway Visions. Here are ten more.
- “I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free” – Nikos Kazantzakis, “Japan, China,” 1963
- “Abide in me”– Jesus of Nazareth
- “Jesus is the unseen guest in this house” – as inscribed over a Quaker family’s doorway in Belmont County, Ohio, followed by, “He listens to every conversation.”
- “The closer we get to our hopes, the closer we get to our fears” – artist Lita Albuquerque
- “Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for mankind” – Horace Mann
- “Mind the Light” – old Quaker counsel
- “I make dreams … I don’t see clothes, I see the world” – Ralph Lauren
- “Everyone wants to reach for something a little higher. … Part of Ralph’s genius is he understood life’s aspirational” – Michael Gould, Bloomingdale’s buyer
- “Randomness invites the universe to speak” – James Bartolino
- “You better be good to toads,” Cassia in What’s Left
~*~
Yay!
We’re all ears for any you might want to share.
How tightly are they bound together?
Cassia and her brothers and cousins face a crucial decision. Do they continue to jointly hold the family business as a resource for future generations, requiring them to keep working for a living, or do they divvy up their shares and then live independently wherever and however they desire?
Put yourself in Cassia’s shoes.
How would your life be different if you didn’t have to worry about how you’d make ends meet? What would you dream of doing?
~*~
An ongoing internal tension
Trying to strike a satisfying balance:
Between my local Meeting and serving the wider world of Friends.
With my writing, finding a wider audience for my existing work.
With the rest of my life – householding, exercise, reading, etc.
It just never seems to come together neatly!
So just what, exactly, holds it all together?
Banzai, Zeke
to know a good life is not easy just look at all that’s broken here knowing you miss so much is to concede abundance and blessing as well until the eyes move away from what’s harmonious see, a house wrapped in leaves repeats marriage and even the compost unassumingly transforms to its own succulence while the children expect everything before attaining focus, at last requited by frugal exercise where we may be generous
Jnana's Red Barn 