Tag: Literature

Acid test mystic: James Nayler (1618-1660)

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The most powerful of the public ministers in the early Quaker movement, Nayler remains unjustly tarnished by what I see as a street theater event that erupted into scandal and his conviction by Parliament (not court) on blasphemy. His shameful treatment by Quaker leader George Fox afterward furthered the sleight.

He’s seen as the most systematic theologian of the emerging movement, as I’ve written elsewhere. What fascinates me the most, though, is his articulation of the Light, as early Quakers experienced Christ. Nobody has written more insightfully in its wide-ranging appearances.

One difficulty is that the experience isn’t “like” anything else. What, for instance, is light itself like? Or the color green? Nayler’s writing, then, can make full sense only to others who have experienced a spiritual Light inwardly. Logically, we’re stuck in a tautology.

His text, though, works and sounds more like contemporary poetry than you’d expect from 17th century English prose. Well, Ezra Pound did describe literature as “news that stays news,” which I think fits here.

 

I do love daffodils, by the way

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Having Subway Hitchhikers come out first did throw a ringer into the sequence of what would emerge as a kind of series. For one thing, it was out of print when the ebooks came along.

For another, I needed to tone down some of the hippie excesses.

As I’ve said, it started out as a nice, thin book. I completed the first draft shortly after leaving the ashram. But somehow, before I could land a publisher, it started growing. And growing. It gained a sizable back story as well as a parallel out-in-the-sticks hippie existence.

Getting to what would be published as Daffodil Sunrise leaves me in somewhat of a fog. Chronologically, it’s the earliest part of the story, detailing the transformation of a straight young photographer from Iowa into a hippie on a state university in Daffodil, Indiana. OK, no secret, it’s an abstraction of Bloomington and Indiana University, embodied the emergence of the character who started out as Duma Luma but now goes by Kenzie.

From what I’ve seen, very little fiction has been published about today’s American Midwest, at least in contrast to Manhattan or Los Angeles or even the South. Who’s speaking up for that part of the country, relating a viewpoint its natives might feel is theirs? It is vastly misunderstood.

Within that, Indiana stands as a crossroads, one with a strong Southern influence as well. I’ll argue it’s even a kind of symbol of middle America. It’s the only Midwestern state, by the way, not to carry a Native name but rather the generic Indian-a. It also is largely farmland with big cities at its corners: Chicago, Detroit, and Cincinnati.

Kurt Vonnegut strongly resonated with me as a missing voice, a straightforward one with biting humor. As I turned to drafting and revising, he definitely felt like a clarion in the wilderness. Especially his novel, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. Do I have do explain what growing up as a Goldwater Republican was like?

To get closer to the hippie vibe, add Tom Wolfe, definitely not a hippie but someone I first read when he was a columnist for the New York Herald Tribune, my favorite newspaper of all time. His supercharged prose fit the sensation of the surreal and vibrant new world the Revolution of Peace & Love was unleashing. Or so we thought.

Other influences I might throw in are Abby Hoffman’s Steal This Book, though I didn’t buy any of it, or Jerry Rubin’s political entreaties, or Herman Hesse’s shining ideals. As for love, though? I’m drawing a blank. At some point Richard Farina’s Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me caught my fancy, along with Thomas Pyncheon’s V, which finally made sense under an altered state of mind.

Perhaps Genji and Monkey, too?

Bloomington was seen as a wild and somewhat threatening place throughout the rest of the state, yet seemed to be so backward compared to, say Yellow Springs and Antioch, which in turn would seem so far behind the radical curve once I got to the East Coast.

I didn’t want to see any of what I was writing as a rite-of-passage tale, not even for an entire generation of my contemporaries in a Vietnam era. And yet?

I wasn’t seeing the experience, mine or that of those around me, anywhere in the public eye. What was appearing in the spotlight was San Francisco, the Manson cult, the Kent State shootings, and the later circle that abducted heiress Patty Hearst, which originated in Bloomington after I left.

Activist Saul Alinsky, among others, was right in his criticism of hippie political and social action, by the way.

Back to my story. What we think of as the hippie movement really revolved around university campuses. Think about that. It was no longer destitute runaways in San Francisco but legions in enclaves around the country.

Here I was, writing furiously in 1986-87, wondering where it had all gone. Or, I should say, is going.

The big issues still remain, bigger than ever, from climate catastrophe on down.

How could we have gotten this so wrong?

Well, Flower Power did have a lasting impact, though it’s largely taken for granted. The best I could hope for, then, is a reminder or better yet, to rekindle the flame in a younger generation.

Acid test poet: Jack Spicer (1925-1965)

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

His wild poetics drawn on linguistics theory broke ground for a number of us. Quite simply, the narrative within a poem – or a series, as Spicer soon turned away from the single-page model – no longer had to conform with factual reality. I can only imagine what he would have done with Donald Trump as a figure. An image, however, took on a life of its own.

I didn’t realize how central the Los Angeles born character was to the West Coast poetry world. He was co-founder of the Six Gallery in San Francisco, where the Beat movement burst forth, and later in the Berkeley side of the Bay Area literary scene.

His collected poems, published posthumously by Black Sparrow and Grey Fox presses, remain core works on my bookshelf.

I also loved the way Ed Dorn picked up and continued Spicer’s stream.

Breaking my literary logjam was a godsend

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

For readers and for writers, the emergence of Smashwords.com revolutionized the publishing world. It also made self-publishing a much less risky investment for those of us who are indy authors, and let readers purchase books by unknown writers at low cost. It consolidated the platforms so readers of Nook or iPhones could read the same offerings as those coming from Kindle. It also offered an alternative to Amazon, which countered with Kindle Direct Publishing, meaning we could appear in both venues. Real competition can be a good thing, right? Essentially, it’s free for those who follow a few formatting guidelines and can design our own covers.

Since I’ve posted previously about the pros and cons of digital books versus paper, both for readers and for writers, I’ll focus today on my personal reflections on the development.

Getting my books “out there,” rather than collecting dust in a filing cabinet, provided a huge emotional relief. Twenty-three years had passed between the publication of Subway Hitchhikers and my Smashwords debut. And now the novels were available at the Apple Store, Barnes & Nobel, and other ebook retailers, as well as public libraries.

First out of the gate was Hippie Drum, drawn from my subway story outtakes, at the end of May 2013.

At the beginning of September came Hippie Love, using other outakes, and then Ashram in October, reissuing what had been Adventures on a Yoga Farm.

Daffodil Sunrise, developing more of the subway story outtakes, appeared in November.

Subway Hitchhikers was republished in January 2014.

So I had something along the lines of Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet before the public or maybe a string of Jack Kerouac tales.

I then turned to my other big pile of drafting to extract Promise, which appeared in April. I intended to follow that one with two related novels, but the royalties weren’t covering the cost of having a designer create fronts for those volumes. Instead, Peel (as in apple) and St. Helens in the Mix would eventually appear as free PDFs at my Thistle Finch imprint.

That left Hometown News, my newspaper-based novel, for September release.

Getting noticed, however, was a different matter. Nobody was reviewing digital editions, or at least nobody of note. You can’t sign copies at readings or bookstores, either. What was left was largely social media.

And that’s where it stood until the beginning of 2018, when What’s Left joined the lineup. I’ll tell you more about that one and its impact on the earlier volumes in an upcoming post.

As for marketing and self-promotion? It’s still an uphill struggle. Do most users of Facebook even buy books?

Acid test novelist: Jack Kerouac (1922-1969)

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

My introduction to Kerouac was the 1968 Paris Review interview he gave to Ted Berrigan (accompanied by Aram Saroyan, if I recall right – they did have to crawl through a bedroom window to get around Kerouac’s watchdog wife). The idea of typing on long scrolls of teletype paper was something I certainly took up after graduation from college – many mornings I had to go into the newsroom before dawn to attend to the teletype machines and replace the rolls of paper. Nobody else was interested in the discarded bolts.

I’ve never been able to get through On the Road but have read about everything else he wrote, especially Dharma Bums. What appealed in the hippie experience of the early ‘70s was Kerouac’s narrative of similar questing for transcendental awarenesses in music and poetry, music, travel, spirituality/religion, and romantic love – often in the realities of borderline squalor. His experiments with Buddhism resonated with my early yoga, though I now see how much it was more an exploration of French-Canadian Catholicism. The jazz details the excitement of the transformations of the ‘50s and its Beat movement, history as it happened.

At the time, I didn’t realize how much Binghamton in upstate New York resembled Kerouac’s native Lowell, Massachusetts, but without the French-Canadian dimension. The rawness of his freeform narrative was nevertheless entrancing.

Eventually, when I moved to Manchester, New Hampshire, I encountered the Quebec element in the city’s West Side and then in the mills of Lowell itself. We even had obituaries for some of his distant kin who spelled the name Kirouac.

For a fact-oriented journalist like me, his dark and cloudy and openly emotional approach to a story was a revelation. As an aside, I must confess that I now see Henry Miller’s earlier stream-of-thought fiction is superior.

As for Kerouac’s celebrated and lamented Cody? I seriously doubt that he measured up to his image. But that’s a matter of being human, too.

In the company of other writers

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

For 23 years after the appearance of my first book, I was stymied, as far as paper publication went.

Apart from the PDF publication of my second novel, in 2005, I couldn’t get a nibble. Not just the novels, either. Even my poetry books failed to garner print editions.

My on-the-job hours didn’t help either – nights and weekends. So much for networking.

~*~

Looking back, I can acknowledge how some writers’ circles have been very helpful along the way.

The first was an off-campus group in Bloomington gathered around the annual review Stoney Lonesome, named after a village in bucolic Brown County nearby. Once a month, its editors hosted a group that had a featured reader followed by an open mic and sometimes gentle criticism. It gave me the nudge to go deeper into poetry – “You’re hooked,” as one said – along with some great tips for submissions to the small-press scene. I was also invited to coedit an edition, which came out shortly I had relocated to Washington state.

I’ve never been one to be in a writers’ circle closely critiquing each other’s work. The time commitment was one problem, along with the difficulty of finding the right mix of participants. You know, like being a classical musician in a punk band.

There was a group in Baltimore during my sabbatical year, though I’m not sure where its core energy was. The highlight for me was a talk by Tom Clancy just before the movie version of Hunt for Red October was released. I don’t even remember where our regular meetings were held.

In New Hampshire, several open poetry mics took place on nights I could attend. One was weekly in Concord, filled with a hip young crowd and some edgy writing. I was the featured poet there on several occasions.

Another was a poetry group at the local Barnes & Noble, mostly young writers and good energy.

And then I relocated to the seacoast and got bumped to working the second shift, which did free up my Saturdays, if I could get up and away in time.

I joined the Poetry Society of New Hampshire, which had a major event each quarter – the same date, alas, as my ministry and counsel committee of New England Quakers met. The poetry group was more attuned to rhyme-tasters and school programs than to the avant-garde realm I’ve pursued.

Instead, a weekly series just over the state line in Massachusetts filled the gap. Held in a coffee house at the back of a boatyard and overlooking the harbor, Merrimac Mic had a lively bunch of regulars and gave me the featured reader spot multiple times. Isabell was a most appropriately eccentric emcee and organizer.

Performing your work before a crowd is a fine way of measuring its status. The energy of the audience can reflect whether the piece is effective as well as expose deficiencies. Besides, it’s an excellent way to pitch in with a group, as you would at a potluck dinner.

I’m not so sure about contests, but it seems to keep some other writers energized.

At the newspaper, I didn’t go straight from full-time employment to retirement. In the midst of some contentious contract negotiations, some of us were offered a chance to take a buyout. Then it was yanked off the table only to resurface on short notice. I took it.

That gave me a heavenly midwinter month where I indulged in a reading orgy, supported by the monthly severance checks. But the newsroom was short-staffed and wanted me back as a part-timer up to four days a week. Somehow, that felt quite different from the earlier tensions. I could choose which nights I wanted free, and I was no longer party to the office politics.

That’s how I had the Monday night off for a monthly Writers Night Out in Portsmouth, a wide-ranging mix of writers – filmmakers, ad copywriters, playwrights, public relations folks, in addition to poets, short-story writers, and novelists – who met over beer and appetizers or snacks. Writers’ schmooze, as I called it. Each of us briefly shared something about our latest project before the full gathering, accepted feedback, and then broke out into smaller clusters of similarly engaged individuals. Somehow, we weren’t competing with each other – I especially valued the perspective of a well-place sci fi writer and a younger multimedia artist – and the chatter was always helpful. The frustration of marketing was probably our No. 1 topic of discussion.

Those events ran about the time I took up blogging – or building my platform, as we were advised. It’s probably where I first heard about WordPress. And it’s definitely where I first heard mention of Smashwords. (What!?)

Yes, especially, Smashwords.

I hadn’t even considered the option of ebooks, and everything I’d heard up to that point was beyond my budget. Not so here.

Now, as I was saying about getting together with other writers? It really is essential.

Care to look at people around you carved in stone?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

What would your obituary say about you? What would you say there, if asked? Before you reply, pay attention to everyday stuff and your aspirations, especially what you love. Note as well how others see you. Besides, how do you fit into your neighborhood or wider community? Feel free to exaggerate, reflecting everyone else.

As a human, you assume a cluster of identities – some of them chosen and changeable, others immutable. My grandfather, for example, proclaimed himself Dayton’s Leading Republican Plumber, invoking a host of other identities as well: Protestant, Freemason, middle-class, married. “Grandfather” wasn’t high up in his awareness, from my perspective. Being male or female or teenaged or elderly, on the other hand, are simply givens. And the history of what we’ve done or failed to do cannot be altered, except in our own perceptions and retelling.

The range of identities is astounding. They include but are not limited to race, religion, nationality and locality, occupation, family (household and near kin to genealogy itself), education and educational institutions, athletics, hobbies and interests, actions and emotions, even other individuals we admire, from actors and authors to athletes, politicians, and historic figures. They soon extend to the people we associate with – family, friends, coworkers, neighbors. And, pointedly, our phobias and possessions.

Curiously, it becomes easier to say what we are not than what we are specifically. That is, set out to define yourself in the positive and you’ll find the list rapidly dwindling, while an inexplicable core remains untouched. Turn to the oppositions, however, and the list becomes endless. I am not, for instance, a monkey. At least, most of the time.

Sometimes, moreover, a specified negative becomes truly revealing: “I am not a crook,” for instance, as the classic revelation.

Behind the masks of public life – our occupations, religious affiliations, social status, economic positions, family connections, educational accomplishments, and so on – each of us engages in another struggle, an attempt to find inner balance and direction for our own life. As we do so, we soon face a plethora of interior and exterior forces that must be reconciled. We get glimmers into this struggle – both within ourselves and within others – in statements that begin “I am” and “I am not,” as well as “I have been,” which recognizes the history and habits we accumulate and carry with us. There are also the voices – “he remembers” or “she insists” – that also recur in our lives, defining and redefining ourselves both within, as conscience or the angel or devil on our shoulders, and without, as any of a host of authority figures and friends or family members.

All that brings us around to my latest poetry collection, Hamlet: A Village of Gargoyles. There, many of the imaginary individuals profiled are identified by occupation while their confessions typically reflect the more  intimate concerns of their lives – relationships, activities, even the weather. These are, then, overheard snippets more than public proclamations.

Hamlet, of course, is a small town or a village as well as a famed play. In this collection, the inhabitants are profiled in five acts of two scenes each, plus intermissions and intermezzos. They’re even exaggerated, the way a stone carver would in creating gargoyles and grotesques.

Listen carefully – especially when others talk of their romantic problems or other troubles – and another portion of a mosaic appears. This collection of poems builds on such moments, constructing a community as a web of each its members. Sometimes, a place appears; sometimes, a contradiction; sometimes, a flavor or sound or color. Even so, in this crossfire, we may be more alike than any of us wishes to admit. We may even be more like the part we deny. Our defenses wither. Our commonality, and our essential loneliness, are revealed.

Just think.

Having originally appeared in literary journals around the globe and then as chapbooks at Thistle Finch editions, this collection of poems is now available in your choice of ebook platforms at Smashwords.com and its affiliated digital retailers. Those outlets include the Apple Store, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Scribd, and Sony’s Kobo. You may also request the ebook from your local public library.

The move unites the poems in a single volume, rather than a series of ten smaller chapbooks and ten broadsides, and makes them available to a wider range of readers worldwide.

Welcome to town, clown.

Acid test novelist: Ishmael Reed (1938- )

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Assigned as part of a contemporary novels course in the spring of 1970, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down was unlike anything I had previously encountered. The lively tone and style were a kind of pre-rap, I suppose, as were the content. He was amusing in a way Leroi Jones wasn’t and also an example that we can be free of having to “write like cultivated Englishmen of a century or more ago,” as Kurt Vonnegut put it.

He certainly introduced a new world to my essentially suburban Midwestern nature.

Reed was, as critic Anita Felicelli wrote of a later novel, a firebrand, crackling, overflowing, pugnacious, “someone who doesn’t care about genre boundaries any more than he cares about historical boundaries, but who does care deeply about innovating.” In other words, right up my alley.

The novel Mumbo Jumbo confirmed my impression, but, somehow, I haven’t encountered him since, even though he’s written and published prolifically. Note to self: Rectify ASAP.

Back to the underground inspiration

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

As you’ve probably noticed in other posts here this year, I’ve been trying to recall some of the authors and books having an influence on the earliest drafts and later revisions of my novels. As I’m writing this, most of my personal library is still in storage – or other volumes, purged long ago to make room on my shelves for more – and my journals under wraps during the house renovations. I’m having to rely on memory, faulty though it may be.

Look, I don’t want these posts to be about some poor neglected novelist blah-blah-blah, but rather as one account of surviving in a writer’s life, maybe as a bit of advice or even encouragement for the next generation or two.

That said, I can state that my subway project sprang from Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America as its model. Think short, playful, imaginative with an image slash idea as its central character, like a children’s story for Woodstock reaching young adulthood. William R. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch also cast a spell as a free-floating state of mind.

For me, hitchhiking in subway tunnels was a fantasy symbolizing the hippie experience as I encountered it during my time living in upstate New York. You know, underground with urban roots yet flourishing out in the countryside where you could stick out your thumb and go about anywhere. Yes, though I didn’t fully comprehend it then, that Woodstock crowd was mostly from New York City and its suburbs.

The symbol even implied a degree of freeloading rather than responsibility.

While awaiting publication, the manuscript kept growing from its 1973 first draft, typed while sitting cross-legged at my beloved Olivetti 32 typewriter, through a revision shortly after that and probably another in 1976 before I packed up for the Pacific Northwest, where yet more would be added to the text with quite a backstory in addition to a superstructure out in the foothills somewhere north of Gotham.

This was well beyond the initial Brautigan flash. What I had was, in fact, unwieldy, and nodding toward Brautigan’s other fiction and a lot more. Unlike me, he kept most of his volumes short.

And then, somewhere before reaching my sabbatical in the Baltimore suburb of Owings Mills in 1986, the manuscript was greatly slimmed down, leaving many pages of outtakes I couldn’t trash outright. There was enough to create more novels, or so my inner trash picker insisted.

We’ll look at those as they took shape during my furious year of keyboarding on my new personal computer, however primitive the machine and process appear now.

In that sabbatical, I must say I was highly disciplined, keyboarding for four hours or so before taking a break, eating, even napping, and then returning to the work until two or so in the early morning. I had lived my adult life up to this point awaiting this moment, if it was far from what I had envisioned. Suburbs? Without a wife or soulmate? Heartbroken, in fact?

What drives an artist, anyway?

Beyond the yellow BMW 1600 oil-burning coup I was bopping around in – the one that was older than any of the women I was seeing.

A great deal of material and energy was there to be released, and I sensed this was my make-it-or-lose-it moment. As you’ll see.

Baltimore even had its own subway line under construction, reaching all the way out to where I was encamped.

Not that I would be there when it opened.

~*~

My first hick outpost, the one upstate, wasn’t as small as it seemed. Yes, it was a backwater, but the core was more populous than six of the places I would subsequently live in, if you didn’t count the university students in what I would dub Daffodil.

What my first actual job in journalism did have, though, was proximity to New York City, a mere 3½- to four-hour drive away. Despite the distance, the connection was vital, even vibrant. All of my new friends were from the Big Apple, and many of them were Jewish, as my college girlfriend was, even though she had by now oozed away from my presence, off on what I saw as troubling new places. At least none of them were Jonestown.

Starting with a summer internship before my senior year of college and picking up again after my graduation, a time of great emotional upheaval, exploration, and redirection. As I said, this was in the high hippie outbreak.

I presented the image that flashed before me, the gandy dancer who could have been a hitchhiker, but I should also acknowledge a freaky cartoon a housemate had created and handed me, with a face at a sewer grate mumbling “Duma luma, duma luma.” Those were the two prompts for the manuscript, seriously.

~*~

The inspiration also came from my first jaunts into New York City while living upstate, and later to the west in the Pocono mountains of Pennsylvania. Most of my buds and girlfriends had been from the City, as they called it. My early experiences turned into fascination during a period of great personal upheaval and growth for me.

Hippies seemed to be trying to go in two directions at once: back to the big city while hitchhiking out in the sticks. The original version was, in fact, published as Subway Hitchhikers in 1990 – the worst bookselling season in the memory of many publishers, thanks to the first Iraq war.

As I’ve ready described, in the 17 years between the first draft and the story’s first publication, the manuscript underwent a considerable metamorphosis as I moved across the continent in my day job. While living in the desert of Washington state, I even picked up a 1915 engineering book on the building of the New York subway system while browsing in a very small, small-town bookstore. (How did it ever land there?) Much of my expanding text was backstory on the central character, while the urban transit episodes shifted into something akin to an appendix. The result was an unwieldy epic. But I kept the outtakes, which took on their own life later.

As an inspiration for considering gargoyles

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

How would you answer the question, “Who are you?”

It can be harder than you think, especially when it comes to getting past the superficial answers.

Now, look in the mirror and try to imagine yourself carved in stone. Some features will be exaggerated, of course, but at some point, an angel or other truth may also be released.

This is prompted by the release of my collection, Hamlet: A Village of Gargoyles, which can be found in the digital platform of your choice at Smashwords, the Apple Store, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Scribd, Sony’s Kobo, and other fine ebook retailers. You can also ask your public library to obtain it.

In the meantime, a wonderful gallery is available for your viewing at the fine New England-based blog Gargoyles and Grotesques.

There you’ll see that these sculpted images aren’t confined to cathedrals or Gothic castles. In fact, they’re all around us.

They could even inspire another set of poems.