Tag: Literature

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.

Acid test mystic: Isaac Penington (1616-1679)

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Unlike many of the early Quaker voices, Penington was well educated and respectable, the eldest son of a Lord Mayor of London. He even became William Penn’s father-in-law. But his joining with Quakers led to harsh persecution, including imprisonment six times, as well as intense spiritual experiences he described in various writings, including his letters.

A critical reader will recognize that articulating what is ultimately non-physical or confirmable is a difficult challenge. What Penington achieves remains insightful, personal, yet universal. There’s nothing dogmatic or doctrinaire or theoretical or speculative, not when grounded in personal practice.

His style fascinates me, long sentences that coil around and around as they move toward a core. Pulling a short quotation from them proves difficult without losing the wider field of wonder. As an example, “Give over thine own willing, give over thy own running, give over thine own desiring to know or be anything and sink down to the seed which God sows in the heart, and let that grow in thee and be in thee and breathe in thee and act in thee; and thou shalt find by sweet experience that the Lord knows that and loves and owns that, and will lead it to the inheritance of Life, which is its portion.” Eighty words, in all – typical.

Somehow, I find myself contrasting him to the Muggletonian William Blake a century and a half later, who struggled with similar challenges for a much different result.

Is small really beautiful?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

One place I was appearing as a writer was in the small-press realm. Largely unseen and at the fringe of the literary world, its prolific, low-circulation reviews, quarterlies, ‘zines, chapbooks, and even full-sized books reflected a passion for literature, an intense mission, or outright ambition rather than an accountant’s commercial motivation. Many were marginally funded, mimeographed or photocopied, while others had more traditional printers, perhaps even typesetters, and a few of the biggest even had paid staff. Most were edited by dedicated individuals or partnerships; others by an institution or circle; and still others by college English departments, with either students or faculty as the team.

It’s where the action was – and remains.

Among the book publishers, Black Sparrow and Copper Canyon stand out, along with Shambala for a Buddhist focus.

In general, university book presses garnered more respect and financial backing and weren’t open to those of us who weren’t in a professorial track.

In college, I had been told of a widely recognized poet who averaged 20 rejections for every poem he had accepted in one of these journals. That was meant as inspiration to keep us lesser voices from despair.

Well, a few years later, I was getting about 20 rejections for every batch of five poems I mailed out. Still, I got more than a thousand acceptances. They usually paid me with two contributor’s copies, or did before the action shifted online. There are some fine online sites, by the way, if you look.

The track was how you were supposed to build a reputation and even entice an agent or editor. I think they were all too busy to notice.

A newspaper career was usually supposed to grow the same way: start out on a small daily somewhere out in the sticks, one with next to nothing pay, and work your way up. Or as one critic warned publishers, this was a process of eating your young. Or your seed corn, in another version.

(The highest income I ever reached, by the way, was the national median. And that was thanks to our Newspaper Guild contract, unlike most of our rivals.)

~*~

Acceptances created another challenge, drafting a contributor’s note.

I noticed that many of the writers listed their most recent book or two, but I really didn’t have that much. Others went with where they were teaching or working on an advanced degree. With my name distancing myself from the more common tag I used in the newsroom, naming the newspaper wasn’t really an option – and not that wise, anyway, if the content was of a controversial nature, as many still saw the hippie movement.

The solution, then, was to look for some bit that would make me more human. Do try it, if you’re asked to come up with something similar. Even be flip, if you can.

~*~

The World Wide Web has taken all of this in a new dimension, of course.

We bloggers are essentially producing ‘zines or similar small journals. We even have photography as a regular option, not a given back in the day.

I’ve even gathered my published poems along with newer ones and published them as free PDF chapbooks at my own online imprint, Thistle Finch, a sister to this Red Barn. Do look it up.

More crucial has been the growth of ebooks and on-demand print publishing, which I’ll discuss in an upcoming post.

Acid test novelist: Gurney Norman (1937- )

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Returning to Tom Wolfe’s charge that no great novel sprang from the hippie counterculture, it’s clear that he overlooked Divine Right’s Trip, which originally appeared in the margins of the Last Whole Earth Catalog. (Far out, indeed.)

Rather than taking place in any of the celebrated hippie havens, Norman’s pilgrim figure finds himself in Cincinnati, a largely redneck habitation I’ve heard described as a place of perpetual Lent, before heading on into the strip-mined mountains of eastern Kentucky. Yes, hippie did indeed take place in seemingly unlikely locales. It was also often drab and lonely. And then, as Norman illustrates, it also drew nurture from some very unlikely sources.

If anything, there’s widespread lament that Norman didn’t write more. Divine Right’s Trip is humbly beautiful.

Aspiring to the big-time is natural

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Let me confess to the allure of having an author’s photo and bio blip on the back dust jacket of a hardback volume. That’s always carried so much more gravitas than a mere newspaper byline – in my early days reserved only for major stories rather than distributed to just about every headlined item, in part to shift the blame for errors – or, one step up, the columnist’s thumbnail mug shots, for the truly honored writers. A magazine’s contributors page was a step up, especially when they included a full-color photo.

It’s not that being honored was essential – I was an anonymous, behind-the-scenes copy editor, after all – but more an acknowledgment of success, especially when it signified not being a hack. It’s just that everyone harbors a desire to be important, at least to someone, right?

~*~

For me, having the manuscripts but working on them part-time, I sensed myself racing a ticking clock. Would time run out on me?

The book publishing world was shrinking, as was daily newspaper journalism that provided my paychecks. Fewer houses were publishing fiction, and even those were in turmoil. They wanted blockbusters rather than the cottage-industry lines that previously prevailed.

Literary agents were struggling to support the writers they had and were less likely to take on new clients who would require more time and effort to promote. One, who had been considered hot just the previous year, replied to my query – a rarity, by the way – saying my proposal was an important book but not “commercially viable.” Another, equally acclaimed, vented her frustration with the changing publishing world and her struggles to cope within it.

Well, it did remind me of a letter I received from a newspaper editor I greatly admired during one of my job-hunting interludes. He was warm and welcoming, but confessed his career had turned into heading papers through their final days. From what I saw, he did manage some glorious sunsets.

My personal writing turned to several nonfiction projects that had commercial potential, but they, too, failed to break through the brick wall. One problem was that I was only a writer rather than an expert with academic or other highly placed credits.

It was a vicious circle. To get published, you had to have been published to some success.

~*~

It paralleled my earlier efforts to land a position on a major metropolitan newspaper. There had been some near misses, but the Union Leader proved to be a better fit for my remaining career. I even made it to the finishing line in a rapidly shrinking field.

In addition, “making it” as a poet was looking more and more like a dead end. Who can even name a living poet?