Tag: Literature

Was avoiding a genre a mistake?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Introduced to contemporary Inuit art by professor who had been in Alaska as a consultant for the drafting of state constitution, I was told of one artist who never did a similar piece twice. If he carved an image of a standing bear, that was it – not even a painting or print would follow in that vein.

Apart from working in a series, which feels more like developing a single long piece, I’ve tried to avoid any sense of getting stuck in a vein of seeming repetition. I mean, if I do another bear, it’s going to be sitting or stretched out or even nursing cubs.

I have taken the thought to heart. I’ve wanted each of my books to be distinctly different.

Most readers, though, are different. Not just from me, but from art collectors, too. When these readers enter a bookstore, they want to know which way to head and then which shelves are most likely to produce pay dirt. In addition, publishers want to invest in sure-fire hits, even of a modest sort. Beyond that, librarians and literature teachers want to have labels to ease the handling of authors and new books.

And that’s why genres proliferate.

My, how naïve I was, setting out to write fiction. What’s the story? How well is it told? What’s it’s style?

First off, I don’t read in a genre. I’m not shopping for sci fi, per se, or romance or mystery or detective or fantasy or historical of any kind or young adult or even erotica aka pornography. And bestseller status means nothing for me, a veteran of the small-press scene. Nope, I’m fishing in what’s now called literary fiction, especially of the contemporary vein.

And, as I’ve learned, that label can be the kiss of death.

~*~

I object to genre mostly because it leads to stale, cliché ridden cookie-cutter commodities produced for mass consumption. I find them too predictable, formulaic, and jargon-filled. A genre comes with the requisite tropes, after all.

I write and read to discover, to make sense of life as I’ve known it, especially, no matter how far afield that goes. Haven’t I wandered across the Arctic or Sahara in some form, after all? I don’t need to go into interstellar space or an alternate reality to get away from everything. In fact, I doubt I can go anywhere without taking my personal baggage along. How about you?

 ~*~

As for conflict?

When Mrs. Hines, my senior-year high school English teacher, said that all fiction is based on conflict, I piped up, contrarian that I am, “Oh, no it’s not!” To some degree, I’ve been trying to prove my case.

Nor would anything I’ve done fit Kurt Vonnegut’s advice, “Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them – in order that the reader may see what they are made of.”

There are no murders or bear attacks or invading armies in my stories. Well, maybe off somewhere in the distance. They never get personal. think most of my characters are nice folks.  Daffodil Uprising and Hometown News have the most outward conflict, I’d say, while Subway Visions has almost none. The most recent revisions have added some layers of darkness but not enough to alter the overall direction.

Stepping back, though, I see something that surprises me alone these lines. Almost all of my novels are countercultural, by definition in conflict with the surrounding society. In addition, the central conflicts are usually internal or small scale. In the Secret Side of Jaya, she sees and hears things others don’t. Tell me that’s not a conflict. Nearly Canaan examines the consequences of times and places a promise falls short, one after another, in the characters’ lives.

~*~

Still, I have to ask if my resistance against genre or commercial publishing has really been another fatal flaw in my ambitions. Would Subway Visions been more successful if I’d recast it as fantasy, for instance?

Was it foolish of me to avoid genre?

My genre, such as it is? Experimental fiction? It fits me but does little to attract a book buyer.

How about “contemporary history,” which is not an oxymoron. So much that’s happened in my lifetime is ancient history to the majority of the population. My daughters listen amazed at the era – did this or that really happen? Yes, I reply, and you take it all for granted. (Or granite, as I prefer.) So much of it runs counter to the mass-media stereotypes. Yes, my focus has been counterculture, as I’ve encountered it.

~*~

I do like the term genre-bending, which I’ve recently encountered. It’s something I was already exploring in the final round of revisions, especially once Cassia went goth.

Acid test novelist: Ernest Callenbach (1929-2012)

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

I’m not big on sci-fi, but the 1975 utopian novel Ecotopia looks rather prescient in that vein considering so much that’s happened in the years since.

The book came out just before I relocated to the Pacific Northwest for what turned out to be four years, but it springs from a recognition of how much the region stands apart from the rest of the nation. It’s a state of mind as much as watersheds and mountain ranges.

As an expression of hippie mindset, I find it more expansive than, say, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Haunted by a big bad Wolfe in a white suit

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 5 Comments

“You’ll be the next Tom Wolfe,” one creative writing prof promised me. I loved the guy’s flashy writing and, for the most part, his subject matter.

Where he eventually rubbed me wrong was his consternation that no big novel of the hippie era had appeared. There, he kept ringing as a prompt for me.

Part of his hook for me was the fact that my dream job in the newspaper world would have been as a columnist, especially one like Hub Meeker’s State of the Arts in the Dayton Journal Herald. Arts journalism was, alas, a shrinking field, along with the more general community columnist, like that paper’s Marj Heydock or Binghamton’s Tom Cawley.

Wolfe had briefly been one of those, at the New York Herald Tribune.

The bigger part, of course, was about that novel. He was dismissing Richard Brautigan’s unique voice altogether and others, like Gurney Norman, John Nichols, Tom Robbins, who rode the vibe.

Wolfe was also snidely suggesting that he had been the one exception, with his Electric Acid Kool-Aid Test, which really wasn’t a novel and predated the blossoming of the hippie movement.

His idea of the Big Hippie Novel reeked of the misguided quest for a Great American Novel.

Quite simply, there were too many strands of the movement to fit into a single book. Political or social action, anti-war witness, civil rights, gender equality, environmental awareness, organic and vegetarian foods, intentional community, group housing, alternative education were all part of it, even before the sex, drugs, rock’n’roll, hair, fashion, or slang.

These other factors would come more fully into play when I revised Daffodil Sunrise into Daffodil Uprising, and Hippie Drum and Hippie Love into Pit-a-Pat High Jinks.

I’d like to think of those books as nominees for the Big Hippie Novel distinction.

Wolfe’s charge also overlooks the outstanding nonfiction books that reflected the experience, such as Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Moreover, I still feel that many of the difficulties in the current political scene arise from a failure to clearly understand the demons raging from the Vietnam conflict, both for those who fought in the army and those who fought the unjustified war itself.

So here we were, struggling through disco without having faced the lessons of either the hippie outbreak or the Vietnam disease. Hippie had become a dirty word, and many who had been happy to be one were no in psychological denial. It was something nobody wanted to relive either, apart from maybe Woodstock.

As others have observed, an ignorance of history carries a heavy price.

Acid test poet: Diane Wakoski (1937- )

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

When my poetic focus shifted in the early ‘90s from nature to romantic love as I had known it, Wakoski hit home for me. Hers were love poems but far from the sunlight, chocolate, and roses “I can’t live without you” stereotype of the hopeless/helpless romantic.

Hers were alive in an admission of the continuing impact of adolescent awakening and desire, no matter your age, and the imagery was unmistakably American with a rock’n’roll plus Hollywood warp.

The title Motorcycle Betrayal Poems captures the energy, and her fine volumes from Black Sparrow Press fill a stretch of a shelf in my library.

She was a kind of guardian angel in a stream of poems I produced in the decade. For a sample, see my Blue Rock ebook collection.

Everybody should get a sabbatical

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Shortly before finding myself officially unemployed, I engaged a typist to prepare a clean draft of Subway Hitchhikers for submission to literary agents or book editors. At least that would be moving forward.

And then, when the ax fell, I was surprised to find that after arriving in Baltimore, in debt from divorce and selling a house at a loss in a recession, I had saved up a bundle in just two years. Having a company car and an expense account covering my meals during the week added up. Rather than return immediately to the workforce, I decided to give myself some time off, a sabbatical, as it were, to concentrate on the writing I had always wanted to do. The kind that would put my name on the cover and the spine. Something more lasting than a byline on a daily paper or even, more prestigiously, a magazine.

Watching a colleague who was waiting till retirement before he could tackle the children’s book he always wanted to write nagged at me. I had heard a few similar dreams – wait for retirement. Except that a heart attack felled Russ shortly after he got that farewell cake.

In my job-free spree, I hunkered down to hard writing, up to 12 hours a day. By this point, I was pretty proficient with my personal computer and its dot-matrix printer. And so, while she was typing up Hitchhikers, I turned to keyboarding other material.

What I see as I look back on my sabbatical was that I entered the year more prepared than I’ve assumed. It wasn’t like I was sitting down and staring at a blank page and waiting for inspiration to strike. Besides, I had journal notes, correspondence, even maps and photos to draw on.

Every writer works differently, as interviews in the Paris Review demonstrated. The one with Jack Kerouac had inspired to use the end rolls of teletype paper for drafting, freeing me from having to keep inserting new sheets into the typewriter. Using a PC was like that, only instead of having to replace paper I had a 5¼-inch flopping disk that filled up. If only I had an editor waiting, like he had.

As I awaited word on my query letters to agents and publishers, I began examining my life from college to the present through the eyes of fiction. Keyboarding large sections from my journals gave me a foundation for following my moves from the East Coast back to Ohio, on to Indiana, again, and finally the Pacific Northwest, events that included my first marriage. Making it work as fiction, though, was the challenge.

My primitive PC was still a huge advance over typewriters, in my case, an Olivetti Editor 2. And here I had been seeing the ubiquitous IBM Selectric as an enviable sign of a successful writer? The thought is rather amusing today. Gee, and there was no Internet yet, hard as that is to believe now.

In my sabbatical I concentrated on a single manuscript and then put it aside as I awaited feedback from potential agents or publishers or maybe just for a space to season until I could come back to it afresh. That opened a window to start drafting another. I was a fiend, having waited years for this opportunity.

My hunkered down life? I got the deepest tan of my life by taking a midday break at the pool, at least through the summer. And did get out for hikes, especially in nearby pine barrens that had lead mine remains and a waterfall. Spiritually, I was connecting with Plain Quakers, liberal Mennonites, former Amish, and a small circle from the Church of the Brethren – all in the pacifist tradition. There was even a writers’ group that Tom Clancy addressed just as he was on the cusp of celebrity.

What I see now when I look at my earlier writing is that I could never have created those pages later in my life. Too many details would have vanished, along with the urgency and originality and even the voice.

The sabbatical was also a period of heavy reading for me, including the brat pack being edited by Gary Fisketjon at Vintage Contemporaries, Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, and George Eliot’s Middlemarch.

As my savings ran out, I still hadn’t found an agent or publisher. Realizing I’d need at least another year clear to achieve that, I reluctantly headed back to my career in newspaper journalism, this time in New Hampshire. There was a crucial shift, though. The archconservative Union Leader had a unionized newsroom where I could go back into the ranks as an editor and still earn more than most small paper managing editors across the country. I even had job security and a 35-hour workweek that allowed me time for a real life.

I packed up with the first rambling draft of what would become Promise, released via Smashwords in 2013, and two related novels, plus Hometown News and all of the outtakes from the subway project. I could continue to revise those drafts in my free time, but the book publishing world was changing in ways that baffled even the most celebrated literary agents.

Looking back, I must admit how much risk I took in my year off. I had no health insurance, for one thing, and no guarantee I could return to the shrinking ranks of journalism. I was also perceiving the pace I was working at could not be sustained.

I had been appalled in reading interviews with famed authors who boasted that they worked four hours a day – what slackers, I thought. Now I see that as a rather lavish amount of time, considering the additional hours of research, related correspondence, submissions, reading, and basic home-business demands (yes, writing is a business). Gee, how did I overlook all those hours of lunch conferences or cocktail hours in the lives of the literati, which were essentially business? Or even their hours in psychotherapy?

Acid test novelist: Diane DeVillers (1956-2023)

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

While Tom Wolfe charged that no great novel sprang from the hippie counterculture, a challenge akin to the holy grail of the great American novel, his quest overlooked some fine stories that reflected any of its many dimensions.

Among the gems are the three self-published novels of DeVillers’ Eve Chronicles, grounded in the author’s experiences in moving from her native Wisconsin to the Pacific Northwest, where she spent several years – harsh winters included – with a crew in the rugged mountains of eastern Oregon replanting forests in the wake of clear-cut logging. I had heard of the legendary Hodads in the western part of the state (they took their name from the short-handled pick/spade they used), but DeVillers’ case gently probes the realities of the marginal existence and the varied types of people it attracted. Though this was not the Haight-Ashbury stereotype of the era, it was one of the counterculture’s many flavors. She was definitely back-to-the-earth throughout the span of the books.

Another was the holistic health-care work she took up in what she called a nomadic life before settling down in the Willamette Valley, where the Chronicles continue, again reflecting the conflicts of living out deeply felt values.

She began writing the novels after being diagnosed with MS and drew on her spiral-bound notebooks as source material. (Fortunately, those had survived her many moves.) I love the fact that she’s not inventing stories or characters but distilling what she’s known firsthand. She presents scenes – even aromas and lighting – I’ve experienced, too.

I was going to say her tone is reminiscent of Joni Mitchell but now see the singer was an inspiration. How right, then.

She was working on a manuscript about the health care industry and big money and big politics set in the Covid pandemic, but I don’t know how far she had gotten with it.

Acid test poet: Denise Levertov (1923-1997)

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Levertov is a poet I began reading the summer after I graduated from college. There was something in her work that seduced me, something along the lines of Brahms and Rilke, as one early advocate said of her. (It was Kenneth Rexroth, whom you’ll meet later in this series.)

What I didn’t see straight-out was the religious underpinning of her work, even in her atheist phase.

I do remember an encounter after a poetry reading in Baltimore, where one audience member approached her and asked how one could sustain a pacifist stance while remaining an atheist. She replied that without faith, the practice was very difficult. A few minutes earlier, I had asked how she had come to become a pacifist and she replied it was through her first lover, who was a Quaker.

Two years on the road came as a welcome respite

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The ‘80s hit me with a couple of hard setbacks. First, Mount St. Helens blew up, as did my job in what I had seen as my Promised Land. I went bouncing back east, first to a stint along the upper Mississippi in Iowa and then three years in the Rust Belt of Ohio, where my shirt-sleeve management position ate up 60 hours or more of my life every week. Shortly after my first marriage fell apart there, my job was eliminated. At least I had a hot love going, with an engagement to be announced once I could relocate to Baltimore, where she had moved for her studies.

Somehow, I landed a field representative job with the Chicago Tribune’s newspaper features syndication service, one that allowed me to move anywhere I wanted within the 14 northeastern states I would be covering. Baltimore was perfect.

Except, once I ensconced in the top floor of an 1840s rowhouse in a gentile in-town neighborhood, my beloved wasn’t. If only I could get a straight answer from her.

Complicating matters was that I was out on the road three weeks out of four, home only to unpack and repack on the weekends. The job introduced me to a world many American men know: frequent flyer lounges, taxis and limos, hotels and motels, expense and mileage reports, quarterly sales meetings, three-piece suits custom made at Joseph Banks, a company car, bonuses. Newspaper management, especially on the smaller papers that I had known, were nothing like that. You might get a nice note from your boss or someone up the ladder thanking you for a particular job well done.

Getting from one sales call to the next gave me a lot of time for thinking as I drove or even reading, if I was flying. The time allowed me to decompress from a decade that had included 11 addresses in seven states. I could journey at ease or read or revise earlier manuscripts at night in my room, whatever its number.

My personal life included some of the loneliest nights ever but also led to my best friendship ever, a Plain Quaker who worked as a supermarket meatcutter when he wasn’t working as a nurse. I also had a circle of Mennonites who introduced me to four-part a cappella part-singing, a step that would lead me to the excellent choirs I would join in Boston and Eastport. I also visited among Friends, aka Quakers, and sometimes managed a few hours for genealogical libraries and archives or walking through cemeteries where my ancestors are buried. I even revisited the ashram and my old stomping grounds in upstate New York.

None of this apart from the newspaper world has entered my fiction directly. I thought she would be a fine character to build on, except in retrospect it turned out all too banal. What these experiences did feed was my poetry later.

Thanks to my best friend from my junior high and high school years, who was now living an hour south – unlike the previous decade, where we kept landing on opposite ends of the country – I obtained my first PC, something some of his buddies were building. It had 5¼-inch floppy disks, which would be ancient history to so many tech-savvy youths today.

In my travels, I saw much industrial wasteland. Not just Pittsburgh and western Pennsylvania or Sparrows Point outside Baltimore, but also around Philadelphia, across upstate New York, in Worcester and Buzzards Bay and the Merrimac/Merrimack River in Massachusetts and New Hampshire.

The newspaper industry was also taking hard hits. As manufacturing jobs disappeared, so did readership for afternoon papers, which were read by people taking the bus home or waiting for dinner. That greatly reduced the opportunity to place new features in their pages. As I was told, only a few years earlier, I would have had no difficulty selling to editors. Now, the challenge was keeping them happy with what they were already buying. I also saw great turnover at the helm of papers. I would curry an editor and have promises for a sale once the new annual budget was approved, only to find that he was no longer there in a year. The position I had aspired to and been groomed for was now revealed to be something less than desirable.

What became clear to the five of us out on the road was that the business was in trouble. One or more of us would be cut. I was the one. Besides, I really never was much of a salesman.

My observations of visiting other papers did augment my actual newsroom experiences that would emerge as the novel Hometown News.

Acid test poet: David Smeltzer (1937-2016)

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

A longish poem addressing his father, The Eyes of Blood, and then the poems experimenting with Kabbala are what caught me either in my return to Bloomington or right after, in the Pacific Northwest. Neither example fit the typical 20- to -28-line poems that filled the literary magazines, and each one worked a different vein – one essentially lyrical, the other, bullets.

At the time, I was reading and enjoying a wide range of the San Francisco poetry outpouring – I’ve long felt more at home there than I did with the New Yorkers of the era. Smeltzer’s on my list over some other better-known colleagues, probably because of a feeling of connectedness.

Despite acquiring a handful of his chapbooks, I wasn’t aware of his role in the San Francisco Beat scene, including jazz performances, but that detail has me wanting to go back to revisit his work, once we have room here for what’s currently in storage at the other end of Maine.

How the style and ethics of my journalism career clashed with my literary ambitions

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

When I sat down to my personal writing, I felt an ongoing tension between the daily grind of newspaper editing that paid my bills, contrasted to my ambitions for something more permanent, more confidential, and more creatively advanced than the anonymous work that went into the next day’s trash. The pejorative “hack writer,” often applied to newspapermen from the early 18th century on, was what I aspired to rise above. The term has haunted me ever since reading Samuel Johnson’s derision.

In my private labor I aimed for something unique, thoughtful, sophisticated, meticulously developed, complex, and even challenging for both me and the reader. If news stories limited attribution for a quote as the neutral “said,” I nearly banished that colorless word from my prose, relying instead on everything from “answered” or “asserted” to “cried” or “swore“ to “wept” or perhaps “whispered,” with a wide range of variants in between. Do note, I’ve come to treasure a thesaurus for ways in can enrichen a text and sharpen the underlying thought and feelings, even though doing so requires additional time and consideration.

My journals, on the other hand, sought mostly to catch up on my life from the previous entry, often in cryptic terms I might get back to and fill in later, though that rarely happened.

~*~

Hemingway could write for a sixth-grade level reader because he was no longer in a newsroom. It could kill you, believe me, if it’s all you got to do.

I needed to foster my literary ambitions simply to keep my editing skills sharp.

It did make for tension in my private work, though. I still love a good 250-word sentence.

~*~

Let me also say something of the ethics. Being told not to wear a politician’s campaign button. No appearance of partisanship. Leonard Downing of the Washington Post even refused to vote in an election for fear it would taint his neutrality or objectivity.

Were we, as one girlfriend taunted me, ethically castrated? My first editor, Glenn Thompson, worked behind the scenes to get progressive things in motion and did urge us interns to have causes.

By the way, I have worked for some very conservative papers and also some very liberal ones. It didn’t affect what I did for them.