We’re fast approaching Read an Ebook Week, an opportunity that encourages readers to pick up the digital device of their choice and download a new book or more to own and read.
I’m excited to announce that three of my books will be available as part of the promotion on Smashwords to celebrate Read an Ebook Week 2024, March 3-9. Yes, starting Sunday. This is a chance to get these books, along with books from many other fine independent authors, at a discount so you can get right to reading.
What is it that made Bukowski such an unmissable figure in the reading life of young poets and others in the ‘70s and beyond?
You probably wouldn’t want to meet him in person, he seemed to be rather obnoxious, even ugly, even before getting drunk or in a fistfight. He was, from evidence he presents, an abusive lover.
Even so, part of the appeal came, I sense, in his unflinching reflection of life in near-poverty, a world where many of us were also residing. His subjects, though, were everyday poor people, drudging away in marginal jobs when they could, rather than recent college graduates intent on moving on.
Another part of his appeal, though, was his embrace of being a Poet and the ways the daily practice of writing kept saving his miserable life. Black Sparrow Press, with its signature look and literary dedication, was created for his work, and the successful relationship provided a platform that gave exposure to many other poets and novelists – the “bird mob,” as one poet I knew said with outright envy.
Was there even a poetry scene in Los Angeles at the time? The focus in California was almost totally on the Bay Area to the north.
I was especially fond of his short novel, Post Office, but the spare lines of his poetry are unpretentiously masterful and sharp-eyed. He cut the BS, for certain, in a life of squalor that’s a revelation. It’s a life most of us would rather avoid yet somehow touches on our own.
While living in the small industrial city that’s the setting for Hometown News, I began exploring my genetic roots, at least on my father’s side. It involved a lot of correspondence, especially with a cousin of my dad’s generation, as well as probing whatever records we could dig up.
By this time, my spiritual practice had recentered in the Quaker stream, or Society of Friends, where it turned out my ancestors had been active from the early 1660s until my great-grandfather moved from North Carolina to Ohio and “married out” in 1893. I now had access to historic minutes, correspondence, journals, and other resources that proved helpful.
My findings are presented on my Orphan George blog, should you be interested.
What fascinates me in regards to my fiction is the fact that so many of my ancestors were essentially countercultural in regard to the broader society. They were pacifist, for one, and wore distinctive garb and used distinctive language. (Sound hippie?) In North Carolina, their community had the first manumission society in the state, buying freedom for slaves and transporting them to safer lands. This was not the Deep South of popular culture.
These findings, and the research methods, proved quite helpful when I drafted my nonfiction New England history, Quaking Dover.
The techniques and insights also played into my novel What’s Left, where I took Cassia’s lineage on both sides back to her great-grandparents, including their quite different faith traditions.
I am intrigued by the values and practices from one generation to another. What is rejected and what is embraced?
In my case, I discarded the mainstream Christianity and lifestyle of my parents and grandparents only to find myself later reconnecting with much of the radical Christianity and countercultural outlooks of my great-grandparents. Well, most of them on my dad’s side. My mother’s were an entirely different matter.
As I’ve found, genealogy often presents a much different history than we’re taught in the conventional versions, especially when our focus is on everyday people rather than the political and military leaders and the upper class. The lives can go ways we wouldn’t have plotted. For instance, my family in North Carolina had a gold mine.
Who was I to think I could say something fresh about underground public transit? Well, the outsider has long had a place in the arts … and in comedy.
I had expected to wind up living in a big city, where I’d have access to frequent symphony concerts and perhaps opera as well. Foreign films, well-stocked bookstores, kindred souls. All the rest. My life journey and my career went another way, but I still wound up as a subway rider, of sorts. I was far from a private jet or even taxi kind of existence.
My introduction to underground transit probably came in a series of big, cartoonish, wildly rendered Subway Riders canvases that received a special exhibit at the Dayton Art Institute sometime in my high school years. I think they were by a hot New York rising star who was visiting Ohio as an artist-in-residence or an arts school guest instructor, though his identity eludes me now. Flash in the pan? Rubes in the sticks?
I wasn’t exactly wowed, but I was intrigued. He wasn’t Rembrandt.
The furthest east I’d been was Pittsburgh. Perhaps the next year my family got to Toronto and Montreal, though I didn’t venture on the subway in either of those cities.
Do families even take such vacations on the road nowadays? We did have our camping gear in the trunk of our red Buick Roadmaster.
~*~
Writing about subways – becoming fascinated by them, their offensive grit, stench, and loud noises included – was about the last thing I would have expected when I graduated from college or even high school. I was a Midwesterner through and through. The closest I had come to what I saw in those Subway Rider paintings was on the City Transit trolleys at rush hour. We definitely weren’t flashing along a dark tunnel or loading by hoards or packed together like sardines.
But people kept telling me I wasn’t destined for my hometown, no matter how loyal I felt. Or was that defensive? The message they conveyed was that I should look to Manhattan or some equivalent opportunity. Even Cincinnati, an hour away, looked sophisticated.
The hippie outbreak, or Revolution of Peace & Love, was still somewhere in the future, though the Beatles were shaking the status quo and skipping around Elvis in what we’d now call the pop culture scene. Culture was, let me emphasize, concerned with things that would raise our vision and intelligence rather than merely mark social norms as in averages, either mainstream or ethnic.
By the time I actually rode a subway train, I was nine months away from earning an urban studies certificate, thanks to my multi-disciplinary college studies. The journalism career that embraced me would instead lead out in the boonies or an equivalent emotional wilderness.
~*~
My book that sprang from those encounters started out short and flashy as its first draft in ’73. Inspired, in part, by Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America, I typed away sitting cross-legged before a converted coffee table and my beloved Olivetti Lettra 22 blue typewriter. The very portable one.
Graffiti, wild splashes. This was going to be my wild hippie book, the essence of it all. It had the Midwest – what would emerge as Daffodil – and it had the Big Apple, where so many of the freaks I knew after graduation had grown up. The movement was a confusing clash of youthful excess.
It was too much – way too much, actually.
By the time I distilled it down into what was published as Subway Hitchhikers, it was more of a lacy collage presented in a strobe-light kind of then/now alternation that I came to see was overly ambitious to be effective rather than confusing.
What I did sense was the way big cities draw on the interior landscape, almost like vampires on the innocent. Not that I ever expressed it that openly, but I am now thinking it fit Gotham if only I were usually trying to look at the bright side of life.
Was it even a novel? Short, and perhaps meta-fiction?
After recently tweaking the cover for my Hometown News novel, I found my eyes zeroing in on another volume and once again questioning its effectiveness.
This design continues at Amazon. While Cassia goes Goth in the plot, I suspect this was a bit extreme for her style.
What’s Left: Within a daughter’s own Greek drama had been especially difficult to develop, as I’ve explained in earlier posts, but ultimately ended up following a girl who lost her father in an avalanche on the other side of the globe when she was only 11. She then continues on into her emotional recovery and growth, rounding out in her mid-30s.
By the time the book appeared in both digital and print-on-demand options at Amazon, the cover image had settled on a photo of a Goth girl.
For technical reasons, she continues at Amazon, while my cover at other digital retailers got updated.
I wanted a better sense of the initial suffering, or even an edginess in her development, but nothing worked perfectly. I am still taken with the daring in her stare at the camera, but is that enough? (I did a post about the earlier covers on December 20, 2019, should you want to explore my archives. I was quite fond of the first cover, the one with its falling egg yoke, but nobody else seemed to get the connection.)
The figure appears more ambiguous in my attempt to do something more in line with some of the Young Adult covers I saw. Ultimately, this was a mistake.
Furthermore, she’s genetically a mix of Greek and American Midwest and a tad on the pudgy side. I hate it when a story follows, say, a brunette but the cover shows an obviously dyed blonde.
Another challenge involved balancing the two words of the title. The second word, “Left,” should have the emphasis, but it’s only half the size of “What’s.” Nothing I tried corrected that. In many of the typefaces I sampled, “Left” simply didn’t read easily, either. It could have been “Lest” or “Lett” on first reading. In making a sales pitch, there’s no time for deciphering the message. “What’s” presented similar challenges in other typefaces.
The text had been difficult enough to nail down in a convincing voice, but the cover was equally problematic – especially finding an appropriate image. How do you summarize all this in a single graphic impression, especially one that works thumbnail size online?
Do note, there’s an ongoing argument about using a facial image on a cover, period. Does it grip a potential reader or does it turn one away? Will it even limit a reader’s impressions of the character at the heart of the book?
At last I had a photo that more or less captures her despair. The title and author presentation never quite matched.
Remember, my budget wasn’t generous enough for a graphic designer, the kind who would create a flowing dust jacket replete with insider clues for a potential reader. I’m not particularly fond of those designs anyway. In general, I think photos pack more punch in a first impression. Just look at magazines at a newsstand. Remember those?
Cassia, or more formally Acacia, goes into mourning after her father’s death and then morphs into Goth dress and appearance through her teenage years, where much of the story develops.
The book doesn’t fall neatly into genres – part of it could be Young Adult, but I’d say the core of it is New Adult and beyond. So how old should she look on the cover?
Finally, in the latest stab at this problem, I decided to run with an image I’d settled on earlier. This time, it would bleed off the cover at both sides for maximum impact. I then decided to run it off the bottom, too. Somehow, that left the photo square, a format her photographer father pursued.
At last, we have this.
My reason for cropping the photo tighter was to give it more depth, putting the focus more fully on the girl and her emotion. I’m now seeing that the rocky background I eliminated had actually suggested another kind of story. No more of that distraction now. An artist might have replace it with her extended family, by the way.
In leaving the top open for author and title, rather than separating those elements with the photo in the middle, she has more presence and gravity.
I’m also glad I stuck with an impulsive decision to not fill in the remaining cover with a background color. A new typeface for me, Yu Gothic Semibold, seemed to work best for the title, though I’m not exactly happy with the single-stroke bar apostrophe. But “Left” carries its own weight in the dance of letters.
Book Antiqua, meanwhile, a fallback for me, does nicely in italic for the author.
That’s all – clean, simple, and somehow daring in its starkness. Without an obvious border, the design declares its independence from paperbook constrictions. It’s also quite contemporary, in a confident way. It even pops out on websites. And there’s no question that it comes together more harmoniously the one it replaces.
This one’s now available on 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.
Although she was known as a poet and story writer, her book that I most value is An Island Garden (published the year she died), with illustrations by Childe Hassam, an Impressionist painter I admire highly. (He hated the term, by the way, and didn’t fit the label neatly, but it gives you an idea.)
The island, in the Isles of Shoals of the shore of Maine and New Hampshire, is a remarkable place, as I found in a visit I posted here on June 14, 2020, “Celia’s garden … on Appledore Island.”
Under her guidance, the hotel her family owned and operated became what can be seen as the nation’s first artists colony every summer, attracting a who’s who of writers, painters, musicians, and more. Her influence can be seen especially in many of New England’s authors of the period.
Reading about her, I’ll confess, can be as pleasurable as reading her work itself.
Is a writer really expected to explore deep matters without including the hot subjects of religion and politics? Here I’ve been writing about the hippie movement, which had a strong anti-materialism streak, at least on the surface, as well as a strong anti-war stand, though I’m sensing it wasn’t quite as anti-violence as well. Early drug use was often described in religious terms pointing toward a union with the divine or transcendental wisdom.
For some of us, at least, spirituality and religion (shorn of religiosity) were a big part of the era. Not that that many others wound up there by now, from what I see.
As for politics? What a disaster.
~*~
In my journey, the time in the ashram was the ultimate of hippie. We were a tight-knit community (think of the ideal of tribe), vegetarian, back-to-the-earth (though not off the grid), sitting in meditation twice a day (the best way of getting high). The celibacy ran counter to the broader movement, but we did have a better balance of the sexes than elsewhere. We were focused, after all, on changing ourselves first before trying to change society.
So that’s the basis of my novel Yoga Bootcamp, humor and all.
I tried to walk a line between guru adulation, which I saw in books about various religious leaders of all stripes, and an expose about their shortcomings, mostly sexual and financial. While there were problems after I moved on, I had learned and grown much during my residency. To turn on that for larger readership would have been a betrayal.
~*~
I wasn’t so considerate with the churches in Hometown News. What I saw in the industrial city that modeled Rehoboth was rivalry, and I never got to know the ministers. I was worshiping with Quakers an hour to the south.
~*~
The subject became more nuanced in Nearly Canaan, where Jaya ventures forth to spread yoga-based spirituality along with her progressive social service. Having her become close friends with an evangelical pastor’s wife, which evolved in the final revision, is one of my favorite strands in my fiction, along with the middle novella in the Secret Side of Jaya, with its more primitive Baptists.
~*~
Let’s return to my first book, where a third leg of the original saga was Tibetan Buddhism. Memories of a documentary I’d seen in childhood about the flight of the Dalai Lama had taken root in my psyche, and my yoga ashram residency included teachings about karma and reincarnation. Even my fundamentalist mother had been impressed by some of that. Well, and maybe the fact that they were fighting the evil Communists.
Once the seemingly absurd premise of a lama being reincarnated in Iowa, I was off running. And then, a few years after publishing the book as Subway Hitchhikers, news stories presented claims about such an occurrence actually happening. For me, though, the prompt fit a personal sense of being born into the wrong place and time.
After the book was drafted, I returned to Indiana as a research associate and found myself taking the bus to work some days with the Dalai Lama’s brother as one of the passengers. I was too abashed to try to converse with him, but he was on the university’s faculty and, as another coincidence, a Tibetan Buddhist center took root in Bloomington, something I was already anticipating in the story line that finally jelled as What’s Left, springing from the ending of the subway story.
Drafted a quarter century after Hitchhikers was published, What’s Left picked up with the Greek-American family the lama married into, except that I felt I needed to tone down the reincarnation possibility. Besides, I was exploring dimensions of Greek-American culture and Orthodox faith, which I’ve presented here at the Barn.
This has me thinking about the original scope of my subway novel. What if I had envisioned it as a graphic novel sans the graphics but one where each encounter somehow builds toward his establishing a temple somewhere in the Catskills or Berkshires or other high point near the big city? Instead, I intuitively had him zoom back to Indiana, a reflection, I thought, of how far Manhattan’s tentacles reach.
Tibetan Buddhism was a way of abstracting my Hindu-based yoga training, and my Buddhist tastes leaned toward Zen.
After moving to Dover, though, I got to know a deeply committed woman who was on her way to becoming a Tibetan Buddhist nun slash teacher. Some of her insights have been woven into the revised story as it stands today in Subway Visions.
The newest addition to my list is someone I’ve come to know and admire since moving to Eastport.
Lee, a longtime high school teacher and valued community figure who has written short fiction for most of her life, finally released a collection of 12 stories in 2022, and it’s a treasure. Island Secrets is rife with every-day, blue-collar existence on a remote fishing island in Maine – veiled Eastport – but the secrets are those that lurk unspoken in the open. Consider the trials of harvesting scallops in the dead of winter, which runs through the final story. Few consumers have a clue to the dedicated labor involved in the occupation (I’m tempted to call it a profession, including the fact that it is highly licensed and regulated) or of the domestic tensions that accompany the precarious business.
She’s original, a consequence of digging intuitively into the world in front of her, with her prose infused with the precision of her succinct poems as well.
I promised my first lover I’d never write about her, meaning in my books. And I promised another that no matter what, I’d always leave the door open.
So while neither of them is outwardly present, my novels originate in heartbreak. There, I’ve said it. And also in hope.
Yes, I promised her I would never write about her, even though I’m pretty sure she’s never read anything I’ve written in the past 54 years.
It’s not that she didn’t cast a shadow over the story, but rather that her spot on the stage is abstracted into a more universal figure, perhaps even an archetype. Details from later lovers have also been woven in to the point a composite female emerges.
How could I deny the passionate devotion or yearning? Like so much else of the hippie outbreak, it could be embarrassing today.
I did ceremonially burn the letters I had kept until moving to Dover. It was a long fire.
~*~
It’s unlikely that my life would have gone in the direction it did if she hadn’t appeared in my life.
The hippie side, definitely.
And my yoga, while she veered off with the Sufis.
I didn’t realize just how rich they were or how much of my ancestral farmland they were buying up. Her parents were still quite supportive of me, anyway.
I still needed someone to fill her place in my novel Daffodil Uprising.
~*~
Much of what followed turns up in Pit-a-Pat High Jinks, including my first Summer of Love.
I’m curious to hear their side of the story. Most likely, I was pretty pathetic. I certainly was naïve and not the most savvy romantic. Like what did I really have to offer anyone? In my revisions, I was able to include details from twenty-some years later, my second Summer of Love, but Peace and Love had more grittier aspects than the dippy love songs present. Let’s turn to the blues.
For me, at least, the experiences turned out to be very confusing.
At one stage in the later drafts, as I tried to come to grips with the conflicting accounts of one character’s past she had revealed to me (the real-life person, not the abstracted figure in the story), I actually broke down weeping as I sensed she had been a victim of sexual abuse from at least several directions. No wonder her accounts to me hadn’t added up.
We did reconnect online, but I didn’t dare broach the possibility. Was she even aware of them or was she still in denial. There was no way to ask, though. Besides, she barely recalled me, though she had been a big thing for me.
~*~
The love life definitely came into play with Nearly Canaan, though the abstraction underwent greater transposition. Ages and genders changed, for one thing. Tracking real life, the relationship turned into marriage now mirrored in the marriages around the central couple.
I was really dashed when one literary agent said she didn’t like the character based on my now ex-wife, someone I still saw on a pedestal. Back to the drawing board, along with some therapy sessions for a clearer understanding. My remarriage helped me recast much of this, too.
If only I could have kept this within the bounds of a Romance genre, I might have had a bestseller. Right?
One of the delights of ebook publishing is the ease with which updates can be made. It’s not like having a warehouse of paper volumes to discard in the process.
Recently, while preparing a new book for release at Smashwords.com, I revisited my novel, Hometown News, and wondered if the cover might work more effectively than it did.
I liked the cleanness of the current design and the graphic impact of the elements but questioned whether it might convey a better sense of being about the news business itself. The typeface on the cover conveys the title but nothing else. The story does play out in a moderately-sized industrial city, which also needs to be hinted at in the design.
The photo delivers on the idea of hot news and impending disaster as well as a working-class, blue-collar neighborhood, but I was curious to see if it might have more punch if it reached both sides of the cover. Or “bled” off the page, as we’d say in the trade.
The previous version of the cover did just that, but cropping the photo to accommodate the title and author type was another matter. Remember, ebook covers are essentially thumbnails to be viewed on a cell phone, laptop, or tablet computer screen.
The photo here is cropped less tightly than on the later cover. Does including a portion of the porch roof below add to the message or does it lessen the immediacy? Does the placement of my name detract from that?
There are good reasons this one went back to the drawing board.
The first cover, below, played on the idea of bucolic small-town America and fit into the series of covers of my other novels, but as you can see, there’s no promise of the coming drama within the book itself. So much for brand identity.
While this one was produced by a professional designer at low cost, I must ask myself what an artist would do as an alternative to a photo as the key graphic element. Perhaps a roll of newspaper reaching out across a steel mill and downtown? Downplaying color might allow for the title and author’s name to float over the artwork and still be readable, something that simply wasn’t working with the house fire photo.
Few newspapers have managed with a feel-good approach to community, no matter what many critics would wish. Everybody hates a fire, right? With a morbid fascination?
Returning to the design challenge, here’s where the book stands now:
The key to the redesign was having the name in a single line, like a newspaper nameplate. Thus, a different serif typeface in the new cover. Admittedly, it is harder to read as a thumbnail, but I am going with the tradeoff. I’m venturing that it will reenforce the type on a Web site’s pitch rather than run alone.
The photo, once again, bleeds off the page, delivering maximum visual impact.
More and more, I’m looking at an ebook cover as a poster than as packaging for a commodity.
Jnana's Red Barn 