As I said at the time …
You know, of course, what an absolute delight it is to have all five submissions accepted. I’ve been floating all day.
Thanks.
Tag: Literature
LOST AND FOUND
Enter the woods. Listen. Breathe.
Sometimes a woodlot will do. Or a grove along running water.
You don’t always need a forest.
Don’t worry about getting lost. Just pay attention to the trail. And the wind. And the light. Maybe a companion or two. Some of them human.
We’ll talk about holy later.
~*~
For your own copy, click here.
WITH THE SUMMIT SOMEWHERE ABOVE
Let me confess to struggling with the preposition for the title of this collection.
The initial thought was of being atop a mountain, with its panoramic views. But that runs the danger of suggesting superiority, submission of nature to man’s will, or placing more value on a given result rather than the process of getting there (and back). The climb, I’ll contend, is purification for what lies ahead.
An alternative “on the mountain” allows for the sense of having one’s feet on a trail or even presenting a series somehow “about” the mountain as a set of explanations.
I settled on “under” for its sense of looking upward, in awe or even reverence, as well as the fact that even in mountainous terrain, we live in the valley, with some degree of protection from the elements. Where the streams come down and weave their threaded branches together. Where at times the clouds nestle in. Where the eyes wander from the summit.
~*~
For your own copy, click here.
IF YOU MAKE THE EFFORT
Food, shelter, clothing, bedding, cooking gear, toiletries, maps and guidebooks – everything practical, collected, focused – fit on your back. You’re as free as can be, if you make the effort.
Each trek is a revelation you pack home.
For your own copy, click here.
~*~
EN ROUTE TO BECOMING A RESPONSIBLE MALE AUTHORITY FIGURE
As I said at the time …
The writing had rather burned itself out by the time my love life was heating up. The big project, in fact, was a volume on personal finances with a holistic Certified Public Accountant who hasn’t been all that active in the project, but whose credentials are a big help. Or would be.
More recently, I’ve gotten back to a big series of poems – one that, if it works, will be about 160 pieces long. Many ifs, though.
In the meantime, had four paying gigs, and that’s always nice! But finding time to write, to submit, and to read in public seems to be mutually exclusive: doing just one is almost a full-time job, and when you already have a full-time job, to say nothing of other responsibilities, it can become a nightmare!
Finding myself the Responsible Male Authority Figure in a 17-year-old’s life (her term for my role, for now) gives me a different perspective on much of your own activities, (And telling the authorities one thing and printing another is not precisely wise, my dear.)
On top of it all, we have her other best friend, a Pisces, in fact, undergoing a similar set of explorations -– while we hope she manages to survive it without lasting psychic or physical harm. (Someone, in fact, who appears incredibly young to me – even as she tries to appear much older, attempts that seem merely to accentuate her youthfulness.)
~*~
For another take on a changing home life, click here.
AFTER MANY INTENTIONS
As I said at the time …
Aha! Thanks for both your latest edition and the letter. So I finally get down to replying, after many intentions to do so … and wind up with writer’s block instead! Last night, all fired up to get this piece down, I instead encountered a message from my Norton Utilities warning me that my PC was on the verge of death if I didn’t defragment the hard drive immediately … which took up the next hour. In the portion of the evening remaining, I wound up replying to my honey’s last email, which naturally took far more time than I had expected … and then went to bed without a real dinner because, well, time was up and two martinis were kicking in.
Yes, so much has changed since we last communicated in any depth. I know how unsettling it is to move and then be living out of boxes. Roommates, too, can unsettle any routine/rhythm in your life – and it’s so crucial to find ways of maintaining those quiet times/spaces in our individual lives if we’re to nurture our own vitality or at least any depth in our experience and outlook.
In a nutshell, I’m preparing for a major move in the next several months. Get out your atlas and notice where Manchester and Dover are situated in New Hampshire. While my job is in Manchester, the Quaker Meeting I attend is in Dover – a congregation founded in the early 1660s by three traveling English women. John Greenleaf Whittier, whose parents married in our meetinghouse, has a long poem about the persecution of those fearless visiting ministers (and so, you know my outlook on the failure of many denominations to recognize the ministry of women). In the best of conditions, the trip is 40 minutes each way, but the route is quickly being built up and will no doubt be heavily congested in the next half-dozen years. At any rate, because of the social life of our Meeting – between committee functions, workshops, presentations, dinner invitations, even parties and picnics – I’ve been considering moving in that direction for some time, but the idea of a commute, plus the further distancing myself from Boston, now an hour away, kept me in place here where I am.
That is, until things began to connect.
You mention “being single for two years now,” and that rather parallels the way my life had been going. I realized there was no point jumping into a relationship if it wasn’t going to have a chance of continuing for the rest of my life. For so much of my life, it has seemed that when I finally did connect with someone, she could offer only half of what I needed, and my love-life history appears as a zig-zag course between two polarities.
Jump ahead again, and I’m now spending half of my free time living out of a duffel bag and half trying to catch up on things here on the hill – and feeling not totally in place in either location. The relationship itself is incredibly solid, in ways I’ve not experienced before. This is the woman I’ve dreamed of, one who could go to the symphony with me or to the mountains (we’ve done both) and felt equally at ease. Someone who could understand the importance of Meeting – both as worship and as a community – in my life. Who could enjoy a whale watch (throw up three times and still smile) and Canobie Lake amusement park down the road. One who owns as many books as I do – and perhaps a larger vocabulary – while maintaining both girlish delight in life and an earth mother ability of keeping a household afloat. One who can be intensely intellectual and also viciously humorous. As well as compassionate elegantly frugal. The upshot is a recognition that we will marry – just when is the question, depending, in part, on the reality of college aid for the elder and health benefits for the younger child.
What we are looking at now is the move – whether to leap straight into the purchase of a home, or to find a large apartment first. I’d love to skip the apartment step, having packed and unpacked too many times already. But I’d like to have more in hand for a down payment, and prices are ballooning again. I’ve already seen that bubble burst, cutting some valuations in half. Fortunately, we recognize we have no reason to rush … and just beginning to dream about some of these matters has both my imagination and hope reawakening.
I realize that even as we piece together the essentials for this move, there’s more discussion – and give and take – than I had experienced in marriage when purchasing a house. A place, in fact, that would be perfect for this set-up if we could only find it, and afford it, here.
Or, as the elder one and her boyfriend call all this, Geriatric Love. Never mind that her age and her mother’s combined finally surpass my own – by one year!
Now, of course, for the Geriatric Love poem all this brought about:
Imagine double-dating
with your sixteen-year-old daughter
and her twenty-year-old boyfriendtheir shock
realizing
our tongues meet.
That, actually, inspired from events while watching a video of The Full Monty together nearing midnight.
Or her revenge, in the conclusion of a long bit of verse concocted at Ogunquit beach in Maine, July 5, air temperature 100, but the ocean 56 F, and 20 mile-an-hour winds blasting sand:
Somebody, come rescue me, please!
This is all the fault of my mother’s Main Squeeze!
As I’ve said to others, we had a choice between Hell or Hell Froze Over – and all the Novocaine delights of being pushed into the frigid Ogunquit River as the icy tide rolled in. Egads! Only a week before, arriving before low tide (the timing, it seems, makes a huge difference), we had floated blissfully more than a mile down that river, on our backs, along the dunes and beach, only to run back upstream and jump in again.
Well, you get a sense of how the summer is going. Add a bit of Junior Chautauqua at Strawbery Banke in Portsmouth (a collection of antiquity along the lines of Williamsburg, Virginia, but covering a wider time span and less contrived in its presentation) and British Coaches’ Soccer Camp. Many new experiences for me, to put it mildly.
~*~
For another take, click here.
HERE COMES COMPANY
Chief Seattle, who appears in the Grilled Salmon section of this poetry collection, is an elusive figure in American history. Whether he pulled a fast one is another question, but he did get a major city named in his honor.
As for his role here?
I enjoy his company. I hope you do, too.
~*~
For your own copy, click here.
REVIEWING THE BUMPY TRUMPY HORROR SHOW
During the presidential primary run, his Republican rivals had reason to complain that Donald J. Trump was garnering all of the coverage. It was, as it turns out, all about him, mostly from his point of view, that is, largely unquestioned. From a headline perspective, their problem was simply that they weren’t saying or doing anything new, meaning reporters and editors had nothing fresh to report on those candidates and their campaigns. A policy statement, let’s be candid, is news just once, when it’s released. Trump, in contrast, was providing outrageous grist for the mill – he was a truly unconventional, unpredictable, and unkempt subject. To their everlasting remorse, his opponents failed to take him on full-force, much less seriously, which would have at least landed them comparable headline presence. If they had only done their homework, they would have had many of the factual details that are finally coming to light against Trump and his ways. Gee, the recent New York Times report about Chris Christie’s forgiving Trump $25 million in overdue state taxes could have taken down two candidates at once, had Jeb Bush or Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio or any of the other dwarves been on their toes.
News media coverage is not the only route to primary victories, by the way. Most of the Republicans were relying on very expensive direct-mail advertising flyers, at least from what we endured in New Hampshire. You may have read some of my household’s reactions.
In contrast, on the Democratic side, Bernie Sanders was gaining ground by flying under the radar, sticking to a successful script that included little new material while hammering his points home in speech after speech. He was certainly helped by strong organization and a vibrant (dare I say organic?) grassroots social media presence.
When Nacky Scripps Loeb was publisher of the New Hampshire Union Leader, she liked to quote her late husband’s adage than negative publicity was better than no coverage at all. I know the basis of the argument, especially for an upstart, but I’ve also seen its downside: sometimes the attacks really inflict damage.
You didn’t hear Trump complaining about the billions of “free media” exposure he got on his ascent, but maybe none of his inner circle could see it would eventually come with a price.
My, has it!
We find ourselves waking in the morning with an obsession to discover the latest. It’s not just the New York Times or Washington Post, either. Team Trump has been stimulating a stunning parade of splashy tabloid headlines, from the New York Daily News to the Huffington Post and Politico. Done well, there’s an art to these, I’ll confess with admiration. Not that my journalistic training or practice ran in that direction.
Almost every day now has delivered a new, well, Trumpage that stirs up the question, Is he really trying to lose? Is he even running on Hillary’s behalf? In the latest round, the pundits are sensing his new strategy is to circle the wagons and focus on his core supporters while hoping the Libertarian and Green parties erode enough votes from Clinton to give him an edge. As they acknowledge, it’s a very risky approach, especially for someone who may be recognizing he’s really losing.
Step back from the daily revelations and you can see Trump’s bigger story is fitting into a classic type of fiction or biography or history – a rise-and-fall epic of tragic proportions. (Remember, true tragedy is what happens when a character challenges the gods and bears the consequences.)
In American literature, Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby or Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick come immediately to my mind, along with Peter Matthiessen’s less conventional Killing Mister Watson, which opens with the well-earned finale for a character who has a lot in common with Trump.
The Trumpster provides plenty to focus on as a character-driven story, especially of the psychological nature. He’s a spoiled bully full of inner conflict, anger, bombast, self-delusion, insecurity, social-climbing, hostility, and more, all abetted by the proverbial silver spoon.
There are other classic structures the story could also develop, including the idea novel, which starts with a question; the event tale, where the world is out of order and demands correcting; or the milieu narrative, which would require the protagonist to emerge a new person after traversing the strange landscape of American politics, big business, and celebrity entertainment posturing.
Each day, we’re reading and hearing more bits of the unfolding story.
Now into the post-convention stretch of the White House quest, Trump is still the primary subject of the media coverage. This time, though, as the plot line is well into the “fall” half of the equation, it’s been to Hillary Clinton’s advantage to be flying under the radar. Are we watching a death by a thousand self-inflicted wounds? Are all of his previous falsehoods, fraudulence, and flatulence finally resurrecting and running up behind him, like monsters from a horror show?
We’re still quite a few pages away from the final pages, and it’s possible Trump will somehow pivot into a new, unanticipated, denouement. Deus ex machina would be a huge letdown, to say the least, as would anything having him live happily ever after.
Not after all this.
WITH GRATITUDE FOR THE INSPIRATION
You know the disclaimer, “Any resemblance of the characters to real people living or dead …” Something along the lines of purely unintentional.
But let’s be frank. The fiction is that you can create a character without having someone real in front of you, somewhere in your past or present. No, you need flesh and blood somewhere. Anything else would be a caricature.
It’s a special problem when you’re composing in a semi-autobiographical vein. You’re trying to be true to the dictum, Write about what you know. The details, especially.
(Oh? What, then, makes it fiction? Other than changing a few dates?)
Admittedly, the personalities work best when you take your inspiration and abstract it, so that a real individual would no longer recognize himself or herself – or those who were no way involved will imagine they, themselves, were.
And, by way of further confession, I’ll note that my most recent outings have led me to new characters lacking immediate introductions for me – but I’ll know them when I meet them if I haven’t already come across them here and there in pieces.
But back to the argument at hand.
I have one character, Nita, who runs through four of my five Hippie Trails novels and is a major character in the new one I’m writing, set years later. She was inspired by impressions I had of a friend’s girlfriend – or more accurately, mostly his impressions conveyed to me at the time – as I sat down to draft a half-dozen years or so later. She becomes a catalyst for much that happens around her.
In reality, we all drifted away.
And then, a few years ago, I met her again.
Nothing like I’d remembered. Or the idealized character in my fiction, now infused with another two or three people I’ve met. The lines blur.
I can say this person never did X, Y, or Z, unlike the character. Or that these two worked together on a controversial project or became known for certain accomplishments. In fact, she doesn’t resemble the other one at all, not anymore, if she ever did.
Still, it’s an eerie feeling. Something other than deja vu. Something still spurring gratitude for the inspiration.
For more on the series, click here.
~*~
IN THE WEB OF COLONIAL DISSIDENT HISTORY
As I reviewed of Dover’s early (and admittedly tangled, hazy) history recently, I was struck by a reference to several early settlers who had been banished from Massachusetts Bay Colony amid the Antinomian Controversy to the south.
In a flash, my mind leapt from 1638 to 1662 when three Quaker women arrived, preached, and were banished by Major Richard Waldron.
The Colonial histories traced an underlying religious tension in the New Hampshire settlement arising between the Anglican affiliation of the colony’s charter holders and the Puritan convictions of many of its earliest settlers. That, in itself, suggests serious political and social differences as the two institutions of belief and action conflicted. After all, the Parliamentarian armies that would defeat and eventually execute King Charles I were largely Puritan, as was Oliver Cromwell, who ruled Britain as Lord Protector from 1653 to 1658.
Beyond the Anglican/Puritan rivalry for power in New England, however, was another struggle, the role of a trio of dissident voices and their followers in New England in the mid-1630s.
The new readings did change one of my premises. Rather than having all three of the dissident voices being from Salem (closer to Dover than is Boston), their residences were more diverse. Only Roger Williams (c. 1603-1688) had a Salem connection, and that was as a controversial pastor between his tenancies in Boston and Plymouth. He was banished in 1636 for “sedition and “heresy” (note the linkage of politics and religion) and left to establish the colony of Rhode Island and the Providence Plantations to the south, as well as the first Baptist church in the Americas.
Next was Samuel Gorton (1592-1677), banished in 1638 after ministry in Boston and Plymouth. He fled to Portsmouth, Rhode Island, before settling Warwick on the other side of Narragansett Bay. My postings at my Orphan George Chronicles blog about Robert Hodgson and his wife, Alice Schotten, take place largely in Portsmouth, and Alice, as a descendant of a Gorton follower, inherited a large parcel of Warwick. So these histories begin to overlap and even get personal for me.
The third dissident voice was Anne Hutchinson (1591-1643), the daughter of an Anglican cleric and the wife of a prominent businessman. She was banished in 1638 after leading home Bible study groups for women that were both popular (even among the men) and, to the ministers, “unorthodox.” Her theology became the focus of the famed Antinomian Controversy that challenged the conventional Calvinism held by most of the Puritan clergy. Reputedly, the “Veritas” in Harvard University’s crest comes from the cries of the judges, asserting their orthodoxy over her offending testimony, as she was taken from the courtroom at her banishment. She soon settled Portsmouth, Rhode Island, where Robert Hodgson would land in 1657 as an itinerant Quaker minister and remain when many of the Hutchinson’s followers joined in his Quaker faith. Hutchinson, however, had already moved on to the Dutch colony on Long Island to avoid continuing Puritan persecution before she and most of her family were slain in an Indian attack.
All of this ran through my head when I came across the reference in John Andrew Doyle’s 1887 The English in America: The Puritan Colonies, Vol. I: “After the persecution of the Antinomians, some of the victims took refuge at Cocheco,” an early name for Dover. Could this have provided fertile ground for the three Quaker women 24 years later? I think so.
The plot thickens when looking at the history of First Parish Church (United Church of Christ) in Dover, which divided into two hostile camps when one side of the congregation preferred two of the Antinomians as ministers over the more orthodox alternative. This was one the courts had to settle. Add to that an Antinomian leaning in nearby Exeter, and I’m left wondering all the more. Throughout its history, New Hampshire has always been at odds with Massachusetts – and here’s one more example.
The fact is that a third of the population of Dover quickly joined with the Quakers after their initial exposure to the new movement. Resentments do, after all, linger, and those chafing under an imposed authority just may break away, given an alternative. As much as we Friends like to think our early message and witness alone were sufficient to sway new adherents to our cause, I’m left considering how much of the attraction came from altogether different motivations. Think, for instance, of finding yourself always outvoted at town meetings; how much of a threat is actually felt when your right to vote is taken away as a result of your religious affiliation?
For that matter, how much of a similar situation is unfolding in the current political scene we’re viewing today? Are there lingering hostilities that have been buried only to resurface today? I’d say it’s worth considering.
Jnana's Red Barn 