You never know what we'll churn up in cleaning a stall
I look at the covers assembled and think, This is my life.
Turn by twist by turn, introduction by introduction.
All that didn’t happen, too, or was cut short.
Do I cry? Or laugh?
Are you with me?
~*~
See what’s available at Smashwords and Thistle/Flinch.
In many communities across the Northeast, the once neglected mills along the running waters have found new life as commercial real estate. Often, high-tech firms and other startups find them to be flexible incubators. Other times, floors are occupied by stylish residential condos or office suites.
The small city where I live proves that, three decades after the boarded up windows were once again open the light and the spaces within refurbished. The new tenants were the key to a revitalized downtown, especially.
Before relocating to New Hampshire, though, I envisioned something similar while drafting my novel, Big Inca Versus a New Pony Express Rider. Actually, I had no idea that was about the same time the mills were being restored one by one by developers like Joseph Sawtelle. Not that he was anything like Bill’s mysterious Boss.
Oh, how I love the mills – even before we get to the intrigue in my novel.
The seed was planted back when I lived along the Susquehanna River and was introduced to the trail that twisted through a wooded strip between the water and the freeway.
The site included a bridge now closed to vehicular traffic and a low dam that once diverted water to power cigar factories along the shore. The mill trace remained, filling with moody water after a heavy rainfall.
As I imagined the vanished mills as they might have been in their prime, Big Inca Versus a New Pony Express Rider began to take shape. The town where I lived, after all, was in economic decline and would have welcomed an infusion of investment.
That wasn’t a singular site, even along that particular river. As I would later observe, the opportunity was repeated throughout the Northeast – and many of the communities still had the old buildings, usually in boarded up condition.
As the intervening decades have demonstrated, I wasn’t completely off-mark.
Come along, then, and see where it leads. Just click here.
As I said at the time …
To what extent can we break free of prose narrative cloaked in verse form? (What the critic Paul Chowder calls “slow prose.”) Sing and shout! Chant! Evoke incantation! It’s always comforting to know of others who feel the same way! Keep it up! The night is friendly, indeed.
~*~
Sometimes, even the galaxy seems to drum along with the crickets.
When it comes to my novels, any resemblance to actual persons is greatly exaggerated … meaning it’s truly fiction, not fact.
Of course, they way they see themselves, or did, is also far from any reality.
The places, of course, are rendered with perfect faithfulness.
~*~
For a free copy of my latest novel release, click here.
Jaya, in Promise, isn’t the only character in my fiction to address a concept I’ve dubbed the DLQ, or Dedicated Laborious Quest. But she does, I’ll argue, come closest to aspiring to an artistic expression for its encounters.
The DLQ, as I envision it, is the long-range discipline of spiritual pursuit, one that can be found in any number of variations in any number of religious, artistic, social activist, or even athletic lines of action. It’s a blending of heart and head, body and soul, awareness and discovery – the poet Gary Snyder refers to something similar as the Real Work, for instance, or maybe simply “daily practice” will touch on it as well.
One of Jaya’s concerns is a search for a fitting vehicle to embody the experience. Essays are too prosaic. Poetry? Sometimes. Drawings or paintings? To a degree. Maps of a kind? Getting closer, I’d hope.
Even so, I’ve wanted to leave the ultimate form she uses open to the imagination.
And then, more recently, I came across something that comes closest. An exhibition of Shaker art and artifacts at the Farnsworth Museum in Rockport, Maine, introduced me to what are called Gift Songs or Gift Drawings or Gift Paintings, which take their name from the faithful artist’s position as a medium receiving the song or design from a deceased member of the sect (that is, given) to be conveyed to another, living member of the sect (also, as given). To be appreciated, these must be seen in the original, full size, since much of the detail gets lost in reproduction. Sometimes the words are in a secret, private language and alphabet. Sometimes they blend. The lines flow, turn upside down, sideways. The works are sprinkled with artwork as well as words. Are they magical? Or simply mysterious?
Whichever, they spring from a tradition and discipline and practice to utter something deep in the heavenly desire and earthly community of a particular recipient.
I can tell you Jaya would have been most impressed. Definitely.
~*~
To turn to my novel, click here.
As I said at the time …
For too long, there’s been a huge gap between the blockbuster superstars and the rest of the practitioners, many of them far more innovative or penetrating.
Paris for American ex-pat writers? Again, I smile. By the time you and I came along, the destination was Seattle or San Francisco or Greenwich Village. Or some mountainous terrain, for those of us who couldn’t afford anything better. (Or thought so.) And then Minneapolis and, of all places, San Antonio. As it turns out, New Hampshire has far more than its share of authors, probably because of its proximity to both Manhattan and Boston, in addition to its tax structure – so again, I’m in a decent spot.
Especially compared to many of the others.
Three hundred sunny days a year in a fertile land may seem like Paradise.
But it’s surrounded by desert.
~*~
Desert turns everything to bone. That, or to stone. Even the scattered tufts of cheat grass and the isolated clusters of flowers turn into straw skeletons. Social conventions, too, dry away. In pursuing clarity, which parched spreads possess abundantly, I also enter an order of madness. Paradoxically, to preserve my sanity in dealing with people, it becomes periodically necessary for me to revisit this incomprehensible delirium. Settle back on this my bedrock, readjust to my own frame. Here, then, I return afresh to spaces within and without. Wait. Listen. In this place, wind is a clearing, spiraling on itself. Then, when this twisting reverses, screwing into bony alkaline soil, we give praise. At times, I even see my own heart clearly. As I come to know my way around more securely, I lift a cup of clear spring water and pour it on bleached parchment at my feet. Selah. The next day a bouquet of tiny flowers rises like fingers bent by wind. Always somewhere, wind.
~*~
For a free copy of my newest novel, click here.
With its cloudless skies, it could be an ideal agricultural cornucopia. If you had water.
~*~
In other climates, you commonly overlook the element of space, unless looking into the heavens on a brittle night. You observe objects, and space becomes the measure of distance between an object and you, or else some arrangement of objects. In contrast, desert appears more as a vacuum — a juxtaposition of surfaces, of sky and earth extending outward not to some imaged convergence (such as the perspective point where the twin rails of a train track become one) but rather away from any focus, and thus outward around both of the observer’s ears. Here, space itself becomes obvious, as if turned upright, like a wall in your face. So often in life, what should be most obvious is the hardest to see. The spider is on the window; the spider is on this page.
~*~
For a free copy of my newest novel, click here.
One of the biggest lessons I carry from backpacking as a kid is the importance of traveling light. Take no more than you need. Be resourceful.
In those days, I should add, everything weighed more than today’s high-tech, lightweight gear and dehydrated food packets.
On our week along the Appalachian Trail, I was a 12-year-old hauling a 60-pound pack in what seemed endless uphill marathons.
It’s a lesson you don’t easily forget, even when you’re going by airplane.
~*~
To learn more, click here.
Jnana's Red Barn 