Tag: Literature

DESERT DANCES

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Appealing to the heavens for rainfall was only one of the reasons for dancing. Your feet could pray as well as your hands in this landscape.

~*~

Somehow, the novice begins dancing, if only in his head. Something simple, at first, until familiarity gains ground. Feet, legs, torso, arms, and hands eventually follow. A reel leads into a jig. Thought and emotions balance. Head and heart dialogue. With confidence comes freedom. More and more, the aspirant concentrates on partners or the group or motion itself, rather than his own next step or position. The music becomes more textured, until the hornpipe stands as the liveliest structure. So it’s been in this landscape. This is not just any desert, for there’s nothing generic about any detail encountered closely. With both people and places you come to know dearly, you find nuances and subtle contradictions will blur any sharp image. It’s easier to describe someone or something you meet briefly than what you know intimately. To say desert is dry and sunny misses the point, especially if you arrive in winter. At first, like so many others, we didn’t even consider this valley as desert, for it has no camel caravans or mounds of shifting sands with Great Pyramids on the horizon. One word or phrase can be misleading. Even the Evil Stepmother from folklore and fairy tales must have possessed some redeeming qualities. Could we be more specific than “evil”? Simply selfish? Or was she mean, jealous, domineering, afraid of whatever, from the wrong party? Suppose she was really a victim of some deep abuse? The portrait changes. Has anyone detailed how she dances? In the end, it’s either entertainment or worship, depending on the individual’s orientation.

~*~

Kokopelli 1For a free copy of my newest novel, click here.

END OF THE EARTH

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The mythologies of Greece are easily countered by those of India, China, Tibet, and Japan in the Native tales of the Olympic Peninsula and the coastal tribes of the Pacific Northwest.

Sit down by the fire, then, and listen. Some of the voices are millennia old.

~*~

For a free copy of the complete American Olympus, click here.

Olympus 1

WHILE SUBMITTING TO LITERARY JOURNALS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

As I said at the time …

It’s a quirky process, this exercise of seeking homes for personal work – the reactions of editors and readers so idiosyncratic and varied that the same piece can be considered too intense, by one, and not raw and bloody enough, by another. I can never predict who will accept what, no matter how long I’ve known a publisher or journal.

Contributor’s note? Just say I hope soon to be tent camping again.

NEW VALHALLA

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The Olympic Peninsula of Washington State is a world of its own. About the size of Delaware, it has few settlements apart from its Native American tribes. Its remote coastline is gorgeous. Its forests are thick and varied and receive some of the heaviest annual rainfall in North America. Its central mountains include hot springs and glaciers. There’s a U.S. Navy base on the eastern edge along with an artist colony and ferry connections to Seattle.

Listen closely and the underlying mythologies shape a new understanding.

Here is a place where East meets West in its own nature.

~*~

For a free copy of the complete American Olympus, click here.

Olympus 1

ARID SHADOW

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

The conditions that created the desert where we lived created what was sometimes called a “rain shadow.” It was ironic, actually, considering that we got far more sunlight by living on that side of the Cascade Mountains than if we’d been in, what, the rain glow?

Sometimes, though, it seemed to dry up all of our emotions, too.

A journey into the murky places of endless fog, mist, and rain, in contrast, could do wonders in the soul.

~*~

Olympus 1For a free copy of the complete American Olympus, click here.

LIBERATING IN THE END

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

A central question facing compositional artists of all stripes (in contrast to performing artists like actors, dancers, and musicians) is the matter of determining when a work’s finished.

How do you know?

Is just out-and-out satisfaction a measure? A trusty one? Hmm.

Let me suggest some others.

Sometimes it’s a sense that you just can’t go any further with it. And if it’s in a state beyond notes and fragments, maybe that’s it. You’ve hit a wall, a property line, or just the shore or riverbank. So you stop. Period.

There are times, admittedly, when you think something’s finished and put it aside only to find, on returning, it needs more – revision, for starters, and maybe additions and major restructuring. (A friend spoke the other evening of drafting a memoir in the third-person and then redoing it in the first-person, the kind of change I’ve done in some of my fiction. And Brahms had an early symphony that became a piano concerto, if I recall right.)

Working under a deadline can simplify matters. Time’s up! Next!

Nice, if you happen to have an advance or pipeline of delivery or the concert’s coming up.

Novelists might even find doneness appears as the time they find their focus obsessing with the book under the one they’ve been tackling.

Some poets will say that once it’s published, they can let go of it. Finito!

~*~

In the bigger picture, the “finished” question isn’t just about having a manuscript ready. For a writer, it’s ultimately about landing the work in a reader’s hands. A place where a dialogue can begin. And getting that manuscript from a polished draft into circulation can be a huge, energy-depleting limbo, especially if your life is filled with competing claims on your time.

In short, you can either focus on seeing that one work through to publication – or you can create the next one, while the inspiration’s still hot. For me, as I tried to balance my writing life with a journalism career, personal relationships, spiritual practice, and so on, I wound up with a huge backlog of finished material. At least I’d wisely not put off the writing for retirement, as had a number of colleagues I’d known – none of them ever managed to fulfill that dream.

What I did find, though, was that the unpublished work became a burden of its own. Its emotional weight inhibited new work. Why bother? It even had a way of twisting my sense of identity – who was I then and who am I now? Think, too, of the relationships that fed into one work – and the people I’m with today. As in lover or spouse.

So the experience of having my book-length works finally being published brings the “finished” consideration across yet another threshold – the matter of being liberated. I can let go of trying to hold that memory, treasuring that epiphany, honoring that friendship.

Should I have just trashed them long ago and moved on into other, non-literary endeavors? Just think of the hours that could have been directed instead to overtime pay, which would make my retirement more secure. Or travel or …

Maybe it’s just a case of hoping for acknowledgement. Hey, here I am!

Still, it’s what I’ve done.

What I have is a feeling of being true to a responsibility carried to its completion at last. What happens from here is, well, liberating any way it goes.

BACK AND BACK AND BACK

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 4 Comments

As I said at the time …

You’re home once more, with many fresh laurels, I hope. On my end, the computer’s fixed and I’m dancing with some frequency again. At least between some heavy allergies. (Birch pollen at the moment; pine comes soon.)

I’m still in shock from Sam Hamill’s “To Eron on Her Thirty-Second Birthday” – she’s always a twelve-year-old tomboy in my memory! Impossible, it seems. And that was back when I was still married and my wife studied painting under John Bennett’s wife, Ellensburg, Washington … back in his Vagabond days. Small world. Am still trying to figure out when and where I heard Bill Stafford read. Yakima Valley College, I believe. Will the parts of my life ever come together?

Yes, you certainly are a moon-child, with all of the sign’s gentle humanity. Violet, a variant of purple, the cancer-sign’s color. Star, like the moon, of the moody night. Well-named, it seems! For whatever reason, more of my serious relationships have been with women born under the sign of Cancer than with any other; in fact, there have been no Gemini or Libra, which are supposed to be a natural fit for me. Go figure!

~*~

My, what ancient history this, too, has become!

LILACS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 4 Comments

So when did this appreciation begin? When I lived in the orchard house, we had a big lilac bush at the corner of the yard – the one where the bees swarmed from the hive that one day.

But I think the real change happened that spring after my first marriage collapsed and I was finally in love again. I crowded the house with those cut blossoms and their fragrance. It’s enough to make me picture a blue silk kimono.

That was years ago, and many miles. Yet the lilacs are more precious than ever.

As I said at the time, when I lived in that last apartment, I vowed if I ever bought my own place, I’d get cuttings from a friend whose lilacs likely descended from the first ones brought to North America. Of course, I didn’t, and the owner has since moved into a retirement center.

Even so, these days, we have our own, screening the Smoking Garden from the street. One lilac had, in fact, grown as tall as the house – but hollow. It’s been work, restoring them to flowering condition.

Still, there’s nothing more luxurious than lilac cuttings arrayed in the bedroom, with their heavenly aroma.

So quickly, they pass.

WHAT WAS I THINKING?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

Every writer, we can presume, has plans for the next work – or several. Tackling them, of course, can be another matter altogether, especially if the schedule’s already full, even before we get to the overdue house and garden projects. Or some equivalent.

Listen to other writers, by the way, and you’ll hear just how much of that schedule now focuses on marketing, including social media, to push already published work instead of doing the, well, not exactly “fun” part (it is, after all, work) but the passionate core that prompts the entire enterprise: drafting and revising. The very thing that makes us writers.

For me, much of that has also involved moving four decades of serious writing, however experimental, into the public access where adventurous readers might find the volumes. Places like Smashwords.com and my Thistle/Flinch site here at WordPress. To be candid, the backlog was inhibiting my ability to forge ahead on new work – not exactly writer’s bloc, but something more like claustrophobia? Having the remaining novels in the pipeline for ebook publication is a huge relief.

Let me repeat, though, about the necessity of marketing and how that should be the focus.

What’s taken root over the past several months, though, is another novel. One that just might pull my Hippie Trails series together a half-century later. That is, something that covers far more than just ’60s and ’70s. Am I crazy?

Well, maybe. What’s shaping up is far different from anything I’ve previously undertaken.

For one thing, I’m starting with an overarching structure – something approaching an outline, rather than my usual setting forth on a journey to see where an image or character or idea will lead. And then there’s little autobiographical here; it’s largely new territory, apart from tying up some loose ends from the earlier novels. The dictum, “Write about what you know,” gets readjusted to “Write about what you would like to know,” meaning more about certain ethnic groups I’ve encountered, businesses I’ve brushed up against, spiritual practices, histories, desires, losses. I’m even beginning with a commercial genre in mind, which means drafting from a perspective and in a voice far from my own.

I’m not sure this is a work I’ll actually finish. It may be too difficult. Or it may become more of a collaboration, perhaps with a circle of beta readers set at liberty to edit at will. (Have I ever written of my theory that what we know as Shakespeare was the product of a circle of very talented improvisers, whose inventions were recorded by the playwright? Almost a committee, if you will, except for his imprint on the final version.)

Different from anything else I’ve done to date? How about needing to finish a draft of the last chapter, along with a stretch of the opening, before writing anything else? Or heading off with 80 or so pages of notes for the middle, plus questions to pursue? It’s certainly driven by the characters and events that turn in directions I’d normally avoid.

What I do know from experience is how crucial it is to sit down at the keyboard when these juices are flowing.

LOOKING FOR THOSE LOCAL DISTINCTIONS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

As I said at the time …

Greetings again from this old mill town along the Merrimack River.

There is still a special feel to an octavo-size, typeset journal – a unity of design and purpose carried throughout – even in this era of desktop design and photocopy wizardry. A major challenge, whether it’s in shaping a literary journal like yours, a daily newspaper, or even an old-fashioned country dance, is simply: what can we do to make our own locale distinctive?

An example: a few years ago, the New England contradance scene was becoming generic: you’d drive for miles to a village town hall only to find the same faces and same pieces you had faraway the week before. Fortunately, that seems to be changing as different callers, musicians, and promoters are striving to put their own distinctive signature – and a local stamp – on each venue. So there’s your challenge!

I’m struck by the fact that even familiar voices from our round of journals seem to sound different in varied locales. If you’ve ever been around paintings, as I was when married to an artist, and seen a piece go from her studio to our living room to an art gallery to a major museum, you would be amazed how different it appears it each setting. Publishing is the same.