A WRITER’S IDENTITY

November 14, 2014September 18, 2014 ~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

“You’re more of a poet,” one of my favorite authors mentioned over coffee.

Huh? I had, after all, found publishers for two of my novels but none of my collections of poetry. So what if both novels were out of print, right?

Back in high school, when the writing bug hit me, I envisioned successfully working in fiction, poetry, theater, and journalism – successfully and famously, at that. That was way back before I discovered the reality of just how specialized each field can be, even before we get into the micro-subcategories, or how much rarified knowledge is required to navigate them professionally. Or how much competition there is across the board.

A first I felt my friend’s comment as a gentle reproach. There is always so much more to master, after all, as I tell myself after encountering another moving example of fine craftsmanship and deep insight.

As I returned to his comment, though, I picked up on another angle, the one that reflects a particular author’s sensibilities. He has me realizing that my basic outlook is as a poet, and that I carry that over into my novels.

Recently, another friend and I were discussing what we’d been reading, and he brought up Jim Harrison’s novels. He’d just finished seven in sequence. “He’s also a fine poet,” I said. But now, as I return to my bookshelves, I see an argument that Harrison is a novelist first, an outlook he carries over into the poems.

This is not to say that a writer has to be pigeonholed or can’t move among forms. After all, I could present a long list of fine poets whose essays I treasure. Many of them, as I noted in the Talking Money series at my Chicken Farmer I Still Love You blog, address the decidedly down-to-earth issues of income, budgeting, labor, possessions, time, wealth, and community.

Detailing what would place a writer in the poet category or else in the novelist line could provide an interesting roundtable discussion all its own. We’ll leave that for another time.

I will, however, suggest it arises in a state of mind – of seeing the world and of relating to those around us. And, I will add, I find myself far from writing or revising poetry when I’m working on a novel, simply because the fiction generates or relies upon another state of mind, even if the prose that results has poetic qualities.

THE NOVELIST STRIKES ANOTHER POSE

November 10, 2014September 18, 2014 ~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Dear Reader: Are you aware that this is a social protest novel? Have you delineated the symbolism running through construction? Can you guess the antecedent novels that most influenced the Author in his quest of the Muse? What form will his next opus assume? Will he learn from his mistakes? Does he even perceive them? Will he renounce writing? Who will turn this into his next movie? What music will be selected to amplify it?

Please clip and mail to the Author. Your comments are always appreciated.

Thank you.

The Author.

~*~

To learn more about my novels, go to my page at Smashwords.com.

BEYOND DRESSING FOR SUCCESS

November 1, 2014September 18, 2014 ~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

Waiting in an airport lounge for their flight to arrive and begin boarding, a wife was describing to her husband the computer she had ordered (not just any computer, mind you) and then detailing the renovations required for the room they were upgrading, or perhaps it was a wing they were adding. He nodded in thoughtful agreement throughout. They appeared to be comfortably retired, and she was resolved that this was what she needed to sit down and begin writing her first novel.

Somehow, it all felt wrong.

Not the writing, but the matter of appearances, as though one begins the volume by posing for the back cover color photograph – tweed for the men, a tasteful blazer for the women. As though writing depends on the workspace itself. As though you just plump down in a picture-perfect setting and turn out a critically acclaimed bestseller. Or at least a hefty advance. It is echoed in the group photographs of famous authors one comes across in Vanity Fair, the half-dozen or more serious novelists arrayed in a two-story private library or a publisher’s corner suite overlooking Manhattan, the happily ever after with afternoon cocktails. Leather and brass.

I’ve long pondered the airport scene, attempting to nail down what has struck such a loud discordant note. Listen to published authors discuss their workspace and you often hear it comes down to a concrete block cell or a corner of an attic or even, thanks to laptops and wi-fi, a booth at McDonald’s – not an interior designer’s photo spread. We write wherever we can – sometimes, as I prefer, in solitude, or other times, as daily papers’ newsrooms, in a large office crowded with shared computers and telephones augmented by TV screens and police radio scanners. They write, I would hope, out of some urgency – some sense each one has something unique to explore and present to the world. It’s what Bukowksi called his daily “butt time.” It’s what you put in to be a writer, the dues you pay, the actual effort rather than any posturing.

This is not a matter of comfort. The best writing, I will argue, comes with discomfort. It’s hard, after all, doing good work. Finishing the first draft is just the beginning, leading into multiple revisions and a pile of correspondence (much of it unanswered, even when the obligatory SASEs are included) attempting to connect with an agent and publisher before embarking on the marketing of the finished work – one of the five hundred or so novels published that week.

Did the retired beginner actually complete a first draft? Or did she find excuses along the way? Did her health hold up? (Writing demands more physical strength than one imagines – especially in maintaining the mental concentration of developing the characters and plot turns.) Did she have a storehouse of memories and exotic experiences to draw upon or a long gestated outline to quickly fill in? Had she done her homework in devising a story fitting a tightly defined marketing niche – one that would easily sell? Had she filled suitcases with letters, notes, and snapshots to prompt specific details or sketched in a lifetime of personal journals? Did she possess crucial contacts who would come to bear on publication?

There’s more to writing than looking like an Author – whatever that is. Maybe in the ensuing years she succeeded. But at the airport gateway, she gave no awareness of the actual struggle ahead. I, for one, cannot wait for the perfect space to appear. Rather, I’ve settled in to work where I could and then plugged away, between sleeping and the commute to my paying job.

COMPOSING A REQUIEM

October 29, 2014August 31, 2014 ~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

When I first drafted this novel three decades ago, little did I expect it to be a requiem for a profession I’ve loved and served all my life. Now, though, as the history has unfolded, I’m left hoping against hope it’s not a requiem for community after community across America as well. Read it and weep – yet laughing along the way. We are, after all, still a resourceful people

~*~

To find out more about Hometown News or to obtain your own copy, go to my page at Smashwords.com.

THE RELIGIOUS TWIST

October 27, 2014August 31, 2014 ~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

While my personal struggle bobbled between practicality and art for its own sake, the yoga and Quaker teachings introduced new tensions. Consider:

Creativity? No, God creates. Man discovers. Man cultivates and brings culture and learning, nurtures, softens, establishes coherence. This is the difference between the artist who submits to a greater power and the one who tries to use it for his own ends. The first desires to serve God, by whatever name or description; the second, his or her own ego.

Which leads to: Problems of the ego. Gertie Stein: Every writer wants to be told how good he is, how good he is, how good he is. Insecurities!

Yet in yoga, all for God: the sacrifice, the labor gifted to generate good karma. (As if your boss is another deity, rather than bottom-line motivated and conscious. Here’s a letter of commendation plus your pink slip.)

Early church father Tertullian warned, in De Spectaculis, Latin circa 200 C.E. Essentially: “The Author of truth loves no falsehood: all that is feigned is adultery in His sight. The man who counterfeits voice, sex or age, who makes a show of false love, anger, sighs and tears He will not approve, for He condemns all hypocrisy. . . . Why should it be lawful to see what it is a crime to do?” (Translation by Kenneth Morse).

These are hard charges, along with the seduction of “preaching for sin,” as George Fox warned.

So to examine the multiplicity of personality / goals / desires. Just who am I? Who are you? Empathy. Anger. Bliss. All the rest.

Honesty. Our dark sides. Do we really express our weakest aspect in our art? (In vocal ministry, how often the message comes from that area of our current conflict!)

Versus becoming so rarified we lose all sense of joy and delight. The danger of Plainness or strictness, that it suffocates personality, makes us so humbled we cannot move forward in the Holy Spirit to perform bold action. Crushes or stifles the imagination.

So how do we make a living without violating our beliefs? (Military-industrial extensive penetration of all facets of American society: not even the universities immune.)

Or how do you practice your art to the fullest, without undue restraint, while still being faithful?

NEWSPRINT, PAPERBACKS, AND HARDBOUND VOLUMES

October 25, 2014June 3, 2018 ~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

My entire life I’ve harbored a bias regarding quality in the world of writing. Even though I’ve long been a front-line journalist, I’ve believed the text in a hardbound, academic or commercially published book must somehow be superior to what’s presented in a newspaper.

For that matter, magazines were, in that measure, a degree above newspapers, but a step or two below either paperback or hardbound volumes.

In the past few years, though, that misconception has been shattered, in part because of conversations I have with one of America’s top literary voices and in part because of encounters with a host of other living authors of more mundane accomplishments.

Yes, we have every right to expect a work that requires a year or two to draft to be superior to reports written on the fly, but in some ways, that long work often turns out to be little more than a series of daily reports strung together. What turns up can be as formulaic as any pyramid-style news dispatch, and filled with more cliche and unchallenged bombast. Read carefully and you might notice a higher standard of editing in your daily paper.

What I now realize is that I had expected the books to be eternal monuments that would sit forever on public and private library shelves. I never expected them to be commodities with their own precariously short shelf life, with rare exceptions. Even public collections have only so much space and so much patience. Rarely do I find there a recommended piece I desire.

What this all comes down to is that reality that good writing is good writing, no matter the place it appears. That, in itself, is cause for celebration.

Now, for more on the newspaper dimension, there’s my Hometown News novel. Adding a further twist to this plot, though, is the fact it’s available only as an ebook.

WHERE’S THE BUSINESS MODEL?

October 23, 2014June 3, 2018 ~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

Newspapers have long run on a peculiar business model.

People buy the paper mostly for the news, but what they pay for the product covers only a fraction of the actual cost. Traditionally, advertising generated the other 80 to 90 percent.

That imbalance always resulted in an inherent tension in the executive offices, where any expenditure for news coverage was viewed with suspicion, especially when few of the publishers – the top local executive – came from the news-gathering side.

The rest of the operation included the composing room and related departments that manufactured the actual pages that then went to the presses, plus the “mail room” where supplements were inserted and the bundles were arranged for distribution, the circulation department, and then the ad sales reps, accounting, community services/promotion, and human resources. Especially accounting. In more recent decades, the computer techs assumed their own role.

For a bit of perspective, go to a store and buy an artist’s newsprint sketchpad and then compare its cost and the amount of paper against what the typical paper carries. You’ll see what a bargain the daily paper has been. What you pay for the news essentially covers the cost of getting it from the end of the press to the place you read it.

So this is how things ran until the Internet came along. And then, for a host of reasons, publishers began putting websites up and readers began getting the news without having to view any of the surrounding advertisements that were paying the bills. That, in itself, was a recipe for disaster.

Curiously, long before the arrival of the Internet, I’d noticed that what the readers paid for a paper would be sufficient to staff a newsroom and its supporting services. Leap ahead, and you can see that if users would pay for their local news online, you could create journalism that would not have the advertisers lurking in the corners. Unfortunately, online users have become spoiled and rarely pay for anything. Attempts at firewalls, as we’ve seen, have also failed.

At the moment, the future of American journalism looks grim. And that’s bad news for our political structure and the lives of our communities themselves.

~*~

To find out more about Hometown News or to obtain your own copy, go to my page at Smashwords.com.

NOT EXACTLY A BOOM

October 15, 2014August 31, 2014 ~ Jnana Hodson ~ 9 Comments

I’ve never really liked the “baby boomer” description. Besides, I think there’s a major barrier between the early experiences of those born before ’47 or ’48, and those after. Around ’48, my wave, was when TV sets were present from the very beginning of our exposure to the world. We can’t remember ever not having one at least somewhere in the neighborhood. (Suddenly, I remember being three or four and having the Sullivan brothers show up to watch “Howdy Doody” with me. They didn’t yet have a tube of their own.)

Every year as our class advanced, our new round of teachers was baffled. All they knew was we were “different” from the previous ones. So to some extent, the TV influence feeds into the hippie outbreak. We were, in effect, wired differently from our seniors. Still are, for that matter.

But the other big shortcoming in the boomer classification is the way it ignores the huge fissure within our generation between those who supported the Vietnam Conflict and those of us who opposed it. That’s something that’s never fully healed, and it’s certainly crippled our ability to come together to advance the ideals some of us, at least, so passionately embraced. I suspect there are many politicians and corporate executives – the dreaded Establishment, that is – who actively worked to keep the wound festering.

So here I am, calling for a renewed vision of our legacy. That’s been one of the promptings of the novels in my series Hippie Trails. You’re welcome to come along on the trip.

LISTENING TO A POETRY READING

October 12, 2014August 31, 2014 ~ Jnana Hodson ~ 4 Comments

Sometimes as I listen during an open mic, especially (and oh how I hate that spelling!), I find myself focusing on a particular reader’s moralizing and editorializing or cliche or heavy reliance on simile rather than metaphor, and that soon sends me into a disturbing zone.

What happens is that I begin editing heavily with an imaginary thick black marker, striking through all of the offending words and phrases, and pretty soon I’m tuning into only to the blackened blocks in the air and tuning out everything else.

Admittedly, I edit myself heavily, and this is a central step in the creation of many of my own works. Admittedly, too, I’m projecting myself onto the poor writer onstage. Admittedly, in particular, I’m forgetting to be humble and open here, star that I might imagine myself to be.

Does anyone else experience anything similar?

THE MISSING VOICE

October 8, 2014June 3, 2018 ~ Jnana Hodson ~ 4 Comments

A central problem for newspapers in the past half century is that they became increasingly homogenized and thus lost their distinctive, individual identities. Admittedly, that was always a problem when people saw it as “the paper” rather than the Times or Post or Chronicle or Herald and so on. But in the days when a city would have two or more daily newspapers, each one needed to have some unique identity to set it apart in the marketplace. Sometimes it was along party lines – Republican or Democrat – or social identities, such as blue-collar or proper society, but often it also meant the kind of news that was emphasized: national and international, for instance, versus local. And hometown columnists were always a voice that readers could count on. Think Herb Caen in San Francisco, Mike Royko in Chicago, or Jimmy Breslin in New York – or any of the great sportswriters.

In those days, newspapers were thinner than they became in the last decades of the 20th century – often just two sections – rather than the four to eight that followed in the great mergers and closures that led most cities to have only one daily journal. Much of that problem, we should note, could be blamed on the “unduplicated readership” that ad-space buyers relied on in allocating their budgets. No matter how marvelous the Washington Star was in its final days, or the suburban Journal papers were in the counties around the city, they couldn’t overcome that hurdle – when it came to outright readership, the Washington Post had the monopoly. Since everybody had to read it, there was no point in advertising elsewhere.

With few exceptions – New York, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia – we’re left with single-paper markets where the product looks and reads like those everywhere else, except that the stories take place there than elsewhere.

As the local newspaper more and more became a one-size-fits-all model, what I no longer heard was the feeling that it “speaks for me” or my section of the wider community. And now, even those special voices within its pages are no longer there – one by one, the columnists were never replaced.

The newspaper I longed to create had little resemblance to that bland crime-and-crashes emphasis that too often prevails these days, in place of more difficult and costly investigative reporting or a bigger view that critically examines education, the fine arts, social justice, the environment, and so on.

It’s hard to get excited by what’s there. And we wonder why circulation kept declining even before the Internet?

This is, I should note, a contrarian viewpoint, since the publishers kept proclaiming the “improved service” each time they merged two papers into one. So here we are, online and blogging.

~*~

To find out more about Hometown News or to obtain your own copy, go to my page at Smashwords.com.