You never know what we'll churn up in cleaning a stall
So we’re having coffee once again, one of my favorite authors and I, and while he’s a decade younger than me, I still marvel at his relentless output.
Why do you pace yourself that way, I ask.
Because time’s running short, he answers.
As I said, he’s a decade younger.
Maybe we should talk to an older painter we know, a good decade-and-a-half ahead of me. The one who’s still painting furiously. Quite possibly better than ever.
You have to wonder what makes some voices so distinctive. Maybe it’s what makes a master. They way a few notes instantly separate Mozart from Haydn or announce Beethoven. A few strokes, a Rembrandt from Vermeer. Any number of writings.
I think of particular musicians, too. The conducting of Max Rudolf, for certain.
The way God claims to know each of us by our voice.
I’ve always been a visual person. Had even considered a career in art before the writing took over. As further evidence, remembering a story or argument I’ve heard has always been more difficult to recall than one I’ve read. As for names, I’m hopeless unless there’s been a name tag.
Somehow, though, I can remember a musical line much more than I can any lyrics, including those we’ve been working on in chorus. So I’m not memory deaf, exactly.
As a visual person, I’ve found the point-and-shoot digital camera entries you’ve seen posted in my blogs to be a wonderful way of sharing the way I look at the world and many of the details that catch my attention.
But there’s another range of experiences I can’t begin to describe. Often, especially while watching people, my vision shifts from photo-realism to real-life cartoons. I hope I’m not staring, but the transformation is incredible. R. Crumb had nothing on me, other than technique. Sometimes they’re squiggling black-and-white line drawings. Sometimes, baroque etchings. Other times, wild blobs of color.
Even before they start moving.
As I said at the time …
When I was 38, several developments occurred in a way that allowed me to give myself a year of unemployment, drawing largely on savings. Rather than travel the world or undertake some related activity, I hunkered down in a writing spree [that resulted in the novels now (finally) being published]. The sabbatical meant that for the first time in my life, I had a period of uninterrupted concentration on this work. The writing itself. Three fast novels, now to be revised, and thud! skidding to a crash or whatever. Enough to expand to a dozen, in the hours of revision after I went back to the paying work. Looking back, I know it had to be done. And done then.
Nevertheless, in my struggle between practicality and art, there’s been a longstanding sense of guilt in spending time on myself. To my surprise, a resolution came through a workshop on prayer, when we were divided into smaller groups and then asked to write out a prayer request. Not for what others might need or a social issue, but for something we needed individually. “Ask for something for yourself,” which the others would then pray for.
Of course, each of us works differently. I’m not one for the blank sheet writer’s block syndrome: I’m usually springing from notes jotted down earlier. (Pacing is another matter: just where is this going? And why?)
In contrast, I recall a poet friend who was also a public school teacher; he was quite prolific during the busy school year, yet during the summer, could produce little, though he could never quite figure out why. (He could also stare at a piece of paper for five hours and then turn out a sharply focused gem.) The other friend, having all the leisure in the world, could produce only disconnected flashes. Could it be some juggling or resistance is also essential to the practice?
As I said at the time …
So here we are. Who would have thought we’d be attending kids’ soccer and rugby matches? Not us!
Or dealing with declining parents. Your mother’s dementia must be difficult. You mention that she still remembers people and is in a wheelchair, which makes me wonder if she’s afflicted with Alzheimer’s or something different. My wife and the girls talk fondly of Grandpa Marion and how his Alzheimer’s brought out a sweetness in him, while another, with episodes in the past years, turns mean and paranoid. Parkinson’s is rough, too, with its long decline; I lost a dear Mennonite mentor last January, in Virginia, and one of my best friends here is in the early stages – so far, controlled by medication, when they get it right.
Galapagos? My elder girl will be very envious. At age 11, she went on a big Darwin kick, a passion that has never abated. A few years ago, we went down to the Boston Museum of Science for a special exhibit they had, and it was quite impressive. In all of the historical debate over his insights, I’m surprised we don’t hear more about the religious roots of his work – most of his encouragement and support seemed to come from clergymen. Me, I’m quite fond of his later affection with earthworms. Maybe it has to do with my monster composting.
Now I still want to hear how you distinguish between mystery and magic. I have a few ideas, but I doubt they’re as expansive or insightful as yours.
In the meantime, I’m hoping to get back to poetry by early fall. Why can’t I stick to just one kind of writing? Or be somehow easily identifiable? A good friend’s son, who is a successful serious novelist, seems to have the same problem. He, too, wants every book to be unique, rather than a continuation of or variation on his others.
Gotta run … time to commute, again. And tomorrow, another birthday. How can that be?
Back in the late ’70s I attended a weeklong interdisciplinary conference at Fort Warden State Park on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, an event that remains a potent influence on my work and thinking. Organized by Sam Hamill, then of Copper Canyon Press, the Power of Animals seminar spanned biology, literature, anthropology, mythology, and more. Presenters included the writers Barry Lopez, Gary Snyder, Howard Norman (then just the author of a chapbook of poems called Born Tying Knots), David Lee, and an equally impressive slate of zoologists and botanists in an interdisciplinary examination of the dimensions of the animal kingdom. One highlight was a stage production from Reed College that relived some of the glorious Coyote tales of the Pacific Northwest.
Now, with the release of my chapbook In a Heartbeat from Barometric Pressures at Kind of a Hurricane Press, I hope to return the favor. This set of poems runs playfully with wild and domestic animals of all sizes and influences as they impact our lives in real and imaginary ways.
To join in, simply click here. And remember, it’s free.
Perhaps you’ve heard someone tell another, “You should write a book about that,” relating to some personal experience they think would become a bestseller.
Neither of them, however, actually reads books, even if they expect others to do so.
Sometimes one of these individuals actually does crank out the manuscript and even self-publishes it (not that self-publishing is intrinsically wrong, mind you – just that one needs to be aware of the perils that route takes, whether it’s in the traditional bound paper editions or in the newer digital ebooks).
A neighbor came across one of these paper versions a few months back and decided to ask a librarian acquaintance for her reaction. After reading a page or two (often that’s all it takes), she sniffed: “This reads like somebody who doesn’t read books.”
How telling. How telling, indeed, even before we get to the swollen ego.
The Barometric Pressures author series at Kind of a Hurricane Press has just published In a Heartbeat, a set of 20 of my poems arising in the animal kingdom. As you can imagine, I’m delighted. Let me roar and crow, if you will.
The set occupies a much different tone and style of my writing from what you’ve previously seen. It ranges from television cartoon characters to ancient mythology as it traces our interplay with our fellow animals across the earth, under the sea, into the air, and throughout our imaginations.
This 35-page echapbook is available free from the Barometric Pressures author series at Kind of a Hurricane Press.
If you decide to print yours out, you might even want to select a fancy paper to make your copy unique.
Let me add, that way I’ll be even happier to autograph yours when we meet. But first, for your copy, click here.
A while back, while reading a selection of letters by the itinerant Quaker minister Elias Hicks (1748-1830), I was impressed by the length and quality of some of the individual correspondence. These were pieces that could have been published essays, yet were addressed to a specific individual – pieces, I should add, from a farmer by trade.
I’m left wondering about the amount of time some Friends (and others, of course) spent daily or weekly in reading and writing as well as reflecting on the issues at hand.
Don’t tell me it was a slower era or that they had more time to employ – labor was more demanding and often tedious, after all. I think something else is at play here.
As I said, I’m impressed.
As I said at the time …
There’s no denying the importance for a writer to have a physical space where the work-in-progress can be left out in the open, safely behind a closed door, between sessions. Where there’s no lost time putting everything away, only to have to bring it out again in order to resume where one left off. This doesn’t have to be a dream space, either.
But making time for writing is even more crucial. Being able to get a thought or line down on paper, while it’s fresh. Of finding large blocks of time to engage in the interior dialogue of characters as they emerge amid your daily errands and nocturnal dreams. (Like babies or demons, they possess you.)
I’m not alone in finding my practice of writing becomes part of a larger juggling act, especially when I’m already working fifty-hour weeks as a professional whatever somewhere else. Especially when those hours are outside the “literary” field altogether. Then there are the needs of a home life to contend with, and, in my experience, a faith community, too. For instance, I’ve found that as long as I’m employed as a full-time journalist, my off-duty hours leave me only enough hours to (a) write and revise or (b) focus on submissions and correspondence or (c) attend and give readings and other public events; but there is no way to do two of the three (much less all three) in the same period.
On top of it all, the work takes as long as it needs. Or, like the old-house syndrome, every repair or renovation project will require at least three times more time and money than you budgeted.
Jnana's Red Barn 