Tag: Memories
Some final shots for the year in my writing life
Sometimes my own writing goes beyond anything I can explain. For instance:
- My Kinisi here at the Barn? Prompts, yes, if you want.
- But firing them into full blast?
- Much less igniting a conflagration?
- We do what we can, each one on the edge.
- I keep shooting what I think are some good ones at you, hoping someone will take it the next step.
Meanwhile, over the years:
- I’ve attempted to walk in the Light daily, though fallen far short.
- Ridden the uprising Spirit.
- Found silent meditation crucial to writing poetry.
- Uncovered 12 generations of my Hodgson ancestors.
- Returned unknowingly to the faith of those ancestors.
- Survived a shrinking profession to reach retirement.
- Sought an incandescent language.
- Still need a champion.
- Never taught creative writing.
- Found literary writing can resemble prayer.
- Am perhaps best known for my Mixmaster approach to poetry and fiction. Or maybe it was my radical history of Dover along with uncovering an alternative Christianity in the Quaker metaphors of Light and Seed
- Prefer a religion that relies on questions more than answers
- Think we’re confused enough, already.
- Store bath towels in a basket.
- Wear reading glasses, more and more.
- Have become uncomfortable around smokers.
- Had hoped to reclaim my social activist witness, after years of journalistic neutrality.
Remember, you can find my works in the digital platform of your choice at Smashwords, the Apple Store, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Scribd, Sony’s Kobo, and other fine ebook retailers. You can also ask your public library to obtain them.
Our winters from the perspective of neighboring St. Croix Island
The French learned some harsh lessons in their attempt to establish their first North American settlement on a small island perhaps ten miles north of where I know live.
“It was difficult to know this country without having wintered there; for on arriving in summer everything is very pleasant on account of the woods, the beautiful landscapes, and the fine fishing for the many kinds of fish we found there,” Samuel Champlain wrote. “There are six months of winter in that country.”
I’ve previously contended that New England has a five- or six-month winter, so that passage offers me some confirmation.
As that winter dragged on, however, more than half of the men and boys developed what Champlain called a “mal de la terre,” or “land sickness” – scurvy, a disease caused by Vitamin C deficiency. It was common among sailors stuck on ships for months at a time, and many captains knew to keep citrus fruits on board, or beverages made from evergreen tree needles. During the European Age of Sail between 1500 and 1800, it was assumed that half of all crews would die of scurvy.
It wasn’t pretty.
“Their teeth barely held in place, and could be removed with the fingers without causing pain,” Champlain wrote of the horrific suffering the settlers endured over the winter of 1604-1605. “This excess flesh was often cut away, which caused them to bleed extensively from the mouth.”
Eat your apples and oranges and grapefruit, then, as well as lemons and limes.
Religion turns off readers, and yet …
That’s an advice given to authors, though it’s something I cannot avoid in my own novels and even poetry. Where else can we fully address the deepest values we hold?
Politics doesn’t seem to be working that way, for sure.
Is science fiction the best we can do for now when it comes to grappling with philosophical issues?
Still, I’ve dug in, ranging from the spirituality of yoga and Buddhism in Zen and Tibetan traditions to Quaker and Mennonite Christianity to Greek Orthodoxy as well as Indigenous strands.
I tackle this most directly in Light Seed Truth, an ebook that includes four earlier booklets investigating the revolutionary impact early Quakers found in applying the metaphors of Light, Seed, and Truth. To that I add examples of the power of metaphor in modern secular society, just for balance.
My goal is to raise readers’ awareness and sensitivity rather than convert anyway to a particular faith.
With religion, I want to hear how faith is experienced by different individuals, rather than what they speculate they should be experiencing.
The best mystics I’ve known have surprisingly practical and humorous.
~*~
You can find it and more in the digital platform of your choice at Smashwords, the Apple Store, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Scribd, Sony’s Kobo, and other fine ebook retailers. You can also ask your public library to obtain it.
Sounding so dated now
RETAIL THERAPY: used books or classical/jazz/folk CDs.
WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE HOTEL? To date, Omni, Providence, Rhode Island. Yes, over Boston, Chicago, and New York.
I’LL KNOW I HAVE IT MADE WHEN: I can rent a cottage by the sea or a mountain lake. Or I have grandchildren.
WHAT IS YOUR CURRENT PROJECT? Creating an author’s website and blog.
WHO WOULD YOU MOST LIKE TO INVITE TO DINNER? My agent or publisher. If only I had one.
UPCOMING: Retirement.
Notes from a Yule tree search in the woods
The tree the kid wants ain’t natchural! At least not the ones we’ve cut from the wild.
What we find in the woods are typically lopsided, with the growth mostly to one side. And they tend to be more open than full, which can have its own appeal when it comes to adding ornaments.
Not that she perceives that on her arrival from the metropolis.
She’s always been challenging and demanding.
In our longest nights
How long the day now? Our shortest is a mere 8¾ hours of visible sun if the clouds permit, barely a third of the 24-hour cycle.
Where I live, we’ve now reached the earliest sunsets. They’ll be inching later by the solstice.
Enjoy the long nights, then. Perhaps by a fire but especially in sleep. Or even out, bundled up, viewing Northern Lights and meteor showers.
Kinisi 291
behind the house
I do miss my barn
Where is today’s local communication and shared identity?
Unlike many localities, Eastport has a fine newspaper, one that appears twice each month. It covers much of Washington County in Maine and Charlotte County in neighboring New Brunswick, Canada.
You get a good sense of the place from its pages. I can’t say that for many of the newspapers I’ve seen across the country, even when they were big moneymakers.
Living in out-of-the-spotlight localities, I’ve been sensitive to the nuances of each landscape and the people who inhabit there, not that I’ve often found them reflected in mass media outlets.
It’s not just newspapers or, for the most part, TV, though Northern Exposure did create the sense of one, especially with Chris Stevens as the disc jockey on KBHR radio.
I do sense that the lessening of local identity reflects the loss of local economic power centers, largely through corporate buyouts. The pharmacist no longer owns the drug store, nor does the local bank have its own president. The newspaper is part of a chain, as are most hospitals these days. The list goes on.
As I’ve explained, for many years, despite the arcane business structure in which advertising rather than sales of copies provided the bulk of the income, hometown newspapers were cash cows for their owners – who, in turn, paid their reporters and editors minimal wages.
The resulting management practices – reflecting those of surrounding corporate retailers and manufacturers – have put news coverage at risk, endangering both the communities and democracy itself. How will they, like the reporters and editors, survive?
Oh, yes, the big box stores – especially Walmart – rarely bought advertising space in the local paper, even while they squeezed the smaller retailers out of business. I remember one year when an economic downturn put five of our ten largest advertisers out of business.
~*~
Social media posts by amateurs may fill some of the gap, but there’s no substitute for fact-checking and other accuracy. Reporting and writing take time and devotion, not a given when you have a real job and family vying for attention.
And if you’re out there solo, who’s going to back you up when the topic at hand gets nasty? As it does, when corruption seeps in.
Anybody else feeling crushed?
From a Scroll of Improvisation
The premise: So much of my writing has resulted from distillation, revision, compression, and concision, often as a matter of collage or thesis/antithesis/ synthesis opposition and release.
The pieces of this scroll, in contrast, are envisioned as longer, free-flowing outbursts without structure or topic, a matter of simply letting the writing stream where and how it will. Perhaps my Dialogues are my closest antecedent, although I could throw in Ned Rorem’s journals or John Cage’s diary or Keith Jarrett’s solo improv concerts. I like the story about one of those performances, where Jarrett came out and sat for some time, unable to begin. As the audience grew restless, someone called out to the stage, “D sharp!” or some such; the pianist turned, said “Thank you,” and began.
While I anticipate these to emerge as prose, their spirit should be poetry. Whatever the key or time signature.
~*~
To start slowly, or even slow, with a single note. Not even a chord. A word or two, cryptically without context. Sit in place, melting.
Where was I, then? Or you?
De Tocqueville set out to define America, that is the United States, as some overriding commonalities. What conceit, though I suppose we might do the same regarding Europeans, as if Italians and Danes resemble each other in many ways. Yes, I boldly spent a week on the Olympic Peninsula followed by a couple of years digesting the place and its peoples. More recently, the decades of investigating New England have proved more elusive. Even my native Midwest is far more varied and nuanced than I would have suspected. Explore the world? My focus becomes more and more this place I inhabit along the Cocheco.
The falling water, splaying on rock below. The mills. My own small tract, now covered with new snow. Birds at the feeder. Skittering.
What do I know of anything? Of anyone? Just who am I, and how did I ever arrive here, with this woman and her daughters? All these squirrels and buried black walnuts.
Each shell, a note. Each snowflake, another. Cry out, unheard against the wind.
Jnana's Red Barn 