Tag: Memories

Thinking of repeated-digit birthdays  

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

11 – In an American Midwest industrial city during a gray period. Boy Scouts and chemistry were everything in my world. Hiking and camping, especially. Much of the rest was a blur.

22 – My senior year at Indiana University, deeply head-over-heels with my first lover and spinning into hippiedelic as a promising young journalist. But just ahead was an unexpected change of events, pointing my route into Upstate New York and then yoga. See Daffodil Uprising, Pit-a-Pat High Jinks, and Yoga Bootcamp for parallels.

33 – Back in Ohio, in a Rust Belt small city, after four years of what I considered my Promised Land, the interior Pacific Northwest. My marriage was rocky, but I was gaining recognition as a poet, despite the exhausting hours I was working as a management-level newspaper editor in some admittedly exciting work. On the other hand, I was also moving into Wilburite Quaker circles of deep spiritual grounding. See Hometown News for parallels,

44 – Now in New Hampshire after a round in Baltimore and a stint as a field representative for a major newspaper syndicate, I was recovering from a divorce and crushing engagement. But I did have a first novel in print and a trove of manuscripts in hand, along with being active in New England contradance circles and about to explode into my second summer of love – the first having been nearly half of my life earlier. The Quaker practice now had a tinge of Mennonite, too.

55 – At last, I had remarried, this time with children, and relocated to what we called our City Farm in New Hampshire’s seacoast region – the place with my Red Barn. What a whirlwind! I was being widely published as a poet, had a decent income for a change, and enjoyed union representation as a member of a Newspaper Guild local. Both ocean beaches and mountains were at hand. Life had never been better, apart from my getting older.

66 – Finally retired, I could focus what I considered the Real Work of literature, mostly. The blogging was underway, as were the novels as ebooks. I was even applying my Mennonite part-singing abilities to more demanding scores as a founding member of the Boston Revels community chorus. I was amazed to be surrounded by such fine singers and grateful it was not an auditioned choir.

77 – In the throes of downsizing, I’m now residing in a remote fishing village with a lively arts scene on an island in Maine. Yes, I’m feeling my age but not complaining. It’s been a remarkable span, overall. You’re reading about it here on this blog.

88 or 99 – I wouldn’t bet on either. I’d much rather take each day as it comes. However much longer.

This one doesn’t seem that long

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Or so I keep muttering to myself when I realize I’ve lived here on an island in Maine longer than eight other locations in my zig-zag life’s journey. Somehow, looking back, those others feel more action-packed, dramatic, even influential while this one seems to have flowed by more gently and quickly and, yes, more pleasantly overall.

This, of course, is Eastport, my remote fishing village with a lively arts scene at the easternmost fringe of the continental United States.

The mere idea of writing from an island in Maine strikes me as pretentious, yet here I am, far further east than the others, and I am here year-round, whatever.

My habitations of shorter duration were all in my 20s and 30s, largely career moves one way or another and mostly taken as professional stepping stones to something higher, though the next move was rarely the one I anticipated. This, in contrast, is in my 70s, with any dreams of next steps largely evaporated. Rather, I’m savoring an awareness of culmination, even if the big successes I desired ultimately remain vaporous. Especially the bestseller rankings or critical approval or genius grant recognition remain vaporous.

Add to that the fact of time going faster the older you get, something I’ve previously remarked on here at the Barn.

Returning to the thought of residency, the three longer locations in my route were my native Dayton (20 years) before I set forth to other fields, and then, finally, slowing down again in New Hampshire, with 13 years in Manchester and 21 in Dover.

I’ve been attentive to what I have in all the turmoil.

No, I’m not going swimming nude in a group at a summer lake any more

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As I’ve previously mentioned, for much of my adult life, I’ve thought of myself as a retired hippie. Or I’ve simply been called one by others. One of millions and, unlike many, one who’s not embarrassed to admit it, that was a time to remember, no matter how short we’ve fallen from its promise and potential, even though I’m not so sure how much I’d want to go skinny-dipping with others these days or even sleep on the ground or a mattress on the floor.

That said, I’ll also admit that much of my first year after graduation from college in the height of the hippie movement was deep misery and loneliness punctuated by playful discoveries. The writing of Richard Brautigan definitely fits in here.

What’s often overlooked in the era is that the central element was the hippie chick. Plus, personally, I was without one, since mine had moved on and left me stranded. (Oh, misery, oh, woe, I am sounding pathetic, but let’s move ahead.) My novel, Hippie Farm, celebrated her in her many guises, even if you can’t even use the term “chick” anymore without being corrected. At the time, though, it was a badge of honor and invitation – one leading, in this case, to that rundown farmhouse in the mountains outside a college town I definitely restructured in terms of fiction.

A second novel, Hippie Love, retold the same plot line from a different perspective, one more of a what-if optimism. I would love to have heard that story retold from their impressions. Ouch? Were they as lost as I was? One I’ve been in contact with all these years has shared her insights, helpfully, and another, reconnecting much later, barely remembered who I was. And here I had thought she might be The One. Oh, my.

In the light of the publication of What’s Left, those two books were then greatly revised and newly released as a single volume, Pit-a-Pat High Jinks. Compressing the two was a major effort, but ultimately satisfying, at least for me. So much happened personally within that short span.

The inspirations cover quite a cross-section of people, with one becoming a United Way executive, another a U.S. Attorney, yet another one an OBGYN physician. Not that you would have guessed it at the time. As for most of the rest, I have no clue. Some were real losers, likely lost to drugs now. Others, tragically damaged. Being hippie wasn’t always a quest for enlightenment, justice, and equality. And when it was, it was countered by powerfully invested self-interests. Sometimes I’m surprised any of us survived, even before we look at the Vietnam veterans on the other side and their continuing traumas. Not all addicts, by the way, were hippies.

Flash ahead, then, and I don’t see youths today finding community anywhere, much less a shared cause. This is supposed to be an improvement?

Contrary to many people who lived through the era, I saw much that happened needs to be remembered and often cherished, even comically. It’s a place where people can begin rebuilding. I’m holding on, then, in my Quaker Meeting as one root to be grafted.

Look closely at the women, especially, and see how much of the legacy continues in spite of everything. (The kids today have it right, their perception of hippie as a girl thing.) Or, as they say. We’ve come a long way, Baby.

Yet that hippie label, I should add, has undergone its own transformation, rarely positive. Alas. Especially for us males.

Most of them, I hope, come across better in the book.

Still, it’s an account of history as we encountered it.

You can find Pit-a-Pat High Jinks 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. It’s also available in paper and Kindle at Amazon, or you can ask your local library to obtain it.

How relative is time, anyway?

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Let’s consider fourth place, as far as length in time. That is, realizing that I’ve been dwelling in Eastport four years now strikes me as a bit of a shock. I’m finding it difficult to make sense of the fact, at least in light of earlier landings.

Quite simply, I’m still settling in here, even if it’s in my so-called sunset years. And, yes, I’m still feeling this is it, a very suitable end of my road, even if I am being greeted by name by people I don’t recall knowing, this is in sharp contrast to earlier locales.

For perspective, those shorter spans were in my early adulthood: Bloomington, Indiana (four years in two parts); Binghamton, New York (1½ years, in two parts and three addresses); the Poconos of Pennsylvania (1½ years); the town in northwest Ohio I call Prairie Depot (1½ years); Yakima, Washington (four years); a Mississippi River landing in Iowa (six months); Rust Belt in the northeast corner of Ohio (3½ years); and Baltimore, my big-city turn and turning point (three years). You’ve likely met many of them in my novels and poems.

Looking back, each of those addresses was filled with challenging turmoil and discovery, soul-searching yearning as well as glimmers of something more concrete and fulfilling just ahead.

In contrast, my longest period of living anywhere was Dover, New Hampshire (21 years), my native Dayton, Ohio (20 years), and Manchester, New Hampshire (13 years).

For better or for verse, here are more lodes I’ve also mined  

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

By the standards of many, I’ve been a prolific poet, though if you consider that just one new poem a week would come to more than three thousand now.

Sounds about right, even with the arduous revisions they underwent, pressing the original inspiration into something quite different, always in an “experimental” rather than traditional vein. Add in all the hours of submitting the results to journals and small press openings, and all the rejection slips that followed, it was an obsessive amount of time – I had been warned that even “successful” poets averaged 20 rejections for every published poem. And beyond that, simply preparing a “clean” page for those submissions back in the days of typewriters pressed the limits of patience.

Still, poetry could be done in shorter spurts than fiction in my free days and nights while I was engaged working fulltime in a newsroom. As a minus, it did divert my attention from the local news scene and related gossip, but it did sharpen my editing and writing skills, both of which chafed at the limitations of newspaper style.

Many of my early poems sprang from my journals, something that changed over the years, especially as I got into Deep Image and related techniques. While more than a thousand of my poems were published in journals around the globe, book-length collections remained elusive. Now, however, some are available as ebooks, allowing you a chance to sample my evolution over six decades.

Here’s a lineup:

American Olympus: This longpoem is also a mythopoem set in a single week of camping on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington state. The book came close to being published by a prestigious letterpress imprint but fate intervened, sending me spiraling back eastward. Many other nature and landscape poems reflecting my experiences from one end of the continent to the other and back in my early adult years await full collection. Please stay tuned for future appearances of those works.

The volume has a new cover, one that’s a departure from my usual design style. I do find the leap rather exciting, and suitably unconventional.

Braided Double-Cross: Intense attraction, sexual ecstasy, and long-term dreams ignite this set of contemporary American love sonnets that reflect the conflicting emotions and unspoken expectations that surface in the eruption of breakdown and breakup. The set, my first run of poems composed as a series, explores passions that sugarcoat realities and betrayals. Sometimes something so truly hot leaves a lover branded for life.

Blue Rock: Continuing in the conflicted passions line, these poems reflect attraction, romance, and the aftermath in today’s society. Just groove to their beat.

Trumpet of the Coming Storm: Admittedly polemic, these are brimming with buried anger erupting at last. Sometimes you just can’t ignore politics, even in a historical perspective.

Hamlet, a Village of Gargoyles: This playful investigation of human identities alternates between gossipy and confessional, set within the context of close community. The collection now hits me as somehow prescient, considering that I’m now living in a real village with characters I hadn’t considered. The tone is contemporary with nods to Shakespeare and Chaucer.

Ebook formatting does limit the visual array of what you would otherwise find on a defined page of paper, but it does make my daring work available inexpensively around the world. I can live with that and so can you, especially if you’re reading on a smart phone.

I promise, there will be more.

You can find these 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. Or you can ask your local library to obtain them.

Suicides along my trail

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I’m reflecting on the list – a best friend ever, a lover who was more passionate about me than I was of her, a woman I dated once and then backed off, the leading anthrax researcher who stayed with us for a weekend or week, the PhD naturalist from my high school (and brother of my first real girlfriend), even my ex- fiancée’s scarred wrists. Add to that the LSD physicist attending our Quaker Meeting or the French-Canadian Catholic up the road in Gonic, and the list of suicides along my life pathway has more examples than I would have expected even without getting into the many people I’ve known along the way but who vanished after.

It’s a dark side that’s usually overlooked but probably more common than anyone admits.

More and more my curiosity involves the question of life itself rather than matters after death.

I’m taking one mystery at a time, as it happens.

On my own, I was writing contemporary literature, except that it turned into underground history

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When I was starting out in my career and sitting at the edge of the semi-circular copy desk, one broad story I kept seeing in the headlines didn’t reflect what I was finding in daily life. It was the hippie experience, told one the public side as drug busts, antiwar protests, and rock concerts, while the personal side I sensed something much broader and transformative, which was largely ignored.

Tom Wolfe, who had come to prominence as a newspaper columnist, was right in saying that the great hippie-era novel needed to be written, though he was wrong in thinking a single book could cover it.

From my perspective, a traditional facts-and-quotes approach couldn’t touch the emotional reality, pro or con. Interviewing celebrities posing as leaders wouldn’t work, either – they largely betrayed us, maybe like never-a-hippie Trump would do later. Hippie was a grassroots movement on many fronts, many of them outside of the big media headquarters in the biggest cities.

In previous Red Barn posts, I’ve touched on many of the hippie movement’s continuing influences, things our kids and grandkids take for granted, but so much – especially of the broadest nature – remains to be examined and presented. I’ll leave that to someone else who can give it full and fresh attention.

For my part, I leave four novels as foundations for others to build on.

I’ve looked hard for work by others but found little yet faithfully left reviews online where I’ve could. Those works are, alas, slowly vanishing. Yes, we are passing.

I am haunted by a definitely hippie copy editor from the year I interned as what we called the rim, but he was gone when I returned a year later, perhaps after pressing for union organization. A lot had changed in those nine months. I wish I knew more about him, other than the ticket for Woodstock that I couldn’t accept, considering the scheduling and my bicycle as my only transportation.

~*~

The core of my perceptions remains in four novels to my credit.

 Daffodil Uprising: I was on campus when the repressive constraints of institutional America blew apart in the late 1960s. Crucially, many of the radical currents emerging on both coasts began connecting in academic nerve centers in the Midwest – places like Daffodil, Indiana, where furious confrontations exposed positions that later generations now take for granted. My novel revisits the upheaval and challenge, both personal and public, triumphant and tragic. As I still humbly proclaim.

Pit-a-Pat High Jinks: The hippie movement that is usually thought of as the Sixties actually appeared most fully during the Nixon administration, 1969-74, and brought changes that younger generations now take for granted. Yes, the ‘70s. In my case, that was Upstate New York where I lived in bohemian circles near the downtown and then on a rundown farm out in the hills where a grubby assembly split the rent and a bit more. My, we were so green and so wild-eyed.

Subway Visions: There were good reasons so many of my freaky housemates and new friends came from the Big Apple. My jaunts to The City, as they called it, provided high-voltage flashes of inspiration that ranged from grubby to psychedelic. It was a whole new world to me, even as a frequent visitor.

What’s Left: So much remained unvoiced and unexamined in the aftermath. I drafted a series of essays that came together as a creative non-fiction volume, but that went nowhere. But then I had the flash to reshape it from the encounters of the hippie protagonist of the previous three books but explored by his curious and snarky daughter. My intention for a big book about the revolution of peace and love turned into one asking what is family, primarily. Hers was quite the colorful circus.

~*~

I still believe there’s much in these that’s “still news” despite the dated surfaces that usually pass for the era.

This year, though, I’m finally saying good-bye to maintaining an effort to engage in an awareness. It’s ultimately in others’ hands.

You can find my novels 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. They’re also available in paper and Kindle at Amazon, or you can ask your local library to obtain them.