Tag: Memories

What’s left after ‘What’s Left’

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Every writer has to face the question of knowing when a particular work is done, as in finished and ready to release.

The problem is that there’s always more that could be added or refined. Writing is, by definition, imperfect. In fact, the vaster the ambitions of a novel, for instance, the more imperfect it will be. Visit the critical examinations of the great novels Huckleberry Finn and Moby-Dick as prime examples.

The decision finally comes down to the line where the work releases the writer. The obsession burns out. You’re exhausted and feel you need to move on. You’ve said all you can say. You’ve discovered just about everything of relevance you can on the subject. For some writers, I suppose, it’s like the end of an affair.

For luckier ones, it’s when the editor or publisher demands the manuscript, ready or not.

~*~

I’ve previously posted on how my novels percolated over time. There was the sabbatical year I gave myself in Baltimore, where I lived off my savings and armed myself with a new personal computer with 5½-floppy disks (for you high-tech geeks with a knowledge of now ancient systems) as I poured myself into keyboarding rambling manuscripts in the search of publication.

When my savings ran out and I returned to the workaday world, I kept picking at those seminal drafts, usually on vacations and holidays. Other efforts at more marketable books also got attention and even a few nibbles, but in the end, none of them panned out. Working full-time, I simply didn’t have the additional open periods required for successful self-promotion.

I’m glad I didn’t wait until retirement, as so many others I’ve known did, to start writing those novels. The details and intensity would have evaporated. Instead, retirement played out in a different way and the novels did finally find publication.

My one fully new book was the one that grew into What’s Left, though it did start with piles of outtakes from the earlier novels as well as other material.

As I’ve also previously posted, it did eventually lead me to thoroughly revise and reissue those earlier novels.

The result is that I have eight books of fiction available today, and I am proud of them, even if they haven’t found wide readership or critical acclaim. Not that I wouldn’t welcome either.

~*~

I am struck by how much has changed for me in the seven years since then, some of it a consequence of the shift to digital writing and publishing. I don’t require as much space for files, for one thing, or for research materials and correspondence. What can be found online with little effort is amazing, as I discovered while writing Quaking Dover. I hate to admit I no longer keep a dictionary or thesaurus at hand.

Downsizing to our remote fishing village at the far end of Maine four years ago meant that I no longer needed a studio in the attic. A corner of a bedroom sufficed for some pretty heaving writing and revision.

It’s a far cry from the dream I once had of remodeling the top of the red barn into a year-‘round studio that included a custom-build semi-circular desk with me sitting in its center – something like the copy desks that were common to many newsrooms.

No need for that now, not even at newspapers.

~*~

The task for me now turns to cleaning out remaining files, both digital and physical, that are no longer needed. I don’t want to leave that mess to my wife and kids later.

One thing I’ll confess is that I doubt I have another novel up my proverbial sleave.

~*~

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.

The hardest prompt: a love letter

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

You’d think these would be the easiest, most natural thing on earth, except that they usually wind up being 99 percent cliché and hot air.

Besides, how many times and ways can you express the dirty stuff, if you dare?

(And be prepared to back it all up in person.)

Really!

In addition, the audience of one can be the world’s most demanding, no matter how fond of you they are.

Even more difficult, add to the assignment something I heard a writing prof say, quoting another one: Never revise a love letter.

Nope, let it gush forth.

~*~

For further humiliation, there was an instance when I was living in the ashram and writing a reply to a beloved’s epistle when several of my fellow yogi residents came up and grabbed my effort, grimaced, and declared, “If I received that, it would be the end of the relationship.”

Those girls were so full of helpful insights, as you’ll find in my novel Yoga Bootcamp.

~*~

Well, I’ve never been good at pickup lines, either.

~*~

About a dozen years ago, I had a spree in the loft of our old barn when I went through the remaining letters to me from girlfriends and lovers over the years.

Earlier ones had been helpful when I was drafting my novels Daffodil Uprising and Nearly Canaan. What jumped out at me in this round was their underlying unhappiness apart from me. It didn’t make for a good give-and-take in a relationship. No wonder things didn’t work out in the long run.

The time for the ritual burning was way overdue. It took longer than I would have guessed.

~*~

More recently I came across some surviving letters written on computer, some of them that were then sent by the postal service and others that went by email.

The ones I wrote now embarrass me. As for theirs? A gentleman won’t say, though they reflect a long search for a fitting relationship that never panned out, like panning for gold. My, all the hours I spent writing those and reading the responses!

Once more, though, a purge is overdue.

We could get into a discussion regarding the intimacy of handwritten letters versus legibly typed ones, though that’s largely moot now that the exchanges have shifted to emails and cell phone texts. That topic deserves its own conversation. For now, let me say that the playful back-and-forth with my now wife via America Online when we were getting to know each other is woven into my Prelude & Fugues poems available at Thistle Finch editions.

~*~

Back to the advice about never revising a love letter. I find it useful as an ideal for other kinds of personal writing, too. Just let it pour out, best as you can. Not that it usually proves so easy.

Yeah, yeah, I fall back heavily on the revise-revise-revise emphasis elsewhere, along with the adage, “Talent goes into the first draft; genius comes in the revisions.”

Still, some of those love letters gave rise to the poems in my collections Braided Double-Cross, Blue Rock, and Long-Stem Roses in a Shattered Mirror (upcoming).

Let me add to that the only time – well, just about – that I face the dreaded writer’s block is when having to come up with something spiffy on, say, a get-well card. Like the ones they used to pass around the office. I know of a truly major writer who agrees with me there. Maybe sympathy cards are even worse. You can’t go with “Miss you” there, and nearly everything else is so trite.

~*~

One final concern I’ll raise while we’re circling around the topic involves what would we say to each other now, all these years later. At one time, I tried to find out, thanks to Facebook. It wasn’t encouraging. Some who had been hot on my end barely remembered me.

And while I had tried to be conscious of their objections or potential feelings of hurt in reading the fictional accounts of our lives, I finally had to realize they never read what I had written after our breakups or differing directions.

Ouch! Most of them I missed more than they did of me.

Sound familiar?

~*~

You can find Braided Double-Cross 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 local library to obtain it.

Recalling an obscure West Coast vinyl record operation

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Its albums stood apart from many of the others I borrowed from Dayton’s public library, with its fine record collection and its guardian.

Contemporary Records was the name of the company, founded in Los Angeles in 1951 by Lester Koenig and soon a leading advocate of what became known as West Coast jazz, including Chet Baker, Shelly Manne, Art Pepper, Sonny Rollins, Bud Shank, and Andre Previn. It was even the first jazz label to record in stereo.

It also ventured into classical, including guitarist Pepe Romero, perhaps joined later by his brothers and father, all of whom soon became famous.

The company also offered a Good Time Jazz label focusing on Dixieland, plus the Society for Forgotten Music in a classical vein, and a contemporary composers’ series.

I had thought one of its founders was American songbook master Vernon Duke – aka Vladimir Dukelsky, his Ukrainian name, used for his 12-tone pieces – but I seem to be wrong. I vaguely recall that one of the disks presented his work as played by the Hollywood String Quartet, but find no support for that now, either.

I have no idea what brought all of this to mind, all these years later. What I am seeing now is how easily so much falls into oblivion.

Quakers, the New England town meeting, and more

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

One of the items I wish I had pursued more openly in my history Quaking Dover is the evolution of the iconic New England town meeting from its origins in the Congregational churches of Puritan faith, as a means of collective church governance, and then into a more secular democratic ideal.

The presence of Quakers (Friends), with their unique decision-making that achieved unity without taking a vote, would have been pivotal in this evolutionary step both before and after the Revolutionary War.

A town moderator, presiding over the session, and a Quaker Meeting clerk share a number of commonalities in their efforts to balance the voicing of alternative positions, where all are heard equally and respectfully, at least ideally.

Quakers also realized that a minority position, even a single person, could be closer to the Truth than the majority was. Resolution of the differences could lead to a superior synthesis, done right.

A fuller history would be informative.

I do suffer through public meetings that don’t have that underpinning, especially when it comes down to a clash of egos or power plays or showboating.

Nevertheless, there are clues in my book suggesting that the Quaker minority did temper Dover’s town decisions, sometimes humorously.

~*~

Another point that would welcome further research by a dedicated historian would be the three volumes of Dover Meeting minutes dealing with male Friends who enlisted in the American Revolution, contrary to Quaker pacifism as a matter of faith and faithfulness.

It was a struggle, with no guarantee that the new government would recognize the hard-won religious liberty that Friends were finally enjoying.

~*~

After publication of Quaking Dover, I became aware of the influence of the Scottish prisoners of war who were brought to New England after the battles of Worcester and Dunbar. Like the West Country fishermen who settled before the arrival of the Puritans, the Scots became a subculture in the region, embodying a different culture and set of folkways. It seems to have been a factor in the Bean family of Dover Friends Meeting.

Again, it’s another history that needs fuller treatment.

~*~

Reading a history by someone else dealing with details you’re familiar with can also be disturbing.

For instance, Nathaniel Philbrick’s bestselling Mayflower has no mention of William Hilton and his family, who were instrumental in a scandal involving the Reverend John Lyford, an Anglican priest in the Plymouth Bay colony who baptized a Hilton child contrary to the rules of those we call Pilgrims, or more properly Separatists. The plot thickens with the introduction of John Oldham and events leading up to the Pequot War.

The picture takes on a different perspective when you’re concerned with what was happening north of Boston.

William Hilton headed off to Dover, where his brother Edward had already built in what would become the third oldest permanent settlement in New England.

~*~

Leaping ahead two centuries, I’ve had to ask myself if someone else with Dover Quaker roots, John Greenleaf Whittier, was America’s first great polemic poet.

Not just a forerunner of Robert Frost but Allen Ginsberg, too, in fact?

~*~

Quaking Dover is available in paperback through your favorite bookstore or as an ebook 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.

Rude awakening? Like at dawn?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

All this time spent online is not at all what I anticipated in retirement.

Perhaps, you know, rather than the lingering over coffee and an open newspaper or even a Bible and or deep meditation in front of a candle first thing each day.

I’m still seeking an ideal daily routine, or perhaps even a weekly one.

What are my goals at this stage of my life? I’d still love to have a champion for my literary ambitions.

For that matter, how will the renovations to our dwelling impact me? It should be easier to stay up later or take afternoon naps, for one thing, or even listen to music. Things were getting pretty crowded.

Many of my activities weren’t on the horizon, back when I was thinking ahead to my years of freedom. Blogging, choir, photography, and, for a while, swimming laps all came along after I left the newsroom. As was moving to this remote fishing village on an island in Maine, where 8 p.m. is the local midnight and dawn can start appearing around 3.

One option just might be rediscovering the joys of “simmering” abed in the morning, likely with (decaf) coffee and some light reading or journaling.

Now, if I could only purge some of my deadline-driven dreams that trouble my sleep.

 

Ointment? I was skeptical

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

When my plantar fasciitis and related ankle pain kicked in again, I assumed that the only real healing required extended rest.

Shoe inserts, a few exercises, and ibuprofen seemed to provide some relief, but I really don’t want to be taking one more pill in my daily regimen and, frankly, I wasn’t so sure that anything that would cover up what my body was trying to tell me was such a good idea.

Finally, I did cave in at my wife’s suggestion of Voltaren nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory ointment. I just couldn’t see how something applied to the surface of the skin could really reach far into the muscles. I guess all that Bengay smeared on me in my childhood hadn’t convinced me.

We buy ours in Canada, by the way, where the tubes that are offered are stronger and longer-acting.

So far, as I’ll crow, my attitude’s changed.

It even has me reconsidering some of the traditional treatments in the healing circles of our neighboring Passamaquoddy tribe. Pine tar, anyone? They say it works wonders.

Let me repeat my fascination with subways

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

I doubt that I’ll ever get back to New York City in my remaining years. Even Boston seems like a rarity, though far more likely. Yet let me repeat my fascinating with subway trains and their tunnels.

And Manhattan was, after all, the center of publishing, including best-selling novels.

Tackle that from the perspective of where I live now, where the year-round population would fit on a single subway train. Add the flush of summer people and vacationers or even the cruise ships that visit and it still wouldn’t add up much more. Some of the visiting cruise ships would be like three or four trains arriving and totally discharging for a stroll around the village. A hiccup, then, in comparison to a Manhattan underground station.

My playful novel Subway Visions, grew out of my encounters in the Big Apple way back when.

As I once noted, growing up in a Midwestern city that was too small for rail mass transit, or maybe it was from an intellectual awareness of underground as a conduit of counterculture and spiritual wisdom, subways came to define a Big City for me and to symbolize the range of possibilities present therein. A subway transit system separates cosmopolitan from lesser cities. The trains are filled with real people – a cross-section of the populace between many diverse origins and destinations. As an underground, subways also present counterculture and surrealistic currents many of the riders fail to consider. Here, then, were snapshots from that route.

Later, with my wife and kids, came our outings in Boston and its MBTA.

Or my favorite Dover lifeguard’s revulsion and disgust after relocating to Beantown for college and having a drunken passenger vomit on her sandals on a hot, crowded platform.

So much for my perception of a carnival air.

Still, I think of subways the way I think of rollercoasters, even with our small downtown of boutiques, less pressured than the subway station settings of much of Boston.

Just how do those cruise ship passengers view our village, anyway?

You can find Subway Visions 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.

It’s a heavy awareness to carry, but it’s one I’ve shared 

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

Indiana sometimes shows up as a symbolic state. It’s not just a “crossroads of America,” as it likes to tout itself, a blending of North and South or balancing East versus West. It’s an anomaly even in the Midwest, where it’s the only state not bearing an Indigenous name yet it’s named in supposed homage to the Original Peoples – INDIAN-a.

With a capital called INDIAN-apolis. Or Naptown, as it’s known in other parts of the state.

Not that there are any tribes remaining within its boundaries.

It’s not as industrial as Ohio or Illinois nor as agricultural as, say, Iowa or Minnesota – feel free to counter that with hard data, I’m just running on gut feeling here.

And just what is a Hoosier, anyway? There are theories, but it’s certainly not like a buckeye or hawkeye or badger or the Bluegrass State bordering its south or Prairie State on its west or Great Lakes State on its north. You can get a picture in your mind with those.

In short, it rather strives to appear just average, or maybe a level just below. Somehow, that’s what fuels its role as a symbol of America itself, especially the Bread Basket sprawling largely westward, even though it’s rarely in the spotlight, except for Indy 500 week, and even that reflects an earlier glory.

That wasn’t always the case, though. The place gave birth to some leftist progressives over the years as well as some vital inventors. It also gave us the likes of journalist Ernie Pyle, jazz lyricist Hoagie Carmichael, actor James Dean, radio storyteller Jean Shepherd, basketball great Larry Bird, rocker John Mellencamp, late-night host David Letterman. But no U.S. president.

Early on, it had a heavy Southern influence, especially as Quaker families fled the slaveholding economy of North Carolina, as I learned after taking up genealogy and uncovering my roots.

It also has some distinctly different regions, including the once dominant steelmaking crescent along Lake Michigan adjacent to Chicago; the hardscrabble rolling forests and quarries of southern Indiana; and the flat agricultural belt in the middle.

I got to know it first by family camping trips and Boy Scout overnight hiking excursions. Yes, in the southern tracts of the state. We also had journeys when my great-grandmother decided to visit from Missouri or central Illinois; her son and his wife lived in a dreadful corner of Indianapolis and served as the relay point. Later, I finished college, again in the rustic south, and returned four years after as a political science research associate.

I must admit my angst at what’s been happening politically and socially, even though the Indianapolis Star was always a pretty dreadful archconservative voice, proof for me that “liberal” journalism has always been in the minority.

~*~

Not that the state hasn’t had an artistic presence. Just think of the artist Robert Indiana of the iconic LOVE image (born in New Castle).

Novelist Kurt Vonnegut nailed the state for me, though other writers of note include Booth Tarkington, Theodore Dreiser, Ward Just, New Yorker regular Janet Flanner (from Paris), and young-adult superstar John Green. The poets Clayton Eshelman, with his collection Indiana, and Etheridge Knight also have had strong careers.

For my part, my novels Daffodil Uprising and What’s Left are both based in an imaginative reworking of Bloomington – I do play with geography, making the Ohio River a lot closer to Indianapolis, for one thing. My novel Hometown News could also be placed in the upper half of the state, though its setting is more generalized.

My poetry chapbook Leonard Springs definitely reflects the cave country around Bloomington.

I anticipated remaining there much longer than I did, but fate intervened. And after that, I’ve never been back, except in my memories.