Tag: Midwest

BOTTLED UP EMOTIONALLY

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Laboring behind the scenes in the subculture of daily journalism (Newspaper Traditions) meant bottling up a lot of my own feelings. My talent took place in near anonymity, advancing others and hoping to help the wider community and broaden the readers’ vision.

It was like being a teacher without any of the affection or apples. I suppose it took its emotional toll, too.

At least, I’m in the rush of a sensation of release now, even if so many of my recent postings look like history. Just remember, it’s unfinished history.

If you want to see what it was like inside the newsroom, especially in the escalating pressures of budget cutbacks, I’ll invite you to my novel, Hometown News. No matter how surreal the action turns, it’s not that far from the bigger impact of multinational conglomerates on local communities like the ones a daily newspaper covers. Or at least did.

Hometown_News~*~

For the novel, click here.

ENDLESS PERSPECTIVES

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Rarely do you stand at the summit. It’s a lesson of life.

Even on the trail, the climax awaits, somewhere overhead.

We need something to look up to, from infancy on.

And then there are clouds – or the surrounding range.

Or the streams, threading together, below.

Mountain 1~*~

For your own copy, click here.

FORGET ZEUS AND HERA, FOR NOW

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The Olympic Peninsula is an extraordinary extreme in continental United States. It juts out in the far upper left-hand corner, surrounded on three sides by ocean and inlets and featuring a jagged mountain range in its center. Much of it is lush and tangled, and there is relatively little human habitation.

It could be a land of the gods, as its very name suggests. Or as the Native Americans, with their stories still intact, will relate. Forget Zeus and Hera, then – this is a panoply arising from American roots and its westward focus.

Come along into the rainforest and then camp just in from the beach. As I did, collecting these poems.

Olympus 1~*~

For your own copy, click here.

TRANSPLANTED

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

As I said at the time …

Did I ever mention that if you examine the headstones in many cemeteries in Montgomery County, Ohio, where I’m from, the names are identical to those in a typical Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, graveyard? Turns out half of my dad’s ancestry is Pennsylvania Dutch who continued in western Ohio from the early 1800s.

World War I, of course, obliterated any awareness of that German connection. But we weren’t alone. Not just the first wave, who arrived before the Revolutionary War in their desire for religious freedom, either. The more urban wave of the mid-1800s, with all of its high culture, also vanished from public awareness.

These are histories that need to be restored. They helped build America, urban and rural, and they were a sizable part of the population.

TRIPLE PLAY

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Any writer tackling a large work such as a novel or screenplay will need to consider the matter of structure. The easiest way out, of course, is to follow a conventional model.

In fiction that might mean 60,000 words, more or less, spread out over 20 to 24 chapters, typically in a straight chronological order, past tense. For the film, something that would come in a little under two hours. To that you’d add pacing, points of conflict, resolution, number of main characters, and so on.

Sometimes, though, you find that’s not the best way to organize your material.

For example, in its revisions, Promise emerged with three sections, each set in a different locale – Prairie Depot, the Ozarks, and finally the Katonkah Valley. Each one, as it turns out, can be viewed as a novella held together by the central couple, Erik and Jaya.

I didn’t intend it this way. The original version had five sections, for one thing, which I came to feel were simply too unwieldy. The cuts provided what I feel gives a better balance.

Let me also admit to a fondness for shorter novels. Novels, mind you, not simply novellas, no matter how much I enjoy them, as well. Maybe it’s a reflection of my typically crowded schedule.

Still, both short stories and novellas stand as kinds of orphans in today’s literary scene. They should be more popular than they are. An occasional solution, one I’ve enjoyed reading, runs a central character through a set of short stories to culminate in a volume of novel length. It’s a tricky strategy, though, and hard to pull off.

Maybe that’s one more reason I feel a special satisfaction with Promise.

Hope you do, too.

Promise~*~

For your own copy, click here.