Tag: Personal

Layer by layer of discovery

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

In preparing this weekly series about things that were behind my novels, I wasn’t expecting to see how much of what was happening in my own life during a revision could also impact a manuscript based on much earlier events. It’s not something I’ve seen mentioned in author interviews.

One of the writing adages I’ve kept at hand is this: “Steer into the pain.” I’m not sure where I found it or perhaps adapted it, but it has been helpful in reminding me not to take the emotionally easier way out when facing a situation, whether personal history or fictional abstraction. The pain is where the higher-level energy is as well as the revelation.

So add to the advices, “Write about what you’re discovering.”

In a way, it’s a reminder to write about what you don’t want to know but with the added kicker, “What you don’t want to admit.”

For those of you doing the NaNoWriMo challenge this month, may you add that insight to your energizers.

More recently, I would add to that something else that motivates me: The magic!

Or, in my case, pure wonder. Again, what do I know? And celebrate?

I’m finding they’re both essential currents in my life’s work.

~*~

Let me say I rather miss Cassia from my novel What’s Left. After prodding me to that round of big revisions of my previously published fiction, she’s gone off on her own. She was even remote when it came to my nonfiction volume that more recently demanded my fullest attention. Well, she did earn her own category here at the Barn – Cassia’s World, based on the research and many outtakes from her novel’s drafting.

As for the real-life inspiration for many of my characters, let me repeat: Where are they all now? Or more accurately, where did they go? I don’t mean the aging rockers. I can think of social activists who kept the faith and marched on, largely out of the spotlight, though they’re aging, without replacements in line. But as for the others? I’m unsure of most of their names. And let’s forget the boilerplate disclaimer regarding all persons living or dead, even for futuristic space journeys or fantasies deep into the past.

~*~

As I look back on the history underpinning my novels, I have to insist the potential was there. I must also ask, what if we had a more solid social structure and tradition, with something akin to elders? The dorm I lived in, the core of the opening half of the revised Daffodil novel, has today become something of the center I envisioned, without the radical political edge.

I suppose I could have told these stories time after time after work in a bar, but to me they seem to address a different collective experience. Besides, journalists have their own “war stories” to compare.

Just where were we gathering now, anyway? And where have we gone to get here?

A few have found a progressive faith community – church, synagogue, sangha, or perhaps a masonic order or fraternal lodge. But for the others?

Should I point back to the posts on the breakdown of community?

And here we had thought we were creating tribe.

As an extra point of emphasis, I’ll add: I’ve never returned to many of the locations where I’ve lived.

Make way for ‘The Secret Side of Jaya’

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

As a third book involving Jaya shaped up, I reflected on ways some people perceive things most folks don’t. The angels everywhere, as Hassidic contend, perhaps matching the dakinis of Tibetan Buddhist circles. Some of my fellow yogis saw auras around people, although I’ve seen just one, quite black, surrounding the Reverend Pat Robertson when he and his handlers walked through the newsroom for a conference with the editor-in-chief and the editorial writer.

Since moving Way Downeast, I know of the small rock people some of the Passamaquoddy observe.

You might add elves or gnomes or other creatures to the list.

The concept did give me a threat to unite the three novellas into one.

~*~

What was needed was a third novella, reflecting the place Jaya lived between Prairie Depot and the Pacific Northwest. It would have With a Passing Freight Train of 119 Cars and Twin Cabooses before it and Along With Kokopelli’s Hornpipe following. It would be like an adagio in a symphony or sonata or the middle panel in a painted triptych.

I decided to draw on a wooded alcove I loved to explore during my return to Bloomington. It was a largely unknown tract that had included a city water reservoir as well as several caves and springs that had fed two gristmills.

In the years since I moved on, the site has been cleaned up into a city park that even has a stairway down one of the steep slopes.

It had inspired a set of Leonard Springs poems you can find as a free chapbook at my Thistle Finch blog. As I revisited those pieces, I realized that the hollow’s scene and history just beyond the duplex my first wife and I rented on my return to Bloomington as a research associate would transport well to the Ozarks. Especially the part about grist mills at the foot of the sharp hillsides slopes where springs poured out from cave formations.

The story took off from there, especially when I chanced upon the woman miller. I must confess being especially fond of the result. Was this Cassia from What’s Left whispering in my ear once again?

Researching details for this story was a delight. Grist mills had run for a while in my ancestry; the Hodgson Mill in the Ozarks, for one, reflects one side of my family – they even spelled their surname for a while without the G, like mine. (They descend from one William while the other William, also a miller, was my umpteen greats-grandfather.)

Caves were another thing the Ozarks had in common with southern Indiana.

And, speaking of things some people see and hear that others don’t, we had the American Shakers whose spirit drawings and writings wandered outside of the normal artistic constraints. That gave me one more element to play with, especially when I turned to the artistic projects that Jaya had relied on to replenish her own soul in her spare time. I didn’t want her to be writing poetry, as I had, but to be creating some blend of art forms beyond that. Think of Joseph Cornell’s boxes or Emily Dickinson’s bits of paper constructions as possibilities. While I touch on Jaya’s legacy on that front toward the ending of Nearly Canaan, I felt freer to explore it here.

Just what was Jaya’s off-hours creative activity and spiritual practice leading to? Or what prompted them?

Miller at the Springs became an ideal forum for their consideration. Here it was, the final piece of writing in my range of fiction, and it was the most joyous to draft, the least ambitious in its art, and perhaps the most down-to-earth.

~*~

These three novellas presented a private Jaya much different from the one in the public eye. Titling the book the Secret Side of Jaya came naturally, along with the subtitle, Three surreal and fantastic encounters.

The book rounded out my Living Dharma series.

I was ready to kick back and relax, intending to enjoy the role of an author.

It’s as close as I’ve come to a romance novel

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The model in the photo I selected for the original cover of the story that stands today as Nearly Canaan was nearly too perfect. I even had to tweak the description of Jaya on the pages inside to make for a better match. Much later, I came across other photos from the shooting and was appalled.

In yoga circles, it’s what we would call Maya.

Apparently, I had shifted Jaya’s spiritual identity from Sufi much earlier than I recalled. Now that I had a solid backstory for her in my novel Yoga Bootcamp, I could turn my attention to the messy trove that had sprawled into three big books. Thanks to Cassia from What’s Next, I was now intent on distilling them back into one. Trying to compress them into the maximum 120,000 upper limit of a big novel meant having to hone more than one hundred pages of manuscript. And that’s before I decided to add a fourth section for fuller closer.

~*~

At heart, I was trying to figure out just what had gone on in my first marriage. I’m still not sure. And note I had said “gone on,” not “gone wrong.”

But I also wanted to say something about the influence of the landscapes where I’ve lived. In fact, I came to think of them as major characters. If only I could have allowed them to speak? The first was pretty bleak and, for a small town, rather petty. The second had its beauty and its rough spots. The third, their intended Paradise, initially appeared desolate and unforgiving.

Place as a character? How about the Mississippi in Huckleberry Finn? The story wouldn’t have been the same if Twain had started on the Ohio River, even though it was larger than the Mississippi where he did.

Naturally, I had to abstract real people and events and in doing so, I settled on some big flips. Jaya emerged as the older partner in her marriage, for one, which gave a fresh twist on a December/May romance.

Along the way, the story became one of overlapping couples, a contrast of marriages that were close to Jaya’s home. It’s almost like the mirrors in an amusement park house of mirrors, to my way of thinking, not that the story started out that way.

Yeah, we’re supposed to avoid religion and politics. That leaves some pretty big gaps in the meaning of life and, as I’m seeing, in relationships, too.

If you haven’t noticed, changing the novel’s name from Promise to Nearly Canaan is a Biblical nod. Well, I had previously been calling it their Promised Land.

Developing Pastor Bob and his wife, Wendy, provided a big advance for the revised novel. They might have had serious reservations about her as a heathen, but they were still intrigued and at points even supportive. That marriage also had its problems.

I definitely wanted to avoid having southern Indiana in one more of my books, so I shifted the scene of the middle section to the Ozarks of Arkansas. There are a lot of similarities, from what I’m finding.

In addition, I wanted Jaya’s career to be as volatile for her as newsroom management had been for me. She needed to work weekends and nights, too. Beyond that, I did have an experience of being paid from “soft money,” as grants are sometimes called, and having a very good neighbor work as regional director of a social action agency provided me more inspiration.

By the way, the cover photo I settled on for the revised edition did require some tweaks on Jaya’s physical description on the inside pages.

Retrofitting Jaya into the ashram led to a chain reaction

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

I had expected that the deep revisions to my previously published novels in reaction to the appearance What’s Left would apply only to the ones related to Cassia’s father.

I was wrong, once again. I blame Cassia, by the way.

She had led me to present a more unified set of hippie novels and bring them more into the present. Now she wanted me to do something similar to my remaining works.

I could connect two more books through the character of Jaya. She was the center of my book that leads into the Pacific Northwest. By shifting her spiritual identity from Sufi to yogi, I could then weave her into the yoga novel, in effect creating a two-part series.

How would that work?

It all depended, I sensed, on the yoga novel. She would have to become one of the eight resident followers of the guru.

The obvious one, Swami’s right-hand disciple, was male. That shift would throw off the balance of having half of the followers being male and the other half, female. In addition, the interaction with Jaya and the guru, a female, would lack a basic tension.

Having Swami be a woman, as mine was, had presented a hurdle for many of my potential readers. The ashram was rogue enough as it was.

The gender change allowed for a more credible – and colorful – character. It also had a ripple effect through the rest of the cast.

In the end, the book had a new title and some renamed and otherwise altered characters while now leading organically into a series. Just where does she go when she leaves the ashram? You got it.

~*~

Finding the artwork that now graces the cover was a boost. Maybe it even prompted another sweep through the story to enhance the humor.

Much had happened in the yoga world in the time since I drafted the story and eventually published it. Many of the new religion organizations in America – and I’ll include yoga, despite the usual protests – had suffered serious scandals, either monetary or sexual. At least I had avoided that by keeping my story to a single day.

Bit by bit, I learned some of what happened after I had moved on. A chance encounter in a central Pennsylvania diner with one of the figures, who was waitressing on a very busy day, revealed one disturbing schism. Later, through the Internet, I heard from several key players from my residency and learned I hadn’t been ostracized, after all, but the operation had undergone a serious upheaval shortly before Swami’s death. And then I had some long phone calls with the figure who had been in the role Jaya subsumed in the revised novel. The relationship wasn’t exactly as I had assumed – or anyone else, as far as I can see. On top of that, a former girlfriend finally told me of her mistreatment when she visited. There were other dark sides I hadn’t suspected.

Repeatedly, they agreed that I was at the ashram during its glorious apogee. I missed later conflicts that erupted when the locals decided the place was a cult or events I see as fatal changes in direction, especially in terms of guru worship.

~*~

With the focus on Jaya and what she gained from her experiences on the yoga farm, I’m spared from going into an expose of a marginal spiritual community. For me, the time was a major turning point in my life, leading me to the Society of Friends, or Quakers, which to my surprise had been the faith of my ancestors.

I still believe as a nation, we could be doing much, much better. Something more like what I see in the Biblical Kingdom of God on earth.

Yoga had been a stretch for me. My preference would have been for Zen Buddhist, had a teacher appeared. Instead, this American woman in a pink jump suit came across my path. It still seems surreal.  In my hippie novels, it’s Tibetan Buddhist.

A good friend who had been an Episcopal nun had her own insights on monastic life, with many overlaps to what I had experienced. I’ve long been fascinated by American Shakers, too. More recently I’ve added Greek Orthodox examples and mysticism to the mix. And, curiously, my most “hippie” identity or fullness came during those years on the yoga farm.

There are lessons I’ve carried through life, but I should also acknowledge potentially damaging instances, including things that came up in therapy years later. My denial of emotions, especially.

Novels about yoga are surprisingly few. As touchstones for his book, I’ll instead cite non-fiction: Anagarika Govinda’s The Way of the White Clouds, Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, collected writings of Swami Sivananda. Ram Dass’ Be Here Now, and stray bits by and about Murshid Samuel Lewis, and Kathleen Norris’ Cloister Walk, for a Christian parallel. Surprisingly, Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha left me cold.

 

Taking the subway to now

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Damn Cassia! She even tore apart my first published novel, Subway Hitchhikers.

A lot had happened in the nearly three decades since the book was first published – and even more since it was first conceived in 1973. Gee, that’s more than a half a century.

As I came back to the story after the release of What’s Left, my first task was to bring the tale more in line with the rest of the series, starting with the name of the lead character. Kenzie was an advance over the hippie-era Duma Luma, which rather echoed Wavy Gravy of Woodstock renown. His earlier legacy of being a lama reincarnated in Iowa was also downplayed if not entirely erased. Besides, there had been reports of such things actually happening since my book was first published. I have no idea how they turned out, either.

Another big job involved changing the original structure of short present-tense chapters flashing against past-tense ones, like subway trains passing in opposite directions. It was a creative touch but quickly confused the reader. A more conventional chronological-order storyline took its place.

That was accompanied by a new plot based on Kenzie’s monthly trips down to Manhattan to study with his Tibetan Buddhist guru in a tenement on the Lower East Side. That development added a handful of other devotees to the characters and realigned any who had previously existed.

Some of the Tibetan details now reflected tales I had heard from a more recent friend who was studying to become a Buddhist nun. Never mind that her experiences came decades after his or that there might not have been a Rinpoche residing anywhere near the Big Apple. Rival yogis, however, were plentiful.

Tibetans by the early 21st century? Our favorite dining option in Manchester, New Hampshire, was a Nepali restaurant that featured momos, a steamed dumpling staple in Tibet, too. The owners and staff were quite honored when an authentic Buddhist Rinpoche dropped in and approved of their dishes.

My, I have lived in a changing world. When’s the last time you even saw a subway token, by the way?

The freewheeling hippie-era fantasies of my book were soon followed by some creepy downsides. Hitchhiking out on the open road had turned sinister. Subway surfers, seeking the thrill of riding atop the cars in the tunnels and on the elevated lines above the street, were being decapitated and worse or worse by immovable objects in their trajectory. And the onset of homelessness during the Reagan years created whole villages surviving underground, as Jennifer Toth reported in her book The Mole People: Life in the tunnels under New York City, which was published just four years after my novel.

In addition, Long Island Newsday had assigned a columnist, Jim Dwyer, to its new subways beat, leading to a nonfiction book, Subway Lives: 24 Hours in the Life of the New York Subways, which came out only a year after mine. Now that’s some tough competition. No wonder I didn’t hear from him after sending him a comp copy for review when my book came off the press.

By that time, though, I was living an hour-plus north of Boston and entering a time of my life when I’d be riding its MBTA trains about once a week – perhaps a thousand fares one way and back with girlfriends and later family on my visits. Familiarity with underground mass transit hasn’t lessened my fascination.

Still, since Subway Hitchhikers had been about hippies, I had to admit they had largely fallen into disrepute or self-denial. But that’s not how the book stands now, something that’s reflected in its current title, Subway Visions; Along the tubes to nirvana.

As for today? Here I was, with my fascination with subway systems, asking my favorite lifeguard about her experiences in Boston during her freshman year of college. She must have been taking the cute little cars of the Green Line, right?

Instead, she emphatically told me how disgusting they are, miserable on hot days and packed at peak hours – and, especially, the fellow passenger, an utter stranger, who puked on her feet in sandals.

I didn’t dare show her my book after that.

When an interlude becomes pivotal

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Rather than being a retreat to the hills, as I initially saw the period between her future father’s leaving Daffodil after college and his return a few years later, I now see him undergoing a major slow-motion transformation amid frenetic surroundings.

For him and for me, this was a personal High Hippie time, pro and con, no longer a mere interlude to a landing somewhere in the future but a rich mix of its own.

And now, thanks to the daughter, Cassia, I had a better sense of where the larger story was headed.

Before writing and publishing my novel What’s Left, I had depicted his situation in two parallel volumes – Hippie Drum and Hippie Love – one full of near misses when it came to new love, while the other (R-rated) more often connected.

As I returned the drawing board with Cassia standing beside me, I had to admit the dual presentation was a luxury that did nothing to advance the overarching story. The two conflicting books, while beginning and ending at the same points, ultimately confused the reader. Still, it was a valuable experiment for me to file away. Thanks, Cassia.

Reuniting them into one book was a bigger challenge than you’d think. Finding the right tone, verb tense, and balance were only a start. More clearly profiling Kenzie’s country and in-town circles plus his workplace required another big effort.

If I ever do another novel, I don’t want more than four or five characters, if that. (Fat chance.)

~*~

Helpfully, What’s Left now gave me a clearer sense of Cassia’s aunt Nita as a central figure. Only a year older than Cassia’s future father, she now expanded from being his guardian angel, as she was in Daffodil Uprising, into something more of a magnet and Wise Woman who came and went as needed as he underwent crucial encounters, many of them emotionally painful.

~*~

In my revisions to what now stands as Pit-a-Pat High Jinks, I also wanted a better integration into the urban parallel to Kenzie’s life at the time, the subway novel, which would undergo its own thorough reconstruction.

My own job hours at the time would have been too constrained to allow the escapes to the Big Apple that I compress into Kenzie’s timeline. I didn’t even have a two-day weekend – only Sunday off after a late Saturday night, and then Wednesday; four of my days I had to be at the office by 5 or 6:30 in the morning, and it was brutal. In one of my later career positions, however, I did have a floating three-day weekend, which I adapted to Kenzie’s situation. Once every month he could head off somewhere, which soon became jaunts to New York City.

Another thread that I strengthened was his introduction to Tibetan Buddhism and subsequent growth in its practice, giving him a good reason to be heading off to the big city as often as possible.

~*~

In the years after moving from Binghamton, the scene of the action, and off to the ashram and beyond, I lost touch with all but one person from that period. Well, make that two, but he was an older sports editor who had nothing to do with the hippie scene. The other was a former girlfriend where the parting had been mutual.

As for the rest? I wondered where they all went, though I’ve even forgotten most of their real names. Why couldn’t I have been more snide, like calling a character “fat, stinky Frank” or “gaunt Ellen”? Nicknames were only a move in that direction.

As I revised, though, I now had the Internet at my fingertips.

Satellite maps allowed me to see that two – and maybe all three – of my housing sites there had been demolished. (I’m wondering whether I even tried driving past them in my calls on the newspaper editor when I was with the features syndicate. I don’t recall.)

And then a few ghosts from my past reconnected, first from the ashram years – I hadn’t been ostracized after all – and then my former housemate in upstate New York, the one who forms the basis for Drummer in the story.

He event came up with his wife for a visit in Dover. It was about time I met her. She was a much better fit for him that the Latina who commanded his devotion in the book. (I couldn’t invent a character like her out of thin air, by the way. She really was a center of attention in any room we shared.)

Back in the day, he had gloried in a full naturally blonde Afro back in the day, only now it was shaved bald. His smile and intensely blue Nordic eyes were the same, along with his eternally goofy outlook on life, but that chrome dome was disconcerting.

It was time to catch up.

“Did Jnana really have long hair?” my elder stepdaughter asked.

“Oh yes,” came the reply.

Somehow that was enough to get one of my younger generation to relent from their vow to kill me if mine grew out again.

“If you’re writing hippie novels, you might as well look the part,” she conceded. So I got their permission to grow a ponytail. Maybe she was just tired of what was called a combover for the balding.

He also filled me in on some of mutual friends. One was an OB-GYN in inner-city Philadelphia. Another, a federal attorney in upstate New York. Yet another was a functionary for the United Nations. And the biggest lover of the lot had settled down to raise a large family while working as a social services executive. So much for one of my hippie circles.

I even found a girlfriend, via a Chicago Tribune photo and story, who remembered very little of the time and only vaguely pictured me. She had been much more of a presence in my life, even at our distance, than I was in hers, it turned out. I had even hoped she’d be The One.

In fleshing out the characters in my pages, I now had a second Summer of Love to draw on as well as related experiences. I could ask people about their own hippie identities, and many of the thoughts filled earlier posts here at the Red Barn.

While connecting the dots for one figure whose account to me had never neatly added up, I broke out weeping. Signs of adolescent abuse were abundant. I suspect one of her teachers as a villain, but have no proof, of course. Is he even still alive?

As for the others?

Let’s be honest. We freaks weren’t as close as we’d like to think. I hate to consider that the despised fraternity brothers of college may have had the more solid connection.

So what did happen to those who shared the farmhouse? And most of the lovers?

Not that I’m thinking they’d make another novel. Not unless a unique structure surfaced, say something like postcards.

In the revisions, the plot of our shooter’s college years ominously thickened

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Sometimes, in writing, at least, starting at the end and moving forward is the way to go. Now that I had What’s Left as the ending of my hippie series, I could revise the earlier books to provide a more uniform development. I had hoped the process would involve simple tweaks.

I was wrong. A thorough overhaul was ahead.

Crucially, Cassia gave me a clearer idea of her father, the aspiring photographer. And in filling him out in the revisions, he went from being known simply as DL to Kenzie, to conform with What’s Left as well as present a more substantial figure.

She had also grown up at the edge of the campus where he had come to study. (Just as I had.) In my return to the university as a research associate, I lived at the far fringe of the college town and saw faces of the community that were quite different from my undergrad experiences.

Some of these played into her story, What’s Left, but others were woven into the transformation of his undergraduate years, what would emerge as Daffodil Uprising rather than Sunrise.

This time, it was more character-driven rather than action.

It’s also darker, including an ominous air and an admission that the hippie movement was often drab rather than psychedelic. Drugs and sex could have serious downsides, and Vietnam weighed heavily on the spirit.

Yes, Bloomington was a gloomier place than I had wanted to paint it, but now, thanks to Cassia, I could acknowledge Gothic and tragic sides – even a paranormal streak.

The plot was restructured into a full four-year chronology, and the hippiedelic excesses, as well as Kenzie’s situation of being a reincarnated Tibetan monk, were toned down or erased.

Age differences, from freshmen to seniors, took importance in the nurture of a student community. And there were significant new characters, including Lee Madbury, named after a New Hampshire highway exit sign.

The college dorm of the first half of the book was loosely modeled on the Men’s Residence Center, which was suffering from neglect on high. I am happy to see via Internet that what I call Mulberry Row in the book has been renovated into the Ralph L. Collins Living-Learning Center, one that’s not all males, either. Sometimes hard reality follows the dreams of fiction.

In moving the second half of the book more off-campus, I imported a large and once-impressive Victorian apartment house from my upstate New York hippie experience after I had graduated. Instead of having the Susquehanna (as well as the Upper Mississippi from yet another one of my personal relocations) just a block or so away, we now have the Ohio River. The distances do create a bit of a joke for folks closer to the action.

I originally thought Daffodil was about hippies. It’s really about the rise of the modern mega-university. David and Goliath with a dash of counter-culture in the face of the military-industrial complex. Really sexy stuff, right? Except that our kids and grandkids are burdened with huge debts in the aftermath of seeking its credentials. I’m thinking of it more as tragedy, with the focus essentially on Cassia’s future father, lost as he was. It might even be seen as a critique of the hippie outbreak. And did my failed engagement a decade and a half later also seep into the story? I was now looking at these events about a half a century later.

~*~

Cassia also gave me a clearer understanding of her aunt, Nita, who had functioned as guardian angel for her father in the campus years. In the revisions, Nita becomes a more central thread through the entire series.

And, thanks to What’s Left, Cassia was freed to comment on her father’s college years life. Why not? She had the advantage that looking back that history allows.

~*~

Cassia even had me adding subtitles to my novels. They’re commonly used for nonfiction, but somehow rarely for fiction. Well, why not? Adding “the making of a hippie” does give a browser (meaning a human rather than an online device) a clearer idea of what might be inside the covers. Should I have used that for the title, rather than what I did?

I do like the colorful batik flowerbed by MsMaya that now adorns the cover, even if I miss the bold single daffodil of the earlier version. To me, it more aptly conveys a sense of the era.

Daffodil The revised story now carries more heft and is, to my eyes, something of a baroque book.

Well, if Kerouac thought his experiences were remarkable, why shouldn’t I, looking at my own? And he did write in big bursts that released a lot of pent-up energy.

And then ‘What’s Left’ came into focus and changed everything before it

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

By the time the ebooks were published, I had remarried and settled into our little city farm on the New Hampshire seacoast, the one with the red barn that gives this blog its name. My life had stabilized and my job wasn’t devouring me alive, unlike my previous lower-level management positions.

But something kept nagging at me. I wanted to know just where the hippie movement had gone. Many of the insights have been posted here at the Red Barn, and I did draft a series of essays – Hippie Hopscotch – for a book competition that was cancelled after I sent my entry off. My conclusion is that the hippie impact is still around in many varied streams, much of the legacy taken for granted in contrast to the mass-media stereotypes or the current teens’ perception of hippie as being a girl thing. My wife and stepdaughters kept asking about the era and were astounded to hear just how much had changed for the better because of it. They were incredulous at the restrictions I had faced. Were things really as bad as Mad Men presented them? Yes, and the show had me retasting the first newspaper I worked for, the one that came closest to major metro. I mean, I could almost smell it.

Could any of this earlier work be salvaged? And what could I do with the searing childhood betrayal piece published online in Hobart?

My first published novel, Subway Hitchhikers, had ended with Kenzie’s return to Indiana. Intuitively, I had him, as a Tibetan Buddhist lama reincarnated into Iowa, marrying into a Greek-American family in Daffodil. I saw it as a way of blending two streams of ancient wisdom – one Asian, the other at the origins of Western culture. Something still felt incomplete in that ending.

Rather than trying to pick up the story with Kenzie himself two decades later, I decided to shift the focus to the next generation, which led me to create a daughter. This would be her story. As an added twist, I decided to have her lose him, not to divorce but an avalanche in the Himalayas, when she was just 11.

Unlike my earlier fiction, this one was undertaken totally in my retirement years. Yes, I had the ending of Hitchhikers as my prompt – and, based on that, some characters and a setting to work from – but this book would be done with fewer external demands than I’d faced in working on the others in my “spare” time.

Surprisingly, this became the hardest of all to bring to fruition, undergoing nine thorough revisions. In one version, there were no quotation marks. Another changed the tenses.

No quotation marks? Since she was relating the story anyway, including what other people had told her, who knows how accurately she repeated them. Blame Cormac McCarthy as a bad influence there. It was one flash of brilliant inspiration that ultimately proved confusing. Now, how many quotation marks did I eliminate in one sweep and how many did I have to insert as repairs? Both times, it involved a lot of keystrokes.

The focus shifted greatly, too.

At first, it was on what she uncovered about her father and his times. He was a hippie, after all, so we would see the hippie scene through her perceptions of his photographic record of people and events. In the next revision the focus turned to what had attracted him to join her extended family, one so different from his own roots. That led me to questions of just what a family is – a pretty slippery concept in today’s America – and then an examination of Greek-American culture in the Midwest itself. Finally, the focus was entirely on her, period, starting with her stages of adolescent grieving and emotional recovery.

I was a bit spooked when she began talking to me through my fingers as I was typing. She was snarky, too. Talking? She was dictating. Even scarier, she sounded a tad like my younger stepdaughter.

And it wasn’t just when I was up in my third-floor lair. Sometimes she talked to me while I was swimming laps or weeding the garden.

At some point this was no longer about a distant past, in her eyes at least, even when those roots impacted the present and its conflicts. By now, I was watching her grow up with each revision as she gained a snide, seemingly cynical tone and a goth appearance. I wish I had answers or at least advice for where she and her generation of the family wind up at the end of the book, but we do know what their options are.

The book also evolved into a multigenerational affair, reaching back to her great-grandparents and later jumping ahead to her nieces and nephews within a large, tightly knit extended family.

How to structure this baffled me until I came upon the way Jonathan Lethem handled a multigenerational novel that built on four sections of four chapters each, like a mosaic. Mine has five generations at play, once you include Cassia’s nieces and nephews, but the structure holds. Somehow it works differently than the traditional chronology of twenty-some chapters.

One of the 16 chapters, the subway ride to the Brooklyn art museum and its Tibetan galleries, comes from a lengthy outtake from a Hitchhikers draft, this time two or three decades later with Cassia, the daughter, rather than her father.

I should also admit that the title remained elusive. One I liked, Cassia’s Quest, got shot down for sounding more like a space journey. Another, in desperation, Diana’s Daughter pushed Kenzie out of range. What’s Left results as a double entendre, addressing both her situation and the manuscript itself.

Finding a suitable cover image was equally challenging. I liked a failing egg yoke as a reference to her being broken open and to her family’s restaurant. Photos of a grieving child or young woman never quite fit the physical description in the text itself and also failed to reflect the span from early adolescence into her 30s.

~*~

The project also had me reconsidering my own experiences.

Was I really ever a hippie? In my promotions for the novels, I contended that we came in all varieties and nobody fully fit the stereotype. That was, in fact, a central thrust of my novels, even when hippies are nowhere to be found, as was the case in Hometown News.

In the background, the local Greek Orthodox church opened the faith and culture to my curiosity. As I’ve discussed in posts here at the Red Barn, what I encountered was quite different from my Quaker simplicity but definitely enriched it, not just theologically but as in the traditional dancing, music, and food.

It was a good thing that I didn’t encounter the novels of the masterful Jeffrey Eugenides until after What’s Left had been published. I would have been too intimidated otherwise.

In addition to Jonathan Lethem, writers of inspiration during this project included Poppie Z. Bright, Anne Rice, and John Irving.

~*~

Not only was this the most difficult of my novels to writer, with deep revisions, but the central character, the snarcastic Cassia, had me rethinking everything that had gone before. She ordered me to revise the earlier books. Or else?

One of the advantages of ebooks is that new versions can be published rather easily. In this case, as you’ll see, she had my hippie books getting new titles, many characters getting new names, and many of the stories themselves being vastly enhanced.

All from what I jokingly called my culminating novel.

And that was before I returned to the others.

Here I had finally found myself in my goal of being free from the newsroom and having time to focus more fully on my “serious” writing. I just didn’t imagine it like this.

I still held a fondness for the hippie movement and its hopes but could clearly admit I had moved on. That part was liberating.

I’m still looking for that better world, though, as you know.

So here I was, back to the drawing board.

Finally, I turned the camera on the newsroom

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

My novel about small-market journalism originated as an experiment on my first PC, an off-brand back in the days before hard drives or the Internet. In this case, I decided to build a book as a series of variations on a theme relying on a template chapter that I then copied and pasted for development. Set in a newsroom, each day was the next day’s edition but sampled months down the road. Some of you may think of the movie Groundhog Day, but that was still seven years in the future. The key to the book’s development was a set of seemingly random search-and-replace possibilities I then ran through the manuscript – on both of the 5.25-inch floppy disks that were required for the full book. Other variations required physical input, one by one. Either way, think of Mad Libs with seemingly random repetitions popping up like loose threads through the entire tale.

The basis, of course, was a composite of several of the newspapers where I had worked. By extension, it could also represent offices anywhere, but I found myself thinking about how little we usually know about our coworkers. Often, it doesn’t go much deeper than a phrase they repeat all the time or a piece of their favorite clothing or some annoying habit they have. It was enough to sketch each of them through the rounds of the book.

And then I put it aside to season before tackling it again.

When I returned afresh, I had to admit that the variations were insufficient. The loops were, uh, loopy. By then, the revision was turning into a kind of paint-by-numbers to flesh out the bones.

The tale still needed more work. So much for my pioneering experiment with A.I.

~*~

Hometown News did take my fiction in a fresh direction. It wasn’t exactly countercultural, for one thing. And it took place largely within a workplace, with day-to-day drudgery many people might identify with or at least recognize.

While Kenzie in my hippie novels labored as a photographer on his campus newspaper and then on a small-town daily chronicle, he did move on to higher pursuits once he married. In contrast, when my savings ran out, I was back in the newsroom.

Another surprise as I look back. This manuscript was also in the works before my Baltimore sabbatical big writing spree opened.

I have memories of jotting down notes while driving Interstate 95 between sales calls in Connecticut. My time on the road and in motels left me plenty of opportunity for uninterrupted thinking.

Even with TV shows like Lou Grant and Mary Tyler Moore, the public had little idea of what really happens in a newsroom. At the time, the job carried some prestige, if not outright fear.

There was an adage that every newsman had a novel waiting to be born, and there was the cliché of the crusading reporter battling corruption and crime. Even Clark Kent and Lois Lane of Daily Planet renown. Mine wouldn’t be anything like those. The villains weren’t politicians or mobsters but, in the ultimate view, capitalism itself. And here I was, cheering for small, local enterprise.

For me, what emerged is the most problematic of my published novels, yet one of the most fertile. It certainly has the darkest humor and a large dose of dystopia.

I do recall one newspaper editor who candidly admitted to having taken a popular genre novel and essentially written over it to launch his own successful line of commercially published successes. Should I note that the owners of his newspaper also had one of the top book publishing houses in the world? Connections? Don’t discount them. Just don’t think of them as literary success, which I was aspiring to.

Rather than having the high drama of big bad guys somewhere outside of the newspaper company, mine were more insidious. In my experience, though, a more pervasive conflict smoldered behind the scenes within the business itself between the journalists, on one side, and the bean counters and their bottom line of obscenely rich profits, on the other. As the saying went at the time, many newspapers were a means of printing money for their owners. Not that much of it ever got down to the workers.

Let’s just say, too, that some papers were more competitive and innovative than others.

In my job of calling on editors across the Northeast, I heard personal stories that added to my own insights from working within two dailies that had undergone major transformations under inspired leadership, as well as lessons from leading a small paper in the town I call Prairie Depot and some stints elsewhere. Let’s skip the rest of the resume and get on with the book.

It was a world all its own. Or so I thought. And yes, it was set vaguely somewhere in the American Midwest.

Check it out at my Jnana Hodson author page at Smashwords.com.

More than volcanic ash spewed out from my days in the Pacific Northwest

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Stephen King has advised novelists to have only one Big Idea in a book, but I came across that way too late to put it into practice. (Maybe if I ever tackle another novel?)

As I hunkered down in my self-imposed sabbatical in Baltimore – or was it self-incarceration or even cloistered? I did little else – my attention eventually turned to a more recent span of my life than the Kenzie novels covered. It was time to consider my nearly ten years of marriage and its breakup. If only I really knew how to star in it.

I thought that this next book would be about the most heavenly time and place imaginable, but as I typed and would eventually see, the real story was about a deeply troubled marriage, with me holding the debris after it blew up and a whirlwind romance afterward left me in a fog where I was.

So courtship, marriage, and relationship per se were one big subject. (Idea, in King’s expression, feels too refined.)

The other was the Pacific Northwest as seen from the other side of the Cascade mountains in Washington state, a land that is essentially desert rather than rainy gray Seattle.

One was something many people had some familiarity with, but the other was what I found more enticing as a writer. Besides, I had written many landscape poems I could draw from. Swami’s insight from her first visit to India, that the reason Hinduism had so many gods was a reflection of the ways each locale had a distinct vibe. The Yakima Valley and the Cascades were unlike anything I had experienced in the eastern half of the U.S. Especially the vast spaces you never see in a movie or read about in a book. And there I was with my new bride.

My inner drive was to better understand – and remember – the events leading up to what I thought was near perfection, my Promised Land. Except that it all blew up after four heady years, and we retreated eastward in haste. Now, six years later, I was trying to make sense of everything, and writing is my primary tool of thought.

One big hurdle was that I still had too many unresolved issues to provide clarity on the relationship struggles. I couldn’t see that the darling I thought every reader would find fascinating was, in a wider view, dislikable.

The plot – and the manuscript – kept growing by the proverbial pound.

Baltimore for me was so many lonely nights broken periodically by sex that wasn’t with my beloved. The whirlwind who came after the marriage. The one others have called my one true love. If only she had been true.

~*~

I really should go back to my journals to get a clearer sense of what I was going through both as I drafted it and also during its revisions. I suspect the reality would be painful, even embarrassing, and as I write this, those volumes are wrapped in plastic under the house renovation. Maybe that’s for the better.

What was I even originally calling the manuscript?

What coalesced for me was the many dimensions of the word “promise,” including the wedding vow, potential, and what I saw as our Promised Land. And then I had the flash of ending the book on a shocking note.

Well, so had much of my life.

I suspect that I spent far more effort than I’ve thought on the novel that now stands as Nearly Canaan.

Somehow, I even had a round with a real literary agent, who ultimately passed on the project.

During later revisions in New Hampshire, the big blob of material I had in hand turned into three parallel volumes – Promise, Peel (as in apple), and St. Helens in the Mix. And I was wondering about my subsequent engagement and the young woman I thought was a perfect subject for later. (I now see how banal that would have been.)

Would the project have been any easier if I had all the facts rather than empty denials and evasions? What if I had steered this more into the fantasy realm, perhaps having the earth magically speak directly to Jaya? Or broken it into a sequence of short books, each with a sharper focus?

A very bruised journalist, alas, was still at the helm, one still engaged in a difficult, painful exile and trying to report on the facts before me.

~*~

I’m trying to recall books and authors I was reading at the time, especially ones that might have nurtured this project. What comes to mind are Ann Tyler (I can smell the back entry of some homes in her Roland Park section of Baltimore); the Random House Vintage Contemporaries series edited by Gary Fisketjon and writers like Jay McInerney (Ransom more than Bright Lights, Big City) and Tama Janowitz; beyond that, Larry McMurtry, Tom Robbins, and Joan Didion; as well as Calvin Trillin’s U.S. Journal letters from here or there in the New Yorker. I also had John Nichols (Milagro Beanfield Wars), Ken Kesey (Sometimes a Great Notion), Edward Abbey, and Ecotopia.

~*~

Promise came out as an ebook at Smashwords but went nowhere. Rather than pay for covers for two companion volumes, I released them as PDF freebies at my Thistle Finch imprint, only to find nobody was downloading anything that big. Ditto for the full-length poetry collections. There would be a major refocusing of the offerings.