Tag: Personal

What do you mean, how do I write?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Isn’t it obvious, one word at a time? Except it’s more complicated than that, and every writer approaches the deed differently.

I would like to approach a writing project the way Neal Welliver did his large-scale paintings, starting in the upper left-hand corner and finishing in the lower right. He worked with a tightly defined palate, too. Instead, I wind up more like Mark Rothko, painting over earlier parts, adding or scraping off layers – what’s known as “painterly.”

For novelists, the difference is posed as “outliner,” meaning someone who starts out with an outline and pretty much sticks with it, versus a “pantser,” going by the seat-of-the-pants with perhaps a vague sense of a destination, which may very well change en route.

You can guess which camp I’m in. As another artist put it, what’s the point of putting all that work in if you already know the ending?

For the record, I hated outlining when it was assigned as school homework. It seemed redundant.

~*~

I don’t like formal prompts, by the way. Instead, I often start with something that keeps nagging at me, the way the flash of a trackside worker in Brooklyn – a gandy dancer – turned into a subway line hitchhiker. (Maybe that third element, the unique word, turned the trick.)

As a project percolates, so do related ideas during the rest of my day, leading to piles of scribbled notes to weave in. When I lived in New Hampshire’s seacoast region and worked in Manchester, I had an hour commute in each direction, largely through rural country. I kept a notebook and pen at hand as I drove. Likewise, some of my favorite lines in What’s Left came to mind while swimming laps in the city’s indoor pool. As soon as I was back in the locker room, I was scribbling. Getting up from the keyboard every hour or so, sometimes adding a short walk, also works wonders. As a journalist, some of my best headlines came on my way to the men’s room or back.

Much of my writing then becomes the way of connecting two thoughts or flashes.

Outtakes from other projects also get recycled, though they rarely wind up quite how they began. I’ve drawn heavily from correspondence, maps, and photos as well, as well as silent meditation. As has been said, some of the best barns in New England were designed in Quaker Meeting, and it is amazing how many problems get worked out by stepping away from them.

~*~

As much as I’ve longed for an editor or a partner truly in sync with what I’m about, that hasn’t been the case, not since my first lover, back in college. Instead, I’ve been a lone ranger. It’s meant putting big projects aside for several months or even years before coming back to them afresh.

~*~

There are also the epiphanies when a character starts dictating the story, as well as the times of slogging through mud.

I should also mention learning from other writers, especially by example.

~*~

Determining when a work is finished is usually a mystery. My high school art teacher used to say I either stopped too so or else overworked a piece. I’d prefer too soon, since my usual taste leans toward austere. Think Quaker, Shaker, or Zen.

Another answer would be that I stop when I have nothing more to say on the project, for now. Or, as I’ve heard elsewhere, when the writer just gets tired of it.

As a newsman, a more common answer was the arrival of a deadline.

Why do people want to know about writer’s workroom?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Is it even a sanctuary? I call mine a studio, while my spouse refers to it as my lair.

In my first four apartments, mine was in a corner of a room, including three where I sat cross-legged. (Not an option any more, thanks to aging. The sitting on the floor, I mean.) The fourth had a circular utility spool on its side as a table and some kind of chair. If you don’t remember that piece of hippie furniture, just ask.

In later moves, I rented apartments having a second bedroom I could dedicate to the Real Work.

The most impressive was in the small townhouse, where my dream studio occupied the only bedroom upstairs. With its hanging ferns, it looked pretty impressive – from the street, especially, I configured the downstairs into a comfy studio apartment.

There’s the question about sitting in front of a window, providing some kind of view. Annie Dillard, for one, has weighed in totally against that, preferring concrete blocks. At the other extreme, I remember overhearing one wannabe writer detailing to her husband all of the remodeling that was to be done to their house so she could take up writing the novel she planned.

I’ve had both. My office chair in the townhouse gave me a commanding view of the parking lot and water tower beyond. Well, the arrangement gave me a feeling of command, period. In my second apartment in Baltimore, my studio overlooked a set of AM radio towers but my desk stared straight into a wall. The first had looked down on some small urban backyards and an A&P grocery beyond an alley.

Once I moved to Dover and remarried, I wound up in the north half of the third floor, under the eaves, as you can see in previous posts here at the Red Barn.

At the moment, I’m in a corner of my bedroom, in front of a window and our backyard. Once our renovations are finished, I’ll be upstairs but with the window further above me.

Since I’m pretty much paper-free these days, I need far less tabletop and filing cabinets – remember those? You can’t even give them away any more. They’re rather like used pianos.

Well, one friend gets a new chair for each new book, sometimes nothing more than an aluminum lawn chair, and he’s done quite well, getting reviewed in both the New York Times and its Sunday book section or magazine and sometimes showing up on the bestseller list.

What’s usually overlooked is the supporting space – filing cabinets (yes, a few remain), bookshelves, tables, additional seating, even a daybed or couch, perhaps. Dillard, I recall, had some kind of cube. I think fondly of a Mainer who had the top half of a small barn remodeled for his library and cozy reading and writing space – it was the inspiration of what I hoped to do to our red barn, a dream that never quite materialized.

One big transformation for me has been the shift from paper to digital. I mean, I rarely print out anything anymore. For a while, I didn’t even have a printer. And, when I was up on the third floor, our printer was down on the main floor, accessible to the rest of the family. That wireless connection was a huge advance over the proprietary cord attachment.

I require far less room now than I did when I dreamed of converting the top of my red barn into a studio and library. My, that was grandiose! I hate to think what the heating bill would have been, just for starters. And besides, once we went from five to two in the household, the entire equation changed.

~*~

Equally fascinating is a writer’s use of time.

Charles Bukowski insisted on daily “butt time” at the keyboard, while Jack Kerouac would charge up for a two-week mostly sleepless typing orgy every six months or more.

I’ve known both but lean more these days toward Bukowski.

For much of my adult life, I felt guilty for the reality that writing took away from so many other things I “should” be doing. It was somehow selfish. One summer, though, at a Quaker gathering on the Bowdoin College campus in Maine, I was in a workshop on prayer. The facilitator handed us each a card and told us to write a prayer request – for something for ourselves. For most of the circle, maybe all, this came as a shock. We were prepared to pray for world peace or people we knew, but not ourselves.

So we broke out into groups of three or four, and prayed for each other’s requests. To my surprise, I felt liberated. One participant told my writing was my gift and to respect that. It made it much easier for me to dedicate one day a week to my writing efforts – I was on a four-day workweek at the time, but managed to continue that focus after going back to the traditional five.

~*~

My productive time in college was after midnight. After living in the ashram, that shifted to dawn. During my sabbatical, it was two stretches – one roughly 10 am to 2 pm and then after 10 pm to whenever.

I had big daily and weekly schedule plans for my retirement years, but now that I’m there, those are either amusing or embarrassing. I spend way too much of my life at this laptop, let’s simply say.

Remember, Internet and blogging weren’t a factor back when I was dreaming of being free of the daily office.

Earlier in this series I touched on authors who said they wrote only two or four hours a day and my shock that it wasn’t more.

Now, though, I’m seeing that in a different light. In my time with the newspaper syndicate, my “productive” time was a mere hour-and-a-half to two hours a day when I called on editors in person. The rest of the time was travel, preparing for the sales call, following up with phone calls and letters, filing expense and mileage reports along with reactions – what I term infrastructure. It’s a pattern I see as more common than the assembly line productivity that’s somehow instilled in me. You know, the reaction when you see a Road Work sign and then see three guys doing nothing more than smoking a cigarette.

Or, as I realized when I was stationed in the composing room on a Saturday night and moving pages for the Sunday editions, I more than earned my week’s pay in an hour-and-a-half as we raced to meet deadline. It was a furious crush. If those papers weren’t in supermarkets or readers’ homes across the state on time, we’d lose sales and subscribers.

In other words, you can’t go by assembly-line wage thinking.

Wandering through a personal wilderness without Moses or Miriam

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Nothing was holding me Baltimore, as much as I loved it. And so, getting back into the American workforce in my mid-30s, I wound up in New Hampshire with the equivalent of a basket of wet literary laundry on those 5¼-inch floppy diskettes.

Although I had called on newspaper editors throughout the region, New England was largely unfamiliar to me. Apart from one couple in Boston, I knew no one. Beyond that, my love life was in ashes.

Thus, I unpacked in a new life along the Merrimack River in New Hampshire, the first of three addresses I would have in the state, fully intent on revising the lode I had mined and finding a literary agent or publisher once I got settled into my new job on the night shift.

What intrigues me looking back is that nothing in my life after my move to Baltimore prompted new fiction. Some details got woven into the revisions, but my literary output during the next three decades was mostly poetry, a more manageable format considering my hours of paid labor. Writing fiction demands the luxury of immersing yourself fully in the lives of your characters. It takes more than a full day once a week.

Besides, unlike my previous settings, New England has been thoroughly mined as far as fiction goes. What could I add to the picture? It had more layers and nuances than my previous locations, and many of them remained cryptic. Besides, I had enough to contend with in my existing manuscripts and the rapidly changing, increasingly confounding, commercial book world. Fewer publishers were accepting fiction, and those that did kept merging. More ominously, they weren’t nurturing promising authors with the hopes of getting a hit five books down the road but rather expected a blockbuster right out of the starting gate – if you could get in. It felt a lot like I had encountered as a newspaper syndicate field representative.

I was, however, appearing widely in the small-press literary scene, mostly with poetry but also chapter excerpts from the lingering novels. It kept me going.

~*~

My persistence finally paid off. After collecting the proverbial stack of rejections and a more widespread snubbing in which agents didn’t even bother to return the self-addressed-stamped-envelope, I finally got a nibble to co-publish with a Santa Barbara press of some distinction. Three years after my move to New England, Subway Hitchhikers appeared in print, right into what became the worst bookselling season in memory, thanks to the First Iraq War. Just my luck.

I did get one extended – and favorable – review, but that was it, no matter how much I pushed the self-promotion. My job schedule, which included a double-shift on Saturday, didn’t help. I couldn’t go to book fairs or author workshops.

My copies to sell appeared shortly after I had moved to a small townhouse atop the highest point in town. Moving them into the hands of readers and reviewers was the next challenge. As I said about the book market?

What did change was my self-image. Publication, for me, was the equivalent of a Master’s degree. I had something to show for my work. People respected that, even if they didn’t buy a copy. As for my personal life? There was a second Summer of Love! I was back in the euphoria of the early ‘70s, only better.

The swirl also had me thinking I could solve the tangle of my Pacific Northwest tale, so I kept revising, usually on a vacation week or holiday weekend.

And then, in 2005, Adventures on a Yoga Farm was published – as a pioneering ebook at PulpBits in Vermont. Again, it went nowhere as far as recognition, though several incarnations later, it’s Yoga Bootcamp and a much better book. As for timing? The yoga movement hadn’t yet rebounded and PDF books never really caught on. There I was ahead of the curve.

Somewhere in that stretch, my PC’s green screen went dead, already obsolete, meaning forget finding a replacement. Instead, the option was to upgrade to a new computer, one with a hard disk and telephone access to an online browser. Email was still somewhere off in the future. And I had to convert all of my keyboarded material from WordPerfect 4.1 to Microsoft’s Word. I wasn’t happy.

Are you one of the folks who recognizes these steps? Or are they all way before you came along?

And who sez the writing life is glamorous or that it runs along the lines of the movie plot were you’re suddenly rich and famous?

As I look back on this period, I see myself in a kind of wandering in the Sinai without a Moses or his sister Miriam to guide me. At least I developed an active social life, largely through contradancing and Quakers, and I was regularly riding Boston’s Green Line in underground tunnels.

Was avoiding a genre a mistake?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Introduced to contemporary Inuit art by professor who had been in Alaska as a consultant for the drafting of state constitution, I was told of one artist who never did a similar piece twice. If he carved an image of a standing bear, that was it – not even a painting or print would follow in that vein.

Apart from working in a series, which feels more like developing a single long piece, I’ve tried to avoid any sense of getting stuck in a vein of seeming repetition. I mean, if I do another bear, it’s going to be sitting or stretched out or even nursing cubs.

I have taken the thought to heart. I’ve wanted each of my books to be distinctly different.

Most readers, though, are different. Not just from me, but from art collectors, too. When these readers enter a bookstore, they want to know which way to head and then which shelves are most likely to produce pay dirt. In addition, publishers want to invest in sure-fire hits, even of a modest sort. Beyond that, librarians and literature teachers want to have labels to ease the handling of authors and new books.

And that’s why genres proliferate.

My, how naïve I was, setting out to write fiction. What’s the story? How well is it told? What’s it’s style?

First off, I don’t read in a genre. I’m not shopping for sci fi, per se, or romance or mystery or detective or fantasy or historical of any kind or young adult or even erotica aka pornography. And bestseller status means nothing for me, a veteran of the small-press scene. Nope, I’m fishing in what’s now called literary fiction, especially of the contemporary vein.

And, as I’ve learned, that label can be the kiss of death.

~*~

I object to genre mostly because it leads to stale, cliché ridden cookie-cutter commodities produced for mass consumption. I find them too predictable, formulaic, and jargon-filled. A genre comes with the requisite tropes, after all.

I write and read to discover, to make sense of life as I’ve known it, especially, no matter how far afield that goes. Haven’t I wandered across the Arctic or Sahara in some form, after all? I don’t need to go into interstellar space or an alternate reality to get away from everything. In fact, I doubt I can go anywhere without taking my personal baggage along. How about you?

 ~*~

As for conflict?

When Mrs. Hines, my senior-year high school English teacher, said that all fiction is based on conflict, I piped up, contrarian that I am, “Oh, no it’s not!” To some degree, I’ve been trying to prove my case.

Nor would anything I’ve done fit Kurt Vonnegut’s advice, “Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them – in order that the reader may see what they are made of.”

There are no murders or bear attacks or invading armies in my stories. Well, maybe off somewhere in the distance. They never get personal. think most of my characters are nice folks.  Daffodil Uprising and Hometown News have the most outward conflict, I’d say, while Subway Visions has almost none. The most recent revisions have added some layers of darkness but not enough to alter the overall direction.

Stepping back, though, I see something that surprises me alone these lines. Almost all of my novels are countercultural, by definition in conflict with the surrounding society. In addition, the central conflicts are usually internal or small scale. In the Secret Side of Jaya, she sees and hears things others don’t. Tell me that’s not a conflict. Nearly Canaan examines the consequences of times and places a promise falls short, one after another, in the characters’ lives.

~*~

Still, I have to ask if my resistance against genre or commercial publishing has really been another fatal flaw in my ambitions. Would Subway Visions been more successful if I’d recast it as fantasy, for instance?

Was it foolish of me to avoid genre?

My genre, such as it is? Experimental fiction? It fits me but does little to attract a book buyer.

How about “contemporary history,” which is not an oxymoron. So much that’s happened in my lifetime is ancient history to the majority of the population. My daughters listen amazed at the era – did this or that really happen? Yes, I reply, and you take it all for granted. (Or granite, as I prefer.) So much of it runs counter to the mass-media stereotypes. Yes, my focus has been counterculture, as I’ve encountered it.

~*~

I do like the term genre-bending, which I’ve recently encountered. It’s something I was already exploring in the final round of revisions, especially once Cassia went goth.

Haunted by a big bad Wolfe in a white suit

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 5 Comments

“You’ll be the next Tom Wolfe,” one creative writing prof promised me. I loved the guy’s flashy writing and, for the most part, his subject matter.

Where he eventually rubbed me wrong was his consternation that no big novel of the hippie era had appeared. There, he kept ringing as a prompt for me.

Part of his hook for me was the fact that my dream job in the newspaper world would have been as a columnist, especially one like Hub Meeker’s State of the Arts in the Dayton Journal Herald. Arts journalism was, alas, a shrinking field, along with the more general community columnist, like that paper’s Marj Heydock or Binghamton’s Tom Cawley.

Wolfe had briefly been one of those, at the New York Herald Tribune.

The bigger part, of course, was about that novel. He was dismissing Richard Brautigan’s unique voice altogether and others, like Gurney Norman, John Nichols, Tom Robbins, who rode the vibe.

Wolfe was also snidely suggesting that he had been the one exception, with his Electric Acid Kool-Aid Test, which really wasn’t a novel and predated the blossoming of the hippie movement.

His idea of the Big Hippie Novel reeked of the misguided quest for a Great American Novel.

Quite simply, there were too many strands of the movement to fit into a single book. Political or social action, anti-war witness, civil rights, gender equality, environmental awareness, organic and vegetarian foods, intentional community, group housing, alternative education were all part of it, even before the sex, drugs, rock’n’roll, hair, fashion, or slang.

These other factors would come more fully into play when I revised Daffodil Sunrise into Daffodil Uprising, and Hippie Drum and Hippie Love into Pit-a-Pat High Jinks.

I’d like to think of those books as nominees for the Big Hippie Novel distinction.

Wolfe’s charge also overlooks the outstanding nonfiction books that reflected the experience, such as Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Moreover, I still feel that many of the difficulties in the current political scene arise from a failure to clearly understand the demons raging from the Vietnam conflict, both for those who fought in the army and those who fought the unjustified war itself.

So here we were, struggling through disco without having faced the lessons of either the hippie outbreak or the Vietnam disease. Hippie had become a dirty word, and many who had been happy to be one were no in psychological denial. It was something nobody wanted to relive either, apart from maybe Woodstock.

As others have observed, an ignorance of history carries a heavy price.

Everybody should get a sabbatical

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Shortly before finding myself officially unemployed, I engaged a typist to prepare a clean draft of Subway Hitchhikers for submission to literary agents or book editors. At least that would be moving forward.

And then, when the ax fell, I was surprised to find that after arriving in Baltimore, in debt from divorce and selling a house at a loss in a recession, I had saved up a bundle in just two years. Having a company car and an expense account covering my meals during the week added up. Rather than return immediately to the workforce, I decided to give myself some time off, a sabbatical, as it were, to concentrate on the writing I had always wanted to do. The kind that would put my name on the cover and the spine. Something more lasting than a byline on a daily paper or even, more prestigiously, a magazine.

Watching a colleague who was waiting till retirement before he could tackle the children’s book he always wanted to write nagged at me. I had heard a few similar dreams – wait for retirement. Except that a heart attack felled Russ shortly after he got that farewell cake.

In my job-free spree, I hunkered down to hard writing, up to 12 hours a day. By this point, I was pretty proficient with my personal computer and its dot-matrix printer. And so, while she was typing up Hitchhikers, I turned to keyboarding other material.

What I see as I look back on my sabbatical was that I entered the year more prepared than I’ve assumed. It wasn’t like I was sitting down and staring at a blank page and waiting for inspiration to strike. Besides, I had journal notes, correspondence, even maps and photos to draw on.

Every writer works differently, as interviews in the Paris Review demonstrated. The one with Jack Kerouac had inspired to use the end rolls of teletype paper for drafting, freeing me from having to keep inserting new sheets into the typewriter. Using a PC was like that, only instead of having to replace paper I had a 5¼-inch flopping disk that filled up. If only I had an editor waiting, like he had.

As I awaited word on my query letters to agents and publishers, I began examining my life from college to the present through the eyes of fiction. Keyboarding large sections from my journals gave me a foundation for following my moves from the East Coast back to Ohio, on to Indiana, again, and finally the Pacific Northwest, events that included my first marriage. Making it work as fiction, though, was the challenge.

My primitive PC was still a huge advance over typewriters, in my case, an Olivetti Editor 2. And here I had been seeing the ubiquitous IBM Selectric as an enviable sign of a successful writer? The thought is rather amusing today. Gee, and there was no Internet yet, hard as that is to believe now.

In my sabbatical I concentrated on a single manuscript and then put it aside as I awaited feedback from potential agents or publishers or maybe just for a space to season until I could come back to it afresh. That opened a window to start drafting another. I was a fiend, having waited years for this opportunity.

My hunkered down life? I got the deepest tan of my life by taking a midday break at the pool, at least through the summer. And did get out for hikes, especially in nearby pine barrens that had lead mine remains and a waterfall. Spiritually, I was connecting with Plain Quakers, liberal Mennonites, former Amish, and a small circle from the Church of the Brethren – all in the pacifist tradition. There was even a writers’ group that Tom Clancy addressed just as he was on the cusp of celebrity.

What I see now when I look at my earlier writing is that I could never have created those pages later in my life. Too many details would have vanished, along with the urgency and originality and even the voice.

The sabbatical was also a period of heavy reading for me, including the brat pack being edited by Gary Fisketjon at Vintage Contemporaries, Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, and George Eliot’s Middlemarch.

As my savings ran out, I still hadn’t found an agent or publisher. Realizing I’d need at least another year clear to achieve that, I reluctantly headed back to my career in newspaper journalism, this time in New Hampshire. There was a crucial shift, though. The archconservative Union Leader had a unionized newsroom where I could go back into the ranks as an editor and still earn more than most small paper managing editors across the country. I even had job security and a 35-hour workweek that allowed me time for a real life.

I packed up with the first rambling draft of what would become Promise, released via Smashwords in 2013, and two related novels, plus Hometown News and all of the outtakes from the subway project. I could continue to revise those drafts in my free time, but the book publishing world was changing in ways that baffled even the most celebrated literary agents.

Looking back, I must admit how much risk I took in my year off. I had no health insurance, for one thing, and no guarantee I could return to the shrinking ranks of journalism. I was also perceiving the pace I was working at could not be sustained.

I had been appalled in reading interviews with famed authors who boasted that they worked four hours a day – what slackers, I thought. Now I see that as a rather lavish amount of time, considering the additional hours of research, related correspondence, submissions, reading, and basic home-business demands (yes, writing is a business). Gee, how did I overlook all those hours of lunch conferences or cocktail hours in the lives of the literati, which were essentially business? Or even their hours in psychotherapy?

Two years on the road came as a welcome respite

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The ‘80s hit me with a couple of hard setbacks. First, Mount St. Helens blew up, as did my job in what I had seen as my Promised Land. I went bouncing back east, first to a stint along the upper Mississippi in Iowa and then three years in the Rust Belt of Ohio, where my shirt-sleeve management position ate up 60 hours or more of my life every week. Shortly after my first marriage fell apart there, my job was eliminated. At least I had a hot love going, with an engagement to be announced once I could relocate to Baltimore, where she had moved for her studies.

Somehow, I landed a field representative job with the Chicago Tribune’s newspaper features syndication service, one that allowed me to move anywhere I wanted within the 14 northeastern states I would be covering. Baltimore was perfect.

Except, once I ensconced in the top floor of an 1840s rowhouse in a gentile in-town neighborhood, my beloved wasn’t. If only I could get a straight answer from her.

Complicating matters was that I was out on the road three weeks out of four, home only to unpack and repack on the weekends. The job introduced me to a world many American men know: frequent flyer lounges, taxis and limos, hotels and motels, expense and mileage reports, quarterly sales meetings, three-piece suits custom made at Joseph Banks, a company car, bonuses. Newspaper management, especially on the smaller papers that I had known, were nothing like that. You might get a nice note from your boss or someone up the ladder thanking you for a particular job well done.

Getting from one sales call to the next gave me a lot of time for thinking as I drove or even reading, if I was flying. The time allowed me to decompress from a decade that had included 11 addresses in seven states. I could journey at ease or read or revise earlier manuscripts at night in my room, whatever its number.

My personal life included some of the loneliest nights ever but also led to my best friendship ever, a Plain Quaker who worked as a supermarket meatcutter when he wasn’t working as a nurse. I also had a circle of Mennonites who introduced me to four-part a cappella part-singing, a step that would lead me to the excellent choirs I would join in Boston and Eastport. I also visited among Friends, aka Quakers, and sometimes managed a few hours for genealogical libraries and archives or walking through cemeteries where my ancestors are buried. I even revisited the ashram and my old stomping grounds in upstate New York.

None of this apart from the newspaper world has entered my fiction directly. I thought she would be a fine character to build on, except in retrospect it turned out all too banal. What these experiences did feed was my poetry later.

Thanks to my best friend from my junior high and high school years, who was now living an hour south – unlike the previous decade, where we kept landing on opposite ends of the country – I obtained my first PC, something some of his buddies were building. It had 5¼-inch floppy disks, which would be ancient history to so many tech-savvy youths today.

In my travels, I saw much industrial wasteland. Not just Pittsburgh and western Pennsylvania or Sparrows Point outside Baltimore, but also around Philadelphia, across upstate New York, in Worcester and Buzzards Bay and the Merrimac/Merrimack River in Massachusetts and New Hampshire.

The newspaper industry was also taking hard hits. As manufacturing jobs disappeared, so did readership for afternoon papers, which were read by people taking the bus home or waiting for dinner. That greatly reduced the opportunity to place new features in their pages. As I was told, only a few years earlier, I would have had no difficulty selling to editors. Now, the challenge was keeping them happy with what they were already buying. I also saw great turnover at the helm of papers. I would curry an editor and have promises for a sale once the new annual budget was approved, only to find that he was no longer there in a year. The position I had aspired to and been groomed for was now revealed to be something less than desirable.

What became clear to the five of us out on the road was that the business was in trouble. One or more of us would be cut. I was the one. Besides, I really never was much of a salesman.

My observations of visiting other papers did augment my actual newsroom experiences that would emerge as the novel Hometown News.

How the style and ethics of my journalism career clashed with my literary ambitions

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

When I sat down to my personal writing, I felt an ongoing tension between the daily grind of newspaper editing that paid my bills, contrasted to my ambitions for something more permanent, more confidential, and more creatively advanced than the anonymous work that went into the next day’s trash. The pejorative “hack writer,” often applied to newspapermen from the early 18th century on, was what I aspired to rise above. The term has haunted me ever since reading Samuel Johnson’s derision.

In my private labor I aimed for something unique, thoughtful, sophisticated, meticulously developed, complex, and even challenging for both me and the reader. If news stories limited attribution for a quote as the neutral “said,” I nearly banished that colorless word from my prose, relying instead on everything from “answered” or “asserted” to “cried” or “swore“ to “wept” or perhaps “whispered,” with a wide range of variants in between. Do note, I’ve come to treasure a thesaurus for ways in can enrichen a text and sharpen the underlying thought and feelings, even though doing so requires additional time and consideration.

My journals, on the other hand, sought mostly to catch up on my life from the previous entry, often in cryptic terms I might get back to and fill in later, though that rarely happened.

~*~

Hemingway could write for a sixth-grade level reader because he was no longer in a newsroom. It could kill you, believe me, if it’s all you got to do.

I needed to foster my literary ambitions simply to keep my editing skills sharp.

It did make for tension in my private work, though. I still love a good 250-word sentence.

~*~

Let me also say something of the ethics. Being told not to wear a politician’s campaign button. No appearance of partisanship. Leonard Downing of the Washington Post even refused to vote in an election for fear it would taint his neutrality or objectivity.

Were we, as one girlfriend taunted me, ethically castrated? My first editor, Glenn Thompson, worked behind the scenes to get progressive things in motion and did urge us interns to have causes.

By the way, I have worked for some very conservative papers and also some very liberal ones. It didn’t affect what I did for them.

Have you ever done genealogy?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

While living in the small industrial city that’s the setting for Hometown News, I began exploring my genetic roots, at least on my father’s side. It involved a lot of correspondence, especially with a cousin of my dad’s generation, as well as probing whatever records we could dig up.

By this time, my spiritual practice had recentered in the Quaker stream, or Society of Friends, where it turned out my ancestors had been active from the early 1660s until my great-grandfather moved from North Carolina to Ohio and “married out” in 1893. I now had access to historic minutes, correspondence, journals, and other resources that proved helpful.

My findings are presented on my Orphan George blog, should you be interested.

What fascinates me in regards to my fiction is the fact that so many of my ancestors were essentially countercultural in regard to the broader society. They were pacifist, for one, and wore distinctive garb and used distinctive language. (Sound hippie?) In North Carolina, their community had the first manumission society in the state, buying freedom for slaves and transporting them to safer lands. This was not the Deep South of popular culture.

These findings, and the research methods, proved quite helpful when I drafted my nonfiction New England history, Quaking Dover.

The techniques and insights also played into my novel What’s Left, where I took Cassia’s lineage on both sides back to her great-grandparents, including their quite different faith traditions.

I am intrigued by the values and practices from one generation to another. What is rejected and what is embraced?

In my case, I discarded the mainstream Christianity and lifestyle of my parents and grandparents only to find myself later reconnecting with much of the radical Christianity and countercultural outlooks of my great-grandparents. Well, most of them on my dad’s side. My mother’s were an entirely different matter.

As I’ve found, genealogy often presents a much different history than we’re taught in the conventional versions, especially when our focus is on everyday people rather than the political and military leaders and the upper class. The lives can go ways we wouldn’t have plotted. For instance, my family in North Carolina had a gold mine.

Big city, big dreams

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Who was I to think I could say something fresh about underground public transit? Well, the outsider has long had a place in the arts … and in comedy.

I had expected to wind up living in a big city, where I’d have access to frequent symphony concerts and perhaps opera as well. Foreign films, well-stocked bookstores, kindred souls. All the rest. My life journey and my career went another way, but I still wound up as a subway rider, of sorts. I was far from a private jet or even taxi kind of existence.

My introduction to underground transit probably came in a series of big, cartoonish, wildly rendered Subway Riders canvases that received a special exhibit at the Dayton Art Institute sometime in my high school years. I think they were by a hot New York rising star who was visiting Ohio as an artist-in-residence or an arts school guest instructor, though his identity eludes me now. Flash in the pan? Rubes in the sticks?

I wasn’t exactly wowed, but I was intrigued. He wasn’t Rembrandt.

The furthest east I’d been was Pittsburgh. Perhaps the next year my family got to Toronto and Montreal, though I didn’t venture on the subway in either of those cities.

Do families even take such vacations on the road nowadays? We did have our camping gear in the trunk of our red Buick Roadmaster.

~*~

Writing about subways – becoming fascinated by them, their offensive grit, stench, and loud noises included – was about the last thing I would have expected when I graduated from college or even high school. I was a Midwesterner through and through. The closest I had come to what I saw in those Subway Rider paintings was on the City Transit trolleys at rush hour. We definitely weren’t flashing along a dark tunnel or loading by hoards or packed together like sardines.

But people kept telling me I wasn’t destined for my hometown, no matter how loyal I felt. Or was that defensive? The message they conveyed was that I should look to Manhattan or some equivalent opportunity. Even Cincinnati, an hour away, looked sophisticated.

The hippie outbreak, or Revolution of Peace & Love, was still somewhere in the future, though the Beatles were shaking the status quo and skipping around Elvis in what we’d now call the pop culture scene. Culture was, let me emphasize, concerned with things that would raise our vision and intelligence rather than merely mark social norms as in averages, either mainstream or ethnic.

By the time I actually rode a subway train, I was nine months away from earning an urban studies certificate, thanks to my multi-disciplinary college studies. The journalism career that embraced me would instead lead out in the boonies or an equivalent emotional wilderness.

~*~

My book that sprang from those encounters started out short and flashy as its first draft in ’73. Inspired, in part, by Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America, I typed away sitting cross-legged before a converted coffee table and my beloved Olivetti Lettra 22 blue typewriter. The very portable one.

Graffiti, wild splashes. This was going to be my wild hippie book, the essence of it all. It had the Midwest – what would emerge as Daffodil – and it had the Big Apple, where so many of the freaks I knew after graduation had grown up. The movement was a confusing clash of youthful excess.

It was too much – way too much, actually.

By the time I distilled it down into what was published as Subway Hitchhikers, it was more of a lacy collage presented in a strobe-light kind of then/now alternation that I came to see was overly ambitious to be effective rather than confusing.

What I did sense was the way big cities draw on the interior landscape, almost like vampires on the innocent. Not that I ever expressed it that openly, but I am now thinking it fit Gotham if only I were usually trying to look at the bright side of life.

Was it even a novel? Short, and perhaps meta-fiction?

Unlike any other.