Tag: Relationships

Keeping track of a big cast

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

A multi-generational family tale like the one in my novel What’s Left can lead to a lot of characters, and keeping them all straight can be a problem.

My plot line takes a few twists that minimize their numbers, but when you get four generations over time, it’s bound to create a challenge, no matter how hard you try. Sometimes it helps to stick with somebody who knows everybody, when you’re circulating through the crowd.

When reading a big book, do you have tricks for keeping track of the individuals? Anything you’d like to share?

~*~

Just listen to the melody.

Construction report

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

behind plaster we rip from the kitchen crumbling accounts of protracted death Floyd Collins 15 days 1925 age 36 Sand Cave Crystal Cave Kentucky as published in Boston, accounting inescapably cold mud and implacable rock when my own parents were first walking, yet this story my mother related as if she were on the carnival rides of its macabre vigil but now we find nothing holding this roof to the walls so much callous indifference riding on the blind arrogance a foolish turn, perchance, or just dumb luck when it comes to catastrophe of course, I remember living on the roof of a cavern down in muddy Indiana

Remarkably, it seems

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

what’s happened I no longer want to travel or climb the high mountains or is it just all the moves across the continent and back, my years on the road, my commute daily so stretched I’d contract into my nest and grounds for reading or revision, the places I’ve been and people I’ve known so many I want to know my own better . people come from all over the globe to see the landscape I call home

 

Family terms of affection

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

While walking down the street after finishing a revision of my novel What’s Left, I noticed a vanity license plate with five letters, PAPOU. I smiled, recognizing the Greek for “grandpa.” The car was parked in front of the Orthodox church. Wonder if I know him.

Do you have a similar affectionate term for your grandparents?

 

Seriously, Saul

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

stuffed in the official portrait how Happy it is Ground Hog’s Day already with its SOLAR SEASON running six weeks ahead of the calendar, thus the first half of spring overlaps I don’t care what some people say, a photocopied Christmas message still delivers So how was the Holy Land?

 

Drawing on strong roots

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

While my novel What’s Left picks up a generation after the final events in my Subway Visions tale, I found myself needing a better understanding of the five siblings’ roots. That meant going back not just one generation but two in this case.

Have you ever done genealogy or looked into your family’s history? Are there stories you feel would make for good fiction? How about the characters, too?

~*~

Here’s how her ancestry might have looked back in the Old World.

Merrily, Noelle

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

what news you published, contorting that instant, overcome with discomfort, a whirl as alert as any orchestra as that last confused and perplexing note confirms coyly your reckless addiction to lost causes, frankly in retrospect, it really didn’t take hours to start your obligating my leap without a job I’d subscribe to, oh, yes, the lifeblood we identify when you demand a reply, there simply isn’t enough time in two days for whatever prevented your return to the meetinghouse that weekend

So much for their model of a commune

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

When Cassia’s future father moves in with Nita’s four siblings, their big old Victorian house and its household are practically a hippie commune.

But then, when her parents’ generation begins marrying and having children, things change.

Still, she’d grown up as part of a tightly knit extended family, one that was just about everything his hadn’t been.

Where was your family when you were starting out as an adult? Nearby or far away?

Have you ever lived in a group household?

 

In your mother’s dreams

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

brutal deep-freeze, heavy snowfall blanket, ice dams on roofs, melting drips through ceilings the hill resembled a resort ski condo development appropriate considering the city-operated slope on the other side of the expressway runs a single chair-lift I tour the surrounding woods on cross-country blades and observe bald eagles wintering along the Merrimack and recall the rainforest of the Olympic Peninsula, desert along the Yakima, views down over the Mississippi or Potomac or elsewhere in New England . spread your wings, then, in the thawing