If you’re dreaming of writing a book, here’s some perspective.
“Write what should not be forgotten.” — Isabel Allende
“The story must strike a nerve in me. My heart should start pounding when I hear the first line in my head. I start trembling at the risk.” — Susan Sontag
“Run your own race. Don’t worry about how fast someone else writes, how much another author makes, how many followers another author has. Write what makes you excited, and the enthusiasm will come through on the page.” — Christina Lauren
“Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.” — Stephen King
“If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” — Toni Morrison
“You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.” — Madeleine L’Engle
“I always write in the morning. I was pleased to hear lately that Rousseau, too, after he got up in the morning, went for a short walk and sat down to work. In the morning one’s head is particularly fresh. The best thoughts most often come in the morning after waking while still in bed or during the walk.” — Leo Tolstoy
“The author, in his work, must be like God in the Universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.” — Gustave Flaubert
“You can’t fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.” — William S. Burroughs
“I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English — it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don’t let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep.” — Mark Twain
Some of them seem to think it has to be book-length. Short and sweet can be compelling, too.
My journaling in college-style spiralbound notebooks would continue for another seven years before getting interspersed with hardbound sketchbooks. I wouldn’t move away from them altogether until mid-’87.
Some of the habit no doubt was reenforced by the fact the notebooks were cheap. Money was always tight for me. I also enjoyed picking them up casually in bookstores, especially in and around university campuses.
They’ve always been workbooks for me, something of the moment. Frankly, I never expected to live this long, and any posterity was intended for my published poems, fiction, histories, and essays.
Look at how some of mine opened in this period.
Vol. 49, 1 July 77 / day after the full moon: blue Western College Bookstore Association, 100 sheets, usual size
Vol. 43, Turns out to be the second a spiral-bound Strathmore Sketch 400 series, 9-by-12, 100 pp, fine arts paper. Cover in Cordoba Brown (First of three in series.) Entries in large, black, chancery-cursive script. Quite elegant.
Vol. 43, 1 Sept. 77, Orchard Shack. (Numbered out of order.)
Vol. 42, 1:X:77 Orchard Shack. So this is really out of sequence! Covers just the month of October …
The first of my beloved longbooks was not from Cornell in ’71 ….
Now they morph into long unruled sketchbooks … or so but rather a spiral-bound Strathmore Sketch 400 series, 9-by-12, 100 pp, fine arts paper. Cover in Cordoba Brown (First of three in series.) Entries in large, black, chancery-cursive script. Quite elegant.
Vol. 44, 1 Nov. 77, Orchard Shack, the third of the Strathmore sketchbooks
Observing seasons
in one place
Note the impact on Hometown News, Nearly Canaan, and Secret Side of Jaya. Also the poetry, especially American Olympus …
Each journal volume somehow opens anew, yet usually fades off at the end.
~*~
I wonder how others approach the practice. I’ve heard of using loose-leaf pages and binders, to facilitate reordering of pages. An alternative is to have several volumes at a time, each devoted to a different subject.
Use of writing instruments can also be considered. Ballpoint pens gave way to felt-tips, for instance, and much later fountain pens. As for journaling exclusively on a laptop or smart phone? The plot thickens …
My hand these days may not be as reliable for sketching or painting as it once was, but my eyes are still alert. In our downsizing on our remote island in Maine, as I chanced upon our collected rubber stamps and inks, I started playing. Add to that some related artistry.
Do take a look for the results at my free digital bookstore, Thistle Finch editions.
The albums are Inked. Stamped, Pressed, Visual Twists, and Shore Things (collages arising from beachcombing findings).
You might even what to download and print some of the images. I humbly think they’re great.
My weekly offerings at my free digital bookstore, Thistle Finch editions, include some remarkable new entries gleaned from our ongoing journals review.
There’s the Chronicle, Antiques Dealer, profiling a woman who saw deeply into the landscape she adopted. I do miss her.
Another Chronicle, Shakers and Me, has me now reflecting on a late friend who had held extensive conversations with Eldress Bertha, one of the last Shakers; I urged him to set the exchanges down on paper, to no avail. Yet a few he mentioned still echo. What I present here could be a prelude.
Still another Chronicle, On the Rock Wall, underpins the petroglyphs and petrographs I would later see firsthand in the Pacific Northwest.
I am fond of Scenes From a Life, prose sketches of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s.
And then there’s Sue’s Bread Recipe. Yes, learning to bake loaves was one of my lessons in the yoga ashram, one that led to hundreds or maybe thousands later. Here’s what Little Sue introduced to me.
If that weren’t enough, there are the poetry broadsides Within a Bigger Order, Kansas and Kyoto, and Bronx to Brooklyn (about someone I’d still love to talk to once more).
Put them together and I think you’d have a great magazine. Well, I am open to letters to the editor.
As for poetry? “Wonder if my work adds up to summa, if it has a point” …
The night before (so where were we?): “the aging aesthete dismissing Pfingston’s piece, ‘This isn’t a poem,’ as though he knew, this uptight, pretentious high-school teacher whose 30 friends kept clinging to him, whispering comments about ‘classical forms’ and the ‘need for discipline’ and keeping a guard against ‘imitators’ and how Joan Stone can’t STAND Duane Niatum, ‘He borrows everything.’”
“That’s what happens when you get a PhD,” I almost said.
How many tall tumblers did that guy down — a dozen? How can any drunk evaluate a poem, appreciated its silence?
I’m tired of veneer, tired of poetry tasters — everything but the purely original, primitive, religious incantation …
[I had not yet delved into Jackson Cope’s “incantatory language” perspective on early Friends …]
When a batch of submissions go out, the first back are quick rejection slips — usually overstocked — then the mixed bag of acceptances and misses — and finally the slow anguish of almost-takens and those returned unread …
It’s almost a pattern
~*~
Wollah Wollah = whistling water = Walla Walla
~*~
When Coyote desired Beaver’s beautiful daughter, Rain sent his own beautiful daughter to plead with Coyote, who instead tried to rape her and make her his other wife. And thus, enraged, Rain punished the east — Coyote’s land — by raising the Cascades mountains so that Coyote and Wind could not steal all the clouds.
I’m left wondering about Beaver and his child.
~*~
Meanwhile, these local poets and artists who don’t study, don’t know what’s been done before, wouldn’t recognize ancient excellence, don’t know what’s being done now, don’t experience the nature out there or the scary, untapped energy fields within themselves … who don’t try to make each piece unique but merely a repetition of their static non-discovery closed-in closed-off non-lives …
[How’s that for non-judgmental?]
~*~
Hops, which are used to favor and stabilize beer in its brewing, were another famed agricultural product from Yakima. The vines would climb the ropes to the top, with the whole vines being cut down at harvest. Note Mount Adams in the background. (Photo by William Borg via Wikimedia Commons.)
~*~
I used to write poems about the weather. But what can you say about a place where the weather’s always good? Only that the wind’s blowing?
[Think of a comment I recently heard, about a poetry editor who scorned Weather Report pieces. Gave them an instantaneous rejection.]
While my novels Nearly Canaan and Secret Side of Jaya contain many details from my Yakima Valley years, the experience also prompted a proliferation of poetry.
In the Far East there is a vital, well-read proletariat literature – speaking for a people.
Here, we have intellectuals playing games. Along with populist idiots.
Still, how much of the Far West book scene I knew revolved around poetry-conscious, well-stocked bookstores that were also patrons to readings, broadsides, and small private volumes.
Suppose, now, a poetry journal allied with a bookstore where its authors’ books could be purchased …
This was pre-Internet, which has opened new opportunities, or before I knew of radical publisher and bookseller Giles Calvert and his Black Spread Eagle on Ludgate Hill near St. Paul Cathedral in London, the voice of many early Quaker tracts and volumes.
As I noted in October, ’76: Good two weeks of poetry acceptance — 12-14 pieces taken.
That confusion some have, mistaking Jimm for Swami Jnana. Though they live together, they are distinct. One is the patron, who pays the bills by laboring on newspapers, complains about things, tries to live in some style, occasionally smokes, sometimes eats meat, likes to dine out (despite his income), listens to classical music, reads Newsweek, snuggles with his wife. Swami Jnana is his guru, appreciates silence, honest laughter, high country hiking, hardline poetry, animals, and fully human circles. Although they share the same household and many of the same interests, they are distinct. They met in early 1972 and things progressed from there. They have lived together in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and now Washington state. Since joining, Jimm has been calmer and happier while Jnana spreads Dharma seeds. Jimm’s childhood and historical roots have become less urgent; he may disappear altogether. There’s nothing more to say at this point. I’m not certain whose journal this is. It doesn’t matter. They each enter lines on these pages.
Rexroth amazing in the number of unknown poets he admires and the candidness with which he demolishes others. The Paris expatriates were, he says, drawn there by booze (Prohibition in the U.S,) and cheap dollars. Frost wasn’t modern at all but old-guard and compares poorly with similar English poets of a century earlier.
Duane Niatum an often bad poet who comes up with some fine lines, “pine cone city in rain.”
My introduction to Marnie Walsh of the Dakotas, sounding as if created by the people and place.
Her flattest possible diction with all of its crudeness almost a parody of pig-Indian English (“Um! You white!”) almost imitation Black and yet, how utterly devasting.
Yet with a freshness that cannot be ignored, especially in its directness.
~*~
Liz Sohappy, given her Palouse name, Om-na-ma, in 1969: “My Indian name has made great difference in my life. I really felt like a floating body until I received my name. My grandmother said that was how it was to be — no one else is here on earth until he has an Indian name”
I resonate with that, having been given the name Jnana in 1972.
As for the Native poet Dave Etter?
~*~
How strange, the Ginsberg’s The Fall of America is filled with place names and realizing he has no sense of place, but exactly the opposite — that is, a loss of place and roots and thus center, as in perspective, turning the Hari Krishna and Buddha to stop the movement, to cease the spinning …
~*~
Reviewing some of my work, wishing there were something more personal, intimate and yet more forceful there …
In W’s novel, it’s haunting freshness. No feeling of the veneer of (& chilling) revisions, editing …
If the book satisfied us, why would we want to read another piece by him or in the same voice, when there is no other
Photo of Goat Rocks and Mount Adams by David Toth at Pexels.
Andy Wyeth confession of losing himself in the character of what he’s creating but his lack of interest in the finished work; also, the difficulty of being watched while working: his need for secrecy, the self-consciousness intruding in the event of observation-in-creation, “Don’t talk out,” don’t analyze, don’t smooth out or you’ll lose the spark. The feeling of a compulsion forcing him to do a piece, submerge himself when there’s that sweeping instant of perception (a certain touch of light, for instance). The need for solitude and for tactile feeling to get beyond the eye’s flat view.
As for Christina, she is the essence of New England — even its witchcraft. (This, before I had ever been to New England.) Sprung something in me, a recognition of America and truths we do not allow ourselves to admit. A strand I kept denying in Binghamton and Bloomington, the Poconos and Fostoria. Some lack, too, in the Anglo culture, despite exorcism-slaying.
~*~
Wed. 17 Nov. 76, see I was reading Robert Bly “Looking for Dragon Smoke” … I would come back to its impact much later, somewhere in New England …
Snyder is to me what Thoreau was to generations of Americans.
But if Henry is the amateur, Gary is the professional.
Ginsberg, meanwhile, runs with old Walt Whitman.
Snyder works from the inside-out, where others try from the outside-in.
In revising my novels Nearly Canaan and Secret Side of Jaya, I created several lookbooks slash storyboards from images found online to sharpen details in some of the passages. It’s a great writer’s hack, by the way. You pick up bits you overlook at the scene.
I do wish I had my own photographs from the decade of journals we’re sampling, but often I had no camera, much less training in how to use anything except the simplest point-and-shoot.. I did, however, work with some of the best photojournalists and knew some outstanding fine arts photographers as well. It would have been wonderful to work with them on these posts, but time has intervened. Well, I still have memories, faded as many are. And with a camera, I wouldn’t have worked so devotedly on writing, no doubt. There’s only so much time in a day, even without a paying job to attend to.
Jnana's Red Barn 