Tag: Writing

Acid test novelist: Grace Metalious (1924-1964)

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

One of my colleagues at the New Hampshire Sunday News insisted that Metalious was a much better writer than the tabloid image that plagued her and her notorious book.

After reading Peyton Place, I have to agree. The realities it exposed are no longer scandalous but widely acknowledged. The novel, meanwhile, is skillfully accomplished and hints at more that could have been accomplished under other conditions. She certainly understood the unspoken skeletons of northern New England as well as anyone else I could mention, and she took the risks of admitting the dark undercurrents of survival in a small town anywhere in the country.

Her personal life, on the other hand, is an American tragedy.

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.

Acid test poet and essayist: Gary Snyder (1930- )

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

It’s pure coincidence that he should appear in this series on Earth Day, but it’s totally fitting.

The tumultuous spring of 1970, when the first Earth Day was observed, was also when I first saw someone sitting in deep meditation. The figure was in lotus position under a beech tree totally motionless for perhaps a half hour while I waited for my girlfriend at the street corner nearby. My inner reaction was hostile, wondering how anybody could withdraw from the world amid all of the conflict around us at the time. Only later did I put the events together – Gary Snyder, just back from years of Zen practice in Japan, was giving a reading on campus. I even admired some of his calligraphy in a display in the Student Union. And, as I would discover, he was a leading activist on progressive fronts.

About a year later, when I took up yoga and its meditation, I had already begun reading his poetry and was struck by what seemed wild construction. What I eventually detected was how precisely it fit an American voice yet moved on Asian meters with utmost economy and, in his case, clarity.

About a year later, I was living in a yoga ashram, a monastic community not that different from the Zen monasteries he had known in Japan. In addition, one of his essays told of visiting the ashram of our teacher’s teacher in India. It was perhaps the best portrayal of Sivananda I’ve yet read, free of the usual guru adoration.

Similar flashes continued as I returned to Indiana, where he had done graduate studies, and then on to his native Washington state, where he had long been a much better mountaineer than I ever would be. Still, the high country he celebrated was both real and transcendental, even in my briefer experiences. His familiarity with Indigenous tribes also informed my own encounters while living at the edge of the Yakama reservation.

I relate more of this in a poem in my Elders Hold chapbook, should you be interested.

Or, for a thinly veiled biography of him before he left for Japan, there’s Japhy Ryder in Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums.

Much of my writing, poetry and fiction, has concentrated on place itself, and that’s been something Snyder, too, has done. While I have moved independently of his example, I have been indebted and inspired.

Hari Om Tat Sat!

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.

Skillsets that became useful in my non-fiction book

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Returning to that adage, “Write about what you know,” I realize how some work experience from my past gave me a unique edge in drafting Quaker Dover.

For instance:

  1. My journalism career included an early gig of pure research for a daily Action Line column. (We had an editor/writer, a secretary, and two researchers – big time!) Writing and editing, of course, were the staples of the rest of those years.
  2. From writing and then revising the novels, of course, I had explored the dynamics of building a large book and then the distinguishing qualities of fiction in contrast to journalism. I even learned to excise a hundred or more pages from a manuscript and not weep.
  3. My long service in Quaker meetings, as presiding clerk in addition to committee work and visitation, steeped me in the decision-making process and culture of the Society of Friends, past and present. Along the way, I gained familiarity with our peculiar customs and historic language, ranging from liberal “unprogrammed” worship at one end and old-order conservatives at another to pastor-led evangelical at the other extreme.
  4. Genealogy research accompanied much of those discoveries, especially as I gleaned the old minute books and journals. (Many of my findings appear on my blog, Orphan George.)
  5. Triangulation of three or more differing versions of an event, as I encountered especially in material and correspondence regarding my grandparents, became helpful in considering Colonial history in New England. I could live with the ambiguity while letting the conflicting accounts still add to the bigger picture.
  6. My long interest in geography – maps, especially – came to play in placing Dover in perspective with the rest of New England as well as Devonshire in England itself.
  7. My training as an artist in high school and my work with photojournalists in the years after came in handy in examining portraits of Quakers (once those were permitted) as well as related locations. Sometimes I could see where an individual was in regard to changes affecting Quaker practice and the world around them.
  8. Online sleuthing, rather than archives (which I had explored in the genealogy), came to the fore during the Covid-19 lockdowns. Somehow, I think my experience in formatting my novels as ebooks, fed into this, but I had already devoured many digital texts by the time I became amazed at the number of rare old, arcane books I could download for free.
  9. Despite the fact that Quaking Dover is a history involving political conflict, I was surprised to find that my political science degree didn’t add that much, though the way Vincent Ostrom had taught us to closely read an argument came in handy, especially in looking at a system from the ground up rather than top-down.
  10. Moving to Maine before the final revision and publication also added to my perspective as I settled in. Dover, like much of New Hampshire, gravitates toward Boston, as did much of the Dover Quaker history. Little did I suspect just how much Dover Friends and the broader community influenced the growth of Maine to the east and northeast once the territory reopened to English settlement once the conflicts with the French and their Native allies wound down – earlier than I had presumed, in fact.

Acid test poet: Frederico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936)

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

When surrealism hits the mark for me, there’s something natural rather than forced about it. The juxtaposition of images connects organically, without need for the intervening steps.

That’s why Lorca is among the writers who serve as a touchstone for me. Besides, I can more or less follow his Spanish in the original, not a given with other Spanish masters I’ve admired and enjoyed – Jorge Borges, Garbriel Marquez Garcia, Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, for instance. His volumes are the first I pull from the shelf in that direction.

I love the way he saw New York, by the way – did it influence my novel Subway Visions?

Add to that the tragedy of his life being cut short by Nationalists at the outbreak of the Spanish civil war.

Acid test translator: Everett Fox (1947- )

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

His gorgeous large volume, The Five Books of Moses, leaves the reader agog that the Hebrew Bible wasn’t written in King James English. Fox’s rendering instead sticks close to the original tongue and has a rough-edged, field-research vividness where many of the characters come in unfamiliar names – Ish  and Isha for Adam and Eve, for starters. Familiar quotations sometimes differ so sharply that they pass unrecognized.

The translation evokes the sounds of reading the text aloud and hews to puns, word play, word repetition, and alliteration – with detailed notes and footnotes, as needed – that give a sense of what’s been stripped away in conventional translations that polish and soften the action.

It’s my go-to version these days, augmented by others to context to my earlier readings. I wish we had more of the Bible rendered along the lines Fox pursues.

Acid test novelist: Ernest Callenbach (1929-2012)

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

I’m not big on sci-fi, but the 1975 utopian novel Ecotopia looks rather prescient in that vein considering so much that’s happened in the years since.

The book came out just before I relocated to the Pacific Northwest for what turned out to be four years, but it springs from a recognition of how much the region stands apart from the rest of the nation. It’s a state of mind as much as watersheds and mountain ranges.

As an expression of hippie mindset, I find it more expansive than, say, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Acid test poet: Diane Wakoski (1937- )

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

When my poetic focus shifted in the early ‘90s from nature to romantic love as I had known it, Wakoski hit home for me. Hers were love poems but far from the sunlight, chocolate, and roses “I can’t live without you” stereotype of the hopeless/helpless romantic.

Hers were alive in an admission of the continuing impact of adolescent awakening and desire, no matter your age, and the imagery was unmistakably American with a rock’n’roll plus Hollywood warp.

The title Motorcycle Betrayal Poems captures the energy, and her fine volumes from Black Sparrow Press fill a stretch of a shelf in my library.

She was a kind of guardian angel in a stream of poems I produced in the decade. For a sample, see my Blue Rock ebook collection.

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?