Tag: Writing

Never mind that bit about bearing gifts

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Growing up in the middle of America, I had little awareness of the extent of immigrant Greek influence in the New World, much less in my own hometown. These days, though, I see how pervasive — yet nearly invisible — it’s been, now or then.

My decision to have my first novel close with Cassia’s future father marrying into a Greek-American family was, in part, predicated on a desire to have his immersion in one ancient culture from Asia, Tibetan Buddhism, be countered by another from Western civilization, and thus Greece , blending both classical glories and some New Testament threads, which seemed appropriately symbolic.

It’s up to you to weigh in on how well it works in my novel What’s Left.

In the past decade, though, perhaps prompted by the annual community-wide festival our local Greek Orthodox church presents every Labor Day weekend, I’ve been connecting the dots and discovering how many Greek-Americans I’ve known over the years and how much the recent encounters have been enriching my own outlook.

As I wrote to one friend:

One thing that’s greatly surprised me is how little literature exists that relates the Greek-American experience. You’re too numerous to be so invisible. What’s up? Just look on your impact in Dover alone. Perhaps the best overall portrayal comes in Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex (a masterpiece, by the way), although the work is acclaimed mostly for its exploration of hermaphroditic genetics and identity. Along the way, he also does a knock-out job of nailing the Midwest where I grew up, another strand of literature that’s otherwise anemic. I am glad I’d finished the first draft of my new work before encountering his novel — he won the National Book Award and Oprah’s endorsement for good reasons. It could be too intimidating. Well, if he could go on to do such an insightful job with Quaker Meeting, as he does in his third novel, The Marriage Plot, maybe I’m not so out of line in venturing into yours. I hope. Oh, yes, I’m also glad I finished the draft before getting to connect the dots of your own family. You’d be ideal for the movie version.

~*~

Look around at the people you know. Tell us something (good, we hope) about someone of Greek descent.

~*~

I think she looks a lot like the young woman on the cover of the book, apart from Cassia’s Goth garb and makeup. Aphrodite, anyone?

A breath of new heights

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Despite growing up in the flat country of the Midwest, I’ve always been attracted to heights. The top of the tree in our backyard was mine alone. I remember taking the speedy express elevator to the top of the Carew Tower in downtown Cincinnati as a child and looking down on the ant-like people on the streets far below. And mountains have always loomed large in my imagination, later abetted by a few early visits to the Appalachians in Kentucky, Tennessee, and North Carolina. I even backpacked a week on the Appalachian Trail at age 12 as a Boy Scout with my primitive-camping troop.

By the time I returned to Indiana in the mid-’70s, I had also lived in the Allegheny foothills to the west of the Catskills in New York state as well as the Poconos in eastern Pennsylvania. I’d even ventured into New Hampshire to climb Mount Washington, the highest point in the Northeast. I thought I had a familiarity with mountains.

The paperback cover …

My next upheaval sent me west. The drive across the Great Plains and Rockies was a revelation, and the entry into the environs of my new employment came frankly as a shock. Neither my wife nor I was prepared for the arid, open desert where nearly everything, including its famed apple orchards, required irrigation. Forefront in my mind was Swami Lakshmy’s observation from her first visit to India, that every place she visited had its own unique vibration.

And yes, there were mountains, including the barren heights defining our valley as well as the eastern flank of the Cascade Range to our west and glacier-clad Mount Adams looking down on us from 50 miles away.

As I adjusted to the realities, everything was filled with wonder I came to love, as you will see in my novel Nearly Canaan, which started out being more about the distinct landscape than about fully considered characters.

My employment situation, meanwhile, provided its own fodder for what would emerge as Hometown News back in the Rust Belt. I never wanted to leave Pacific Northwest, for sure, but a new publisher at the newspaper made the situation intolerable. As I bailed out, along with the most of the rest of the management team, I entered a difficult period that added much to the newspaper tale, plus a divorce and broken engagement.

It’s always hard to come down from a mountain. A part yearns to hang there forever.

Death takes a big toll on a family firm

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

A huge challenge to family-owned businesses arises in the passing of one generation to another. The unanticipated death of the patriarch or matriarch in his or her prime can wreak havoc on the company, even if inheritance tax liabilities aren’t overwhelming. Sometimes the heir apparent isn’t the best option, not all of the heirs want to be part of the operation, or bitter rivalries emerge. Getting through the fourth generation, with a spreading number of family members and interests, can determine the fate of the enterprise. As I saw in the newspaper industry, most nameplates sold out to media chains at this point, losing much of their underlying local connection in the process.

Do you know of any businesses that fit this description? 

One side of a family as friends

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Having a circle of close cousins in my novel What’s Left, freed me from having to create additional friends for Cassia. She had more than enough in her own extended family, close at hand.

I hadn’t thought about that before now, but as an author, it’s a big relief. Cassia’s busy enough as it is, and we have plenty of named characters.

~*~

Well, while thinking of fondness and monikers:

Do you have a nickname? How did it come about? Does it fit? Are you fond of it? Or does it annoy you? Have you ever tagged one on someone else?

~*~

Anyone else fond of Greek yogurt? Especially with honey?

Are we finished?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

We writers or artists, at least some of us, push ourselves as far as we can, coming to a point where we no longer know if a piece is any good or not, only that we’ve done everything in its pursuit that we possibly can at this period in our life.

Either it gets published or whatever as is or gets pushed aside, maybe to be picked up later and reworked, maybe to go in the trash. Or maybe Death intervenes.

An aside for karma yoga

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

In one of the early drafts of my novel What’s Left, I tried this perspective — which I removed from the final version of the book, feeling it was too preachy:

If our workroom was where we could act honorably under the eye of God, it was still no substitute for times of celebration and worship! No, we need to take time every day for prayer and the study of scripture. Just remember: work spent in activities that help our neighbors and enable us to come together for periods of common delight is quite different from anything I see in the realm of time cards or the Harvard Business School.

~*~

Whew! Let’s try to bring this back to everyday experience.

Is there somebody you encounter someplace during the day who makes you feel special? A coworker, cafe wait person, bus driver, teacher, friend? Do tell us!

Karma yoga, by the way, is explained in my novel Yoga Bootcamp. Work itself gets complicated, no?

~*~

The old church Cassia’s family buys in my novel might have looked like this … before the wild rock concerts begin.

Why didn’t I become an academic?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 4 Comments

The second of my three times of stepping out of the news business came when Vincent and Elinor Ostrom invited me to return to Indiana to become the social sciences editor in their new Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis. Vincent had been a wonderful mentor through my undergrad years, and the opportunity to work with them again was truly exciting. Besides, I was newly married and the move would allow my wife to continue with her college studies. It was a pretty heady undertaking all around.

We settled in at the edge of town, pretty much as I describe in Nearly Canaan. But having Indiana show up so much already in my fiction – Daffodil Uprising and What’s Left, especially – as I revisited this stage in my life, I looked around for a landscape with similar features and people, which I was surprised to find arising in the Ozarks. Now you know. In full candor, I have to admit I’ve never been in Arkansas or that swath of Missouri, even though my mother was born in St. Louis.

Two important things emerged for me personally during this sojourn. First was my shift from yoga to Quaker as my spiritual path. Second was my emergence as a poet, largely through a lively off-campus circle that was surprisingly free of academic influence. As a research associate, I could borrow books from the graduate library for unlimited periods, and so I had a shelf of small-press chapbooks at hand – what a luxury! And my interludes in the renowned Lilly rare-book library remain treasured, where I handled rare editions of Samuel Johnson’s Ramblers (1750-52, including a few coffee stains and pencil marks, presumably from their first readers) and Audubon’s original luxurious prints (all birds presented life-size, as if stunningly pressed into the pages) and fine-arts broadsides of Gary Snyder’s poems from the 1950s onward.

I found the academic life to be much to my liking. I’ve been asked since why I didn’t go on to graduate school and a professorial direction. My answers are muffled, beginning with the personal finance situation and the glut of doctorates already looking for tenure, at least in my fields of interest. I would have chafed at the internal politics, naturally. And then I came across Snyder’s reason for not continuing his own post-graduate degrees (at Indiana, when he made the decision) – he realized he could be a good professor or a good poet, but not both. I would later arrive at something similar when it came to the management track I pursued through the first half of my journalism career, as you’ll see.

Those of us in the Workshop had barely celebrated our getting the second phase of our major grant renewed, meaning I’d be staying in Bloomington another four years, when we were hit with the devasting news that the amount had been drastically slashed during an unanticipated realignment of the federal agency’s priorities. What it meant for me and my wife was packing up and moving on again.

The next opening felt like a ticket to Heaven.

Oh, brother! Watch out when he’s bossy

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

When a family-owned business has two siblings at the helm, how effectively they resolve conflicts – or ignore them – is crucial. As one well-known New England brother has said, he learned that family was more important than always being right. In their case, it worked. They even became TV stars in their ads. I suppose there were other corrective mechanisms behind the scenes or ones that would kick in later. We’ll see the biz school case study in time, no doubt. On the other hand, differences can also lead to lawsuits, the breakup of the company, even its sale to rivals, perhaps followed by a longstanding refusal to speak to each other. We’ve also seen those headlines.

Do you know of any businesses like this?