One of the basic bits of advice given to a writer is to envision your reader. It’s one that’s always troubled me, though. Could it be because I carry multiple identities as a writer? Poet, novelist, Quaker, retired journalist, with overlapping interests?
As a poet, I can’t describe the audience that shows up for a reading — the individuals seem to represent all types. Picture my readers? They could be anywhere in the subway car I’m riding!
OK, maybe it’s a younger, or at least more hip, crowd, but not entirely.
In What’s Left, Cassia spends hour after hour organizing the chaotic mess of her father’s photo studio after he vanishes in an avalanche halfway around the globe.
He was something of a hippie, too, as she sees in some of his excesses from the period. Here’s something that popped up for her in a conversation with her aunt Nita. You won’t find it in the final version of the novel, though — some things just got toned down.
And? You ever see the movie he made about the courthouse?
The one with the dome turning into his girlfriend’s breast? Diz’s?
You remember he made that while he was still an undergraduate? Before all the really freaky stuff that followed?
Yes, and that reminds me. We need to have to get that reel converted to digital from Super 16. Before it starts disintegrating or fading.
You know what a hit that was in some circles? How he was on the verge of notoriety or celebrity?
So why didn’t he continue in that vein?
How would he have paid the bills? The big bills? Where were his introductions? Producers, distributors, even actors? Or his confidence,
~*~
I’ve been trying to think if there’s anything in my past quite that outrageous, but it all seems to be included in my Freakin’ Free Spirits series. My kids would likely be disappointed, but I’m glad my parents never knew the details. I hate to think, though, of some of the things my two girls are hiding from me. My, the times have changed!
What’s something you or your friends are hiding from your parents? What’s most shocked or surprised you about them? What other directions might their lives have taken? What might you hope your own kids never ask you about?
One of the joys of publishing ebooks is that they can be updated easily and quickly.
So I had a flash, maybe while I was in the shower, and wondered what would happen in What’s Left if Cassia’s father died of a coronavirus complication instead of an avalanche.
It was tempting until I started realizing that it would have to be an entirely different story. She couldn’t grow up, for one thing, not unless I wanted to project that into the future, up to 30 years from now. Right now, everything just a year from now’s looking fuzzy.
And it couldn’t work with the premise of her having to go back through photo negatives – we’ve been digital too long now. As for the hippie, Buddhist, or AIDS epidemic dimensions?
The very thought, though, has me looking at some of the daily news reports through fiction-oriented lenses. Who are the villains and who are the heroes? Where do you want to set this – the White House, an intensive-care unit, a multi-generational household? What focus would you take? Would it be romance, young adult, sci-fi, fantasy, children’s?
I don’t see myself getting to this anytime soon, but good luck to any of you who feel free to tackle a Covid-19 big tale. There are certainly plenty of angles to consider.
I relied on writing poetry and fiction in my spare time as a discipline to counteract the conventions of newspaper editing, my professional career.
The job could feel quite dulling of any aesthetic awareness, and quite confining.
Still, some of the qualities between my vocation and avocation overlap, including an insistence on factual observation.
And now I’m free to focus more fully on my literary aspirations. Surprisingly, my focus has been on the fiction, rather than poetry. Could it be that without that dual tension of before, I can now steer a route between them?
For me, poetry springs from quietude and meditation. I began to resonate with what I was reading and then started writing poems seriously only after I had taken up yoga and eventually moved to the ashram. My Quaker practice in the decades since has sustained the practice, even while working in chaotic newsrooms or dealing with passionate relationships.
If you’re “into” poetry, either as a poet or reader, what’s the prompting for your own interest?
Some of my novel What’s Left, has her revisiting her memories of early childhood.
Later revisions made this passage redundant, and so it’s been scratched out:
By then even Papou Ilias and Yiayia Maria are long gone. Only the wisp of Yiayia Athina remained. But we still had our own little gang — Barney and Pia’s kids, and Tito and Yin’s, plus my brothers. By then we even have Rinpoche and his presence.
~*~
The final version of the novel has many sharp details, including some prompted by the photos she turns up. It is surprising, though, how powerful some of these memories can be, sometimes triggered unexpectedly from deep recesses. When I was 12, I ran into two brothers from my old neighborhood, my pals up to my fifth birthday. I hadn’t seen them in over seven years, and people do change a lot in that time. Still, I recognized them immediately at the Boy Scout event where we were.
Tell me one of your earliest memories from childhood, good or bad.
~*~
Cassia’s roots included inspiration like this. Church of St. Pantaleon in the village of Siána on the Greek island of Rhodes. Photo by Karelj via Wikimedia Commons.
I was long overdue for a reading orgy — you know, an indulgence in books — and a little while ago, before the quarantine, in fact, I immersed myself in ebooks by other authors at Smashwords. Some of the volumes are even free.
If you’re curious about what I was reading, zip over to the books reviewed by me at the bottom of my Jnana Hodson page at Smashwords.com. Yes, I thought about posting the reviews here, too, but there was already a lot on the agenda.
Most of the ebooks touch in one way or another on topics in my own novels. It’s lovely finding kindred spirits. Well, it’s a lot like the ways we here at WordPress connect, too.
The kernel of this passage is insightful, but it got reworked and retold in a much more humorous vein in my novel What’s Left.
Well, he had every reason to feel out of place, I suppose. He might as well have been a Tibetan or a man from Mars dropped down in the middle of America. But reincarnation would assume that Iowa was the right place for him to be growing up, that he’d found the right set of parents and right surroundings, and that would mean I’ve been overlooking a lot.
~*~
Well, the alienated individual is one complex issue to take up. Just look at Kafka. Cassia’s having her own struggles, so let’s concentrate on those, especially as she’s becoming aware of surroundings that work in her favor, unlike those of her father’s youth.
Perhaps nobody’s in a perfectly right or wrong place. We usually make do, as best we can, although I’ve lived some places where that could be challenging.
What’s been “right” for you where you are? Or, if you’d rather, what’s felt “wrong”?
~*~
In my novel, the renovated restaurant could have looked like this. The pizza oven at Little Creatures, Fremantle, Western Australia. Photo by Gnangarra via Wikimedia Commons.
I was in the midst of revising what’s now Nearly Canaan and found myself surprised to find myself living vicariously in the minds and hearts of the villains. Well, three of them. (I won’t name them, since they all start out as darlings. Don’t want to spoil your reading.)
Jnana's Red Barn 