Tag: Writing

LIBERATING IN THE END

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

A central question facing compositional artists of all stripes (in contrast to performing artists like actors, dancers, and musicians) is the matter of determining when a work’s finished.

How do you know?

Is just out-and-out satisfaction a measure? A trusty one? Hmm.

Let me suggest some others.

Sometimes it’s a sense that you just can’t go any further with it. And if it’s in a state beyond notes and fragments, maybe that’s it. You’ve hit a wall, a property line, or just the shore or riverbank. So you stop. Period.

There are times, admittedly, when you think something’s finished and put it aside only to find, on returning, it needs more – revision, for starters, and maybe additions and major restructuring. (A friend spoke the other evening of drafting a memoir in the third-person and then redoing it in the first-person, the kind of change I’ve done in some of my fiction. And Brahms had an early symphony that became a piano concerto, if I recall right.)

Working under a deadline can simplify matters. Time’s up! Next!

Nice, if you happen to have an advance or pipeline of delivery or the concert’s coming up.

Novelists might even find doneness appears as the time they find their focus obsessing with the book under the one they’ve been tackling.

Some poets will say that once it’s published, they can let go of it. Finito!

~*~

In the bigger picture, the “finished” question isn’t just about having a manuscript ready. For a writer, it’s ultimately about landing the work in a reader’s hands. A place where a dialogue can begin. And getting that manuscript from a polished draft into circulation can be a huge, energy-depleting limbo, especially if your life is filled with competing claims on your time.

In short, you can either focus on seeing that one work through to publication – or you can create the next one, while the inspiration’s still hot. For me, as I tried to balance my writing life with a journalism career, personal relationships, spiritual practice, and so on, I wound up with a huge backlog of finished material. At least I’d wisely not put off the writing for retirement, as had a number of colleagues I’d known – none of them ever managed to fulfill that dream.

What I did find, though, was that the unpublished work became a burden of its own. Its emotional weight inhibited new work. Why bother? It even had a way of twisting my sense of identity – who was I then and who am I now? Think, too, of the relationships that fed into one work – and the people I’m with today. As in lover or spouse.

So the experience of having my book-length works finally being published brings the “finished” consideration across yet another threshold – the matter of being liberated. I can let go of trying to hold that memory, treasuring that epiphany, honoring that friendship.

Should I have just trashed them long ago and moved on into other, non-literary endeavors? Just think of the hours that could have been directed instead to overtime pay, which would make my retirement more secure. Or travel or …

Maybe it’s just a case of hoping for acknowledgement. Hey, here I am!

Still, it’s what I’ve done.

What I have is a feeling of being true to a responsibility carried to its completion at last. What happens from here is, well, liberating any way it goes.

CRACKLING IN OUR AIR

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

In blogging here, I’ve generally tried to steer clear of current events, as in political and economic news. Even my reflections on the weather have been, I hope, along a larger or more timeless horizon than mere day-to-day changes. Think of watching the grass grow.

But I do live in New Hampshire, and the campaigns for the November 8, 2016, presidential election are already generating daily front-page headlines here. Remember, that’s nearly a year-and-a-half away.

The primary is tentatively set for February 9, but that could move up, depending. We hate when it clashes with Christmas.

The point is, politics is already crackling in our air. How can I possibly avoid it?

BACK AND BACK AND BACK

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 4 Comments

As I said at the time …

You’re home once more, with many fresh laurels, I hope. On my end, the computer’s fixed and I’m dancing with some frequency again. At least between some heavy allergies. (Birch pollen at the moment; pine comes soon.)

I’m still in shock from Sam Hamill’s “To Eron on Her Thirty-Second Birthday” – she’s always a twelve-year-old tomboy in my memory! Impossible, it seems. And that was back when I was still married and my wife studied painting under John Bennett’s wife, Ellensburg, Washington … back in his Vagabond days. Small world. Am still trying to figure out when and where I heard Bill Stafford read. Yakima Valley College, I believe. Will the parts of my life ever come together?

Yes, you certainly are a moon-child, with all of the sign’s gentle humanity. Violet, a variant of purple, the cancer-sign’s color. Star, like the moon, of the moody night. Well-named, it seems! For whatever reason, more of my serious relationships have been with women born under the sign of Cancer than with any other; in fact, there have been no Gemini or Libra, which are supposed to be a natural fit for me. Go figure!

~*~

My, what ancient history this, too, has become!

DIGGING OUT INTO SUMMER

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

Now that winter’s over, some of us are finding difficulty in trying to shift gears. Yes, the snow’s finally melted, but that’s not how I feel.

I suppose officially I’ve been enduring a mild depression, though for me that means mostly emotional numbness along with some simmering anger. Call it the blahs. No need to go into details here, other than to admit there were a few complicating elements of chronic negativity in the air.

What does matter is the feeling of being stuck. Molasses. Even impoverished, no matter the reality.

Where’s the joy, the sunlight, the ongoing pleasure?

There have been small steps. The daily indoor swimming, for one. Yes, it’s still a daily effort but also an emerging sense of accomplishment and meeting some goals. I’ve also been growing my hair out, which is going much slower than the first time around – don’t know if I’ll keep it this way, either, just wanted to revisit that side of my hippie past. Still, the seemingly terminal winter chilled much of my desire to play with my Christmas-gift camera, even if I did get some shots I’ll likely post next winter. (I just didn’t want to put any more snow and ice up on the Web. It was getting tedious.) And there’s been some overdue reading, including a bout of Philip Roth, pro and con.

The question, on this merry-go-round? Well, a cluster of questions, actually.

What’s really at the center? Where’s my core energy? What do I have to offer to others? To the world? How do I become a better person, more open to others? More compassionate, especially? In other words, how do I more fully engage the spiritual life before me?

Time to turn some soil, transplant sprouts, plant some seeds. Ideally, helping others – or sharing companionship in the process.

In other words, here we go ’round again.

TAKING WHOSE TIME?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

Got a rejection letter last week. All authors, and especially poets, are used to them. What was striking for me was that I hadn’t sent off any hard-copy submissions in the last three years. Repeat, THREE years.

As I’ve explained, a while ago I shifted over to online-only submissions as a consequence of much higher acceptances that way and of simplifying the difficulties of trying to maintain duplicate sets of files. (One for online, and a duplicate for hardcopy.)

So it took the editors of this particular journal more than three years to decide? What’s their problem? No wonder they’re feeling swamped!

This also touches on the issue of exclusivity in sending out work for publication. In the old days, meaning when I started, you didn’t dare send your work simultaneously to different periodicals. It was more a kind of serial monogamy. Or serious business.

Although the hard-and-fast requirement started melting, I stayed with exclusivity more as a matter of keeping track of what was out where – but I did keep an unmentioned caveat: after six months, if I’d heard nothing, it was fair game to send out again. In more than a thousand acceptances, I don’t recall more than a half-dozen cases where this became a problem.

Suppose I could look up the five poems to see if they’ve been published elsewhere in the interim, but frankly it’s not worth it.

You might have even seen them here, at the Barn.

WHAT WAS I THINKING?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

Every writer, we can presume, has plans for the next work – or several. Tackling them, of course, can be another matter altogether, especially if the schedule’s already full, even before we get to the overdue house and garden projects. Or some equivalent.

Listen to other writers, by the way, and you’ll hear just how much of that schedule now focuses on marketing, including social media, to push already published work instead of doing the, well, not exactly “fun” part (it is, after all, work) but the passionate core that prompts the entire enterprise: drafting and revising. The very thing that makes us writers.

For me, much of that has also involved moving four decades of serious writing, however experimental, into the public access where adventurous readers might find the volumes. Places like Smashwords.com and my Thistle/Flinch site here at WordPress. To be candid, the backlog was inhibiting my ability to forge ahead on new work – not exactly writer’s bloc, but something more like claustrophobia? Having the remaining novels in the pipeline for ebook publication is a huge relief.

Let me repeat, though, about the necessity of marketing and how that should be the focus.

What’s taken root over the past several months, though, is another novel. One that just might pull my Hippie Trails series together a half-century later. That is, something that covers far more than just ’60s and ’70s. Am I crazy?

Well, maybe. What’s shaping up is far different from anything I’ve previously undertaken.

For one thing, I’m starting with an overarching structure – something approaching an outline, rather than my usual setting forth on a journey to see where an image or character or idea will lead. And then there’s little autobiographical here; it’s largely new territory, apart from tying up some loose ends from the earlier novels. The dictum, “Write about what you know,” gets readjusted to “Write about what you would like to know,” meaning more about certain ethnic groups I’ve encountered, businesses I’ve brushed up against, spiritual practices, histories, desires, losses. I’m even beginning with a commercial genre in mind, which means drafting from a perspective and in a voice far from my own.

I’m not sure this is a work I’ll actually finish. It may be too difficult. Or it may become more of a collaboration, perhaps with a circle of beta readers set at liberty to edit at will. (Have I ever written of my theory that what we know as Shakespeare was the product of a circle of very talented improvisers, whose inventions were recorded by the playwright? Almost a committee, if you will, except for his imprint on the final version.)

Different from anything else I’ve done to date? How about needing to finish a draft of the last chapter, along with a stretch of the opening, before writing anything else? Or heading off with 80 or so pages of notes for the middle, plus questions to pursue? It’s certainly driven by the characters and events that turn in directions I’d normally avoid.

What I do know from experience is how crucial it is to sit down at the keyboard when these juices are flowing.

A LITTLE AFTER THE FACT

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

So there we were a few days ago, finishing our Chinese dinners before dashing down the street to choir rehearsal. After cracking open my fortune cookie, rather than reaching into my pack for my eyeglasses, I asked my companion if he’d read my little slip to me. (Ah, the joys of getting older.)

After he recited my fortune, I replied, “You’re making that up, right?”

I was rather impressed, actually, and he does have a great sense of humor. Not bad for improv.

“No, here it is. You read it.” Which I did:

You are a lover of words someday
you will write a book.

LOOKING FOR THOSE LOCAL DISTINCTIONS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

As I said at the time …

Greetings again from this old mill town along the Merrimack River.

There is still a special feel to an octavo-size, typeset journal – a unity of design and purpose carried throughout – even in this era of desktop design and photocopy wizardry. A major challenge, whether it’s in shaping a literary journal like yours, a daily newspaper, or even an old-fashioned country dance, is simply: what can we do to make our own locale distinctive?

An example: a few years ago, the New England contradance scene was becoming generic: you’d drive for miles to a village town hall only to find the same faces and same pieces you had faraway the week before. Fortunately, that seems to be changing as different callers, musicians, and promoters are striving to put their own distinctive signature – and a local stamp – on each venue. So there’s your challenge!

I’m struck by the fact that even familiar voices from our round of journals seem to sound different in varied locales. If you’ve ever been around paintings, as I was when married to an artist, and seen a piece go from her studio to our living room to an art gallery to a major museum, you would be amazed how different it appears it each setting. Publishing is the same.

SAMPLING A FEW QUAKER PERIODICALS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

Now for the magazines rack. The one in the meeting library, where we display our current periodicals.

First is the monthly Friends Journal: Quaker Thought and Life Today, published in Philadelphia from a Friends General Conference perspective. In its elegant format, it’s a delight to hold. Admittedly, the articles often run the range of crunchy granola-head interests and sometimes a too “politically correct” editing and can leave one wondering just where Friends stand as a body, but there’s almost always something provocative, from one side or the other. Look, too, to see how it progresses under editor Martin Kelley.

Second is Quaker Life: A Ministry of Friends United Ministry published six times a year in Richmond, Indiana. This colorful, glossy magazine underwent a lively transformation in its few years under youthful editor Katie Terrell, who attempted to give each issue a distinctive focus – integrity, transforming lives, what does a new kind of Quaker look like, humor, authority, discernment, even controversy itself. Considering its audience of primarily Midwestern and Southern pastoral Friends, I’m often impressed by the number of writers from unprogrammed meetings, many of them in New England – as well as those from Third World nations. If you want to get a quick overview of how our spiritual roots influence us today, turn to historian Tom Hamm’s one-page question-and-answer column in each issue.

Also of note are the quarterlies. Quaker History can be anything but quaint when it’s examining the difficulties of integrating Sidwell Friends School in Washington, as well as its not-so-orderly roots, or the psychedelic influences of ergot-infected oats on the early Quaker movement. (The real Quaker oats?)

And Quaker Religious Thought, often focusing on a single topic such as Speaking Truth to Power or the strand of Holiness movement in Friends tradition, typically counterpoises the primary article with considered reactions. Sometimes a thorny theological issue can be too arcane for general discussion, but that’s offset by the others that prove unexpectedly stimulating.

*   *   *

Oh, yes – the extra magazine and newsletters piling up in your home? Consider dropping them off at the public library magazine swap pile, a local coffee house, or the Laundromat. You never know who might learn of us that way.

REMEMBERING THE ‘BIG TIME’

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 7 Comments

Found myself chuckling the other day as I was making photocopies on the computer printer. What came to mind was the memory of my old definition of knowing I’d made the big time as a writer would be when I had my own IBM Selectric typewriter and my own Xerox copier. Gee, it didn’t even have to be Xerox, now that I think of it. (And it wasn’t even something really big like a sailboat or shiny new BMW.)

My, how that dates me! But let me explain.

Not too long ago, writers like me were clunking away on big old manual keyboards, even in newspaper offices. The electric typewriters were more likely to be found in the jewelry store on the corner or at the bank than on the desks of people who had to type constantly as part of their employment. Well, really good secretaries also had them – with a lot of our admiration.

While the news writing could have cross-outs and handwritten insertions, serious literary submissions were expected to be perfect – and each submission to the journals was expected to be clean, meaning a copy seldom lasted long in the face of multiple rejections. (Remember, even top-flight authors can expect to receive an average of 20 rejections for each acceptance – or that was the story back when all this was going on. And simultaneous submissions were absolutely verboten.)

So that’s where the photocopier comes in. The small-press editors eventually began allowing copies rather than originals, which was a big blessing for poets like me. Still, it meant finding a decent place to make copies. When I lived in the desert of Washington state, for example, a trek to Seattle four hours away included several hours making fresh copies.

Once I’d moved up the management ladder a few notches, I did splurge on an electric typewriter, one I loved despite its annoying flying f that nobody could keep repaired. Half of the time it would land several spaces further down the line than where it was needed.

Newsrooms, meanwhile, finally got the Selectrics – not to facilitate reporters’ work but to allow the stories to be scanned directly into type, which raised an entire other nightmare. (Try editing one of those!)

What I really envied with the Selectric was the fact you could choose different fonts and sizes – those magical metal balls that flew around above the page you were typing.

~*~

So here we are, a few decades later. How obsolete all that has become! The computer keyboard allows instant corrections, unlike the bulky typewriter. Even the Selectric. And I have quite the array of fonts and sizes to select from, even before shopping around online for more. So much for the four or five choices in the Selectric, if that many. As for that photocopier, I can simply scan copies from the top of that computer printer for all but the most unusual projects.

As for IBM and Xerox? They’re hardly the monolithic powerhouses they were then.

My, how the field’s changed!

As have my measures of “big time.”