Tag: Writing

THE IMAGE, AFTER ALL, OF A WRITER

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

As I said at the time:

I suppose every writer will have had an image of what an acclaimed author would look like. Maybe the impression comes down through a tour of one of those great hushed houses of history – Longfellow or Twain or Whittier or James Whitcomb Riley come to mind. Hemingway’s Key West, as well. Or from the book jacket portraits or a magazine interview or critiques. Then there are the novels and movies themselves about literary struggle and the inevitable success. So much for the myth – and myth it is, with the superhuman vision and divine blessing accompanied by the Guide’s intervention and the visitors’ awe. And just where does each of us place ourselves in its manifestations?

My own expectations have changed greatly. When I set forth from college, I still envisioned an urban life – a stylish high-rise or a federal era townhouse or a loft in some variation of Greenwich Village – accompanied by a suitable social circle. Or life in a quaint college town, as an alternative. Within a few years, though, I was willing to swap for a rambling farmhouse in the mountains or on a lake, with my studio set out on a ridge. Shades of Kesey and Kerouac, of course. All the while, however, I was employed full-time and trying to work in serious writing in my off-hours – the evenings and weekends while my colleagues were raising children, picking up overtime (“OT”) to buy the house and car of their dreams, going off to professional ballgames and rock concerts. My frugal sabbatical year changed the vision, and publication of my first novel delivered a hardened sense of reality. Now I realized how many writers with a string of books to their credit still drew their main paycheck elsewhere. When they met for lunch, the discussion was likely centered on mortgages, medical problems, and mutual friends rather than literature. I could still hope that a breakout novel might free me from the newsroom, but there was no guarantee it would suffice. There had to be a crack in the wall, of course, someplace, if I could only find it and break through. None of this has lessened the compulsion to write; if anything, that has intensified as I turned away from the management track and, thanks to Newspaper Guild union membership, could afford to live a modest life away from the basic hours at the office. (No more sixty- and seventy-hour workweeks.)

Now I imagine it intensified in official retirement. At the moment, I do not sense another novel in the works – not with seven or eight still awaiting a publisher, in addition to the volumes of Quaker history and spirituality, the genealogies, and the poems. So there is plenty of revision to do, plus correspondence and submissions. Perhaps there will finally be time to attend conferences and workshops, to travel, to give readings. I see it continuing where I am, in Dover, where I’ve established friends and community. Maybe the loft of the barn will be finished into a year-round space, as I’ve longed dreamed, but even that’s not necessary; now that I can access it via attic stairs, it serves nicely as a three-session rustic retreat with room to spread out papers and manuscripts. Besides, as long as the children are gone, there’s a bit more room in the house.

What has changed is that successful author has become simply an active writer.

~*~

And to that let me add, Thank God for Smashwords! As well as WordPress!

 

TRAIL MARKERS AND FIELD GUIDE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

As I noted at the time …

It remains work, except for that sense, in the practice of the art, of being alive. Aware. Totally there, at times. A balance, between inspiration breath within and exhalation the atmosphere without.

Yes, it would be wonderful if we were all so spiritually deep that pure worship and our daily work of gardening and cutting firewood would be sufficient. But from experience, we can see that too often what resulted from enforced exclusion of color and imagination from our lives leads, over time, to extinguishing personality our gifts, as a group, are diminished and rather than loving delight, a bitter boredom sets in bringing with it, the backbiting profits of Satan. Which brings us full circle!

I believe we are expected to bring something back to the world from our solitude. Expected to be visionaries and priests. But not, as some would claim, shaman not unless we want to stake our life on the healing power of the individual work. Perhaps, as was recognized in Zen some time ago, when we start writing and singing and painting from this experience, the spiritual movement is already past its zenith. Nonetheless we also know the power of the Zen-suffused works of painting, poetry, pottery, architecture, tea ceremony, various martial arts.

Tantra: as means of going deeper. Concentration. Vibrations. Here the importance of the work of art is not the surface itself but what it triggers within the psyche of the viewer. That is, the canvas we Westerners revere is not so important mere surface of paint. The reverberation within the viewer is, ultimately, the point of value. (All that the viewer brings to the work, or the use of religious icons in the Eastern Orthodox traditions.)

Art as discipline. Self-discipline. Form. Submission/obedience. Never ending practice.

Stravinsky’s “limitations make art.” Heifitz’s love of movies yet no time to attend.

Solitude. Prophecy. Communion. Community. Vision. Hard labor.

Magnetic center point of growth.

Simplicity/direction versus art/artifice.

A separate life, our art? Or integrated?

Having something to say to express. Versus blue smoke and mirrors. Spiritual man has no need to be clever. Distrust of tricks. (Difference between craftsmanship and trickster?) Rather, to stand naked. Irony? Sarcasm? Or loving concern for the good of all? Celebration! Creation/creating. Versus discovery. Contrived versus organic. Maybe everything is different when played on a blue guitar. Not at all!

Exploring the Mystery. Connections. Links.

Here I am, writing (a) fiction about (b) sex and drugs and other aspects of searching. Also, (c) poetry from my pre-Christian experience. Some of my fellowship would argue that’s not where I should be. Some have been praying for me through this period. The kind of work that could get me read out of Meeting. Is this acceptable activity for a free Gospel minister? All I can do is explore the Truth as it’s been given to me.

How, then, turning outward into community or the world? To be candid, including the desire to get laid, the poet’s quest, the troubadour. Yet most of us, as “artists,” are out of touch with our communities. This is a manifold argument, too complex and heated to explore here, except to say.

Perhaps we really do need to be actively intertwined with our community to write well. Not necessarily a community of fellow artists, either. Rather, an intimate fellowship. Speak honestly, critically. Now look at the faces on the magazine covers or workshop brochures. How few look like people you’d like to meet! How much anger, hatred, envy, darkness brooding comes through. How little serenity, how little joy. (Would I want any of them for neighbors? Even the ones whose work I admire?)

Yet through the act of writing, I’m also more aware of qualities in other workers. Interesting. One measure of admiration is seeing something in someone’s work and recognizing a quality I wish I had but know I don’t. So I read that with gratitude and admiration rather than jealousy. Fellow workers in the fields.

Think of the spontaneous and to our “trained” ears, trite verse composed and uttered at Ohio Yearly Meeting, that when shared received an immediate reaction: “I would like to see that included in the published Minutes” and it was, because it expressed a communal feeling.

In the ancient Shah’s court, the poet stood at one end, and the jester, at the other. When one moved, performed, the other remained absolutely motionless: the unspoken balance.

IT ALL ADDS UP NOW

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 4 Comments

Maybe it was one of those equations on the blackboard in an episode of Big Bang Theory, but suddenly I perceived that grammar could be tackled as mathematical equations.

What finally hooked me on grammar – and the art of writing – was a very patient and very demanding English teacher my sophomore year of high school. We spent far more time than we were officially allotted mastering the rules of grammar, and looking back, I see a close similarity to what we were also doing in geometry.

The turning point came in our diagramming of some very long sentences – 250 to 300 words or so – and then realizing the lines and forking could be arranged in various manners, depending on our application of the rules.

Put another way, those lines on the blackboard were also equations that might also reveal errors in thought and observation or even allow new ways of balancing what was at hand.

A few years ago, though, when my elder one delved deeply into sentence diagramming as part of her linguistics training, I hoped we’d soon be swapping insights. Didn’t happen. Didn’t work, either. The newer approaches she was being taught – and a completely different terminology – were so far from the classic approach in my discipline that we simply had no common ground.

Anyone active in the math and sciences world have similar experiences?

THAT DISTINCTIVE LOCAL VOICE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

By now you’re no doubt aware of my belief that local newspapers need a strong local voice, the kind that’s manifested in a talented general columnist or two. The New York Herald-Tribune, for instance, at one point had both Jimmy Breslin and Tom Wolfe in that role. Think, too, of Mike Royko in Chicago or Herb Caen in San Francisco. In Dayton, we had Marj Heyduck holding forth from the Journal Herald’s Modern Living section – but everybody had to read her daily four or five vignettes, especially when they had a humorous edge.

These are the kind of writers who speak personally from the places regular people live, rather than the council meetings and police blotter events that fill the news pages. Unfortunately, they’ve largely vanished in the cost-cutting rounds at newspapers large and small, and communities and subscribers are impoverished as a consequence.

At their best, they get out and report stories that wouldn’t otherwise appear – or at least the aspects they dig up along the way are fresh and insightful. At the Herald-Trib, for example, Breslin would go to the city desk and rifle through assignments for ones he wanted to cover from the street – that’s how he wound up in Selma, Alabama, with dispatches from the front line of the civil rights movement.

Within the newsroom, however, they were generally viewed with disdain or even contempt, even when they scooped the beat reporters, as Caen often did to his colleagues at the Chronicle. Part of the gulf originated, I suspect, in the professional wall between third-person and first-person singular writing, and the fact that reporters are supposed to be neutral observers while a good columnist is permitted to be actively present and even emotionally involved in the story. Ideally, too, reporters are to be invisible agents, unlike the star billing given to a columnist.

All of the snow we’ve been getting has me reflecting on the first newspaper I served after graduating from college – and my frustration with its resident Scribe. There were, for starters, his affectations of a thwarted wannabe novelist – the tweed jackets with elbow patches, the scarf, the half-moon eyeglasses, and, yes, the fragile ego that demanded deference if not worship. There was also an over-the-top serving of purple prose but little substance that cut to the bone. Ultimately, what he served up was inoffensive and bland, but he did have a following.

His one redeeming quality, though, was an eagerness to jump into covering two kinds of stories no one else in the newsroom really wanted to do – weather storms and the deaths of prominent local figures. And there he excelled. Looking back, I can see where a first-person voice can enhance the story – we’re all in this together, after all – even when he was weaving in rewrites of breaking news fed to him by reporters and correspondents, as I vaguely think he was. The deaths, meanwhile, lend themselves to an “we recall when” transition from one detail to the next. Moreover, as a minor celebrity himself, his presence probably got many sources to say more than they might have otherwise. Hmm, my memory is that he leaned toward the editorial “we” rather than the more direct and contemporary “I.”

Outstanding local columnists, I should add, have never been confined to the big metro papers.

A few leaps later in my career, launching Jim Gosney’s daily profiles in Yakima, Washington, demonstrated that. He gave us a parade of characters who made a difference in the community without themselves being considered the kind of movers and shakers who normally got quoted.

And then, in Manchester, New Hampshire, John Clayton began doing something similar.

Both, I should add, were top-notch reporters when it came to questioning a source and digging up facts – and both could turn a phrase in their engaging storytelling and flawless prose. (That combination is rarely a given.) What they offered was the kind of local color and connection too often missing from today’s standard and shallow coverage.

Perhaps you know of others who deserve recognition. Maybe they could even serve as models in a rebirth of the tradition.

A PILLAR OR MILESTONE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

When I was asked to write a newspaper column two or three times during my senior year of college, I chose – out of the blue – to call it “A Corinthian Column.” Maybe it was just a quirky play on words, crossing the distinctive Greek architectural element with a then very vague sense of New Testament or even prophecy. At the time, my faith was somewhere between agnostic and logical positivist – and vehemently anti-Vietnam war and, to a milder extent, anti-Christian. Yet when someone asked, “Where do you think you’ll wind up, as far as religion goes?” I blurted, “Probably something like Zen-Quaker” – this, when I had little idea of either practice or, for that matter, the way that becoming a yogi a few years later would lead me here in the radical Christian sphere.

Decades later, being nominated to serve as clerk of our meeting had me feeling a similar sense of embarking anew. I could list a hundred reasons why I shouldn’t be clerk. First confession: my motto tends toward “Just do it,” and I worked under relentless daily newspaper deadlines. Either way, this means my patience easily wears thin in many Quaker business sessions. Process? I also wish we had a better system of upholding of our community than committee work. Even so, here we are, all the same.

In the interim, Corinthian Column abbreviates to “C.C.” – the same as Clerk’s Corner. When I set out, I intended to draft some short pieces for the congregation’s newsletter – holding each to just three paragraphs – for upcoming issues. Collect random thoughts on our practice, especially. Maybe even without much (overt) theology. So here’s what happened, Friends. Rarely did it hold to just three ‘graphs, though I usually kept it under a page of copy.

What has surprised me is the way these became pastoral letters after all, much the way the Apostle Paul did, in his own letters to the Corinthians. Yes, I largely avoided the theology, unlike Paul, though I address it elsewhere. The effort of living as a community of faith is interesting enough, as it is.

~*~

You may have guessed many of those newsletter items have now resurfaced in one guise or another here at the Red Barn. My intent this time is aimed at encouraging your own spiritual exploration and growth and possibly even some mutually enhancing discussion of how one tradition can infuse new life or understanding for another.

I love hearing of similar encounters from other directions.

MORE GREETINGS FROM THE PAST

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

As I wrote to a long-lost friend at the time …

Maybe it was the James Tayler concert broadcast from Tanglewood at the end of August, as I sat in the newly accessible and lighted loft of my barn and sorted through some files that had been long packed away. Maybe it was the martini that accompanied it. Or maybe it was simply an aspect of a larger interest these days, of simply trying to figure out how I wound up here after what’s often seemed a zig-zag journey through some rather disparate circles across the continent – a route that’s included divorce, a broken engagement, and finally a second marriage approaching 10 years now.

What I felt was a keen appreciation for you, especially, and Maggie and Ise, wondering how your life has prospered and, hopefully, deepened. Glenn got in touch with me a few years back, when he and Mary moved to a cabin in the New Jersey woods … and she didn’t drive. Am not sure she does yet, either.

At any rate, thanks to the Internet, I find two versions of your name both at the same address – can’t be too many who earned their law degrees where you did or started practice in that year. So here’s hoping.

If nothing else, I ought to thank you for introducing me to The River. Or should I say the ritual of repeated returning to The River for periods of introspection and, pardon the pun, reflection? That year of the Susquehanna; later, the irrigation canal bank in the desert orchards of Washington State and then three years along the Merrimack here in New Hampshire. Or the Cocheco, with its waterfalls that drop down just before passing through a stone arch in the big brick mill in downtown Dover. These days, it’s also the Atlantic, especially when my older one’s managing the seaside motel. This has been my summer for discovering the night ocean in all of its moodiness and mystery.

And now, revisiting my journals (which didn’t even start out to be journals, as I discover) as well as letters from the period has been eye-opening, and often delightful. What I remembered as being an essentially depressed period for me was filled with a lot of wonderful encounters and growth. To say nothing of humor, especially Maggie’s. And there’s so much I had forgotten, or that turns out to be different from my memory. More than ever, I think our Hawley Street (and subsequent apartments) would have made a better sitcom than Friends. Nor could anyone have played you better than you. Maybe Cosmo Cramer would have portrayed me. As for Glenn?

Life these days is, I must admit, even fuller, but that’s a long story. My wife’s an incredible woman who’s off seeing an architect at the moment about moving a charter school to the ground floor of one of our old mills, a lovely space overlooking the bend in the river where ships used to dock. (Right now the school’s on the fifth floor next door, with some amazing views of the town.) It’s just one of her (unpaid) jobs as chairman of the board. … Such as it is.

I’m hanging on, glad to have a union card, and wondering how much longer the entire industry can continue to give away the product online. Professionally, it’s been grim all over. Without planning to do so, about 24 years ago I made the decision not to continue in the management ladder but return to the ranks – something that’s allowed me to focus instead on my own writing, Quaker practice and leadership, and a personal life, including New England contradancing and choral singing, on occasion. And homebrewing, at least until we redid the kitchen. Etc.

Well, that’s a sketch from this end. I hope you’re in good health, feeling accomplished and fulfilled, and maybe even content. I would love to hear from you, however briefly – and maybe even give my wife an independent account of our by-now ancient history.

Best regards …

ALL THE EXTRA TOUCHES ADDED UP

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Another of the nation’s once-remarkable papers was the Des Moines Register. It assumed a thoroughly statewide focus, with locator maps pointing out where many of the communities were and an amazing ability to note where anyone mentioned in a national story had ever lived anywhere in Iowa. The front page had an old-fashioned, authoritative appearance with a prominent, staff-produced editorial cartoon and block-letter capital-letter banner headline. I appreciated the frequency of national and international stories that carried the byline, “Combined Wire Services,” meaning a copy editor had spent several hours comparing Associated Press, United Press International, New York Times, and other dispatches to glean details to rewrite into a more comprehensive report. All of that, of course, cost money.

Statewide newspapers began cutting back as the costs of distribution soared, combined with a recognition that nearly all of the advertisers – the principal source of revenue – were aiming at only the major metropolitan area.

It wasn’t just statewide coverage, either, that has been curtailed. Most of the biggest papers have since shuttered their foreign offices and cut back on national reporting, as well.

You can as easily say they’ve cheapened the product, but that’s a longer term issue.

~*~

For a surreal, playful, and often gallows-humor trip within one young and ambitious newsroom, pick up my novel, Hometown News.

Hometown News

CAPITALIST INTERVENTION

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

You know the Front Page tradition. But how much do you see about behind-the-scenes reality where newspaper reporters and editors are instead besieged by the very corporations that have gobbled up newspaper after newspaper, and city after city? My novel follows a band of idealists recruited to a family-owned newspaper by the promise of professional excellence and a competitive spirit. Through ever-more demanding workdays and a twist of fate, they ultimately overpower a monolithic neighboring rival, only to see their smiling publisher sell out to a media conglomerate. As their moment of glory disintegrates into surreal management games, unethical directives, and excruciating budget cuts, they struggle to save as much of their hard-won victory as possible – and painfully come to know themselves, their trade, and their neighborhoods in a much different light than they had just months earlier.

Hometown_News

~*~

To find out more about Hometown News or to obtain your own copy, go to my page at Smashwords.com.

EDUCATIONAL ATTAINMENT

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 6 Comments

If you want a clue to a person’s educational achievements, don’t ask about degrees or where they went to college. Rather, ask, “What are you reading now?”

The answer will tell you whether the individual has curiosity and intellectual growth, and where those are occurring. Having no books on the list, for me, would be reason for concern. Where are their horizons and challenges? Or even their guilty pleasures?

I’ve met too many people having a slew of degrees who are still unimaginative hacks, whatever their field. And I’ve met people having nothing more than an elementary school education who are well read and have minds to match.

Reading, I’ll insist, is a discipline that needs to be engaged if one is to have credibility as a thinker. Any idiot can have opinions, but a reasoned analysis, well, that’s a much different matter.

By the way, just what are you reading these days?

OUT INTO THE WORLD OF READERS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Poking around in the barn, as it were (actually, it was several folders in my computer, if you insist on being accurate), I wound up reopening collections of my poetry – and to say I’m astonished by their range, variety, and depth is not a matter of boasting. You’ve already sampled some of that here in my postings, not all of it “finished” work, either.

At the same time, as I survey the literary scene today and its opportunities, I’ve decided to issue as much of it as I can now (while I’m still ticking) rather than continue to seek piecemeal publication.

The upshot has been the resurrection of Thistle/Flinch editions, my personal imprint, as a free bookstore venture here on WordPress. Each month, it’s offering a new work as a PDF file to read on your computer or print out to paper.

In some ways, it’s like tucking a print shop into a corner of the barn. I rather like that image.

As an introduction, may I suggest:

Returning 1Or the rocky shores of my latest:

Winged Death 1

Hope you enjoy what you find there. And as always, here’s to happy reading.