Tag: Writing

A NEARLY PERFECT NOVEL

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Way back in my senior year of high school, I remember a moment when our English teacher invoked the dictum that all fiction requires conflict – and my immediate contrarian reaction blurted out, “No, it doesn’t!” My objections were gut-level rather than coolly reasoned and certainly wouldn’t have held up to the novels that were capturing my attention at the time – Brave New World, 1984, and Animal Farm. Yet seeded somewhere in my aesthetic, the low-key, nonviolent approach to a story lingers. Few of us, after all, are parties to a murder, which is a key component of so much fiction. And Kurt Vonnegut’s advice to take a nice character and inflict the worst possible calamities on the poor soul still offends my spiritual proclivities, never mind so many passages in the Bible. Yes, I’ll now admit that true character can be shaped and revealed in intense confrontations and struggles. That is, conflict.

Still, my own entries to date have focused on day-to-day realities drawn from my own observations – attempts to comprehend contemporary social interactions, even if they appear to be history by the time the words finally appear in public.

~*~

In retrospect, my admiration of so much of Richard Brautigan’s output probably arises in the laid-back meandering of his hippie-era characters and their encounters. Think of Trout Fishing in America for starters.

~*~

More recently, Nicholson Baker has emerged as my favorite embodiment of the nonviolent sensibility. You could argue that nothing happens in the first 50 pages of The Incredible Story of Nory, and yet the tension is already mounting. To construct a successful novel on a father’s bottle-feeding session of an infant (Room Temperature) or a short escalator ride (The Mezzanine) is artistically courageous. Book of Matches, meanwhile, takes off on the simple premise of sitting by a fire in the predawn hours of deep winter – it could almost be blogging.

His latest volume, Traveling Sprinkler, pretty much slipped under the radar, yet impresses me as a nearly perfect example of the no-major-conflict novel. His main character, the minor-league poet and anthologist Paul Chowder, faces nothing more challenging than the question of whether his ex-girlfriend will return to him as he muddles through middle age. Yet along the way, Baker weaves in ruminations about the American health system and public education, the advantages of rhyming in song lyrics in contrast to poems, aspects of recording technology, basics of bassoon performance, collectors’ perspectives on lawn sprinklers and related outdoors gear, experiences of Quaker worship, and some travel pointers for Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Billed as a sequel to The Anthologist, it stands well on its own as a rich and deeply personal tapestry. What could be better? Even without a slew of dead bodies?

FAREWELL TO THE SWITCHBOARD

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

At the office, we had the farewell to the switchboard operator who’d been replaced by the new phone system – someone who had been there when I arrived two decades earlier.

Oh, the weird calls we’d get, the ones she usually screened yet some still managed to slip past her.

The woman from California, “Can you tell me what state New Hampshire’s in?” and I wanted to reply, “How the hell did you get this number?”

All of the ones wanting to know my opinion, as if it mattered.

Or the drunks or the individuals convinced of this conspiracy or that. Especially late at night.

As the publisher told one, “What do you think this is, a call-in radio show?”

Listen. We’ve got work to do, rather than yap. Piles and piles of work.

~*~

Oh, my, the telephones! They become a chorus of their own in my novel, Hometown News.

Hometown News

FROM THE FLAT GRAY FIELDS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

As I said at the time …

Standing in the blank fields of Ohio … gray March … the utilitarian cemetery … beside my mother’s grave, knowing soon my father, too, would be planted here.

As it turns out, not as soon as I envisioned. He recovers somewhat. Several years later, I return to the spot, this time with my sister. We explore more, find other great-great-grandparents buried in a cemetery two or three miles away – not at all where I previously thought.

This time, I begin to appreciate the section numbers of township maps, as I place my ancestors’ farms, how often they abutted each other. How many, only a mile or two from this spot, back when these lands were mostly forested.

A native, a student at a then-new state university, a journalist who worked on three of its daily newspapers (each in a different quadrant of the state), I’ve spent a third of my life in Ohio. Married there and, a few years after returning, divorced; nearly married there again, too. Many of my ancestors, I’ve learned, settled Montgomery County in its first decade.

Yet, reviewing my creative writing – the poetry, fiction, and essays – I find little that’s directly about Ohio. Curiously, those few passages typically appear in pieces about other places – Indiana, Washington State, the East Coast. What instead becomes apparent is the fact that my roots remain, complexly and paradoxically, embedded in Ohio. Unavoidably, in my years as an exile, much of my writing comes out of those Buckeye origins. Whether my years away have been the result of forced expulsion (job market, especially) or of self-chosen escape, I nevertheless carry inevitable values, images, and expectations that are not just Midwestern, but more distinctly, those of the Miami Valley. As I’ve delved into my ancestry, moreover, I find also a forceful sub-current of dissenting religious practice and witness in overlapping Dunker (Brethren), Quaker, and Mennonite farming circles planted there – and to these, mysteriously, it would seem, I’ve returned in new settings.

Surveying material currently available for submission turns up very little with even the word “Ohio” in it. (Some fiction, essays, and genealogical writing need more revision before their release.) The five poems enclosed (an offer of first North American serial rights for work you select) do, however, spring deeply from the state – not just the land, but also the emotions. Maybe it’s a sense of the lovers, who were also Buckeyes. Maybe the awareness of mechanical work and objects. Maybe the crossroads nature of the state, looking west (in one poem, the prairie that stretches into Illinois) as well as east, to Baltimore and New York (as in “oysters”) or even, as stated, England. Maybe the underlying naïve outlook that becomes vulnerable to betrayal. Or the dreams of acting (hints of Broadway or Hollywood). Whatever the combination, something of the state is compressed into the fabric of these pieces.

Here’s hoping they work for you.

~*~

For the record, they didn’t.

 

PRACTICE AS A PLACE IN THE UNIVERSE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 6 Comments

As I said at the time:

Along the way, the “creative process” is a phrase I’ve come to detest. “Poetic” is another, especially when applied to another art. Whatever “creative” really means or as though the resulting work always occurs in a given sequence. Perhaps “artistic problem-solving” or “artistic exploration” comes closer, except that “artistic” still carries too much excess baggage.

“Process” sounds too much like ritual for my taste. Or a formula, “If you add L to M you’ll end up with an original poem.” Which sounds too much like a dogma or a creed to recite. Like a corridor through a shopping mall. Like a secret code to be disclosed, a joke to be retold in some variation.

For universities, “creative process” can even be seen as the teaching of mistrust and technique. “Absolute skepticism is one of the powers,” Richard Foster writes in Money, Sex & Power. “Absolute skepticism is so pervasive a belief in university life today that it must be considered a spiritual power hostile to an honest search for truth. The task of a university is to pursue truth – all truth – and yet precisely the reverse is happening today.” Creation, however, requires a foundation. Affirmation – a critical embrace of what remains holy. However we want to define that.

In the periodicals, the accepted pieces are typically of a certain length and idiom – that is, they are those lacking the obvious signs of amateurism; they’re idiomatically correct. But do they say anything meaningful, especially to the general reader, much less the populace? Do they speak to others’ conditions? I sense not: at least, seldom my own. (Leading to literary journals read by exclusively by other poets or short story writers, a particularly ticklish incest.)

Meanwhile, when I look at Japanese and Chinese art, the Zen/Chan work jumps out in its freshness from the well-schooled stream of traditional art. Thus, with poetry or musical performance that knows living silence: a whole higher dimension. Necessity for revolution here: transformation. Transfiguration. Transcendence. Transparency, too. On into unending depth.

When I first set forth, I believed to be truly creative, something had to spring out of nowhere – a bolt of lightning accompanying work thoroughly unlike anything before it. Similarly, my girlfriend at the time thought, “Wouldn’t it be great if we had a language all our own?” One unlike anything before it. Slowly, however, I realized how difficult it is to understand what’s said and written in an existing language, with all of its nuances and roots waiting to be fathomed. The fact is, creative acts happen through building on existing tradition, evolving at the edges and frontiers. The artist or scientist or inventor or entrepreneur is indebted to all who have come earlier, and is responsible as well for those who will follow.

Often see those who start out are filled with an experience/awareness they want to share but cannot because of deficiencies in technique. By the time they master technique, they’ve lost the freshness. Yet I most admire those who have acquired technique the hard way: hands-on, original, primitive, perhaps without any of the accepted shortcuts.

~*~

The term I’ve come to love, by the way, is “practice.” The way a doctor or lawyer practices. Or even a football team or a choir. It’s never really done. It’s just a way of living.

WHEN LESS IS MORE: THE STRAVINSKY EDICT

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

One of the dictums I keep returning to as I consider my own practice of art is composer Igor Stravinsky’s observation that limitations make art. Me, who does not write in formal verse structures, not because they’re too limiting, but because I find they typically dilute the language and its impact. In other words, some limitations strengthen one’s imagination and thinking; others lead straight into writer’s block.

Stravinsky’s limitations, I’m certain, are quite different from the blinders I see imposed in much of the so-called Christian art we see. Dogma of any kind simply inhibits our ability to perceive what’s at hand. (Dogma’s not just Christian; anybody want to address “political correctness,” Islamic fundamentalists, or rabid atheist?)

When it comes to working as an artist – and that includes any field, including comedy – I see a division between those who focus on invention versus those seeking discovery of what’s working within or around them — or even epiphany.

We’re talking about people, after all, wherever they are in their lives. Do they bring us escape or encounter? Either route imposes limitations.

For me, the practice of an art is a way of observing and discovering. It’s a laboratory, in essence. No wonder my literary writing often falls under the label of “experimental.”

I suppose many of the self-imposed limitations arise under the heading of style or method. But they’re deeply imbedded, all the same.

REMEMBERING A PRINCE OF PUNS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Long a staple of the Friday-night Public Broadcasting lineup, Wall $treet Week’s Louis Rukeyser was noted as a master of puns. Or should that be groanster? Or even monster?

So in his presence for lunch one day, I piped up. “You know there are no good puns, only bad ones and worse. So who do you look down to for inspiration?”

He took it in good stride, knowing the sneer puns often earn, and replied calmly that when he was growing up, one of his father’s best friends was Random House cofounder Bennett Cerf – and young Louis gobbled up all of the literary publisher’s pun-filled volumes. I think he said he memorized 14 books in all. Not a bad foundation, for starters, and probably better than the jokes at the end of each month’s issue of Boys’ Life magazine.

Toward the end of his career, Rukeyser increasingly resembled the man on America’s one-dollar bills, an image he no doubt curried with a bit of tongue-in-cheek. Get a shtick in life, you might as well run with it. And how!

He was also an early example of the multimedia celebrity, something I detested in my role as a newspaper editor. I saw enough examples of television or radio personalities who tried their hand at simultaneously writing regular columns for print media, and our side of the equation was obviously the one being slighted. Let’s be frank. Anybody in the spotlight has only so much first-rate material to go around.

(That makes me recall a second-rate Boston newspaper columnist who took on TV features too, and pretty soon you couldn’t understand his content unless you’d seen the show he was amplifying. And then he was unmasked as a disgrace.)

Still, Rukeyser was candid about what we now call a “platform.” His career started as a reporter the Baltimore Sun, and he maintained a newspaper column throughout his run. “It established my credibility,” he said, back in the days when print carried clout.

The TV series, he added, gave him exposure and fame.

But the money came largely from his in-person appearances as a convention speaker. Everybody, after all, knew who he was – and that he could make the “dismal science” of economics and finance a lively, even humorous, topic.

Not every editor, I should note, bought into the argument that his fame as a public television celebrity would translate into newspaper readership. I still share their conclusion.

And then we had Andy Rooney.

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.