Tag: Writing

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.”

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.