Tag: Writing

PAPER-FREE DIGITAL ANXIETIES

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Do we read less closely online than we do on paper?

Do pieces get lost in the email and social media deluge of new material? (With paper, are we more likely to revisit a piece and ponder it? More likely to use it a springboard for response or action?)

Do we keep things in our inbox or mailbox folders? Or do we delete most of them once they’re read? (Or do we scan them, rather than reading?) Or just save them, “for later”?

I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling flooded. There seems to be way too little time to keep up, and my mind is feeling like a sieve. Now, we’re all on to the next …

GOING PAPERLESS, TO SOME DEGREE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 6 Comments

It’s been a little over a year since I went largely paperless, as the high-tech crowd would put it. Not entirely by choice, but rather because my printer died and the one we have for the household no longer interacts with any of our three laptops. So much for technology. Alas.

Yes, it can be an annoyance, especially when I have a choral score to print out or my wife’s found some great coupons. But we’ve found ways to cope.

When my printer went kaput, I was already finding that most poetry journals were accepting submissions only online, and that included the printed quarterlies. Keeping duplicate files of online and printout versions was troublesome and led to several embarrassing duplicate acceptances. So I decided to go to online-submissions only, and had only a few instances where I had to decline an opportunity.

Blogging, of course, has allowed me to move many pieces straight to the Internet without using paper, so that’s cleaned up a corner of my studio.

The big breakthrough was the ebook publishing with Smashwords. There’s no more need for multiple printed manuscript copies or files of postal correspondence to cope with. It’s so clean!

Not that the piles of paper don’t continue. Rather, they’re smaller these days. I’ll still pay my bills with a check, thank you, and there are always paper notes for consideration. Admittedly, I used to jest that sorting papers was one of my hobbies. In a way, it still is.

The fact is I love the feel and look of paper when it’s used well – fine stock and good typography, especially, along with masterful photography or illustration. And I still have a lot of that to sort through, to say nothing of all my years of journaling, which I’ve done with fountain pens for nearly two decades now. The old-fashioned fountain pens I ordered the same time I bought a PC that’s long been out of commission. The pens that dance in my hands, unlike this keyboard.

IN THE PERSPECTIVE OF TIME

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 9 Comments

As a writer, I love taking a phrase and rolling it around, substituting one word or thought and seeing what happens.

With the Grimms’ fairy tale opening, “A long time ago, when wishes came true,” I began substituting “prayers” for “wishes” and realized many people seem to assume that prayers really did have more effect a long time ago – say back in the time of Moses or King David – than these days.

But that also has me wondering about the depth of our wishes today. Are we too directed by advertising and material possessions to seek what’s truly desirable? The fairy tales and Holy Scripture, as I recall, have a lot to say on that account.

THIS SECRET SOCIETY OF READERS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 8 Comments

One of the more baffling questions for just about any author, I suspect, is the one that asks, “Who are your readers?”

Yes, I know about genres and their core audiences – Chick Lit, aimed at unmarried females in their 20s; Romance, middle-age women; Sci-Fi, geeky males; Young Adult, well, it’s self-explanatory. I even know that commercial radio programmers could target their listenership to hit an average, say, of 24.7-year-old women in the office.

For a poet, though, or the novelist working outside common genres, this question becomes more problematic. I can imagine those I hope will find the work appealing, but the reactions often turn up elsewhere. I’m thinking of a writer who hoped her work would speak to her friends, only to hear them say, “I don’t read books,” as if it’s a badge of honor. (Oh, for shame!)

What that suggests is that rather than expecting a boffo bestseller, we writers might envision a much smaller-scale enterprise – connecting with readers one-on-one, as an underground understanding. Let it be private and personal, then. Our own quiet conversation.

Whether my Hippie Trails novels find their appeal more for those who lived through the era or among younger readers undergoing similar searching is still taking shape. I would hope both. But I am enjoying the feedback I’m receiving, from wherever.

It’s not the big-business Manhattan operation I once dreamed of or the San Francisco counterculture success, either. But here we are, connecting, in our own little underground society. Little do the others know what they’re missing now, do they?

BEWARE OF UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

Reporters and editors live in dread of accidentally publishing a lewd expression. It’s not just the list of four-letter words themselves or the inevitable typographical errors. (You know, the embarrassing “pubic” for “public.”) The innocent double-meaning can be the worst. The famous “Colonel Screws guest at banquet” headline that went through five or six editions before getting caught. Or the caption for the Supreme Court justice about to climb the staircase to a second-floor dinner: “Justice Douglas prepares to mount women” instead of “mount stairs with women.”

As one of our colleagues would remind us, quoting one of his mentors, “It takes a dirty mind to put out a clean newspaper.”

(Oh, the stories we could tell.)

SCARF ‘ROUND THE NECK

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 7 Comments

At the first college I attended, nearly all of the writers wore scarves. I don’t think it was a conscious decision to create a group identity, but the school, small as it was, had an excellent writing program. As a commuter campus, we wound up hanging out in what was called a cafeteria, not that I recall a real food line. But the round table (as a roundtable, at that) was open, and maybe the scarves were initially just a way of finding a circle of kindred spirits.

In a way, the strip of cloth may have served like those reminders of guilds and monastic orders of ancient times and their echo in modern clerical and academic vestments. We weren’t yet hippies, with all of their expressive sartorial flair, but it was on the horizon. Think of it as a badge of self-identity and distinction.

In the years since, as I’ve come to appreciate the way scarves can add a layer of comfort through a northern winter, I keep recalling that circle and our aspirations. A few went on to earn literary recognition, but some of the others were also immensely talented and yet have vanished from sight.

Come to think of it, so have many of my own favorite scarves – especially the ones my new stepdaughters latched onto when they came into the picture.

Any way I look at it, a scarf still beats a necktie as an item of apparel. Remind me to wear one next time I pose for the back-of-the-book jacket portrait.

Oh, here we are, back to those aspirations, aren’t we?

A FEW QUICK THOUGHTS ON THE LONG AND SHORT OF WRITING

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

As a writer, I love long pieces that allow a thorough investigation of a topic. Tell me the why and how of a situation, not just the final action.

The Wall Street Journal used to have those front-page, full-column “leaders” that jumped inside, often filling most of the inside page. These pieces actually telescoped a series of mini-stories into a comprehensive whole. How I admired those, even as I was being told to cut stories to much shorter length. (It often felt like reducing prime rib to hamburger.)

The longer stories, if well written and thoroughly researched, provided a sense of feasting, and I could point to research that showed some readers stayed around for those meaty offerings. I knew I had a feeling of getting my money’s worth after I’d savored one of those.

Not that I felt all stories should run long – I was also a big believer in running columns of briefs, in part to make room for the longer reports.

These thoughts return to me as I blog. In fact, I’m having a lot of fun “writing short” here at the Barn. You know, a couple of sentences and that’s it – especially with the photos.

For the longer efforts, though, I’ll point you to As Light Is Sown, Chicken Farmer I Still Love You, or the Orphan George Chronicles. Or to my novels. As I was saying …

THE INSPIRATION OF PICASSO

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 4 Comments

There it was on a public television broadcast, a curator proclaiming that no other artist had made as many bad lithographs (and maybe other kinds of prints) as Picasso. But, came the rejoinder, no other artist had made so many of genius, either. The freedom of one was necessary to open the other.

I took the message to heart. Genius, of course, is another matter.

AFTER THE FROST

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

As everyone’s been saying, New England had a strange summer. It felt shorter than normal, and despite some uncommonly hot spikes, was overall on the cool side. June was drier than usual, while July was wetter. And we swimmers were finding the ocean already growing uncomfortable toward the end of August, rather than leading into the glorious days of September we often anticipate. (The Gulf of Maine takes time to warm, after all.) I barely got my value’s worth out of my season pass to Fort Foster beach, unlike last year, even though I’m officially fully retired now.

As the buzz went, the fall foliage was better than we’d had in years, although it seemed to run about a week ahead of schedule and then essentially drifted off. And, after a few near misses in September, we were finally hit with killing frosts before the last week of October.

Not that many years ago, I would have said that was the end of the garden season, but that’s no longer the case. The cold gives the Brussels sprouts and kale a sweet edge, the parsley hangs in well for a few more weeks, and root crops like carrots, parsnips, turnips, and leeks can stay in the ground until it’s too frozen to spade.

Maybe part of my sense of a shortened summer can be laid to my revived activity as a novelist, thanks to the Smashwords publishing. With Hippie Drum released at the end of May, I found myself busy getting the word out through June and then spent much of August and September revising and formatting more works. Unexpectedly, but with a renewed sense of direction, I even drafted large sections of new material. What all this meant, of course, was time at the keyboard instead of outdoors.

Now that Ashram is in circulation again, I’m once more reflecting on attempting to establish a right balance in my life – time for exercise and home projects, for instance, renewed cooking and expanded social activity. Who knows, maybe I’ll finally reach that sweet spot.

For now, that includes cleaning up the garden, removing the dead zinnia stalks, eggplants, peppers, tomatoes. Pruning the raspberries. Turning compost. And then there’s moving the fig tree to the cellar, putting the hoses and Smoking Garden lights away, dismantling the hammock, stacking the tomato cages.

Already I’m looking at the dandelion leaves and calculating how soon they’ll be emerging from winter and heading to our plates.

Just don’t tell me it’s going to be a hard winter or there will be tons of snow to shovel.

Balance means savoring just one day at a time, right? Or can it mean all of them?

A LOGICAL CONCLUSION

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

As far back as three decades, when I was selling editorial-page columnists and cartoonists to newspapers, even openly liberal editors had become shy of picking up anything except conservative voices.

As a consequence, we’ve had no new voices to speak from the left, especially not in general syndication. Think about it.

Meanwhile, newspaper circulation has been plummeting.

Could it be those conservative voices are deadly dull? (At least, when they’re not shrill?)

Think about it.

A bird with only a right wing won’t fly far.

Yes, think about it.