You never know what we'll churn up in cleaning a stall
Just want to thank all of you who have downloaded your own copy of my novel Hippie Drum and to say how much I hope you’ve enjoyed it.
Since it’s my third published novel, and another in what’s considered the “experimental” literature realm, I’m grateful for all of the positive reaction.
If you haven’t yet joined the club of readers, let me encourage you to join now. Just click here for your own free copy.
A renewed compulsion had me rethinking, reworking, pruning, and punching up much of my earlier writing – the dozen unpublished novels; the genealogy research and narrative; several hundred poems, many of which had been published in literary quarterlies; and varied essays and journal entries. It hit with a vengeance, and was given extra clout at New England Yearly Meeting one August when, in a prayer circle, it was made clear to me that these labors are an exercise of talent, a gift, rather than a self-indulgence that had too often before stirred feelings of guilt.
For the first time in my life, I felt free to undertake this labor, the writing that does not pay the bills but somehow keeps me intellectually and artistically alive. What a blessing! (Never underestimate the power of prayer!)
Again, cleaning up these works and seeing them published may be one more way of bringing some closure to what too often seems a honeycombed life! Writing pulls so many of these threads together.
I began trying to set aside one free day each week as a no-automobile day, a kind of sabbath for writing, reading, or reflection; even with my usual three days off at the time (Sunday News worked a double shift every Saturday), achieving this goal became surprisingly difficult – but wonderfully rewarding when it did.
In some rich ways, it became a kind of retirement, even while being employed elsewhere full-time.
He admitted it was an academic book that deserved to be published, but their research indicated they’d be lucky to sell 400 copies. Without a hefty subsidy, there was no way his university press could afford to move forward on the project.
Welcome to the club.
Because we rely on a wood stove to heat part of our house, one of my annual rituals involves ordering and stacking timber. Living where we do in northern New England, there’s plenty of forest to draw on and we can anticipate suffering through an extended winter. With the advance of “renewable energy” sources, however, we’re also competing with the local electrical utility, which has begun using wood to fire some generators. Since we reside in a small city and have full-time occupations (though not always of the paying variety), we depend on the services of independent entrepreneurs who proclaim, as the saying goes, CUT – SPLIT – DELIVERED. Cordwood, for the stove, being a couple of inches shorter than fuel for the fireplace. It’s a crucial distinction.
This is not something I grew up with. Nobody we knew had a working fireplace, or if they did, it wasn’t used in our presence. My appreciation of wood fires originated in Boy Scout outings with a troop dedicated to backpacking and primitive camping – quite a feat, when you think of it, for a troop based in southwestern Ohio. My first-hand experience with working fireplaces came later, with my residency in an ashram in the Pocono mountains of Pennsylvania, in a single winter of living in town in Washington State, and in the house I owned for a couple of years in the Rust Belt – a half-dozen years, altogether. Thus, my sustained encounters have been largely in the past dozen years in New Hampshire, though I suspect the applications are fairly universal.
Ordering in itself is an act of faith. You find a phone number – perhaps in one of the weekly neighborhood newspapers or perhaps on a kiosk in a local store or perhaps by word of mouth, and eventually dial (one of my delays is making sure I could pay for the wood on delivery; the timing of our income-tax refund is often a factor); usually you wind up leaving a message on an answering machine and hoping for a reply. Even then, there’s no guarantee the woodcutter will reply or follow through on a promise to deliver. For the dealer, arranging for trees can be iffy – a warm, wet winter, for instance, may keep cutters out of the woods. One year, this meant our pile never arrived, and we were stonewalled on our inquiries. These days, our firewood comes from a man in his early seventies. How much longer he’ll continue, of course, is in question. In typical Yankee farmer tradition, he shows up when he’s ready – anywhere from a month to three or four months after he’s expected. We don’t need to dicker over price – he’s well in line with the going rate, and I’ve always been impressed with the quality he delivers.
After some irregularity in our annual pace, we’ve settled on ordering four cords a year, green wood we hope will arrive in time to lose much of its sap before late autumn. Since we’ve been burning about three-fourths of that amount, I’m hoping to get ahead enough to have enough well-seasoned wood, having had more than a year to turn from yellow to gray, to sustain us – a goal that still eludes me. Maybe we won’t have the creosote buildup this year that has afflicted our chimney by March the past two years, but I can’t convince my wife that the savings in purchasing green wood outweighs the cost of the chimney sweep, something she says we have to do anyway. Seasoned wood also burns hotter and catches more easily. Maybe this year will be different. I keep hoping.
The delivery comes in two parts, each one dumped in our driveway to produce a lovely, chaotic heap of timber that also releases a heavenly aroma, especially after a light rainfall. And then I typically set to work, between my required rounds at the office (who knows what will happen, now that I’m retired) and usual household activities. Let me admit, I don’t rest easily while the driveway is covered; I’m like a beaver when it hears running water. So stack I do, probably more than is healthy for a largely sedentary creature of my age and condition.
By now, I have something of a routine down – maybe that’s in the nature of a ritual, too. The location of the two firewood stacks has been determined, in part as a consequence of landscaping decisions by previous owners of the property and in part as a result of my own tinkering. Half of the wood will go on one side of the house, by the lilacs; the other half, on the other side of the house, well be behind the barn and our shed.
The ritual sets in as I fill my wheelbarrow and begin moving the wood, piece by piece. Immediately, I search out pieces that are squared off, having four sides rather than three; these are essential for constructing the corners. Some are flatter than others, and will be used for the lower levels of what has some resemblance to a filled box or brickwork – three pieces set at a right angle atop three more, alternating as high as needed. Eventually, the warped pieces begin fitting snuggly, and if there’s any lean to the line, I want it to slant toward the pile itself to let gravity add to the stability of the stack. At first, the task of reducing the pile appears overwhelming; there’s no visible progress at the source, and little on the other end. Here I must rely on previous experience, remembering that it’s something that is accomplished, one step at a time. The hard work has already been done – the cutting, moving, and splitting of the wood.
A rhythm sets in. I recognize that each piece has already been handled multiple times. Now I handle it at least twice – once to put it into the wheelbarrow, and again when I add it to the stack. There, it may be turned or jiggled for a secure fit in the emerging puzzle. It will be handled at least twice more, once to be carried to the kitchen and then to be placed in the stove. The ashes, of course, will be carried out and spread on the garden. For now, I regard the wood itself, trying to identify the species (maple, birch, oak, ash, beech, mostly) as well as the color and shape. No two pieces are exactly the same, and some that are gnarled or curved are placed aside, reserved for the top of the stack, where stability won’t be quite as essential.
A pattern emerges, or rather a fascinating movement of visual design. Not that visible harmony is on my mind as the pieces amass; instead, my concern is for engineering security and solidity against settling and the elements. I long learned that no matter how stable the stack feels now, it will slip in the months ahead; while one stack will begin dwindling by Christmas or my birthday, and its interlocking tensions need hold only so long, I am planning on the other stack staying in place a year beyond that, so its lines need to remain shipshape. If anything, I try to anticipate the many small shifts, so that the weight of one row will brace another. Still, there’s a degree of chance on how any of this will fare, no matter my care. A Zen Buddhist saying flits through my mind, “In nothingness, form; in form, nothingness,” though “chaos” or “chance” substitute well for “nothingness” here. In other words, look and see: things come together.
The labor also has me reflecting on how I write a poem – or many other works, for that matter. I usually start with a pile of debris – observations and scattered thoughts I’ve jotted down and collected. I’m not one for formal structures or invention; to my senses, that’s more like carpentry or cabinetry, and the related ritual would be stacking 2x4s from the lumberyard. No, I’m sticking closer to the grain, or the quest of exploring wilderness. The irregular spaces in the stack, resulting from half-moon ends and triangular thrusts and other geometric possibilities coming together fascinate me more. The negative gives dimension to positive, shadow plays into light, and small critters will likely find shelter somewhere in the heart of all this.
I can also see the woodpile as a metaphor for my faith community, though there the number of craggy pieces may be multiplied, and I keep hoping for more new greenwood – we seem to be seasoning a bit too much for a good mix, and I’m not alone in that observation.
Either way, you work with what you are given.
So here I am, pleased to have two woodpiles in place by early July. One measures roughly six by six by six, the other 3½ by ten by six – each about 210 cubic feet, in other words, short of the purchased measure (a cord being 128 cubic feet), but fitting the normal practice. I’m not complaining. Besides, I pack tight in my stacking, unlike the typical woodcutter. With the promise of winter comfort, of caring for my family, of coming home from the office (as I often did) around midnight and loading the stove for the remainder of the night, I stand back for a moment, admiring my sculpture. Yes, Jesus did warn against the man who built a huge barn, expecting to hoard forever, so my regard of my woodpiles is tempered. Still, I know the arrangement will go too quickly, and the process will happen all over again next year, if I’m blessed.
Journalism students used to be told of a reporter writing a weather story in a newsroom. Even though he can look out the window to see that it’s raining, he turns to the guy at the next desk, asks him to look out the window, and then quotes him in the report. It’s probably apocryphal, but it does reflect the kind of training no-nonsense reporters had in turning to sources, rather than their personal observations.
That’s why you see so many direct quotations in a news dispatch.
What you learn along the way is that what you see may not be the full story, much less the real account.
For all I know, it could have been glass falling from an explosion or sawdust, as they do in theater productions.
At least this way, there’s someone to blame if it’s wrong.
For decades – perhaps generations – writers would send their works off to magazines as exclusive submissions. Only one journal at a time would get to look at a piece, usually taking six months to reject it. And with rejection rates running 95 percent and higher, a writer could spend a lifetime trying to see a piece published.
More recently, many editors have turned to allowing simultaneous submissions, something I’ve avoided simply because of the difficulties of keeping track of what I have out where. But I don’t call mine exclusive submissions; if I don’t hear back in six months, I assume the work was lost, the periodical’s gone kaput, or the piece has been rejected – and then I put it back into circulation.
The Postal Service submissions also meant including an SASE – self-addressed, stamped envelope – for return of the work and the typical rejection slip or scrawl or, happy day, the rare acceptance note.
When I returned to submitting after a five- or six-year hiatus, much of the field had changed. Many of the journals now took submissions only electronically, especially through one of several formatted services. For a while I tried to maintain two separate sets of files, one for submissions I was sending off in envelopes and another for the online offerings.
And then, one day, I looked at the odds. All of my acceptances were coming from the online submissions. More impressively, some came within six hours rather than six months.
A few editors still limit themselves to entries on paper. But they’re not seeing my work. At the moment, I don’t even have easy access to a printer. (But that’s another story.)
In the old days, a newspaper or magazine often had a personal imprint. The publication took on the publisher’s or top editor’s vision, and a certain tone and range of interests followed. We can look at the legendary names – McCormack, Hearst, Pulitzer, Scotty Reston’s New York Times, Ben Bradlee’s Washington Post, the Bingham family’s Louisville Courier-Journal, Tom Winship’s Boston Globe, even Bill Loeb’s Union Leader – and then realize it’s not something you see in the corporate journalism of today, especially where top editors are out the door in a year. Can you name anyone at the helm today?
As for the big-name stars of network and cable news/entertainment, well, let’s just say they’re pale imposters. There’s something to be said for knowing the ropes of a community and its people. Of having roots and depth – and the responsibility of recognition when they’re out in public.
As I said at the time: Who am I writing to? Right now, me. A conversation with myself. Not that I want it to remain that way. In time, it may be you, the invisible reader wandering around my mind or heart. The kindred spirit. Or perhaps, as prayer, as confession to God. Who already knows the outcome. And who would cheat God? Yes, the ubiquitous “you” in contemporary American poetry may well be God as much as one’s lover.
In my experience, I really do need to get that first overview drafted, to see in part where my thoughts and heart are leading. At that point, I can begin to ask what else needs to be said about you or me, the family, faith, our part of the world (now I think of a friend who painted a much different picture of Maine than the coastal postcards most people imagine), and so on. (And don’t overlook the lessons from the convent, I tell her.)
“The new chapters in your letters have good energy,” I continued. “They move along well, keeping eyes open for details and heart for insight. A good direction!” Having just finished the ninth or tenth draft of one manuscript, retitled again, I acknowledged stages of writing and revision my own process entails. The first draft is essentially for myself: to see where the material leads. The next several revisions tend to round out the logic, support my leaps, provide background for the reader; in this stage, the work becomes wordy, by necessity and is written for others, rather than myself. Then comes the “sponge stage,” where the work begins to soak up more and more new material quotes, references, new insights; it must reach saturation point. Sometime around here, the work needs to be restructured or reblocked: the original outline or roadmap no longer leads the material through the best route. (A chronological approach, for instance, may be jettisoned at this stage.) Eventually, what I really need to say emerges, and that leads to some heavy copy editing, to make the light and dark contrasts stronger. This is when the thesaurus and the search/replace get heavy usage, too, punching up the diction, largely to expand repeated concepts and terms. In a long work, I always find a handful of overworked terms; maybe they reflect the central issues, but left untouched, they become tedious.
Going through our bookshelves the other day, I was struck by how many of my first paperbacks were picked up for under a buck, new. How many, in fact, came in at under a half-buck. These were serious literature, mind you.
Yes, gasoline cost about a quarter a gallon, too, but just compare the impact of inflation over that period. While regular gas now runs up to $4, those fifty-cent paperback titles are now listing around $16, plus – more than twice as much inflation, relatively speaking.
Newspaper and magazine prices have also spiked, for a variety of reasons beginning with the cost of paper itself and distribution.
My concern as both a reader and a writer is that the figures for traditional publishing have simply become too prohibitive to take risks on unknown talent. For instance, I’m very unlikely to shell out $25 for a hardback novel, yet if that title doesn’t sell sufficiently, we’re unlikely to see the trade paperback, which can still be borderline prohibitive for modest incomes.
Public library budgets, meanwhile, keep getting shaved, forcing reductions in both new acquisitions and the staffing and open hours.
All of this means you’re less likely to find a new voice you find personally exciting. It’s all about blockbuster sales for one title rather than a wide offering catering to quirky interests and pleasures. And it’s not just commercial publishing.
Not long ago an official of an academic press related the painful decision they’d made regarding an important history manuscript that would not sell more than 400 copies, according to their marketing research. And so, in the absence of a major subsidy (such as an underwriting grant), the volume would not appear.
Since much of my own fiction falls in the category of “experimental” literature, the response I’ve received from some literary agents and presses has been that the work deserves publication but that it’s not “economically viable.”
The threshold for economically viable, I should point out, has been rising steadily through the four decades I’m reviewing.
I remember hearing the novelist Wright Morris in a televised interview where he said how lucky he was to have a niche following where a press run of eight-thousand copies was sufficient to support him. That’s hardly the case today, especially when the field has been consolidated into two publishing houses handling the bulk of American fiction.
* * *
Even so, hundreds of new novels appear every week, many of them from small presses run as a labor of love. Few of the authors will get any notice, even though some, as I’ve found over the years, are a fine alternative to the cookie-cutter work typically found in commercial fiction. At least the Internet is opening new opportunities to be heard and discovered – and even for readers to pick up a fresh writer for a few bucks once again.
So who are you reading these days you feel speaks directly to you? Or whose style bristles in ways you find delightful? And how did you come across this author in the first place?
Maybe his or her successful niche following is around the corner if we all talk about literature as if it counts in our time. Just maybe.
Central to a life in art is the matter of practice. By this, I do not mean a dry run for a finished performance or product, but rather the repeated exercises that make an action habitual or proficient or even, in its variant, practical. Everyday, useful, helpful, sensible. At its core, the Greek root for practice means “to do,” something we see repeated when a musician practices scales, a physician practices medicine, an attorney practices law, an athlete practices basketball – it’s what one does or must do to be a musician, a physician, an attorney, a ballplayer. In its purity, a practice is pursued apart from an intended outcome – a concert, a healing, or courtroom victory – but rather as the daily discipline itself, which may in turn possibly lead to discovery and increased proficiency. To accomplish this requires time and physical space for experiment: what if I try it this way, what happens if I change that?
All of this requires time, of course – especially time free of specific outcome. (The Shakers, for all of their “Hands for work, hearts to God” ethic, left enough unencumbered time in their labors to experiment and invent – the creative acts that have become their legacy and living witness.) Still, I often find myself coming to my writing with a sense of guilt. (For that matter, even sitting down to read can be accompanied by that burden.) Other people lay claim to my time and attention. They see my writing, revising, and publishing as feeding my own vanity, rather than their needs and desires. There are dishes to wash, a garden to weed, a lawn to mow, walls needing paint. Looking to larger issues, some point to a world full of social injustices and programs that cry out for volunteer action. Somewhere deep in my bones I even carry that ancestral aversion to art for art’s sake, superfluity, escapism, dissolution. (Nowhere do they note how Jesus kept returning to the wilderness for prayer and renewal, leaving the fervid crowds far behind.) This is all complicated by the American measure of ultimate success – the almighty dollar. Its corollary, that a professional is superior to an amateur. Or that making the best-seller list is the measure of a great author. (No poets need apply.) (Inducing its own layers of anxiety and guilt: could I be making more? Have I sold out? Am I somehow now trapped by expectations?) Here, I could have been working overtime at the office.
All of this complicated by Samuel Johnson’s admonition, “No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.” (Which may even be a grumpy acknowledgement that writing remains work, paid or unpaid. Or of his frequent status as a hack writer.)
To push this a step deeper, consider the practice of prayer. I’ve long sensed that poetry and prayer – or, from another perspective, art and religion – spring from a common root in antiquity. The spells, rituals, and restrictions that accompanied fertility, hunting and harvesting, and death lead to both pathways. (“And God saw that is was good,” in Genesis 1, has the meaning of “good to eat” – that is, nourishing – that soon evolves into morally and aesthetically good as well.)
I’m not alone here. For instance, Carmine Starnino, in “Lazy Bastardism: A Notebook” (Poetry, January 2010), admits a similar unease about both reading and writing and then says, “My first contact with poetry was the ‘Our Father’ and ‘Hail Mary.’ Yes, they’re prayers, but they’re also pockets of linguistic energy … epic-accented statements … wonderfully archaic usages.” In his reflection, he argues, “Other prayers were loaded with religiosity, but uninterestingly flat,” and concludes, “Writing poetry is not, in itself, a prayerful activity. That’s because prayer is not a craft; it is the opposite of a craft,” one he sees as essentially secular: “poetry might even be said to be a menace to religious belief … because poetry, to work, needs to strip religious belief of its theological privilege.” To which he adds, “The best religious verse … flirts with faithlessness.” As he move on to other topics, he leaves me recognizing how narrow his understanding of prayer ultimately is and how much of his argument can be turned as a critique of poetry, as well. Many well-crafted poems, I find, remain uninterestingly flat – contrived and spiritless. Many hover well within the bounds of literary privilege. Read at weddings or funerals, they sound obscure and stuffy, as welcome as the parking attendant. Just as we struggle to define a poem within the range of writing today, so too does prayer run a range, from the unintelligible babbling of glossolalia (“praying in tongues,” in Pentecostal practice, as a craft, in some cases, to a raw emotional outpouring, in others) to intimate confessions to the formal Book of Prayer-type compositions of Starnino’s experience. At one end are those who pray for something specific (including a job, love, money, or healing), on to those who seek only to know God’s will and then to those mystics who sit silently waiting to listen to the divine voice in their hearts and bones. The tradition of English poetry, meanwhile, is prey to sermonizing, however secular or prosaic. Only when we break free of our prevailing orthodoxy – religious or artistic – do we truly “flirt with faithlessness,” finding ourselves defenseless in the face of ecstasy or despair, in the face of the one that cannot be named. This is the realm of epiphany, sacred or secular (or both).
I think Starnino loses the trail when he sees poetry as a craft, rather than a practice. Craft emphasizes a finished artifact, unlike practice, which embraces the activity itself. Practice can often resemble a hike in the woods or taking a trail up a mountain, with all the stages of attention or inattention that go with it. As you build stamina and endurance, you can also gain freedom. Whether mountain climbing, praying, or writing poetry, you may unexpectedly break free of the exertion itself – and cross into a state of oneness I’ll call the Zone. Others may discuss whether such moments of communion are epiphanies or a state of grace, or even secular or sacred, but when they come when I’m writing or revising, the lines seem to appear on their own, each move feels surefooted, the world around me appears as vibrant imagery and context. In this realm, I would declare poetry or literature to be a state of awareness, more than any artifact on a page or bound between covers. Likewise, the Zone may appear – it can never be summoned – in any of a number of disciplined activities. My wife experiences it while cooking and gardening; I enter it while dancing or singing, as well. Often, the Zone overlaps multiple ongoing activities: I jot the lines of a poem at a bend in the trail approaching a mountaintop.
I am left wondering why we cannot remain in the Zone long. Whether it would even be healthy. Whether we need some resistance or grit to balance the ethereal. Whether this reflects a basic mind/body, spirit/flesh duality.
Still, sustained practice is not easy. It remains work. Given a choice, the rational decision would be to sit back and devour great pages already given to us by others. (Or view great paintings or plays or films or dance productions and so on.) We can even ask, do we need more books? Who’s reading the ones we have now? I’m not speaking of all the junk fiction, junk movies, junk television, either. All that other kind of butt time. (Yes, I see a need for a slew of Creative Reading programs, more than Creative Writing, but that’s another facet of the work.)
Jnana's Red Barn 