Tag: Writing

GET OUT OF THE WAY

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

In newspaper reporting, you try to observe an event as invisibly as you can without intruding into its action. Yes, you may need to interview individuals, but you quote what they say without inserting yourself into the dialogue.

But the appearance of television cameras and their glaring illumination, especially, tips the equation. Too often, they’re not neutrally observing a natural event but rather turning all of the participants into actors and the scene into a stage. Who knows what’s real as a consequence?

I remember one reporter coming back from a county commission meeting and saying that the commissioners had already voted before the TV crew showed up and pressured them for a revote. The second time around, the tally was different.

So just what was the valid decision? The moral questions multiply.

Equally offensive to me is the canned shot of the TV “reporter” standing in front of the courthouse or floodwaters or crash or fire and talking into the microphone and camera. Look closely and you see the story is more about “we were here” than what really happened. That’s not news, friends – it’s hype, usually accompanied by editorializing rather than just the straight facts.

Here, I had enough trouble about reporters doing interviews over the telephone, rather than face to face. You miss much when you’re not a direct observer, believe me.

So what do we do now about Skype?

DASHES DON’T SHOUT

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

100_9040The Cocheco Arts and Technology Academy, a public charter high school, has begun its new school year in a fresh location after moving from the Washington Street mill where it had resided the past five years. In its location on the top floor, CATA looked more like a lively arts colony than a high school, but the lively part had a downside, I suppose, especially when it came to music.

One of the things I’ll miss is the quirky fire door that had been painted with a wonderfully succinct set of English grammar and syntax rules. In fact, I can think of a number of people who think they’re writers (and have even been paid for their efforts) who could definitely benefit by taking these to heart.

There are parts I love, such as the “helicopter” concept for commas that close a phrase. Although I’ve had to live with newspaper style for much of my career, I’ve long preferred to use the closing comma in a series of three or more items, and from the door I’ve learned the technical term is the Oxford Comma. My!

But I will dispute the claim that dashes shout. I think they breathe. Exclamation points shout.

100_9032

The Punctuation Door to the tower stairway stood next to the Holy Quotes.
The Punctuation Door to the tower stairway stood next to the Holy Quotes.

Mentioning this to one of the students on moving day, I was told she had penciled the rules on the door and then other students painted them. Since their brushes ranged from thin to thick and their abilities varied, the lettering is hardly uniform. I think it adds to the charm.

In the meantime, thanks to Vikki for getting this started. Now the whole world gets to see it.

GOING PUBLIC

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Writers and artists who work alone may know the feeling. It might even fit composers, playwrights, and screenwriters. A piece looks quite different in manuscript or the studio than it does in a small-press journal or small gallery. It looks different, again, in galley proofs for correction or an exhibition. And it’s altogether different in full-length book publication or a major museum.

We could even consider all of the varied emotions that accompany these stages.

When the published novel’s in my hand, I’m not even sure I’d recognize its having any commonality with the manuscript or drafts all those steps earlier.

I suspect the experience for performers – especially those in groups – goes another direction. The rehearsals build a teamwork that’s carried forward to an audience. Could there even be occasions when the finished result is less satisfactory than some points beforehand?

We talk about a creative process, but I’m left acknowledging there are many.

END OF THE LINE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Maybe the last of the high-visibility newspaper chiefs was Dave Burgin, an abrasive, volatile, but brilliant editor who began his legendary career at the New York Herald Tribune in 1963 and then went on to head a dozen-and-a-half major metropolitan daily newspapers, most of them already in their death throes, ranging from the Washington Star to the Orlando Sentinel (his one big success story) to the Dallas Times Herald to the San Francisco Examiner (where he was fired – twice) to the Oakland Tribune. Of course, it’s hard to leave a lasting impact if you don’t stay long in any community.

Still, one boss I had always returned in amazement after a visit with Burgin. Said he was the only person in the entire business with a real vision for a future or the changing needs of younger readers, along with the reasons they were avoiding newspapers en masse. He, too, saw the value of the weird comic strip “Zippy” for his Bay Area readership and was willing to run it page-wide on Page A2. Not that it would fly quite the same in Dallas.

One of his lasting bits of wisdom was the question, “What do I have in the paper today that will bring a reader back tomorrow?” I’ve looked at a lot of newspaper copy with that question over the years and felt we were missing the answer.

Actually, it’s a good question for a lot of businesses. I think it’s even a matter of getting down to the basics.

FREE OF THE ENTOURAGE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Most newspaper writing and editing is done is large, open newsrooms rather than small, private offices. It’s amazing to think anyone can actually concentrate and work amid the surrounding mayhem, especially when the scanner is blaring police and fire dispatches and the television’s on overhead. (Well, I took to streaming opera and music by living composers to blot out that hysteria.)

Still, a few management-level editors had offices, and we’d get visitors who’d head there or to the conference room for private meetings. Usually, the men would be in navy blue suits, along with a woman or two in high heels. That is, they’d arrive and depart as a team. Since New England Cable News also had a presence in our newsroom, I’d sometimes get a phone call from my younger daughter, the political activist. “Do you know who’s standing behind you?” No, I hadn’t looked. I was too busy working. And she’d call out the candidate’s name.

Not that they were all politicians. Sometimes they were business executives or lobbyists of one stripe or another. Even the writers and artists seemed to travel in packs. And often a face would look familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it. Let me add that many of them look quite different in person than they do on video.

Late one afternoon, though, I looked up from my terminal and noticed a dignified solitary personage striding into the room. He was taller than I’d suspected but the face was one I soon identified. David Broder, a Washington Post columnist my college professor had called the best political reporter in the country decades earlier, an evaluation that remained dead right.

I didn’t interrupt with a greeting as he walked past. Respected his space and thinking. But I was far more impressed than I’d been by any of the celebrities who had posed behind me.

RAT-TAT OSCAR

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The title of a chapter in Bill Adler Jr.’s Outwitting Squirrels says everything: “Know the Enemy.” (My copy was a Christmas present, one of many squirrel-related items the family wraps and presents me, in their own vein of humor.) While Adler’s focus is on the difficulties squirrels cause bird feeders, including me, the bush-tailed mammals can be a homeowner’ nemesis – “tree-climbing rats,” as one friend insists – causing a number of fires as they gnaw through wiring and insulation. Ditto for the electrical utility.

In combat, however, one side can begin to resemble the other: their actions and thoughts parallel and overlap. A canny devil may even earn respect.

Many of the poems in a series I call Rat-Tat Oscar poems originate in my encounters with squirrels as part of my second marriage – evicting them from the walls of the house, from their raids on the bird feeders and garden, and eventually from the haunts in the barn – and are spurred by my wife’s quip, watching me transport them away in a Have-a-Heart trap, that I was operating a squirrel taxi. They can drive a man to madness or violence.

The poems also draw on annual Christmas letters to friends and family over two-and-a-half decades, turning the encounters to a would-be squirrel’s perspective. Of course, my wife and children will also insist I’m often more than a tad squirrelly.

Surprisingly, there’s not a lot about squirrels in mythology. Maybe the most prominent one is the Norse Ratatoskr, along with a handful of Native American stories. Maybe they had as much trouble making sense of squirrels in the universe as I do.

THIRD TIME’S A CHARM

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

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.

GETTING FREE OF GUILT EDGES

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

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.

PUBLISHING DECISION

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

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.

STACKING FIREWOOD AS A METAPHOR

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

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.