While these weekly Arts & Letters postings have been focusing on the writing life, at least as I’ve known it, some of the insights do spill over into regular life more generally. (I’ll leave that redundancy for emphasis.)

I am visually oriented, more so than many writers, and I did have four intense years of art training in high school. As a newspaper editor, I was regarded for my design layout skills and photo editing and presentation. I credit my high school teacher for much of that.

As a writer and designer, I’ve collected magazine photos, art books, postcards, and stray photos that happened my way. Use of a personal camera was more sporadic and problematic.

And then came digital photography, for me about the same time I started blogging.

But first, to back up.

Memory can carry you only so far, and even good notetakers miss much at the time. A story or poem can become vivid through a detail that pops a character or a scene. A sensitive writer might find that specific in a scent or a taste or motion or a particular word that’s voiced or sensed, but in many more instances, it’s something visual, the sort of thing you might find in examining a photograph or a painting. I’ve learned how those saved magazine photos as well as later images found online can be valuable that way. You or I can even build memory boards to support certain characters or locales, even a room in their house, to assist in our thinking. Some might use a website like Tumblr to do that, too, though I’ve found much more’s available more openly.

Much of my revision of the novels Daffodil Uprising and Nearly Canaan greatly benefitted from such prompts, as did the drafting of “Miller at the Spring” in The Secret Side of Jaya, and especially some books I won’t tell you about.

Some of these photo archives have become albums I’ve posted at Thistle Finch editions, should you be interested. Others you’ll find there, more recent, are images I’ve been taking in my new setting at the easternmost fringe of the continental USA. They’re more of what I’m considering an adjunct kind of journaling – impressions that might have spurred poems back when I was without a camera. I’m even finding a similar stream in what I’ve posted on my Facebook profile, where the images are more likely to be video. (Yes, today’s author is supposed to be active hustling everywhere.)

I hate to admit this, but the ubiquitous digital camera is greatly reducing my on-paper journaling.

Besides, just what are all of those people out there holding up their cell phones wherever they go planning on doing with all of those digital shots? It’s like they’re trying to confirm their own existence. Note the selfies. Or that what’s in front of them is actually happening.

Not that I’m trying to say I’m somehow nobly above that. (Well, maybe?)

As for photo inspiration? In my household, the collected images are impacting our thinking in the ongoing renovation of our historic old house. At this point, the kitchen, especially.

I am trying to be more selective in what I post here at the Red Barn, even if the subsidiary blogs are picking up some of the overflow. Maybe you’ll enjoy them there, too.

~*~

You’ll find my novels in the digital platform of your choice at Smashwords, the Apple Store, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Scribd, Sony’s Kobo, and other fine ebook retailers. They’re also available in paper and Kindle at Amazon, or you can ask your local library to obtain them.

A poetry editor a decade or two ago asked why I write poems, and in response I came up with this:

I’ve been writing poetry and fiction for so long the questions of “how” and even “when” and “where” arise long before any consideration of “why.” That is, the practice quickly turns directly to “just sit down, start keyboarding, and see where it goes.” Even so, my “why” quickly turns to a succession of motivations within an evolving exploration that continued to present itself as poetry. So here are some of my primary Whys along the way:

• Because it sustains expansive dimensions of language and thinking that have been precluded from my employment as a newspaper (and, briefly, social sciences) editor, where expression is intended to convey a single layer of factual presentation.
• Because it allows me to pursue wordplay, surrealism, ambiguity, innuendo, absurdities, but especially my own emotions and experiences that are forbidden in objective third-person writing. (Intentionally or otherwise, my literary endeavors have worked as a reaction against and counterweight to the strictures of professional journalism, the way a pianist might balance classical and jazz or country-western performance.)
• Because it has kept my skills as a headline writer sharp and pliant.
• Because it collects and distills the seemingly random wanderings of my Aquarian mind and my often-obscured impressions and feelings.
• Because it reflects the intuition and clarity that arise in my practice of meditation.
• Because revision, a crucial element of writing poetry, pushes me beyond linear narrative to a more mysterious matrix as I looking between the cracks and broken syntax to admit other voices to appear.
• Because it allows me mythologies for exploring and celebrating places I’ve lived and people I’ve known along the way. (If I’d taken more photos during all those years, would the drive have been lessened?)
• Because it immerses me in a long stream of poets, troubadours, singers, storytellers, mystics, prophets, and shamans before me.
• Because it’s a kind of prayer.
• Because it keeps me looking at the world around me with an awareness of gratitude and wonder.

Well, that’s what I wrote at the time, and the editor fired back with a round of questions I didn’t have time to answer. Way back then. I have no idea how I would answer now. I do hope it would be less ethereal.