FINDING THE NEW BETWEEN THE YAWP AND THE GNOME

Home and the rain has been falling hard off and on for days, with some sucker holes of blue sky sweeping through.  There are a few leaves on the cherry tree and there is only one red plastic chair out on the point but it blew over days ago.  I’m still using the outdoor shower in the morning and it is wonderful standing in the widening cone of warm water surrounded by the sky of rain falling through the grey-green world.

I have been home reading crime novels I picked up on my travels.  I have loved learning about the dark world of crime in southern Italy in Black Souls, and the wonderfully comic and mysterious world of Laos in Don’t Eat Me.  I also bought an unabridged Leaves of Grass which was illustrated by Rockwell Kent which is lovely.  Now I’m reading Commonwealth by Ann Patchett for a book club that I’ve been invited to in California at Thanksgiving, the Patchett is a nice change of place after Black Souls and I have to admit for the first few pages of her novel I was waiting for a vendetta beheading… that never came.  So I just relaxed into a brilliant and civilized story. 

 During the days looking out on the water I’ve been thinking about how much I love Rockwell Kent’s art, particularly his illustrations he supplies to literature.  He always seems to raise up the text and never just makes a cartoon of it.  Kent was an artist who came to Alaska in 1918 and seemed to be infected by wilderness.  Like Melville he had a very light hand on the thread of wonder.  He never tried to truss up the subject of “wilderness” and and throw it in his luggage to take home.  He knew the thread would break.  Kent became famous for among, other things the art work he supplied for several portfolio editions of Moby Dick , also his book put together from his diary of his year living on Fox Island at the mouth of Resurrection Bay with his young son.  The book was entitled Wilderness and he also put together a classic Christmas story of their only Christmas together there on the island. That book is almost as resonant as A Child’s Christmas in Wales for most Alaskans.  It’s a beautiful book that truly evokes life living rough in maritime Alaska.

 Kent is sometimes compared to Whitman and Melville for their experience of a kind of spiritual and sensual ecstasy while confronting the wild forces of nature.  I read an essay once by Robert Bly talking about the two poles of American poetry being represented by Walt Whitman’s vigor and Emily Dickinson’s reticence, something between the ecstatic “Yawp” of Whitman and the “gnomic scholarship” of Dickinson, as Emily Dickinson signed all her personal letters in later years as “Your Gnome,” or “Your Scholar.”

 There is a world of sensuality that lies between these two poles. In his own work, Kent threw himself into the storm.  He lavished himself in the wild and the sensual, like Melville, like Whitman, but when he applied his work to these other artists work, he did not illustrate, he simply alluded to their own passions for to illustrate would have been too much. Think of Whitman’s Song of Myself where he reaches near ecstasy as he celebrates the human body, or Melville where he describes the whalemen flensing then bucketing the spermaceti from melon of the great Sperm Whale. These are sensual declarations.  Then take a look on the end papers of Rockwell Kent’s edition of Wilderness. See the figure of the naked man flying above the sea as the compass rose, and notice his shadow emerging from the shore.  He most likely drew this image a hundred years ago as men died by the thousands in muddy trenches in France. Here was the dawning of the age that gave birth to existentialism and the death of hope… but to Rockwell Kent here it was, the man in ecstasy, to add any more would have run afoul of the law, surely in 1922 when the book was published. The free man, in perfect living ecstasy.

 American art has always had a tug of war going between the head and the heart; between the mind and the body. Which one directs us, and where does the compass swing true?  I suppose this is what keeps the artist busy.

 As winter comes, I have chores ahead.  I will need to do my editor’s revisions on What Is Time To A Pig. I have been waiting for those, and I am beginning to write the next Cecil book.  I have been thinking a lot about how to balance out my head and my heart.

 I remember sitting on a bed in a hotel once talking to a friend during a writers conference,  I remember saying that writing well should be both as easy and as hard as maintaining a close friendship.  There needs to be a rock steady commitment to the principle of the friendship and at the same time there needs to be restraint… a freedom for the friends to grow and change. In writing it is a commitment to the story and a light touch to let the story change and grow.

 In America… some stories break your heart.  Colonialism.  Slavery. Industrial Capitalism,  Numbing materialism,  Some of these plot twists have no good outcomes.  Some stories just break your heart and cause us to go back, and back and back to old ones that overwork old tropes so that old friends start to disappoint.  Some old stories are just too sad.  And some new stories are built on things yet unfounded in these tentative times.

This is why we must keep looking for the new and the hopeful… or stop trying.  This is why courage remains the most important tool in a writer’s kit.  Courage to look unflinchingly.  Melville clearly had it to write his masterpiece that went unappreciated his entire life: a long complex story where the allegory goes unexplained.  No one ever explains what the White Whale really represents.  That’s what makes that book so perfect.  It is something that is emotionally so true, and intellectually so illusive.  Rockwell Kent had courage as well not to give in to the plain or the literal.  Figures floated above the landscape like magic, just as I imagine his heart must have felt.

 As the rain continues to fall, I keep making notes. I miss my old friends, but I can’t ask too much of them.  The rain continues to fall and I look for the new under the old slick leaves and in the new books that pile up on my bedside, and the old books that I can always read more carefully.

 Love, and friendship… must replenish the spirit.  But so too…I must have faith that in the dark night that seems completely empty of stars, or of rescue, there must be that next new idea which must surely come. 

Crows land

and dance on the yellow grass

while I kiss your neck

at the sink.

jhs

Going Home

I am home again after being in Ketchikan, Juneau and Skagway.  The cherry tree is in full fall color and the leaves are scattered across the lawn.  Rain has been falling like b.b.s from the sky and a hard southeastern wind has been blowing up the coast. 

We took the ferry from Ketchikan on Jan’s birthday after a crass art tour and a spectacular helicopter charter with Ray Troll.  I never thought Revillagigedo was so beautiful in its mountainous center or had so many goats!  The crass art tour was also great. Ray Troll knows where to find it all.

After that excitement and a pint sized bloody mary at the Artic Bar we boarded the Matanuska Ferry and traveled to Prince Rupert B.C. and back across Dixon Entrance, which can be extraordinarily rough, but this trip was a gentle roll both directions. We came back to Ketchikan, then on to Wrangell, Petersburg, Kake, Sitka! (where we off loaded our laundry and some extra weight of books we have read and went for a walk with Ernie Eggleston) then to Hoonah and landed in Juneau at four thirty AM.  The Driftwood hotel had it’s shuttle waiting for us and we checked right in. Jan’s birthday trip was lovely and relaxing.  We love traveling by ship. We played dominoes, read mysteries and I slept more soundly than I had in months.  Three nights on the ferry in almost perfect weather.

Juneau brought classic wet fall storms.  I read at the new State Library with Heather Lende and Ishmael Hope, two of my favorite Alaskan writers.  Heather I have known for years, and Ishmael I have known as a child but who is now coming into his own as a scholar and a poet.  The reading was a fun gathering of smart and loving people, on Alaska Day which, like Columbus day has become somewhat controversial, for it’s colonialist commemoration of the Alaska purchase from Russia, but Heather reminded us to find the good, and Ismael reminded us to cast a wide net in our reading and understanding.  I read haiku in order to share my love of the landscape and how it has shaped us all.

Then the stormy small plane ride to Skagway where I observed the unveiling of the memorial to those lost when the Steam Ship Princess Sophia went aground and almost three hundred and seventy people died when it broke apart and sank on Vanderbilt Reef precisely one hundred years ago.  Entire families, and almost eighty employees of the Whitepass transport lines died in the frigid October waters.  Twenty horses drown.  One dog, a Red Setter survived and swam to shore. 

The Princess Sophia was transporting hundreds of people from the northern gold country back down south.  It was the last boat of the season, carying men and women who worked on the steamers up and down the rivers.  There were gold miners, and administrators of businesses.  There were entire families. One family of eight was leaving Dawson after twenty years. Their youngest was barely two years old. Everyone in the north country seemed to know someone who died.  But this, the one hundredth anniversary is the first major memorial to those who died.  It was 1918 when the ship went down. The news of the tragedy was overshadowed by the two other great killing events of the twentieth century: the flu pandemic of 1918, and the end of the first world war which ended that November.  The sinking of The Princess Sophia, lasted only weeks in the national consciousness.  

As they read the names of all the lost last week in Skagway, I knew there were Alaska Native people on board, but I could also clearly hear names of immigrants, many Irish, some Spanish or Italians perhaps a dozen Chinese. There were four African Americans on the registry, and numerous names which must have originated in Eastern Europe: Polish, Czech, Hungarian perhaps, and of course there were white Anglo Saxon Protestants, but the dead were alone together read in alphabetical order so only the families were grouped together as one can only hope they were on the night they died.

I suppose the only point I am making here is that there seems to be a nostalgia for a White Nation of America abroad in our body politic today.  The beefy boys who chug milk and talk about racial purity and “taking our country back.”  This is an illusion, of course.  It’s a fear that they will wake up and realize that they and their children never were in fact guaranteed the privilege of membership in the management class by virtue of their racial purity.  They talk about the “hard working Americans” who are having their jobs stolen by caravans of immigrants.  Well, I don’t know.  But I’m imagining the Chinese people who died on the Sophia had probably worked hard enough to earn a ride home, so to the Czechs and the Irish, and they all died just as hard and just the same. Together.

I was thinking because on the Matenuska this trip going through the cafeteria line there was a short order cook working the big steel grill and he appeared to be ethnically Chinese I’m not sure if he was or not, but he was incredibly fast and good at his job.  He had a very long single braid that hung down from under his cap down past his butt.  The kitchen on the old ferries have old massive steel fittings and stainless grills.  The whole place spits steam from sinks then grease, and good smells from the grills and pots.  I went into a dream that I could have been back in 1918… I could have been waiting on a bowl of chili and a biscuit after a season of cooking for myself over a wood cookstove of eggs fried hard in bacon fat.  I could be warm and happy to be going home. 

And I was.  I am.

Hard rain,

on yellow leaves, your smile

a warm fire. 

jhs

Life Is Long

Back at my desk, fifty-four degrees and there are high clouds of a storm off shore.  The cherry tree in front of my office shows some yellow leaves and a few red ones fallen on the green grass. The fireweed blossoms have gone to white fluff the are carried off by the on shore gusts of wind. 

 It feels good to be home.  I’ve slept long hours in my own bed.  I spent a terrible night in a fine hotel in Tacoma after the PNBA book fair. The people were kind and there were readers who remembered me and I enjoyed meeting them but I had to do more “pitching” of the book than I am comfortable or used to.  I also had a confrontation with an old friend which troubled me, I had just started taking some medication I had lived without for some time and it was working its way into my system and hadn’t reached its potency… blah blah blah but the result was I was having a bad time where I couldn’t sleep in the middle of an emotional crisis standing in front of a window looking out onto the quiet street of Tacoma Washington, wrapped in a clean hotel sheet.  I fell asleep around six o’clock and had some breakfast and took some more pills. Then walked and walked. Tried to solve my problems to no avail.

Sometimes all anyone can do is hang on and just outlast your crisis and hope that it grows smaller in the rearview mirror.  One thing I try to do when hitting bottom is to get gifts for other people to try and jump out of my own sick ego.  I filled up a bag of books for a friend who was going to pick me up that morning.  I knew she was coming from a writers workshop so I found her a black notebook which I thought would suit her.  I knew my nephew had lost a book he had liked when his cabin had burned down and I found another copy for him.  I found books that I thought other family members would like, and I stuffed them in my already full bag.  By the time my ride came around I was feeling better and had a grocery bag full of books that was almost ripping out of the bottom. 

 My friend picking me up was Ann Randlette who had lived next door when I was six year old, in Woodway Park, Washington.  It was an idyllic time and place: big plots of land with old trees and magnificent gardens.  Ann was a couple of years younger, her mother Mary, was an artist, a photographer and she exposed me to the northwest coast poets and painters.  We slurped our sugary cereal underneath Morris Graves paintings, and when I turned ten years old Mary gave me a volume of “Party At The Zoo” by Theodore Roethke, with Mary’s own portrait of Roethke glued inside.  Bob, was Ann’s brother and we were friends and eventually went to the same school.  Her brother Peter was impossibly young and cute when I left Woodway to follow my dad’s job to New York City in 1965, or so.

 Ann picked me up and we drove to Olympia.  Mary lives close by in an assisted living facility.  Time has robbed her of most of her memories.  Ann has bought Mary’s little house.  I looked at all her beautiful artwork and then I fell asleep on her couch.  This is the first I had spent any time with her except for her coming to a reading in  something like fifty five years, but amazingly we were so comfortable still from knowing each other for so long that soon enough I was snoring like a sawmill on her couch while she checked her email and sorted through the signed books I gave her: an old man… who had once been her playmate, swinging on a rope swing out over a nettle covered ravine… hours on end.  Then we went to Peter’s house for dinner where we talked about old, old friends and what had become of them. Peter had been a professor of media studies at Evergreen, his house was homebuilt on four acres of healthy second growth fir trees: fat furrowed trunks with thin underbrush at the base, and milky light filtering through: perfect Northwest light that his mother had loved to photograph.  He showed me his mother’s collection of Morris Graves paintings.  Some were painted on burlap sacks that Mary got from Morris once when she was visiting and he was just going to throw them away.  She asked if she could have them and of course he said “sure”.  Peter had just sold two of them to help finance a years worth of his mothers placement in the nursing home. 

 It was twenty-four hours of intense contrast: a sleepless night of staring down at hard pavement wondering if I should smash the window I could not open and then the reawakening of the beauty in the past.  Life is long, even in just a day.

 I am happy to be alive today.  Tomorrow night I have a reading here in Sitka. It doesn’t matter, really how many people come, I know Jan will be there and Dick Nelson said he would come.  Even if he forgets, which is more than likely, he told me he would and that means the world to me and when he forgets it will give me something to tease him about which is almost better.  Home, everyone here gets a free pass and they know it.  Because I know they have to take me back no matter what condition I’m in when I get here.

 Green grass, yellow leaves,

fireweed has turned to fluff

and I still love you.

jhs

 Ketchikan at the public library on the 14th.

Juneau at the State Library on the 18th 

Juneau at the Public Library downtown in the evening of the 19th.

Skagway on the weekend of the 20th and 21st for their bookfestival.

Fairbanks  in the Murie Building on the evening of the 27th UAF Contact Northern Studies. 

Ask Me

I’m on a hillside on the eastern slope of the north Cascades just north of Winthrop Washington, above the Chewuch River. Bitterbrush has turned brown and the vine maple trees are golden. The aspen trees glitter green and silver like billions of dollars in different denominations of money. The wind is dry and warm.  Last night coming up the driveway I saw a skunk in my head lights and there are so many deer in town it is almost comic.  I even saw a giant bull moose loping through a hay field near the highway.

 This is the country of my youth.  When I was ten years old in 1963, my dad and I went on a pack trip here and two years later my dad sent me to work for the packer outfitter, presumably, to toughen me up.  I worked in the woods for different outfitters from the time I was twelve until I was 24 and I moved to Alaska.  I learned to shoe horses here and throw a diamond hitch.  I packed mules and horses in the back country and rode saddle horses sometimes six or seven hundred miles in a season.  I met Janice Morrison in the backcountry here where she was working as a wilderness ranger for the Forest Service.  I wooed her by bringing her fresh vegetables and fruit on horseback at the end of her ten day trips.  I married her in 1977 the same year she moved to Sitka, Alaska to take a job for the Fish and Wildlife Service.  It took me two months to join her, and another year for me to want to live in Alaska, so strong was the pull of the high Ponderosa Pine country of the North Cascades.  In some ways my heart is still here.

Mr. Miller. My Guru from age 16 until now. The master of calm all day work.

 Before my parents died they bought my siblings and I twenty acres here on this hillside, and we built this cabin.  My parent’s ashes are scattered here. We’ve celebrated birthdays, wedding anniversaries, Thanksgivings, and many sledding parties here.  Because of the distance from Alaska, I have not come down as much as I would have liked, but I’ve paid my share of taxes and some little bit of the maintenance. But as the years have gone by and as time takes its toll the long drive and the costs have made it difficult to keep up with.  My siblings and I have decided to sell the place, reluctantly, and tonight I am nostalgic.

 Sitka, Alaska is a place of rain and one very long protracted Fall.  The Methow has four distinct and lovely seasons.  Only the early Spring with it’s mud season that lasts a few weeks could be said to be unattractive for any length of time.  The rest of the year has dry fine snow, or crisp mornings with warm afternoons.  Recent summers have had hot forest fires with attendant smoke that have brought coughing and sore eyes.  But today the early fall weather is beautiful with temperatures in the high sixties and fine colors.  But again it could be my sentimentality that changes everything, for my heart taints everything I see around me.  I was young and strong here.  I discovered life away from my parents here: love and sex and adventure.  Nothing viewed through that lens can be seen objectively.  That’s why it’s probably best not to live here. 

 When I first lived here it was at the end of a long road and the people were loggers mostly and orchardists, there were a few ranchers and trappers.  There was a sawmill.  I remember a drunk driving his old pickup around and around the circle of the old town drag and my father pulling back inside the café and off the street.  The drunk driver wore an old fashioned round tin hard hat and a dirty striped Hickory shirt with frayed sleeves. He was wild with red-rimmed eyes.  I was scared and fascinated,  just as I had been scared and fascinated by the mules and the one black bear I had seen in a medow.

 Today the valley is populated by recreating tech millionaires from the coast.  There is a cocktail bar and if someone is drunk driving in town there are just as likely to be on a fat tire bike.  I’m done complaining about the changes.  It makes me sound old.  But I do notice blue collar work has become rather fetishized.  The local horseshoer is now something special… a character…. someone to be revered rather than just another part of the community.  The local horse trader is a pretty woman with colorful shirts and although extremely capable and physically strong and a top hand all around, she also performs her part for her clients as part of her talents, as does her husband a professional folk singer.  I love this valley still, and of course my first boss, Jack Wilson who is long dead, and now lionized as a visionary of the cross-state highway was riveter turned mule skinner performer long before the highway was built. But even still, his need to be lionized has atomized into a kind of institutional self-conscienceness about the west in this part of the west.  The family country house, is perfectly appointed now, and the country clothing is well selected. I don’t mind, but still… I’m not sure the authentic western lifestyle was ever meant to be so comfortable or so affluent.  But… who am I to say?  I was always affluent by cowboy standards, and now my feet are practically webbed from living in the rainforest country so I am by no means a range cowboy.  I cannot hold on to everything in my life.  I married an ocean woman, I didn’t know that when I saw her in the back country that first day in her ranger uniform, but I did.  She loved Ed Ricketts and Between Pacific Tides and when she got a job offer to move to Sitka Alaska she was gone… in an instant.  I was chasing her then and I have been chasing her for the last forty years.

 The reading in Moscow, Idaho was a bust.  No one showed up.  That’s nobody.  Zero. 

 This happens.  It takes a certain alignment of circumstances to fill a room. My old friend who owns the bookstore was mortified, but when I think back on it I shouldn’t have been surprised.  Her store does not tend to sell many mysteries and her events usually are on Wednesday nights and this was a Monday.  Her events are typically sponsored by the University MFA program so she has a built in audience and that audience is not coming out on a Monday to see someone who is not going to be on any of their tests, or part of their program.  I should have seen it coming… but I didn’t.  I was upset, honestly for about ten minutes.  Then I felt bad for her. 

 One guy showed up looking for a place to have a beer.  She recommended a place and he split.  I offered to read for him and he wasn’t having any.  He wanted to get drunk.  I couldn’t help with that.

 She and I walked down to the end of the block and had a cup of tea.  I read her the introduction to my new book of One Hundred Poems Of Winter  which I had planned to read that night.  She enjoyed that.  I didn’t drink any alcohol for it didn’t feel like a special occasion and I didn’t want to risk the depression that could come along with being alone and drinking, particularly since I have run out of meds (and my clinic in Sitka won’t refill to a distant out of state pharmacy… apparently).  She went back to close up her store and I walked back to the motel and called Jan who could take the call on the boat in Prince William Sound by standing on the top of the back deck and we talked for a while as I lay in my motel clean sheets and listened to the traffic rumble by on highway 841 (?) outside my window.  I read her the William Stafford quote from his poem “Ask Me” from my essay:

Some time when the

river is ice ask me

mistakes I have made,

ask me if what

I have done is my life…

On a night like that, and too on a quite night on this hillside on the north Cascades alone, I think of my mistakes. So many. Books I have written and loves that have come to me unbidden, and followed, or not… lies I have told, or simply ill considered observations or remarks I have made in anger, are those things taken in total my life?  The tree outside the cabin, is scarred and has dead limbs on one side.  Surely much of its wood is rotten, its trunk is a home for woodpeckers and squirrels, maybe that skunk sleeps in its knotted roots. Is that my life, or is even that giving me too much dignity?  I don’t know.  The wind and rain must bring love to such a tree on this dry hillside.  Ask me mistakes I have made…  The same night enfolded Jan in Prince William Sound and me and the bookstore owner alone in our separate beds in Moscow Idaho, as well as all the people I still love and have no contact with on this noisy night by the highway.

Tell me mistakes I have made…

What the river says, 

that is what I say. 

 jhs

Poetry Signs by William Stafford, placed alongside Highway 20 (The North Cross-State Highway) written after Bill visited each sight then placed and celebrated the year of his death. Jan and I used my first advance from The Woman Who Married a Bear to pay for the sign materials. The project was the brainchild of Sheela McLean and Curtis Edwards with teasing/goading from me.

La Familia, The Palouse

I am mesmerized by the Palouse country of southeastern Washington and western Idaho. The winter wheat fields’ stretch for miles and read like the hips of reclining figures to the eye.  Some of the lines are chocolate brown of the fertile soil and some are golden with the straw of the old wheat stalks. In mid summer they will be green waves. There are great rounds of hay and alfalfa with their monstrous irrigation pivot systems running on wheels defining the landscape into great circles from the air.  Corporate farming has made it a lonely country now.  Very few homes with the traditional cotton woods and lilac trees around the kitchen windows, those places have either fallen to a shambles of grey boards to become the home of bees or have been bulldozed to make way for pole and metal structures for servicing giant machines.  The little working towns are dusty and the ones that hang on are homes to part stores and mechanics.  The water towers rarely have graffiti from the local football team, for those kids ride the bus to the larger towns now, where the Banks have their headquarters and the truck dealerships share a corner with the John Deere representatives. The biggest towns are Pullman and Moscow and both are University Towns, which used to be big Ag, schools and still have programs but fewer and  fewer people need apply,  now they need to repair the computers and machines that determine what big farming is all about.

I won’t get into if this is a good way to go.  I’m not smart enough in how to feed a planet or if we should be feeding a planet or helping a planet feed itself. I just know that I have a romantic and a philosophical kinship with the notion that people working together on farms where they live for generations impart a certain stewardship and responsibility to both the land and the larger community of their customers and the smaller community of their neighbors.  But I also know that those small farmers often had hellishly hard lives and did not engender generous or literate values upon their families at times and places in the past.  Read a discussion between Wendell Barry and Mary Clearman Blew to get both sides of the supposed pastoral life.

What do I know? I come from a steep-sided rain forest?  This flat dry country is exotic and beautiful to me.  I love driving through it.  I love the brick buildings of its towns and the husky portions and the burgers they put on the plates.  I’m just grateful to be here.

The reading in Seattle was fun.  Lots of family came and definitely outnumbered the unsuspecting customers who wandered in out of curiosity to see me.  An older couple from Alaska had a great time, and acted like an Amen chorus, saying “That’s right… that’s just right!” aloud as I read particular lines describing home, which I quite enjoyed. (I’ve always wanted to be a preacher about Alaska)  Two women who I knew as quite a small child came.  Ann Randlett and I were friends when I was about six years old.  I spent many hours at her house next door when we lived in Woodway Park north of Seattle.  She brought Chris Wright who came from a big family of girls and the Wrights were close friends of our family.  At the reading I introduced her to my sister as “Chrissie Wright” and my sister Martha gasped in wonderment.  Chris said,  “No one has called me Chrissy for probably forty years, and her eyes teared up a bit saying that her father had passed away in the last year or so, and thinking of her old life sometimes made her cry.  She turned to me.  “No… I like it.  I like that you called me Chrissie.” 

 Family has a hold on us. Always and in unexpected ways.

 We broke up early and I went to my sister’s house.  Their children were home for a rare visit.  Their son and his long time girl friend both accomplished artists in New York and Paris, their daughter pursuing her Ph.D. in biology at Oregon State. They were all home. We had a lovely time talking about painting, ecology and poetry, my sister and her husband were happy, with that warm feeling I remember from long ago when my four siblings came home from their colleges at Christmas and my father ran the dinner table as if it were a symposium.  Except this feeling was all love, loose and funny where anything could be said.  My father was much more formal and often wanted to make sure he was getting his money’s worth.  Or so it seems now, and I might not being fair.  I know he loved having us home and certainly our mother did. 

 But the night after my reading I was honored to be in my sister’s house with her smart children wrapped in that feeling of familial love.  Pride. Honest accomplishment.  Again, I’m lucky to be driving across hundreds of miles of lonely country to give a reading where who knows who might show up or not.  I’m lucky to have their love to travel with me.  This is the support a writer needs to give them courage, from a actual family… or a family of choice… this intimacy, this love of long meandering conversations of different disciplines… this does more for creativity than the McCarthur Foundation.  I’m sure of it.

In golden stubble

one male pheasant beats his wings

then glides… silently.

jhs

Postcard From The Train

I’m on the train from Portland to Seattle, bumping along through the farmland and the industrial backyards of the wetlands and river valleys of the soggy northwest coast. We past my old stomping grounds in Centralia where I did the research for Death And The Language Of Happiness, and I strained to see the bridge that replaced the one where they hung John Wesley Everest the unlucky member of the I.W.W. who got caught up in the riot of 1919.  Last time Jan and I were there we cleaned his grave.  Railroad rides always feel like glimpses backstage to me. 

 The reading at Powell’s bookstore last night went well.  There was a nice crowd of about twenty five people who seemed to enjoy themselves.  I read from the mystery and we had a good discussion then I closed with an essay that included a good quote from William Stafford who was both the poet Laureate of the United States and the PL of Oregon, he lived only a few miles from the store where we were.  If anyone could be called a “favorite son” it would be Stafford. We had a fine time and I left feeling bolstered.  Then went to dinner with some good friends and ate at a joint called The Woodsman, and ate the best pork chop that has ever touched my lips.  I ate with Chris Bernard who used to be a reporter in Sitka and is the author of “Chasing Alaska” his friend who is also a writer and my old friends Jody and Willa who have recently moved to Portland.  Willa loves everything about Portland, and Jody is adjusting after twenty fifty some years in the south and the east coast.  Jody is solidly blue collar but an autodidact and incredibly well read.  He doesn’t take to trends or fads.  He also is not one for political group think.  We had a fine time talking about Portland, about the artist in residence at the dump where he goes, and when he worked at the hardware store in Portland about helping a customer who wanted food for his pet ant.  In the singular.  One pet ant. 

 I enjoy Portland.  I like the various neighborhoods, and the music scene seems lively and diverse.  I like the people with all their community problem-solving energy.  New Yorkers have always loved to make fun of life on the west coast, all the way back to Fred Allen, through Woody Allen and his Las Angeles phobia.  Now Portlandia likes to make its stereotypes, which is fine.  I like it weird though.  If not there… in Portland, where then?  And besides, where else could I get a brined and wood smoked slow cooked pork chop with perfectly cooked pork and beans with a delectable cornbread biscuit, served without an ounce of irony?  Perfect, I’m telling you.

 Tonight, I will be in Seattle with my family and tomorrow night will do a reading at Third Place Books in Ravenna.  Then I’m off to Moscow Idaho…  I will take my time to drive through that beautiful wheat country.  Maybe I’ll stop and get a bottle of wine in Walla Walla and pull off somewhere in the Palouse and write another short note. 

Along a slow stream

a muddy pony stands still

as the train blasts by.

jhs

Delray Beach, Florida: Not A Whiff Of Mendacity Anywhere

I am in Delray Beach, Florida after Bouchercon in St. Petersberg.  Jan was with me in St. Pete and now she is driving from Achorage to Whittier to catch a boat and crawl into her berth then snooze until she arrives at her study sites, hopefully.  She was on a red eye all the way across country last night from Ft. Lauderdale to Seattle to Anchorage.  She is tough. 

 Here people are talking about the hurricane that is making shore with a hundred and fifty mile an hour winds up in the Carolinas tonight.  Here in Florida the clouds are stacked up and the air is about eighty five degrees and 90% humidity.  I’m gradually getting used to it.  I’m beginning to feel like a character in a southern novel or a Tennessee  Williams play.  I walked about a mile to a breakfast place today and my shirt was sweat through by the time I got there, and the nice thing is no one seems to mind.  I stopped by a news stand and bought a paper and a bag of Cuban cigars and enjoyed them on a bench by an abandoned building in this lovely holiday town:  Cuban style architecture with bright colors, two story mostly with balconies and arches, pastel walls and sometimes bright red and yellow paint thrown in, Caribbean music and salsa music wafting through.  Even in the grassy parks there is sand coming up through the grass.  Palm trees, and grackles,  minah bird looking black birds. Raucous, all of them. Beautiful black women with a lilt to their accent. Fans in the outside cafes keeping the air moving.  Here I think, the frequent hurricanes are both a boon to the local economy and keep the buildings with fresh coats of paint.

 I had a wonderful time at Bouchercon.  The highpoint was meeting all the great Soho authors, and spending time with my publisher.  I learned a tremendous amount. I suppose the most important thing I learned is that I have spent most of my time trying to subvert the traditional forms.  I messed with the form of the traditional Private Investigator mystery.  I always knew I was doing that.  I never really cared about catching the bad guy. This is what frustrates many readers.  I care about the moral code of the rest of the community that my detective is a part of, I care about where his feet are placed and what difference that makes to his character.  Now, I am subverting the form of the thriller in my next book.  I want to create tension but not by preventing the crime, but by putting all my characters in some kind of philosophical bind.  How do they confront time? The time they have left in their life?  This is the crisis that befalls us all.  We will see….  I hope it is compelling.  I hope its a fun and humorous ride.  It’s just not normal.  Time will tell.  Why do I do it this way?  It’s just more fun for me.  It really is. I hope that’s okay, and the readers will find it fun too.

 Jan and I had a blast in the Everglades.  She is a wonder.  We stayed in a great hotel upon the recommendation of Paul Oliver from Soho.  He grew up in Florida and turned us onto Ivy’s in Everglade City.  It’s a wide spot in the glades that looks as if has been scoured by numerous storms.  The hotel is funky but clean and very environmentally aware.  Good breakfast and great tours.  We would have loved to have stayed a couple of days but Jan had a plane to catch and I have an event.  I washed clothes while Jan walked to a café.  I read a sequel to Gone With The Wind while my clothes washed in the laundry:  warm and swampy, Scarlett, fighting for her pride after Mellie’s death and Mammie’s death and always scheaming to get Brett back, still strong and morally ambiguous, sexy but hard working and her fires banked down in service of some greater good.  The great pot boiler heroine. It made me think about the other thing I keep learning at gatherings of crime writing.  The great theme of crime writing now is the liberation of the reader from constraints of abusive power.  Moral rectitude.  Now… in our current political times there is almost a frantic quest, a radical edge to this hunt for justice.  Look on the horizon for the radical thriller and righteously militant private eye, maybe a return to James M. Cain coal mining novels and Hammet’s The Glass Key where radical labor politics came more sharply into focus.  Not to mention a two fisted lesbian feminist ass kicking PI to break into the NYT best seller list. (If one hasn’t already and I just missed her)

 Jan found a great airboat tour about an hour down the road and the next morning we were  skimming across the great living and breathing river that are the Everglades. We had a wonderful guide who would stop and explain the plant life and animals.  He was raised in Florida to Cuban Parents.  He had a degree in environmental science and he clearly loved his work.  He chuckled or laughed out loud all the time. He was smart but not a show off.  Confident I guess.  He seemed to know the animals personally along his route.  He showed concern for the plant life being sure not to tread to heavily anywhere but mindful to show us as much as he could.  He showed us the native people’s practices and referred to them as natural parts of this place.  He neither condescended to their wisdom or tried to make them magical.  He showed genuine respect. We saw herons, and egrets, grackles, turtles, baby crocodiles, huge crickets, and marvelous flowers growing on the Lilly pads.  We cooled off while running along the surface, and rested in the silence of the high sedges. Beautiful trip. Well worth doing.  Jan found this outfitter on line and all the reviews were five star and were recommended by the Park Service.

 I admit I am having far too much fun.  I will be busy for a few days.  Tonight I’m going to Murder On The Beach and will talk with David Gillstrap, who is a bestselling Thriller writer. That is tonight at seven.  Then early tomorrow I will fly to Portland and tomorrow night I will read at Powell’s in Beaverton.  Then on Friday, I read at Third Place Books in Ravenna, then it’s off to Book People in Moscow Idaho on Monday night.  All of which will be great fun, and a chance to see family and friends in the Pacific Northwest.

 But I’m afraid I will not feel like Brick in A Cat On Hot Tin Roof  anymore.

Was that a Gecko,

 on the hot, sandy concrete?

 Somewhere waves roll in.

jhs

My First Stop: I Can't Make You Like Me.

I’m in Phoenix and it’s a hundred and ten degrees today.  It’s the day after the Poison Pen Mystery Readers and Writers Conference, I’m staying in a swanky resort with eight swimming pools.  I walked around and looked at three of them and I almost melted.  I leaned over and put my hand in the water and that too felt hot and sour with chlorine. I didn’t go swimming but came back to my air conditioned room, and listened to a Tom Cruise movie.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been to this kind of conference.  It’s a gathering of about two dozen writers, with one big name writer to head the bill, and about ninety readers and people interested in writing their own books who pay to attend.  Some come to meet their favorite writers and some come to pitch their books to the editors who also attend.

The programing at this conference was set up mostly by Barbara Peters who runs Poison Pen Press who is a powerful force in the Mystery Literature world, she is a publisher, editor, and legendary bookstore owner and reader of everything.  She knows everyone and is friends with almost all of them. She is smart and apparently ageless.  It’s kind of unnerving.  This was a very pleasant and low key conference.  The people were friendly and relaxed.  At some of the bigger and busier conferences, like Bouchercon next week,  fans have less time and they sometimes need to rush around to get books signed and find their authors on a kind of tense scavenger hunt, but this gathering was more relaxed and we had good conversation about books and authors.

There were great authors there.  Some of them I had read and knew well.  Ian Rankin from Scotland gave a fine talk about Scottish Crime fiction, Dana Stabennow, and I spoke about Alaska and Alaskan readers.  James Sallis, interviewed Rankin and his band entertained us.  I love his poetry and his early crime books.  He teaches here in Phoenix.  There was Francine Mathews who writes lovely books about Jane Austin, and now books about Nantucket.

Then I also met authors new to me: Stephen Mack Jones whose first book August Snow is causing a stir.  He writes about Detroit and it was the one book I bought.  Reavis Z. Wortham, is a rancher from Texas wears the boots and has the hat and the mustache to go with them, but he has a great sense of humor and tells a good story and made me eager to read his books.  Mette Ivie Harrison, is another Soho writer who writes about a Mormon woman who both keeps to her faith but keeps running into the strict practices of the LDS church.  Her Mormon mother is an amateur sleuth and just the contradictions she brought up on her panels drew a ton of interest to her books.  When we went out to dinner, of course I told my usual crass jokes, and of course I apologized when I wasn't’ really sorry and of course she said that she would “pray for my soul” with a good dose of irony… or was that irony?

While I do have a good time at these gatherings and I always learn things, I always have to learn the same thing over and over again each time I go out.  The thing I always have to learn is,  “I can't make you like me.”  That is… I just have to relax and be myself.  When I’m around popular writers, I always feel they are better read than I am more talented more successful, I become extremely insecure and self-conscience and self-conciseness is the enemy of clarity. Worse it sounds whiney and ungrateful to an audience member who sees me as incredibly lucky to be up on a panel or having books published in the first place.  What do I have to feel insecure about?  I’ve made it.  The thing is I haven’t.  But that’s okay. I’m in a good spot in my life.  It doesn’t matter anyway…fame isn’t mine.  Fame belongs to someone else.  The only thing that I own are my words.  This is the mantra I have to tell myself before each public appearance.  Like Popeye,  “I am what I am, and that’s all that I am.”  Which sounds simple… but sometimes… who I am is an insecure mess, and that’s the truth and to be otherwise feels like being an arrogant phony. 

But I must resist.  Because I can’t make anyone like me, so I just have to remember to eat my spinach before I go to these things.

My friends help me always. Dana helps me always.  She is strong and always supportive.  My book seller friends, Ashia in Sitka, and Carole Price at Book People, always help me.  My brother Richard Nelson, always has my back,  and now here in Phoenix I’ve learned that I have a family at Soho Press.  Juliet Grames and Paul Oliver and all the incredible writers are truly in it for the love of the words, which really are the only things we own. 

Tomorrow I will meet Jan in Florida.  She is the strongest nourishment I need,  she transforms me. 

I am so lucky. I can’t wait for the next stop in Florida.

Hot morning

  sun searing the bright green lawn

.and light blue pool.

jhs

Leaving Home For A Book Tour

Rain today.  When I took my shower outside this morning, leaves fell from the alders all around me, and young crows made a ruckus above my head then flitted from branch to branch.  The mist was so thick I could not see the small island so near shore we can walk to it at low tide. 

I am getting ready for a long trip to promote the new book.  First I’m going to Arizona and then Florida to mystery conference. Jan will meet me in Florida because she has some time and she wants to drive with me to Del Ray where I will do a reading then she has to fly home to Alaska because she has a research trip in Prince William Sound.  For years she has been working with the humpback whales in the sound and sampling the small fish they are feeding on, to continue studying the impact of the oil spill and the health of the forage fish of the ecosystem. 

I will fly back to the pacific northwest where I will read in Portland, Seattle, Moscow Idaho, and Ilwaco, then back down to Tacoma for The Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association conference.  (You can find details on my events page)

I look forward to seeing my friends on these trips: Dana Stabenow, and Jim Sallis in particular. I look forward to the good conversations I will have.  There is almost nothing I love more than meeting writers and sitting around gabbing.  I also love meeting people who actually read my books, other than my friends and family.  It seems like a miracle to me to get off a jet plane in some crazy place like Arizona and meet someone who knows Cecil Younger and Todd. Sometimes it is odd when a fan talks with me as if they really know me too even though we have never met. (“John, what in the hell were you doing when you killed Todd’s dog in your second book? I almost came up to Alaska to slap you around!”)  But still, I love it.  I love meeting readers no matter where or when. 

But the older I get the more I hate leaving home.

There is such self-indulgence in my new writing life since I retired from crime.  In the last two years, I’ve written four books of poetry, a book of non-fiction, one completed and published novel and a draft of another.  I have a lovely writing space that looks out on a cherry tree I planted years ago and out to the ocean.  I have a few dear friends who call me periodically to help me move heavy things for them.  My wife, works hard with her students who love her and help her with all her adventures.  On Sundays, I play music in a café with some buddies, which I have done for some twenty years, and it is the most fun, I have all week.  I’m probably the least accomplished musician, I play mandolin and slide guitar.  We play swing music and blues, some folk music and some old jazz. We all listen to each other and no one shows off or wants to leave town to be a rock star.  We are all happy exactly where we are, doing what we do, which I’ve come to see is a blessing. 

I will travel around for a month in the lower 48 then I come home and will make trips out during the month of October for my Alaska tour.  I will be back and forth from home for that and that will be good.  I expect the weather in October will mess with flights so I will take ferries whenever possible, but the ferry schedule in and out of Sitka is not great these days. 

One of our best friends I will worry about is Nancy Ricketts.  Nancy is 93.  She lives in the Pioneers Home in town.  She took a fall the other day and her stomach doesn’t feel great.  She is not eating well.  She hates talking about her health.  Nancy likes to talk about substantial things.  She likes to talk about music, or science, books she has read or things she has learned in her long life.  Jan edited a book about Nancy’s father the great biologist and collector Ed Ricketts, who was made famous by John Steinbeck.  Nancy loves to talk about the things she remembers about her dad. She believes she inherited a great deal of his spirit, curiosity and adventure. I think that is true. Today she is staying in the infirmary at the Home.  I asked her if she was worried that her stomach problems were cancer.  She said,  “No, I’m not worried about that, I just want to know what is wrong, if it is cancer then I will just have another set of decision to make.  What room to be in and what to expect.  I’m still so lucky right now.  None of that really matters, I’ve been planning on dying soon anyway.”

Nancy is very lovely, when I last visited she was working on hemming a nice pair of pants.  She has a great sense of color and always wears cloths that look good on her and her hair is cut in a way that frames her face beautifully.  She is thin now, when she has pain and sits in her big chair under her reading light she reminds me of a Siamese cat, we will be talking about Gregorian Chants or the effects of music on her mood, she will stop and stretch towards the light with her eyes shut, cat-like; shudder a bit and then settle back.  When we visit her she becomes grumpy if we talk too much about her health.  She usually wants out of her room no matter how frail she feels. This weekend we drove out the road in the rain, we drove until we saw a small fawn scampering up the road ahead of us. We drove up a narrow road where we could see the mountains disappear into the clouds. We listened to sacred music then we turned around and I changed to Dixieland music for the bumpy jaunt downhill. 

We went back to her room and I lay on her floor.  I read aloud from a new book called This Land Is Your Land by Mike Lannoo, which is about the early history of Field Biology.  Lannoo is a friend of all of ours and he has written about Nancy’s dad.  I read aloud as Jan and Nancy sat back and listened.  Periodically both the opinionated women would chime in with comments or corrections.  “That’s not quite correct!” Nancy would pipe up, when I read something about what house they had first lived in...ever the editor. 

Soon she wanted to sleep, so we got up to go.  “He is such a good writer.” She said, always wanting to end with kindness, “and I had a wonderful time today,”  she said as we gathered our things.  “You be careful on your trip,” she said to me.  “I will” I said, “I will come see you first thing when I come home.”

Nancy shrugged her shoulders and smiled at me like a coquette,  “Who knows, where I’ll be?”  I kissed her and said goodbye, somehow not sad, but deeply moved, and calm in a way I had not felt before. 

Crows in the alders,

and a fawn sprints down the road

without its mother.

JHS

My Process And What Is Time To A Pig?

It's a beautiful summer day in Sitka, Alaska. The fireweed is better than six feet tall in our wild garden and the berries are ripe and soft on their stems.  Warm wind is carrying the smell of dry grass through our windows and I all most expect to see horses grazing on our lawn but alas there are no ponies to be seen. 

I finished the first draft of my next novel this week and I have sent it out to two readers for a first look.  My plan is to publish a Cecil book one year and a Cold Storage book the next and keep going that way for a bit. See how my readers like that.  The new Book is called What Is Time To A Pig? which is the punch line to a very fine joke. I wrote this draft longer than it will end up, as I usually do in a first draft, so I can trim the fat as I rework it.  The Cold Storage books are different than the Cecil books in several important ways.  First, they have different points of view.  Cecil books are first person from Cecil’s point of view and are pretty realistic. “I went to the store and walked up to the pig and I wondered what the heck the pig was thinking about just then…” CS books are third person and sometimes magical “He, she, it goes to the store and walks up to the pig, and the pig was thinking about what to have for dinner. ” Cold Storage books I tend to think are more like fairy tales, or screwball comedies.  Cecil books are more like a wise cracking detective story gone a little nutty. I don’t really know. I just write them.  I don’t like to characterize them. 

Anyway.  I research the book, but I usually start with a title.  This is bass akwards from what most writers do.  Most writers start with a plot they can pitch to an editor or a movie producer.  Not me…. and maybe that’s why I’m sitting in my yard here in Alaska and not in Los Angeles.  I start with a joke, or sometimes a scrap of poetry or something I read in someone’s notebook.  “The Curious eat themselves” was something that the poet Theodore Roethke had written in his notebook and had always stuck in my head as something interesting to think about and when Juris Jurjevic from Soho Press asked me if I had my second mystery done yet, and I told him “Ah… no… it needs some work…” meaning I hadn’t started it because I was told to tell Soho that the Woman Who Married A Bear was the first book in a series but I never thought anyone was going to buy the first one, so when Juris asked me “what is the title of the second book?”  I totally pulled out of my butt: “The Curious Eat Themselves”.

So, yes, I start with titles.  Then I make a list of places I want my characters to go.  Then I make a list of characters who could inhabit these places.  Then I come up with the plot that takes them to these places, which fits the poetry that was set ringing when I was struck by the title.  Like I said, other people don’t work this way.

Once I had to change a title, because the art department apparently got the giggles with the title I had chosen from one of my favorite haiku by Issa:

Naked

  on a naked horse

through the summer rain.

The novel was called “Naked On A Naked Horse.  The cover Artists apparently got giddy just thinking about it and my editor at Bantam made me change it.  I drove around one weekend with friends who had read the manuscript and we came up with Cold Water Burning.  Which I thought worked out a lot better than my first thought which was Fuck Off And Die, which my friends thought was immature and not helpful for the original problem with the Art Department.

Once I have title, place, characters, plot, lots of time spent staring out the window and making lists and reading and researching all of the above.  I start writing.  Rough draft discipline is number of words a day.  Usually a thousand words a day five days a week.  No cheating.  No storing up in a bank.  Five grand minimum.  No max. Then I get to about eighty thousand I wrap it up unless I have a much grander vision.  The Big Both Ways was meant to be longer.  There, I wanted to write a journey book.  Once the draft is done I let it sit and let people read it and then go back to it and then the discipline is number of hours a day. Usually three hours minimum. No cheating.  Once I start fixing things I’ve already fixed twice OR instead of fixing things I start changing things so I begin to essentially write a whole new book on top of the book I began.  I stop and let my real editor read it.  Then I work with them and follow their advice to the letter.  Unless one of us goes crazy or has a break down that is irreconcilable.  Which has never happened.  Once I get my editors revisions, I work on it until they tell me I’m done. Then there are usually two rounds of line edits after that; catching typos, and spacing issues, formatting, and proper names.  I am dyslexic and most often I hire private editors here at home or close buy to help me to find mistakes, which I am quite literally blind to. Then there are book design and jacket copy, blurbs, which I am allowed to have a voice in, and I'm honored to do that here at Soho.

I have to say that I love the people I work with at Soho Press.  That's it. I'm going to say it now, in case I never get any awards, they are the best. 

I was lucky to correspond with the great poet William Stafford before he died, he told me “An editor is a friend who makes sure only your best writing makes it out into the world.” When he first told me that I felt that editors were the people who sent rejection letters, but now I have come to believe these words of friendship. 

With each novel, I set myself a new goal, some new thing I want to try. This is what makes writing interesting.  I can’t bear writing the same thing over and over.  When I was a kid I loathed doing workbook homework where the teacher could just look up the answers in the book she kept locked in her desk.  I felt, what’s the point of this?  Why not just hand out that answer book to everyone and let us read that one and case closed.  No more suffering at home at night! Writing to a formula seems like doing that kind of homework to me.  It feels like the worst kind of homework, and I just won’t do it.

When I give a new manuscript to a reader for the first time, all I want to know is,  “Am I crazy?”  That’s it.  I will get more editing down the way,  I just want to know if the new twist or new technique is coming across without too much distraction. Is my hallucination real at all to you? So, it's not really, am I crazy... it's more, does this craziness come across vividly, and in an interesting way?  

My insanity is a given. We should all know that by now.  

In a little more than a year, if all goes well you should be able to read the well worked over version of this manuscript which, today at least, is called What Is Time To A Pig?

Here is hoping anyway. 

Warm evening: our yard.

   Wind brings in the smell of grass

and I hear horse bells.

jhs