Small Towns

Today is Emily Basham’s Birthday 30th. This was taken in our yard last Fourth of July before she married Finn Straley. Today is also Gary Snyder’s 90th birthday.

Warm today with high clouds. No rain. One of Jan’s students came out for a morning low tide to hunt for abalone from her paddle board. She left her dog on shore to play with Dot and now Dot is napping out on the porch with the door open. Tomorrow the grass will need to be cut again and I will have to set Dan’s (the mower’s) settings lower so I can get a more even trim because the grass grew so high this week, which will work out fine as long as we don’t get any rain to bog Dan’s motor down. Each evening brings a new chorus of songbirds, and it makes me miss Nels all the more. The other thing that makes me miss him is all the news about the Asian Murder Hornets, Oh he would have LOVED that story. He might have even traveled down to western Washington just to take a look at one, and to record their buzzing. Nels had an appetite for the bizarre and dangerous in nature. I would have loved to wasted an hour or two talking and joking with him about Murder Hornets, I would of course taken their side, in the governments attempts to exterminate them.

Nels had led the charge in Sitka to pull up all the Japanese knotweed by the root, organizing pulling parties of conservationists to eradicate the invasive species. Of course Finn was a little boy and we had our own radio show and we made fun of these activists characterizing them as anti immigrant, with a slightly racist WWII era internment camp overtone. Nels understood but still he would get a little prickly at times. Environmentalism can be a very serious business particularly in a small former mill town.

Small town life can be both calm, secure and incredibly taxing. Calm in that certain kinds of crime are very rare. The usual stranger crimes from big cities hardly ever happen. In the forty years I’ve lived here I haven’t seen an armed bank robbery, and I remember only one convenience store armed robbery and that was mostly a drunken escapade with a gun. In fact I would call it an “armed shop lifting with an accidental discharge of a weapon, involving no injuries.” It would really be unfair to call it an armed robbery. We built our new, pretty nice new house, twenty eight years ago and I think I have never seen the keys to our front door in twenty seven years. We used to leave the keys in our car all the time until I finally figured out that the new keys have these electronic things which keep talking to the cars and drain the cheap little battery in our Honda, so now we keep the car key hung on a hook by the door to keep the battery from crapping out every time we listen to the radio with the car off. We still leave the key in the car when we leave it at the airport. Even if someone steals the car they can’t go far. There are only really about 12 miles of main road. (that a correction from my recording from yesterday. I got it right in the details but not in the main part of the paragraph) We put on a good face in small towns. We will have a murder every few years. Some are shocking there is still an unsolved murder of a young woman last seen walking back home late at night and found assaulted and strangled in the park. A young man I knew was tried and found not guilty for the crime and it was pretty clear to everyone that he confessed to the crime because he had been black out drunk and his friends had convinced him that he was the kind of guy who would do such a thing. They charged him even though the DNA evidence didn’t match his and when he sobered up he realized that he wasn’t the kind of guy who would do it and that he in fact didn’t do it. The young woman’s parents suffer horribly to this day, and the young man accused had to move out of town, and there will never be a solution for their pain.

The suffering in small towns is of this complicated and sticky sort. We hurt our loved ones. We have unprecedented domestic violence in Alaska, opium addiction, alcoholism. and now the rampant rape, murder and disappearance of Native Alaskan women. Some blame outside sex traders and that may be true, some blame local men held in the thrall of drugs, alcohol, depression and the never-ending prospect of forever jail and probation violation. In the public defender it was referred to as “life in prison on the installment plan.'“ It is shocking to find human being so hopeless that they cannot go months without breaking a law or having a serious police contact. Again I think of it as a kind of deep depression of the spirt, they don’t have enough spark in life to go out and even try to actually commit a crime and get away with it. They sink down into themselves and violate themselves first, poisoning themselves with whatever is closest at hand:alcohol if they can get it, meth, dope, or gasoline, cleaning products, copier fluid, anything. They destroy their reasoning function, and then they violate the ones nearest them, other users, family, friends, who ever is at hand. Some would sell women to sex traffickers I’m sure but they make terrible, I mean terrible accomplices to such serious crimes, because no one has been born that is so unreliable as this kind of lost soul. The cheapest bottle of booze buy’s their loyally. Horribly. Horribly sad. It is not the story anyone would want to read a locked door mystery about. Neither Miss Marple nor Hercule Perot would set food in a room with them. In Alaska many of these hopeless addicts are Native Alaskan but not all, the gravity of this kind of black hole does not discriminate by race. These are the denizens of small town underworlds. They don’t congregate in large crowds out of doors, they couch surf mostly. They have been tough loved out of their family of origin, many of whom have to deal with their own health issues or poverty. There simply isn’t any recourses to help these people. What would it take? Frankly it would a Korean war, Moonshot effort to build separate and isolated long term treatment and live in work facilities. Places where people could do meaningful work and gradually build their dignity back together bit by bit. The usual 12 step religion can help but it is not enough when we live in a capitalist state that judges you mostly by what you “do”. Men and women have to be given a chance to do something meaningful in healthy communities. We have to be willing to help Native people rebuild the healthy communities they want, not the ones we want for them.

Downtown Sitka, Alaska, a few winters ago.

Okay… but small towns can be complex and profoundly beautiful. They are not all Lake Woebegon nor Main Street of Disneyland I would argue that what pressure cooks the steamy underworld of small town America is the insistence that the residence not deal with their tragedy out in the open. That for too long small town life has not had civilized conversations about difficult issues like the difference between sexual aggression and appropriate sexual behavior, or more simply Consent. Neither do we talk about bullying and the hurtfulness of gossip. Not that people are ever going to stop gossiping. I think talking about each other is both natural and useful. I think gossip is THE way we deal with the danger going on in our community, BUT when gossip is misdirected or misused it creates shame and hurt causing more pain and sometimes triggering more violence.

There are people and organizations, some of them in the communities of faith that take on these issues. Some reach out to others across all kinds of scary lines: sexual, gender, racial… any boundary where there is tension there is a need for a frank discussion about bullying, gossip and reality in a small town. In any town really, but when it is done in a small town, the results can sometimes be easily achieved, a handful of people can be reached and one or two suicides can actually be prevented by one or two people of good and generous spirit and this has a tremendous ripple effect.

Just as artists in small town can change a culture, as long as they carry some humility along with them. Any artists has to remember that they alone do not shape culture nor history. They are only one part of a complex equation of, earth, biology, community and history. I know this for a fact, many artists think their work springs whole and new onto the earth and should beheld like a wonder of God. Ah… no. You have to work just as hard to win over Sitkans as you do New Yorkers. In fact New Yorkers can be just as provincial as anyone. They just have been on more Senior trips to Europe.

But I love my small town. I have many talented friends. Great musicians, and writers, wonderful painters, and ceramic makers. I think the rain forest breeds a lot of well read people. I mean really. We have a terrific library here and a great bookstore. A world class chamber music festival. We used to have a famous writers festival here and I’m sure something new will start up again. A terrific fine arts camp with a big campus for students of all ages. There is a college campus and a science center. There are activists of all kinds working on historical, land and sea conservation. There is a tribal organization working on health, and cultural issues. A police academy and a boarding school for students from all over Alaska, and non profits dedicated to trails and indoor recreation as well as Arts, Theater, Music and Culture. You can go to a meeting every night of the week and thats just by volunteering. Small town life here could be as busy as you want.

The light and the dark. The happy, the optimistic as well as the dark and hopeless. It is not easy to characterize in one neat picture. That’s what I like about it. Nice, messy and very real. Like the old forest growing all around it: rising up and falling down.

A trail in the Historical Park right in town.

Someone’s yellow cat

slinking through the berry canes:

a bird in her mouth.

jhs

Here is a recording I made this morning of me reading and talking a bit about the first chapter of Wendell Barry’s Jayber Crow. A richly detailed and moving novel about a small town in northern Kentucky.

Sun Drunk

Sun today and the doors are left open. I can almost watch the grass grow up underneath the cherry blossoms. Dot loves running in the long grass, every time she tries to take a corner she tumbles and rolls in the grass. Today is the first time that the day welcomes both the mind and the body out into the world.

Lovely, lovely, if I were as young and dopey as Dot I’d be running and rolling in the grass. My skull actually feels larger today. Jan printed out a draft of her revised edition of her Ed Ricketts book and took it down to Nancy Ricketts. It is due at the printer soon and will be ready for sale by summer. We had hoped to be selling to the cruise ship passengers this spring and summer but there will be no rush for that. We have a few requests already and people at schools are looking forward to it, Jan is happy. Though she tripped on a wrinkle in the carpet and fell today and bloodied her nose a bit, but even that couldn’t put her off her good mood. Now she is throwing the ball for Dot and talking with our neighbor from a respectful distance, while Dot chases, rolls and leaps, and sometimes she even returns the ball… but she is not as reliable as a Labrador.

I spent a good part of the day trying to upload music onto Nancy Ricketts little iPod. Nancy, like her father favors religious music. She said her faith travels to her spirit not through her intellect or through any kind of intellectual expression of belief, but through sacred music. I think she simply feels God in beautiful music. She love Gregorian chants, and recorder music, ancient lute compositions, and choral music. Once on the radio she heard the white gospel singer Frank Newsome being interviewed and singing solo without accompaniment. She loved the sound and had to have some of it. Well her little player is a tricky little beast, and it is old, and my computer is old, but I finally was able to buy an album of Frank Newsome as well as a live recording of Aretha Franklin’s Gospel service which was made into a documentary film. Beautiful. I finally got both albums loaded and the iPod back set to the “easy play” settings with the volume adjusted so that Nancy should be able to listen to them without much frustration. (but I’m not sure…. all those little devices can be cause for frustration, but I made sure there were large print instructions along with)

Sacred music… any beautiful music makes me want to roll in the grass. I agree with Nancy I think that beautiful music makes me feel a little bit the way I felt today… a little sun drunk… as if the inside of my head is growing larger and larger, and I’m a bit dizzy just being in the sun. Intoxicating after so much rain and cold.

Cherry blossom on the grass

Just as music must be intoxicating after so much drone and silence of too much of your own company. How lucky we are to have such good fidelity of sound reproduction in our lives in this day and age. My parents loved music, but we had scratchy old records when I was a kid, but we never complained. They seemed spectacular at the time. I suppose our imagination filled in the sound of the old seventy-eights even. Something about the scratchiness gave them a mood and atmosphere that accompanied the music of the time, somehow. The real beauty, I suppose, was something from the spirit, that the old scratchy record machine just cued up inside of us. Just as the sunlight and cherry blossoms of this afternoon, simply evoked something in me today, which might not have done anything to someone raised in the south of France or the Gulf of Mexico. It would have seemed frigid to them, but I was sun drunk and giddy today.

The Red Alder tree has finally leafed out.

The seas were flat calm all day long As peaceful as a nap in a hammock. It could be possible that high pressure itself effects our mood for the better. It may have only been 57 degrees today but I saw children wading into the ocean in spots, the ocean water I’m sure is in the mid forties. Something is certainly making everyone giddy. Tomorrow pretty teenage girls will have bright red patches of skin on the back of their legs where they were laying out on the grass today reading movie magazines, or more likely sheltering under a towel and looking at their phone. When the sun shines in the rain forest we are bound to act giddy and strange to others. But I will take it, and I don’t care a whit what others think. I will role in the grass with Dot and enjoy the smell of cut grass on my old pants. The pandemic cannot take this pleasure away.

Ripe as a fresh orange

I laugh while rolling in the grass.

Black dog stares, head cocked.

jhs

Here is another recording I made with Dot sitting outside today, reading the ending of Cold Water Burning while I was a little sun drunk.

The Whale

In the mid fifties, high clouds, no rain… yet. The Alder trees are leafing out, Cherry Blossoms are starting to fall, Dot has learned to lay down on her side and crawl out under the steps and out of her enclosure, so she can run around and show us how clever she is. We were all sitting outside last night in the sunshine eating our dinner and Dot came over and peed on both of Jan’s shoes, which greatly annoyed Jan. I scolded Dot and put her in another area where she barked like a crazy person. Now it’s Jan’s turn to be mad at Dot, so things are a little frosty between the two of them this morning. I’m just trying to figure out what kind of message Dot was trying to send with the shoe peeing. There are a lot of weird interpretation of things on the internet. I’m just going to keep siding with Jan. This is the smart plan for me. I think I have to show a lot more affection towards Jan in Dot’s presence. But I’m drawing the line at family counseling. I will do, family treats for everybody… but family therapy with the puppy included. Sorry.

The Mountain Ash is leafing out.

Years ago when Finn was little we read Moby Dick aloud. It took us more than a year to do it. I read the book at night before sleep. I have to admit that there were times I was the last person standing… or awake. But it was a wonderful experience. Jan loved it due to all the whale details, and Finn enjoyed all the goofy voices I did and all the adventures on the water. He was a little boy who, after all had had quite a few adventures on the ocean around whales. Soon enough he would learn to shoot a dart gun and take blubber samples from whales along side his mom. He always had to fight off drowsiness going out in a boat for he found being in a boat the most restful place on earth.

Whales are seen as “charismatic megafauna’ by the United States Park Service and other management agencies. Which means essentially, people go nuts to see them. Which is true. This is basically the theme of Moby Dick, and why not? They are massive. The blue whale is larger than any dinosaur, so to be close to any of the really big whales, to hear them breath and to”be able to look them in the eyeball is a chest expanding experience that even the best monstertron movie theaters have not been able to replicate… yet. I have not been close to a great ape or a herd of elephants but so far being close to a male Sperm Whale when it is feeding is THE MOST humbling experience I have ever felt as a human being. The next weirdest experience with an animal was being with a US military dolphin in it’s tiny pool. They were stationed near Sitka and the Navy had asked Jan to come advise them about the possibility of transient killerwhales being in the area before they deployed their million dollar dolphins to detect underwater ordinance during an exercise. (Transient Killer whales eat dolphins.) Anyway, I was petting this dolphin, and it was looking at me and pinging on me with it’s sonar and I was certain it could read my mind and could possibly transmit my thoughts back to the Pentagon. Super Creepy animal experience.

Here again, these animals, the sea mammals are due a lot of my respect. Smart in a way we don’t even understand yet. We can teach them the rudimentary elements of English, train them to understand words, yet we know almost next to nothing about their communication structures. Sperm whales are the loudest creatures on earth. Think of that for a moment. They also have the biggest brain. Of course bigness doesn’t necessarily mean intelligence, but they pretty remarkable problem solving abilities. Being able to feed themselves when they have huge caloric requirements and they live in a huge dark ocean and they have these tiny eyes that can’t even see their tiny little mouth. What the hell? No digits, no tools, no traps, come on! Give us a pair of fins on our feet and tie our arms to our side. Turn off the lights in the pool the size of Texas and put in a few hundred million protein and fat packets that swim around that evolved to AVOID US for God’s Sake! Give me a break!

No wonder Herman Melville resorted to religious allegory to describe the experience of the search for such creatures! What I like most about Melville is that he never really tips his hand as to what it all means. The Whale is EVERYTHING, dangerous, and marvelous, life-giving, light-giving, dreaded, and desirous. It might be God, it might be the devil. It might be the primordial force which animates paganism, or it might be the Christian God of the crusades. It might just be bigger than anything a human can conceive. It is the thing worth giving your soul for that is for certain. We wait on the calm sea for it to rise, and when it does, we are startled and amazed, both by it’s kinship and by it’s strangeness.

Me. I love whales. It’s a good thing too because I married into it’s family.

Here is a poem I wrote a while back, after rereading M.D. The Rachel is the ship that AHAB refused to help in her search for her lost children. There are many papers written about the biblical significance of that. I didn’t write a paper, I just wrote the poem.

The Rachel

Out of the gray where rain swallows rain

and waves consume the horizon 

The Rachel  lunges heavy and fat,

her lines worn soft, rigging lose

her planking shuddering into the trough

in search of her lost children.

Men cinch and fasten, clamber like chimps up and down the sticks

yelling to the heathen gods, wallowing

beneath the surface,  Neptune with his Trident and the Christian God’s,

beard whipping great waves

across the decks, skidding men on their backs

to grab hold of the gunwales, and pray aloud.  

Then in an hour, the storm has backed,

the lookout calls out flotsam three degrees off the port bow:

for a man clinging to something in the swell. 

The sea is as immense as the sky, and a whale like a planet

passes beneath then turns on its side watching the refuse.

Perhaps an elephant seal, with flippers outstretched,  

the great snub nosed beast pauses and clicks to detect it, but the  

report is wrong,  something hollow, full of air, something hard

and alone. Not food, Not meat. Not worth stopping for

so the great beast glides on, easing under The Rachel

searching for her lost children.

I am that man.  Not meat, not food, and without a ship.

Not a lost tribesman, but a modern man alone.  Homeless.

I would rather have been taken up into the belly of that Whale,

For God still hears a man’s pleas

in the deepest gut of a leviathan, even the lost Jonah was delivered, and it’s true

that God directed a worm to eat the roots of his only shade tree,

still Jonah endured, as will I, as will you afloat on our shipmates coffins, while

our Captain has abandoned us

all of us,

to madness.                           J. Straley

The rhubarb rises!

Blossoms on water

floating in the sea, where whales

feed on herring eggs.

Here is a recording I made reading from Cold Water Burning, where I wrecked Jan’s boat again and bumped into some sperm whales and some sneakers floating in the ocean. I hope you like it.

Alaska

Beautiful morning early, but then, showers later in the day. On our first walk at seven the world was dazzling with light. Dot ran out into the lawn and did a series of summersaults stretched out on the cut grass trying to rub the smell of her kennel off of her hide. There were some chickadees in the berry bushes. Or at least that’s what I called them. Jan was still asleep and Nels is dead. Of course I should look it up in a book, but my eyesight is so bad I didn’t get a good look, just a bit of a flicker in the green. There is an ap which can identify a bird from its call, but by the time I remember about it the little rascals have long stopped singing. I know I should play back some common songs and try and figure it out later but I’d rather just imagine that I called Nels and he told me it was a chickadee. I’m a fiction writer, see how much easier my life is.

This morning as I was drinking my tea and listening to the news I was thinking about how much I love Alaska. What is it that I like? Of course the country but truthfully it is not the beauty. I find the pallet of the color scheme here in southeastern pretty monotonous. Grey to green, white to grey, grey to black. Here there are just a few dabs of color in the wild. Berry bushes in spring, so too the yellow of the skunk cabbage coming up. Even in the fall there is not much variation. The climate is very monotonous (as you can tell if your read this blog regularly) I do like the animals, deer, bear, goats, voles, squirrels, beavers, mice, otters and a few others on land here in my neighborhood. But jillions of living creatures on the intertidal and in the sea, from Sperm Whales to sea squirts. The ocean here is still amazingly rich, and relatively uncrowded by other humans. But still not the main attraction for me. I still love the dessert country at sunset for color and beauty, and give me the cool morning of a summer day on the eastern slope of the Cascade Range for pure sensual beauty. Or even a walk up Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue on a chilly autumn day headed for Central Park for a straight shot of kinetic energy in both man made and natural form.

So what is it that I love most about Alaska? I quote it in the selection I recorded today. It’s race, and space.

Alaska, is huge. There is an incredible amount of room without humans here. But it’s not quite wilderness because there are Native Alaskan’s here who hang on to their languages and who hang on to their traditional life ways. Space, and Race. White people, and white european culture are only one part of the equation here. This makes a tremendous difference, in many subtle and obvious ways.

In my eyes “Real Alaskan’s” are the people who have been influenced by this wildness, not just the room but by the experience of sharing the space with Native human beings. Being prickly… not caring what other people think or say about you is one way of showing this Alaskan-ness. But proving up on it is important as well, Showing respect to the skills of the Native People is part of it. Showing respect to their politics even while you argue about it. Real Alaskan don’t starve to death in an old bus. Also, they would do anything to help a kid to avoid starving to death if he was smart enough to build a little bit of a community.

This spirit, of having grown up with enough room, to be a bit eccentric, to have a few wild hairs of your own. This requires space but also enough of a community which respects the values of survival. Respect the gratitude in having fatty meat and a decent garden, for those things just don’t happen or just come to an individual all alone. There are cultural norms that acknowledge the great distances and the difficulty of feeding oneself. Just understanding this is something Alaskan. Race and Space: it is what Russell Sanders said were the two great streams of American Literature. These two things are what still keep Alaska vibrant.

I think it just gets better by the day.

Now, I know that there are people who will not agree with me. There are some in the Jack London school who see “the great alone” as bringing out some animal nature that is essential to the make up of the Alaskan. But I’m going to stick with the culture of survival which we inherited from our Paleolithic ancestors and we still see practiced by Native Alaskans in a very sophisticated and delicate political environment. The Native Alaskan’s example on the land gives the European settler, their only authentic model for belonging. Certainly none of the actual treaties matter to the individual actors out on the land.

Why does this matter at all? I’m not sure it does to anyone else, but it matters to me, because I love Alaska. When I travel in the lower 48 I realize that I love it more and more and very very few people feel the same way about their state. My Aunt and Uncle grew up in Iowa, and certainly they LOVED Iowa. (on long drives away from Iowa if they pulled into a diner they would check the parking lot for Iowa plates and then make sure they found the other Iowans inside to talk with them!) But I’m not sure this is the same kind of affinity I’m talking about, but maybe it is, I think I have something of a spiritual allegiance to this State, warts and all, because of it’s Native citizens and because of the amount of room. Room that allows wildness and not just wilderness. Room that allows subsistence hunting and fishing and not just weekend sports fishing. I feel an allegiance and a pride that Native people can practice subsistence hunting and fishing on this land and I think it gives every person in the state who abides by it’s rules and regulations a certain character that lives in right relationship with the great expanse of land.

Of course I could be wrong about policy. But I cannot be wrong about the fact that I love Alaska, and all different types of Alaskans: Hunters, and non, Gay, Straight, Urban and Rural. Black, White, Yellow and Brown .I honestly feel in my bones that we live someplace wild and beautiful where there is room enough and still time enough to learn the important lessons from the ancient cultures of this particular location.

Some will say I’m soft for living in southeastern. Some will say I’m wrong because I’m not much of a hunter anymore, and that’s okay. As long as there is room enough for differences, and as long as there are acknowledged experts hunting and fishing, I will happily cede my opinions to them.

Cutting up smoked fish

I stupidly cut my thumb.

My blood tastes like coins.

Here is a recording I made of an essay I did about Alaskan Lit for an old collection called “Alaska At Fifty.”

What Story?

Beautiful sunny day today. I mowed the lawn this weekend for the first time. I had to cut a trail through the berries for the lawn mower. The lawn mower is named “Dan” for our old neighbor who used to love to mow the lawn, but unfortunately he moved back to New England. The grass seems happier to be short and the ground is much more firm. The cherry tree is spectacular and the salmonberries are shooting up like the Blue Angels.

We met Nancy Ricketts for another smoke break on Sunday and sat out in front of City Hall, Jan and I brought our camp chairs so we could all sit far enough apart. We drank our coffee drinks and sipped them with our masks off. A few people came by and waved from their cars, and one person rolled down her window and chatted for a bit while staying parked in the middle of the street. Dot was on her leash and was extremely well behaved and didn’t try and get on Nancy’s lap or steal her cookies. Jan had made some gingersnaps and brought them down to have with our warm drinks. It was a fine time even though it felt cold for May. Usually there would be tourists from the early ships in town and the sidewalks would be buzzing but of course not this year.

I have been thinking about what kind of stories people will want to read in the next few years. I’m sure others all over the world, particularly in storytelling capitols like L.A. and New York. I suppose a lot depends on what happens next. Will our social fabric hold solid, or will we see rifts forming with the fringe groups, the anti vaxxers and the libertarian anti-government, citizens splintering away and holding more power in certain areas, perhaps dragging it out or worse, weaponizing the virus against immigrants and poor people, forcing them back to work and turning their heads while they die, perhaps even trying to cover up the deaths or explaining them away as somehow their own faults. I know this sounds alarmist but I believe that you really can’t get in the way of some stampedes. We panic easily now, look at gun sales, there is literally no way to stand in the way of this kind of fear and not get hurt.

I could write a novel about this, a near future thriller, where good people prevail, generosity, and intelligence, overcomes bullying. But here is the hard question, would you honestly want to read it? Or, suppose I got one detail about the near future wrong, say the real virus doesn’t appear as deadly to you and your community as I portrayed it in a story, would you, the hypothetical reader, accuse me of being Chicken Little and not read the book and heap criticism upon it, for alarmism or pandering?

Or should a writer just focus on a sweet intelligent feel good balm to reassure us all that everything is going to be just fine? Rom Com in the time of the virus? The woman who gets it barely survives, develops super immunity and goes on to take care of everyone in her neighborhood, and falls in love with the local cop who is likewise immune and is solving crimes of bullies stealing resources from the needy, but using super duper spyware that his autistic kid developed in isolation: super cool drones he names after insects, and robots he names after his favorite baseball players? You get the idea? I get kind of queasy just thinking about it. Kind of a zombie movie for the post virus set? Whatdayathink? No. I don’t think so either.

What kind of stories are you in the mood for? I’m genuinely asking. Historical? Fantasy? Straight non fiction. Just the facts? Self help? How to survive in the time of CV?

I’m asking because I’m just not sure the model of the crime story is not working right now. Do we really want to scare readers with an imagined threat when there is an all to real threat all around us? Unless there really is a dark conspiracy behind the pandemic and some sleuth figures it out and not only gets to the bottom of it but finds that there is an instant cure already in existence and ready to go. Could be a popular story but is it a Fantasy or just enough Fuel to run all of crazy town? No… that doesn’t sound very socially responsible way to spend my time. What is the good story to write, right now then?

Another Charolette’s Web? But this time the Charlotte characters actions would extol the virtues of the strength and magic of scientific thought and cooperation rather than the strength and magic of language to change lives. Okay… that shouldn’t be too hard. Mice in lab coats would be great, little tails sticking out. Jesus… who ever thought entertainment in the time of the pandemic would be so hard?

See, I’ve been thinking. But it really doesn’t matter what I think. I’m notoriously bad at thinking of what others might want to read. I usually just write what I know about: Crazy people who live on the edge of some wilderness or another, and they find beauty through their sadness. The good old, Melancholy joi du vivre. Really? Is anybody going to want to read that stuff?

Anyway… write me. What books do you want to see written in the next two years. Lets assume we will be living with this or the hard effects of this virus for at least another two years. What stories do your really want to read? Don’t think what you should read, or what would impress your teachers or anyone what you would be reading. (I am bad about doing that, I am a first class book bullshitter) tell me what story do you really want to read?

Thanks.

From Japonski Island towards town.

Today I read from William Stafford. One of my all time favorites. Here is a little poem I wrote for a dance studio here in Sitka. They wanted a poem as a prompt to improvise a dance, then to choreograph a performance piece. It was a great idea and turned out very lovely. I wanted it to be open and big enough for the small kids to have room to use their imagination and the young musicians had a good time writing “new music” to it as well.

EAVESDROPPING

——— For Bill Stafford

The river,

as it passes,

says,

“See?  It’s easy,”

but the rain

wants nothing

more

than a place to rest. 

“Too noisy,”

is the only thing

the snow says.

Correction: Phillip Marlowe NOT Sam Spade

The sun came out today and there was no rain. If it truly holds I will be mowing the lawn tomorrow. The fireweed bush blossomed today and so to did the first dandelions appear. Red and yellow. The cherry tree shows more and more pink and there were hummingbirds there this afternoon, which was rather dazzling.

This morning I took Jan to the doctor and then we went and bought sandwiches and took Dot to the beach for low tide where we watched sandpipers feeding along the sand and the barnacle covered rocks. We ate our sandwiches and then let Dot run up and down the beach chasing the gulls and sand pipers. The birds were never in any real danger. They flew like one bird ten feet above her head cutting back and forth flashing silver then black as they turn. Dot barked and earn and they lead her into the water where she ran deeper and deeper until she stopped all together and came back. Still she is not a swimmer.

Yesterday I made a stupid mistake of saying Raymond Chandler created Sam Spade, when in fact EVERYONE knows it was Dashill Hammett. I remembered last night as I was going to sleep. So in recompense, I read from The Maltese Falcon today and spoke a little about the changes in power dynamics and sexual tension between the classic crime stories of the thirties and some modern crime stories. How modern crime stories focus a great deal on female empowerment.

I mention too about watching a terrific series on Netflix called The Bodyguard in which the sexual dynamics is 180 from the old stories. The main character is dogged and may be the classic “fallen angel” but all of the women he interacts with have more power than he does, the evil doers come out of the shadows and strike like snakes… the entire story is really about the tension the hero has with the powerful women in his life. It is very interesting. The Bodyguard. Not the old Kevin Costner movie. It’s brand new.

Dot chasing birds.

Yesterday there were none and now there are.

Dandelions rise

one morning like sleepy kids

blinking at the sun.

jhs

Here is my recording made late this afternoon of me reading the first chapter of Dashill Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon.

"To Crime: May it Pay"

Some wind last night but it didn’t seem extreme. It is not raining right now. The air feels warmer. In any other part of the lower 48 states this would be crappy weather but today feels fine to me…. almost exhilarating. Dot went on a wild rampage this morning running in figure eights in the yard as if there were a mechanical rabbit ahead of her. Two nights ago she ate our tulips and dumped out our winter rock salt supply and I’m sure ate some of that salt, then threw up everything in her stomach, which held some interesting contents. Which looked like a mixture compost, concrete and construction waste. Then she lay on the couch and snuggled for the rest of the night. This is what Munchhausen’s by proxy must be all about. She is so dear when she is sick. But she is all better now.

In one of Raymond Chandler’s books, Phillip Marlowe has been brought it to talk with the cops and of course, after the hard nose interview where they fail to get Marlowe to spill any information on his client Spade gets a bottle out and they all have a shot. Marlowe makes a toast before they all drink it down, “To Crime, May it Pay.” Which of course is wonderfully ironic at the time and for the morally ambiguous private “dick” to say.

I sometimes use that toast when I’m with other crime writers, trying to get points for being clever but mostly for saying the obvious that we are all hoping to make it over the top to actually earn a living doing what we enjoy. Over the years since I started publishing in 1993,I have had some good years, two great years, and a lot of mostly lean years in terms of earning money at writing. The last four years with Soho Press reissuing my back list and by trying to provide books more quickly, I’ve done well. Our financial advisor said that I was earning enough to live well if I planned to die “fairly soon.” So… that can’t be bad can it?

But does Crime still pay? Will it in the future? What do you think people will want to read in the near future, and by that I mean within the span of my (admittedly shortened) life-span?

There are different types of crime stories of course: the cozy mystery, Agatha Christy. Louise Penny. Very, very popular, particularly it seems with women. A crime happens and a smart person either an amateur sleuth or a professional of some sort, but not usually an agent of the law, out wits the criminal and solves the crime, using intelligence and courage but not a lot of violence. The tension is HOW the detective is going to get there.

There is the Bone Crusher: violent, and explicit: me, sometimes, Michael Connolly, Pelaconos, maybe even Poe. Usually considered an American taste. Some writers will have a smart detective and a Bone Crusher sidekick, which was popular at one time. Easy Rawlings, had Mouse, Spencer, had Hawk, so when intellect came to an end they had a super badass sidekick to get the job done.

Then of course there are hundreds of other sub-genres. Thrillers, Police Procedurals, Gay and Lesbian Crime Stories, Techno thrillers. I’m not sure you even count Female Writers with female protagonists as any kind of sub genre because they have become so dominant. In my experience from mail, reviews and going to conferences women shape the nature of most crime writing now. They are largely the readership, for mysteries, maybe not bone crushers or thrillers, but clearly for mysteries. Remember Thrillers are when your protagonist prevents a really big event that threatens an whole community or nation from happening. In a mystery a person solves a crime that has happen, and may, prevent other bad things from happening too.

It’s often thought that men LOVE military history and tech, and hardware. Thrillers with lots of tech details about military hardware and Cold War, anti communist propaganda or anti ISIS history and information are marketed to men and may include graphic descriptions of beheadings then evil doers getting their comeuppance.

Is there a winning formula? Some writers, have had good luck with what they have done and they stick with it. But still they had to change it up enough so that they had to make the characters and the circumstances believable. Conan Doyle, and Sherlock Holmes be a “Consulting Detective” which is perfect for versatility. He also gave him Watson which was perfect for steadiness. Anything that came in through the door at Baker street seemed believable and anything Holmes did seemed reasonable for the “greatest living consulting detective.”

But no, I don’t believe there is an overarching formula for a crime story. Or no one is letting go of it if they know it. If you are aiming at a particular audience and a kind of an effect, then you build your world of the book around a mood and atmosphere and you think is rich in a kind of conflict you understand. I met Louise Penny many years ago before she was so hugely famous. I asked her about her books and she told me about her little town and her detective. She said, she knew these people and she wanted to write a “quiet kind of crime story, with a fabulous and interesting detective” and sure enough she did. I found her a very nice person. Very focused and very smart. Much liked Dana Stabenow. She knew what she was doing and what she wanted to do. This seems to me how many popular writers are. They have their eyes on a prize. In the very best way. A focused intelligence.

But back to the formula to making Crime Pay. Create an Interesting world. This is a physical and emotional world. Someplace you know and feel. Someplace you can smell, and hear, and taste. Where you know the people and know the animals and the food they eat. Then Create an authentic inhabitant of that world who has some interesting and unanswered questions in their past. Give them room to grow and change. Don’t box them in. Avoid cliché’s. Try to find qualities you know. Then if you are starting out with a plot of a novel think of it in three acts. I. Introduce the world and the seeds of conflict. II. The beginning of the conflict. III The resolution of the conflict. If you need more structure that that you can have as many as eight chapters per act. A novel should be no less than sixty thousand words. Don’t have more than five main characters. Three is better. Making incidental characters interesting is better than trying to make them all main characters. This crime story will be a series so you can keep filling them out as the series goes on.

Okay so you have caught on that this is basically the formula for any story. And that might be my point. Some people go to crime writing because they think the literary standards are lower in crime writing. That kind of pisses me off. Nothing gets my hackles up more than when I hear some English major ask, “Have you ever tried writing a real novel?” Fuck you,

Crime novels are real novels, just like young adult novels and science fiction novels. Don’t ever think you are doing your readers a favor by going slumming into their genre.

I think there is something that I don’t really like to admit about crime writing, that there is a kind of formula, and it is unstated. It is not experimental, the crime reader wants to be absorbed in a story, they want the satisfaction of rooting for the values of intelligence, and decency in the end. Of course there are complex characters. BUT in the end the resolution has to come down on the side of decency and kindness, openness and yes. True Love. Even if it doesn’t happen to the main character. A broken heart after all is evidence of the expectation of true love. So when the reader puts the book down they may be shaken up by the ride, they know, that they don’t live in a world of existential dread.

This… as much as I’m not sure I like it. Is as close to we come to an unbreakable rule in crime writing.Now I’m sure there are some books that end and you feel like old Leo T. “It’s hopeless, it’s hopeless, Listen to me, I’m consoling you!” But still, if you enjoyed the experience of reading it. If you wrapped up in that chair with the light on above you and finished the damn thing, then there was hope in it somewhere.

The cherry blossoms were brighter today.

Here is a recording I made today reading from Double Indemnity by James M. Cain.

This wet cherry tree

shows more color than it did

yesterday… I think.

jhs

Above My Weight

More rain from the same sky as yesterday. The cherry blossoms seem to be drowning. We need some dry weather. The ground feels saturated. If it were to rain hard now we might be in trouble for land slides but that is just me worrying. The mossy ground is an even more squishy sponge if that could be possible. Our old sauna looks sad and overgrown in the rain. The storm two nights before blew over the red chairs and I haven’t set them right thinking that another one just might be on the way, but that might just be depressive laziness. I should check the weather. My friend Ernie the fisherman whose son just came back from fishing his black cod and who checks the weather every morning tells me it’s going to keep raining like this so I didn’t check. But I didn’t ask Ernie about the wind.

Today I recorded a rather long reading about Gary Snyder and I told some stories about him. I hope the tone was okay… and it didn’t sound arrogant on my part. “It was done out of love,” as Doc Ricketts said about Steinbeck…

and yes… I know that I punch above my weight as far as my literary friends and influences go. But why would I bother admiring and befriending slouches? I will write sometime soon about making literary friendships, essentially you have to give as good as you get and I think I have.

Anyway here is a poem I wrote for Snyder years ago. His birthday is coming up.

I hope you enjoy the recording.

RESPITE

                                                                                                            for Gary-- on his birthday  May 8, 2003

Spring comes

and on the porch our caged bird sings

to the crows perched

above him in the alders

while someone talks about the brown bear

being killed up the hill after he ate

the veterinarian’s old yellow dog

and the seniors in high school skip

their afternoon classes to drink warm beer 

in their pick ups out past the turn-around.

I suppose I should be worried

but I can’t seem to muster the concern.

 Let them all rest now:

the faithful old dog,

our vain yellow bird,

the dopey young bear,

and the highschool seniors.

Let them fold themselves up in this

promise the earth always keeps,

and let them rest

for this spring is brief

and those final tests

were never worth taking,

anyway.

The notorious old sauna.

 More hard rain,

an old man walks his puppy,

being pulled along.

jhs

Some Sudden Beauty

Dot and I slept in a bit this morning after I gave up intermittently watching TV and doing taxes with Jan and going to bed at midnight. Jan soldiers on with taxes until who knows when?

Dot and I went for our morning walk at eight and it was the exact same weather as the last five days: light rain low clouds, and chilly. Not much to offer for improving our moods. Though I have to say that just waking up and finding me opening up her crate seems to always make Dot happy, and as long as she can roll in the grass first thing she feels like dancing and doing her doggy yoga: long stretches, forward backward, and lots of hip openers, or wiggles. But as I was looking around for something in our yard this morning that was noticeably different, I turned and saw it: the cherry tree had blossomed. Yesterday I wouldn’t have said it had, and today I can definitely say that this is a by-God blooming cherry tree. It took my breath away.

This morning.

Now, why do I make such a big deal about the cherry tree? First I just like cherry blossoms. So much of the color pallet in southeastern Alaska is grey-green that this flash of pink in a tree is almost like getting kiss. So too the yellow of a skunk cabbage in the muskeg is as if you are walking into a surprise party. Also I have an affinity to the cherry blossom from my love of haiku poetry

Sleeping late—

stuck to the soles of his sandals,

cherry blossoms. Buson

The cherry blossom I believe is associated with a kind of late night sensual love, sometimes illicit in the Japanese tradition. Somehow this makes sense to me in that the cherry blossom comes in early spring and in in a wild and prolific burst…. but the blossoms do not stay long. Then to complicate it even more for me. I associate the cherry flower with both my parents deaths. There were cheery trees on their street in Seattle and they both died in early spring about a year apart. The trees were in full bloom those years so that when cars would park under the trees the blossoms would fall like snow and when people drove away in the morning there would be noticeable blank spaces in the pink mache where the cars had been. This image follows me and reminds me of the time when I started my life without parents.

Also, the last thing about this specific three is that I planted it myself by accident. I have mentioned before here. When building our home, I was splitting wood, and once for lunch I was eating cherries and I put a cherry pitt into a spruce stump. I let the stump sit and the cherry pitt sprouted and finally split the stump and grew into the earth. I think it is the only thing I ever planted that ever really did well here on this rocky wet ground. So today when I turned around this morning to see it’s pink blossoms, my heart was full of so many emotions.

So too the berries green up near the hidden daffodils.

The Cellini Cup which was at the Metropolitan Museum. That is a very large pearl the bird is holding in its beak. My mom said she wanted to eat ice-cream out of it on her hundredth birthday. My teased that he would arrange it. They both died in their eighties.

When I was a teenager in New York City, I would walk the east side of Manhattan, and I would always go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. My real purpose was to try and meet girls, I was way to shy. I was hopelessly romantic and immature in my artistic taste. Also a little OCD. I looked at much the same things in the same order every time I went. First the mummies, then the “The Kiss” by the sculpture who did The Thinker…August Rodin.. Then Cilinni’s Cup because it was my mothers favorite thing in the museum, then I went to see the Nude Maja by Goya, and then the Andy Warhol and the spatter paintings by Jackson Pollack because you know, I wanted to be hip. Then one day I was checking out the Renoir paintings. Probably for more nudes when, like this morning I turned around and saw something that took my breath away. It was this:

Van Gogh’s Wheat Fields with Crows. Possibly his last painting. This is not a great reproduction, see others on line.

When I saw my first Van Gogh as a moody teenager I was smitten. It was that same sensation of sudden beauty that I had this morning when I saw that the cherry tree that had been dormant for so long was now in blossom. It had an association with freedom, beauty, eroticism and of course dread. Melancholy joi du vivre. I was stuck with it the rest of my life. It would become my life-long subject matter. But let’s save Van Gogh for another time.

Just so you know, for the three years I haunted the Met. only one time did I speak to a girl. As I remember a very lovely blond young lady came up to me and asked me something. She had a pronounced French accent. I was so nervous I muttered something incomprehensible about the painting we were in front of then I realized she was asking about my old cowboy boots I was wearing,(I lived half the year in eastern Washington and I wore my boots on weekends a lot) she had never seen boots like that and when I was trying to make up some smart crap about the painting she was pointing to my boots. Jesus. It gives me butterflies in my stomach almost fifty-three years later. She was very nice to me and did not seem to judge me harshly and we could probably have sat down and had a nice conversation but no. I fled.

It took me years to get comfortable talking with females other than my sisters. But during those awkward years I got a good art education.

Wet spring morning:

looking at cherry blossoms!

I should kiss you now.

jhs

Here is a recording I made of another part of The Music Of What Happens. This is about swimming with whales. I explain here about my own experience.

The Ways Of Love

Fog, light rain, high clouds. So much more of the same it is tempting to call it fall time around here. Yet the salmon berries in the yard are opening up. I would have mowed the lawn (really I would have) but it never stopped raining long enough for the mossy front yard to dry out. My shoes sink down with that squishy sound as if I were walking on sponges still. We have been taking Dot and our beach chairs to the recreation beach down the road so we can run her on the cobbles and eat our sandwiches under cover for a change of pace. Dot is still tentative about swimming. We found a dead cormorant on one outing and Dot barked at it until I threw it up into the woods so that we could get some peace. The next day the bird was gone, so I suspect some collector or a large animal gathered it up. It appeared the cormorant died of a broken neck with some wounds to it’s body which could mean it had been killed by an eagle but I could not examine it in detail.

Saturday was the day that had been planned for a day of remembrance for Richard K. Nelson. People were planning to fly in from all over and we were going to have a big old celebration of life. But the virus put the kabosh on that. In stead Jan, Liz McKenzie (Nels’s old partner, co-producer and permanently listed in Facebook under “it’s complicated”) met at the rec area and toasted him with tears, root beer, and peanut butter and salmonberry jam sandwiches. Then tried to work into our conversation every one of Nel’s favorite expressions, “Balls on a heifer!” (for something surprising) “Balls to the wall!” (for working really hard) Fine Thank You Fine. (The answer to Howareya?) Sitka, Alaska 99835 (The answer to where is the best place on earth?) There are others but many are not appropriate for airing before eleven o’clock. Nels had kind of a classic farm boy sense of humor.

Fine dining al la Richard Nelson. I think he ate a pb and j sandwich every day of his life or would have given the choice. He grew up with an incredibly bland midwestern palate. He told me he grew up never eating salad dressing nor condiments at home. His mom sold potato salad at a gas station that was famous in the region but she had never tasted it because it had mustard in it! Too spicy. He told me he never ate Catsup until he went to graduate school in California, so too Pizza, or a taco! Later he virtually lived on venison burritos.

The radio station did an excellent broadcast of an old encounters show and a show that I thought was very moving about the making of Encounters. You can cut an paste it here:

https://www.kcaw.org/2019/11/15/encountering-the-life-and-work-of-richard-nelson/?fbclid=IwAR17iYxDJl1k-h9MeFvE_2PM-yMna1KkdSGNDrgVhSCbCbfqvVgOPnPfZzw

It features the voices of Lisa Busch and Ken Fate who helped Nels get the show up and running. I thought the reporter at Raven did a terrific job putting it together even though he didn’t know Nels other than through his work.

If you want to hear more original Encounters programs and learn what else is going on in northern audio field recordings go here: https://www.encountersnorth.org

This site is kept up by Liz and has many of the old shows, they truly are unique and capture the genuine enthusiasm for the wild, that Nels embodied.

This is my little offering to Nelsapalozza

 PRESENCE

You had sun in your eyes,

energy so intense that shadows formed

behind whatever you were looking at,

“Un-fucking believable!”

as if blue unicorns were prancing with diamond saddles

through your berry patch rather than

a pair of Anna’s hummingbirds flashing in their

mating ritual at your plastic feeder outside

your old office window.

“Look at them! Oh my God!

Imagine, their hearts! Imagine their muscles!”

Two feathered jewels had you caught in the sunlight,

and I was staring at you,

your attention fixed and taught as a wire.

nothing else in your mind but the blue green dance,

rapid skulling wings, the needle beaks, muscled chests

dipping, probing, ecstatic, and you mouth open, chest open

being filled with light and sound.

A philosophy student once tried to explain

the concept of Heidigger’s  Dasein to me while

we were on an island near your old cabin,

“Imagine that all this,” and he gestured to the trees

and the ocean, the seaweed, the otters eating urchins near the beach

“Imagine, that all of this was your authentic consciousness,

and all the rest… the story you keep telling yourself,

your talking head, inside your head

was just an artifact of culture putting you to work, with language.

 I think of you now, Richard King Nelson: a presence.

A living pair of binoculars, the expensive kind,

that let in more light than most people can see. 

jhs

Here is a recording I made reading from the beginning of my third novel. You can hear Dot bumping around on the porch. She is calming down a bit.