an encouraging word

Life has a habit of waking us up when we least expect it. one day you wake up and find that the path you’ve taken hasn’t turned out quite like you anticipated, and you wonder, just wonder, if it is possible…just a teeny-weeny bit…if that dream you hid in the deeper parts of your heart all these years…is ever going to “come knocking on your door.” 

If the figure who opens that door looks like Gandalf, you have been indulging too much in Middle Earth or some fantasy game and need to look in the mirror to make sure you have not gone through a Shire-inspired metamorphosis. Please check your feet, they’ll be hairy if you have.

And while looking in the mirror is good for actors practicing lines without a partner, that glance can be a shocking revelation to those who go about their lives a little too fast in the daily diddle-daddle of life. Spending too much time observing your hair, your wrinkles, and the color of your teeth does not bring you one more day closer to that dream. 

Like an obnoxious movie line I recall, the best action requires "baby steps." You can be sure that 99% of the time that it will not be in the “I’ve won the lottery” category, but rather, a choice followed by another choice. 

You'll have to ignore the naysayers and step out and do it. Write something. Paint something. Draw something. Fashion some object. Just dance. Just sing. 

I admit to having an Eeyore moment now and again, but most normal people have had a few of those, especially on days when the car won’t run, everything glass breaks in your kitchen, and the postman brings you mail resembling “the black spot.” As you probably realize, I didn’t get where I am today by listening to people behind office desks telling me what to do. I just went out and did it-

I walked into a newspaper office and carved out a job. I walked into a publication office and offered a feature "on spec." What followed were several articles. Then, years working in publications.

And now, beyond that work-frame, I am slowly living out that dream one step at a time.

You have to start somewhere. You cannot think about it for days. Do it, then evaluate your progress. 

 

on wintry days like these

When cold grey covers my pointed hood

when Wind’s icy fingers grow

I think back to the sweetest Spring

to where my heart would go

down among the fragrant pines

in hollows steep with trees

I go there still within my heart

on wintry days like these

a tribute to Souvlakis

If I were Greek, I’d want to lounge around, drinking Retsina, consuming baklava all day...eating juicy black olives, watching the fishing boats in the bay...and having a good time. 

I'd eat souvlakis every day, with that Grecian delight, feta cheese...which sounds kind of stinky, I know, but you have to name cheese like it smells. Goat cheese smells like sweaty feet, so “feta” is a great name. And nothing smells more Greek than a salad or souvlaki with grilled lamb and lots of feta. 

I was introduced to souvlakis and all things Greek during my undergrad years in a town with a noticeable Greek immigrant community. The center of that world was an uptown restaurant simply known as "Souvlakis."

Mama P, co-owner of Souvlaki's, introduced me to gyros and super beef hoagy. She had such a way with stuffing the pita, it made you drool. Tzatziki, fresh tomatoes, onions, olive oil, lettuce- Mama’s souvlakis were almost as amazing as the Central Gyros Girl.

Now, I looked far and wide for the Central Gyros girl, but never found her, or I would have married her on the spot. She was the perfect blonde, with the perfect smile, holding a tempting gyros in her perfect hands. She was my favorite pinup girl, even if she was plastered on the wall of a run-down looking restaurant.

Anyway, Mama had a partner, Mister P. His name was something like “Vasilios.” It sounded more like “Vaseline” to me. He wasn't a slick character though unless Mama had her head turned away from him while he was "cutting" the baklava. 

We college boys often studied the smile of the Central Gyros Girl as we waited for our food. She provided more than a few minutes of useless questions, intense daydreaming, and an occasional search for more clues on the poster about her whereabouts.

Alternatively, Mister P provided interesting entertainment. In between “Opa!” and the sound of a knife on a cutting board, he could string together more run-on sentences than a twelve-year-old Grammar student having a meltdown in English class. Inevitably, whatever he said would irritate Mama P, who carried her own cutting knife, which she flashed in defiance of the five-foot-tall tyrant in the Greek fishing hat. 

Strangely enough, they had a small, old style TV set hanging from the corner of the place near the front door. Every time I was there, they seemed to have old sitcoms or reruns of game shows. With all that went on in the restaurant, it was a slow night when we found ourselves watching a program.

The food was good, but usually a bit salty. I used to purposely interrupt the two when they argued, to ask Mama P for more “Pepsi.” I could never ask for Mountain Dew or Coke or anything else because Mama didn’t know any other word for "pop" or "soda pop" in English. She would smile when she served me, probably because she did not understand half of what I said. 

And now, many years later, Mama P and Papa P have passed on, their children have moved on to other ventures, and the Central Gyros girl no longer smiles from the walls of any Greek restaurant I frequent. But I still wolf down the gyros, eat olives like candy, and enjoy all the things that Mama P introduced to me back when I was a hungry college student.

valuing human experience

our experiences are like trees that bud, blossom, and leaf into beauty, providing a character sketch for our lives. These develop into mature

figures of nature, with lines of distinction, and shades of seasons. 

in that forest of trees, none are alike, yet each reflects a type. None are perfect, each is flawed in some way, like a human being...

just as our figures appear as less than desirable when we look in the mirror. 

it is this humanity that sets us apart as creators of literature. we are destined not to live up to the laws of computer-generated logic, or artificial intelligence... 

which is a good thing. we will never be the robotic mind because we have a soul, we have the DNA of a creator. 

so, everything that we compose, everything that we write, cannot be adequately predicted by AI. Calculations can only give us soul-less alternatives based of a machine-logic construct.

what robotic intelligence will ever be able to express love like one who has been tested by heartache...or feel the impending crossover from this life to the next? 

unfortunately, the "new toy" is out of the box, and it seems like everybody wants to play the game. like the infantile Trash-80 computer was in the 70's, it is trendy, we can do some things with it...but it cannot give us insight into the feelings of our old girlfriend, or our boss, or the man who collects our garbage on Monday mornings.

it is imperative that we qualify the human experience in the words that only a human would write...with imperfections that only a human could relate to. our audiences are the hearts, minds, and souls of human beings. no machine will ever be able to feel what we feel; they will only be able to synthesize, postulate, or copy what has already been written.

writing from the heart, from the soul, will always be more valuable than what is artificially produced. none of us, who value humanity, should ever compromise those feelings released into words with artificially developed fodder. 

 

create anyway

we live, in the post-Pandemic age, in the first and second world, in a society of consumption. what we see, we consume. what we hear, we consume. we are followers of this one, followers of that one. we strive to be relevant to someone. our followers. our audience. even ourselves. 

but we must produce to be relevant. if we create nothing, if we only re-post content, we are not creative, we are still a consumer.

creativity reflects the single, most unequivocal characteristic of God, that is, the first creator. The prime creator. The one who does not consume, the one who creates. 

if my goal today, tonight, is to consume, i have ignored the dream God placed within me. it is challenging most because i have expectations of myself that i may not meet. today. tonight. tomorrow. 

the answer to these earthly thoughts is to create anyway. write what is in your heart, your mind, your soul. let God do the work in you. it may not reach the stars, but it may reach one who is changed. and that will make all the difference, if it is done in the love of the Father.

create anyway.

 

yearning for freedom

 the traditional storyteller, the keeper of family histories, character asides, and the essence of the very fabric of our lives, told stories for us and for our children. they told stories for our grandchildren. they told stories that one day would touch and be a conduit to the old ways, the old country, the old ones who have passed before us.

and now, that task has passed to me. the line is not my responsibility, but the story of our line is. and no matter how vocal my predecessor was, it is my time to speak, to rhyme, to reason- to tell the history as it was told to me. and maybe make it a little more interesting in the approach to it, without sacrificing the truth.

because in that line there were character models, there were people striving to touch the tops of mountains, to settle safely in their valleys, to be free in a crooked land... 

to be a character yearning for freedom.

such was the story of little Jimmy, a man with a pike, and a hoe, an axe, and a rake. a man of the land he did not even own. a man, who, oppressed as he was, looked out upon his fields yearning to call every foot, every yard, between the rock walls...his own.

his neighbors...most of them...had a similar story. and some of them looked around and saw the injustice and called for action. the kind of action you could do without losing everything you owned. and then some.

when you work yourself tired every night, to sit by the fire in the thatched house and wonder where your life has gone, surely, that in itself, may become a burden. not just for yourself, but for the wife, the child in her rocker, and your neighbors. when you are all afraid to act, because the history against your own has been brutal, you tend to steep in anger or relax in defeat.

but little Jimmy refused to sit still. he was neither little, nor in a mindset of defeat. he spoke the language of the sod with his neighbors- the one his oppressors could not understand- and as time passed, small measures became bigger measures until little Jimmy joined some of his neighbors by the light of the moon. 

in the dark farm country of rural Ireland in the 19th century, the British had a singular disadvantage- they lacked the same desire for freedom.

i have no idea how many times my ancestor Jimmy showed up at the meeting by the ford or at the clump of holly trees, but the meetings were frequent enough that he, and his fellow Moonlighters, up to mischief in the eyes of his masters, finally found themselves bound in chains and heading for Australia. 

many a man, yearning for freedom, found himself on a boat for the penal colony on the other side of the world. many lost ties forever with their kinfolk. the branch of Jimmy's line disappears in a mist of history, the details forgotten by the ones who have passed beyond.

but the story reminds those who now live, and who will follow me, that there was a character within our family who fought oppression the best he could and suffered a life of exile because he fought to free his family from tyranny. my children, my grandchildren, and my cousins should know what i know, that the story passes on, that we remember that our line has always fought for freedom, for a better life for our families. it is a story reminding us that we should never take our freedom for granted, because what we have, they did not have.

in the storyteller's voice

if you leave something for a while, and then come back to it years later, that idea you conceived should make more sense now. that is, if it is a dream, or if it has been placed within you by a higher power. 

i put aside a novel for several years and came back to it today. my memory of it has not changed. the setting is still the same. i can still picture the main characters. but some make no sense anymore. 

when you have less noise to work through, your focus sharpens, and the writing moves to a higher level. what you thought worked before, does not work now. not because the world has changed so much. but because you have changed so much. or, at least, i have changed so much.

when writing was a passion but not a more tangible part of a successful future, the story journey was exciting just for the journey. just for the creative process. just for the "writer's high."

now, as i work toward fulfilling dreams, the finished piece is now workable, because i have an actual framework from start to finish, without sacrificing the quality of the storyteller's voice. when you start a piece with passion but without fashioning the finished product, it is a little like putting out to sea in a boat a bit too small for the bay. before you finish a third of the way, you'll be heading back to shore because you can't make it to the island without a bigger boat.

so, it is with a different mindset that i type letters to a page now than how i did ten years ago. when a recent snowstorm became a blessing, rather than an impediment, it allowed me to reconsider how i approach those longer pieces that have remained unfinished. i must, like Saul Bellow, quote "carpe diem," seize the day, and follow it wholeheartedly, rather than take a two-hour break to work on it. instead, i can take a whole day here and there, apart from the cares of this world, and tell the story, with story fresh in my mind.

a window on character development

 in the course of my experience, i have read a variety of dialogue and description of some of the most beloved or infamous characters in novels written in the last 200 years...from Holden Caulfield to Frodo Baggins. as a writer, i not only read the story, but digest the story...chew on it, like a dinner, digesting the essence of what is written and allowing imagination to create those characters in my head. it is that image that becomes part of the narrative as it moves along. 

however, a vast army of notable authors of the twentieth century had a skeletal description of the characters, clothed with a blanket of dialogue. Although Gollum is described in short but excellent detail, it is his dialogue that sharpens our understanding of what Gollum looks like, and, even smells like. ask anyone to describe Gollum and a hundred readers would give you remarkably close descriptions, adjusted for the reader's own interaction with cultural influences and the reader's command of the language and nuances associated with it.

that is all good and fine, but when i take my readers into the mind of a character, i want more succinct descriptive words. in a world with millions of imaginations, i attempt to narrow those choices by paying attention not just to words and phrases but to word combinations. 

In the first scene of a new book i am writing, a character wanders through/ encounters a "shrub-boulder maze." this can be interpreted in many ways, however, there is, in every reader's mind, images of a shrub, boulder, and a maze. His or her imagination, images, may contain vast or small numbers of shrubs and boulders, but it must be a "maze." this maze would have an effect on the character encountering the "maze." the character's personality is reflected by a reaction when encountering that "maze." and you, the reader, choose this from your treasure chest of experience and imagination.

sure, even my dialogue adds fiber to the personality of any created character. but, unlike many of my predecessors in the twentieth century, even dream sequences, and thoughts - placed within the narrative- i hope fashion a robust figure that my readers will picture in their minds as they read beyond the initial appearance of that character. i want to fully clothe these characters so my readers can formulate more specific images in their minds, even if the word combinations i use may seem unorthodox. 

i have paused in the writing of the aforementioned piece now to pen these thoughts because i want to give you, the reader, insight into one hallway of the creative process in the Post-Pandemic world. hopefully, in the future, when i am able to publish such longer works, you will have a better understanding of the thoughts that go into the creative writing process to compose a piece of poetic fiction.