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.

famine in the land

the average American child forty years ago could create pictures in his head when reading a written story. That child could easily elaborate, with descriptive details, on that story.

today, an alarming number of young children cannot paint any picture with words when they read a written story. they have no imagination. they possess no skills, no tools, to translate or communicate that written word. 

it is this fact that has changed the way some generations in America now value, or value less, written creations... and the author is no longer valued as a contributor of culture, entertainment, or values. 

when asked what children want to become when they grow up, the category "author" is no longer mentioned. children mention careers they know nothing about, valuing those that they have heard are the highest paying professions. 

where are the dreamers?

where is the imagination? 

how can we engage a generation of video-addicted children to expand their minds to create visual pictures in their heads as they read a series of words on paper or screen? 

this is one of the most important under-reported stories in America today. we need to intervene, to mentor, to bring children back to a place where they can imagine, they can picture, where they can create a story within their minds from the words and sequence of words presented to them on a page.

we need to address the famine in the land. 

there are many pages, many books, many written stories... but until a child knows how to convert those words within these books into images that create pictures within, they will lack critical skills needed to be imaginative, productive, problem-solving innovators. 

without a vision, the people perish.

A Far Fine Country (the first paragraphs)

 

He sniffed the musky air, broke off the bark of a pine, and darted through the bushes...as if looking for it. A wail, from somewhere on the ridge to the right...the reverb echoed inside his soul. He slipped through the shrub-boulder maze, passing rusty-red rhododendron, to the rock ring before his canvas green tent. 

Distributing bark and twigs inside the ring...blowing one last length of light, tinder crumbling before the whisper-like wind threatened to cool the pit...suddenly a drizzle descended, a mist bathing him. And with it, the sounds of the forest deteriorated into discord. In this dissonance, his heart raced, his head pounded, and his frame stiffened.

But deep in the gray green forests of the gathering darkness, the presence lingered, ever elusive. And though the mountains and the sky melted into the night, the presence hid where no man could hide, between the realm of the known and the unknown...

A canopy of tears emptied from the leaves above, and the hiker wiped his face. The cascade of drops caught the last embers unprepared, and doused his hopes...the fire died, and another stepped in to where the shadowlands had been. There were eyes behind the pines, red bullets that pierced the night...

in the space above

 The Ukraine-Russia War, the advancement of recreational drone technology, and the awakening of a people to their basic human rights, threatens to bring domestic havoc to the landowners of America.

The concept of domestic American air ownership, which was defined by the Chicago Convention of 1944, insinuates that every landowner owns 500 feet above the land they own. In this decade, however, drone technology is being used by some corporate entities, to assess and investigate property, as well as deliver goods to and from that property. 

My involvement in this argument for and against the use of drones in this privately-owned space came about in the last decade when a number of real estate and insurance companies decided that inspection and analysis by drone should be the new methodology for more accurate information gathering. Several companies I knew were aggressively planning for a drone-filled tomorrow, with camera-equipped drones buzzing around targeted properties, with or without the landowner's knowledge. As one engaged in property photography, in contract with various entities, I found this assumption that drones would be acceptable, if not preferable, to any commercial operation, a human relations nightmare. In the land of the litigious, this thinking could bring more lawsuits that anyone could handle or afford. It reflects bad business practices, not to mention a complete ignorance of air rights. 

Yet today there are commercial firms using drone technology as a method of information gathering and analysis. Not the majority, but a minority. While it may be a good idea in some countries, or even some cities, in my part of the world, it is a profoundly bad idea. 

We are, it appears, still living in the formative stages of the concept of domestic residential air property rights. But with the technology becoming more pervasive, those who want to use drones to investigate private property, will push the limits of the fair use of air space. The more invasive, the more private landowners will push back. And the more they push back, the more difficult it will be to investigate private properties for use for information gathering requiring assessments and damage reports that other technology cannot provide at scale, nor in a specific time frame.

Knowing what I know, having interacted with thousands of landowners over the years, I have not yet met one individual who would be pleased with a drone flying close to their windows, doors, roof, and dogs...in the USA, that technology is liable to be destroyed by the more irritated owner. 

If I showed up at a property, without an appointment and a legally binding contract allowing me use of a drone in their air rights, to photograph a property for a client, would I be using common sense? Would I be producing better quality analysis with less irritation to the landowner? No, of course not. I would be stirring up a hornet's nest- figuratively...and maybe literally.

embracing the essential

 on this Thanksgiving Day in the states, it is refreshing to see a whirlwind of activity embracing the essential traditional, that is, the bare traditional. 

in baking, that means a soda bread with honey, buttermilk, and a healthy flour. in sourdough, it means a mix using the same recipe that sustained the adventurers who crossed over the mountains to the Yukon in the days of the Yukon Gold Rush.

and likewise, on this day, when i pull down a copy of the Collected Poems of Robert Service, the poetry i read is melodic and on an essential level. essential an ancient basic, with all the wholeness intended, with no additives.

because here in the states, in what promises to be a return, a chance for reform, the people have risen up against post-modernity, that dark and cynical philosophy that includes Orwellian government aiding and abetting the poisoning of her populace.

we demand to be free. free from chemicals in our food. free from genetically modified non-food products tainting our supermarket faire. free from mass produced. free to embrace locally produced meat, vegetables, and fruit. free from agricultural subsidies that compromise the health of the people of a nation.

on this Thanksgiving Day, in America, we declare our independence from accepting what has been forced on us, and embrace the essential, the unadulterated form of food, the ancient and sustaining, not the processed and poisoning.

creating a style

 at one point in my earthly existence, i was at a loss for words. no matter the effort, i could not express myself in standard, English sentences.

 on a page.

it was like PSTD for a Creative, the frustrating mess of this world invading my creative space and leaving me impotent. It was like having semantic constipation, I could squeeze out a phrase, a word, a series of poetic words, but no semantic flow that constitutes prose.

so i wrote poetry, that hyper-emotional, but terse, word-flow. some of it made sense. some of it, i will admit, made little sense. 

to express myself, i fought Shakespearean license, that habit of creating new words or words one never uses. unfortunately, like a good boy ignoring the chocolate fudge on the plate, i eventually gave in to the desire, and out came the good, the bad, and the poetic. 

when my world became more settled, and the semantic flow more normal, the prosaic and the poetic came out of the word grinder in a form i did not recognize...it smacked of prose with a serious dose of poetic. too much alliteration. assonance on steroids. rebelling against fifth grade grammar. streams of consciousness with more dots than morse code. i recognized it for what it consisted of- poetic fiction.

and while it is one of the styles i write in, it is not the complete image of my work, it is not the collected works, nor can it ever be. I cannot imagine millions of readers plowing through Finnegan's Wake (the book, not the song) or The Silmarillion. No, I don't envision a movement, since it is not ever an "easy read," but I would be tickled if it did produce more than one other such author, so the form is not so much an anomaly in this present age.

 

poetic fiction

from one of my current works of poetic fiction

pungent...this air, a drink of oncoming forest...pine needles, soggy leaves, and moss underfoot.... he climbed the ridge trail. a guttural wail, the reverb from the next ridge over...the taste of fear. what the deep meant to harm, echoed inside his soul...he trembled. slipping through the shrub-boulder maze, he passed rusty-brown rhododendron to the site of his waning fire.

a cool whisper settled over the pit, where the day's remnants crumbled, threatening to dissipate into the darkness. a fine drizzle descended, and the forest view deteriorated into discord. in this dissonance, his heart raced, his head pounded, his frame stiffened.

but deep in the gray-green woodlands of that gathering darkness, a presence lingered. and though the sky and mountains melted into the night, the presence hid where no man could hide, between the realm of the known and the unknown...

he sat in his blue canvas chair and stirred the embers. the breeze. capturing branches above, the drops caught the ashes, dousing his hopes. there would be no warm meal tonight. 

he glanced at his tent, his home away from home, his shelter from any storm. the fire dead, he contemplated a cold piece of chicken left over from the Y Mart. a new day starts tomorrow, he mumbled...

but once deep in the depths of the valley, another stepped in to where the shadowlands had been. eyes came from behind the pines, red bullets that pierced the night.... 

a dead-end world

it is ten o'clock...on a dead-end street

the tapered end of a dimly lit candle

the walls cold from so many centuries

and far too few torches in the night,

memories of the dead-end world.

the Shannon, with dark and lovely tongue

laps the rock-rimmed barriers below

her tourists tucked in their cozy little beds

their buses airing in their own open bays

and far too few figuring hours in the night,

no memories behind the yellowed doors.

 

a micro-second of time

the list blew away in the wind before the welcoming doors of the grocery...that crumpled paper blown across the berm…

the doors open to brown eyes. feminine. like looking into a cup of warm cocoa. a longing there. or maybe hurt. much as you desire to look away, you cannot, you must not. they do not stare, they pierce….and you must look, but your mind tells you to turn away…turn away. don’t get involved.

but it is…you feel it in your gut, the ache, the offense. the well. the tender-well. you touch more than a surface. you cannot look away, even if…but you do not want to. you see her…the tattered threads at the end of her left coat arm, the scraped lip, the eyes that open too wide but close to protect…because you are near her. she makes no move to look up. you can hear her breathing. you can feel her breath. like stale tuna. you want to look away. you want to escape, you want to find time again. where is time? it is nowhere. she is here and you cannot look away, because she is pleading. but the words are not words in her eyes. so you walk, and turn to look, but she is walking away.

….did i dream that...or did that just happen?

as night invites himself in, the lights dim, and you find yourself yawning in the mirror. you have bags under your eyes. my eyes. you notice the gray hair on your shoulder and wipe it off. time slows. you see beyond the mirror. you see the pools of her soul, then the figure walking away. you look deeply, like a full breath in and out. in the waking night. 

why can't i forget?

but as you lay down, curled up in blankets, all alone, you pray…because it is all you can do. somewhere in the distance, separated by space, not by time, is another figure awake in her bed…

in a microsecond of time.

Fancy a Fudge or a Fine Tea?

 The sophistication, the ambiance! Like a feathery soprano spreading her voice...and her slender figure...in a melody against the Steinway, she bedazzles!

You step foot across an imaginary threshold into a fantasy land thick with rose petals and exotic spices from the East, and signs in calligraphy tantalizing your tastebuds...

Spice of Siam...Blackberry Ambrosia...Mandalay Mint...

You have just entered the most exquisite specialty shoppe in town and your figurine...because she is delicate like a glass managerie...is making her way oh so slowly toward your presence.

She presents you with the scent of the day, the finest grade of tay..tea...you will ever lay eyes on.

No, no, her eyes say, ignore that pine tar soap over there on the counter, I have what you want, what you desire, what you crave...

“Our flavor of the day,” she pronounces.

She has a cup for my pleasure, and I gulp.

It is as tepid as a first date with your third cousin. I try to wash it down but it reminds me of a somebody's mouthwash.

She quickly produces a cup of what appears to be a puddle-swirl of reddish particles of an almost "Brazilian Cherry" color.

“Try this.”

With hints of rain forest...an aroma that could be anything from ground cherry wood to dyed fiberboard particles....

“It is a Sassafras substitute, cultivated and dug in the Amazon Rain Forest, with similar medicinal and herbal qualities. I am sure you will enjoy.”

I thought about the European fruit and herb tea section and migrated to the back, passing Miss Air Cloud, a thin blonde with hair like an eraser...hunting for something like Bilberry or Blackcurrent.

But it was nowhere in sight. Burdock, Bombay's Best, Basswood, but no Bilberry. "European" had apparently been replaced by teas starting with the letter “B.”

I thought I had lost her, this wafer-thin whisp.

“I have a new flavor,” she said, startling me like a hyena breaking wind. “It is over here.”

A him...a hint of fish and garlic...brushed by.

“Barberry?”

“It is a simple wild fruit flavor. I think you will enjoy it.”

I took the bag from her hand and turned it over and over…

“And this is from…”

“The Amazon Rain Forest- I believe.”

“Are you sure?”

She studied me like a protagonist would study a toilet bowl on a football field, but I turned my back and made a great fuss.

“Wait.”

She made her way to a little table with assorted fudge. Then, she presented me with a three towered arrangement of Strawberry Tart Fudge.

And suddenly, the thin waif reminded me of a long-lost love, and I took my treat outside into the street, devouring each morsel with delight...

our calling, our passion

 your man in the alcove today, his face into the wind, was there to sell enough books to make it worth the drive. They- that ubiquitous they- had convinced him to drive the two hours, promising a table and a marketer's tent to showcase his works to the hungry masses...hopefully hungry for a collection of historical works. His competition featured an active potter, creating a vase...a half dozen mostly fine, and a couple of fading, beauties, selling candles and candy...and various sellers of trinkets and more dubious treasures. 

but the crowd this day at the street festival was largely peopled by characters of short height, and sometimes shorter memory- children and old people. The children gravitated toward food, fun, and the fascinating, while the older folk did actually stop to talk with the kindly man selling word-pictures from the past. He lacked the comforts of the promised tent, which had gone to another event for children, but did retain a tiny table, just big enough for a dozen smaller books. 

we had a pleasant conversation about the nature of our mutual malady, this passion that compels us to wake at strange hours with strange arrangements of words. Some, like melodious gas in the middle of night, pass eventually, and allow us sleep. There are others that take hours from our slumber, and when we do sleep, we awake having been through more than a few turbulent, tumble dry cycles. 

though mutually feeling disheveled this Saturday morning, we shook hands, and i shuffled off for the theatre. Inside the inner sanctum, i once again marveled at the monstrosity they called "the stage," a piece surely from the "industrial revolution" that would be perfect for a Dickens play. 

students were displaying artwork in the back aisles of the theatre, yet no one else managed to push through the theatre doors. 

it was the same across the street at an actual art gallery. Beautiful paintings, with impressive composition. But no admirers.

a few stranglers wandered around the food truck corral, but more wandered around the marketing tents fiddling with trinkets. 

i returned to my vehicle thankful for the hours i spent in and off the sidewalks, but with a refreshing reminder of why most of my colleagues and i create. we do it because it is our calling, it is our passion. We, Christian creators, create because we reflect our creator. And the more we create, and in what we create, we hopefully, share that passion that comes from the heart of a loving God.

 

earthbound

the trouble with autumn...

when leaves fall, it is i who falls.

this gravity, this pungency,

here, confined to a purgatory,

i am earthbound.

i've scratches on my legs

endlessly applying lotion

as the flies come and go

their lives endlessly slow

i've no escape from the pattern.

i do what i don't want to do

i say what i don't want to say

i am still earthbound.

silence still

it is in the ears, this quiet so sharp it is tangible, 

like a gentle breeze without the whisper

it has presence without form, power without speech

an abyss without depth, space, or time

it keeps me company when i am alone

like the empty rocking chair beside the fire

as i watch the embers, it sits silently still

then slithers away from the fireplace grill.

grandma's roses

the whole house smelled musty

an acquired taste for a twelve-year-old boy.

it lingered even in the flower bed 

where thin limbs wore green gloves

and she cut you with her sarcastic wit

for they were supposed to be her roses

though all i saw was something 

half dried, half barely living

as if trying to find another breath.

they belonged in between the pages

in a book with velum paper

not the memory of a wide-eyed child. 

i come from a long line of storytellers

 i come from a long line of storytellers. our history has been passed down through family tales, accounts recalled from a relative, with a frequent aside added, like meat to the skeleton, to explain what the original may have lost. Frequently, little was lost because of the necessity to store it mentally. When one is repressed by a foreign occupier, that foreign censor, who sees his own culture as superior, may attempt to obliterate any hint of color, of personality, to the subject's speech, including an ancient language predating their own.

This is what happened to my people. Written histories were destroyed, burned. Oral histories, along with their accompanying stories, survived. And thrived. And those stories passed down one to another, relative to relative, until this day. 

In the company of a great uncle, a seanchaí, I drank in the stories, made them a picture memory, a word memory, and a written memory. His body lies buried in a cemetery now...but the storyteller's tales, those remains linger in my mind. 

it is why my own tales tend to echo an oral storyteller, and i may actually reject what fifth grade grammar asserts is kosher. I cannot make a sacrifice on the altar of that drivel, because storytelling cannot be reduced to what may have been grammatically pure to the elementary student, or his...or her...teacher.

if the story cannot be read aloud in a way that, combined with a good imagination, paints a picture within the reader's mind, then it cannot be called a story in the sense of one told by a storyteller. While the written word- that product from our time- may vary greatly in form- there is still a connection worldwide to the basic storyteller's story, and I intend to continue to use this style to take the reader to another place, another story.