Found I liked less driving in my future

At a bus stop on a Saturday morning:

“Do you know if the bus is coming?” A woman sitting in the newly installed shelter, what actually imitated wrought iron decoration.

“Let's see, it's 8:31,” I said. “A few minutes.”

“I didn't know if it would show up. I usually take the bus on weekdays.”

“Oh, it's coming. Maybe on time instead of five minutes late. Less riders on the weekends.”

“Well, it's really much simpler.” She showed me her pass like an advertisement. “My car was in for repair and because I need to go across town, it's much easier.”

In a city of 100,000, most people don't rely on buses. But near Lake Superior, above which are steep hills and in the winter, snow and ice, I was surprised that there isn't more bus use.

I ride the bus because of an eyesight issue. My sight problem is not usual; I had an eye muscle operation as a child that isn't done anymore. Like a character in a short story I wrote, I barely passed the driving test, getting 71 twice. In grade school, I dreaded the art teacher but later could do well enough in photography because my eyesight tends towards the two-dimensional. That made it fearsome to drive on many laned highways. In fact I could drive anywhere in Minneapolis and St. Paul without taking a freeway. I don't think eyeglasses helped because of the muscle limitation.

Image by Ben Schonewille @ FreeDigitalPhotos.net

I refrained from repairing an old car before I moved from the metro area. It was really because, with express buses in Minneapolis, I found public transportation more relaxing and a better prelude to a workday. Riding home was good for reflection. Reading on the bus, then using a tablet and next, a smart phone made that time useful.

I was the first of my peers to get involved with a car. In high school, I drove our Volkswagon two hours on Saturdays to Minneapolis for flute lessons, taking 35 W, a flat, straight trip. A week after I graduated from college, I bought a car. 

While at my first job in Minneapolis, I began using public transportation. At 7:00 in the morning, I didn't feel like driving some days. It became the best alternative, I decided a few years later while trawling for a parking place near the University of Minnesota. There were other benefits. In the winter, I didn't have to warm up a car or sit on a freezing car seat. A few minutes waiting at a bus stop seemed less jolting. Especially if the bus was a good route. 

Image by Sicha Pongjivanich @ FreeDigitalPhotos.net

What I finally disliked was the dependence on a car. With less car repair, I noticed the general dependence and the constant issue of parking. Walking was my main exercise so I didn't mind walking to a bus stop. I knew there weren't many people on my sidewalks at the time, so not many who could identify, which made those thoughts fuel for fiction. Two of my short stories in the collection Curiosity Killed the Sphinx dealt with car issues.

Image by Ben Schonewille @ FreeDigitalPhotos.net

I realized that others might, if they stopped driving some of the time, enjoy riding. The setback is that our public transportation isn't often suited to a pleasant trip. If in places like the Midwest, there were more of a demand for public transportation, it might become more comfortable, especially for commuters. This year, a few electric buses have been introduced up here and apart from their being the newest, they are no different for the rider.

After the successful campaign against cigarette smoking, and with the statistic from the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency - 52 percent of outdoor air pollution in Minnesota comes from vehicles such as cars and trucks - a similar campaign could be launched. Yet I believe that if people tried using their cars less, some might prefer the change. Car-pooling is usually less dangerous than driving alone. If many made the switch, it would lessen the climate issue in the atmosphere.

Influences of the Farm Crisis and Its Recovery

Like many mid-westerners, I visited a farmer relative as a child. The farm was about ten miles from our small city and the relative was Norwegian, not a bachelor. One never forgets the barn, the tree swing with long ropes, the roomy breezy house, and the fields spread around. 

An early 1900's photo of the farmhouse I visited

Our relative and his wife used to visit us in town, and there, they were obviously relaxing on the couch, observing us on their day off. Then, there was joking about farmers coming in, their stalwart, contracted speech, and their clothing styles. Some drove in on tractors, slowing traffic. Yet everyone loved visiting the farm. People drove to outdoor markets and to dairies for eggs and butter because the quality and prices were better.

We went to college, to the city, and heard in the 1980's how the farms were foreclosing. About that time, I learned with sadness that my elderly cousin sold his farm. I'd frequented my first food co-op near the “farm” campus of the University of Minnesota, in St. Paul. After that, I found the closest co-op in other neighborhoods. They were like corner stores when the corner stores were closing. Farmers markets in downtown Minneapolis were festive. But things were changing.

The farming losses had an effect on me. My children's novel, Josiah's Apple Orchard, was revised from a fantasy into a realistic story. (I liked one reviewer saying that it had a “surrealistic feel.”) At the time, I couldn't see the answer to an orchard of specialty apples when in the 1960's, Delicious apples reigned at the supermarket. The foreclosures, though, were fueling an environmental movement that I would be watching. It would have dramatic success.

While I wrote Tug of the Wishbone two decades later, foods free from pesticides and unnatural treatment of animals expanded from farmers' markets and co-ops into the supermarkets. A supermarket began with a corner in the produce section marked “Organic.” The section widened and new organic brands began to fill the aisles. 

 

Image by tawatchai @ FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Mainstream shoppers are now given choice as information reaches them. In the 1990's, the conditions of corporate farms were suppressed. Driving in the countryside, one had to wonder at the animal warehouses appearing while facts about the lack of pasture time leaked out. Humane farming costs more, especially for the farmer, but the demand for it has resulted in a quiet revolution. Mealtimes now retain traditional organic farm foods and are also transformed with new menus. Just as products are advertised in a graded system of their own, the grading of farming methods and animal treatment streams into consumer awareness.

Image by Simon Howden @ FreeDigitalPhotos.net

When some news seems to stultify, this seemingly grassroots movement had swept the nation. Even today with the challenges of flooding and tariffs, it shows how courage and persistence can result in a successful environmental story. Writing in the midst of that inspired my fiction and poetry.

Looking for used books for my eBay store, I know that readers still visit the farm in novels as I did with favorite authors - Thomas Hardy (Far From the Madding Crowd), D. H. Lawrence (The Rainbow), Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm), Willa Cather's novels, Katherine Anne Porter's short stories about Texas, Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres, to name a few. Collectible editions of books with farm settings catch my eye and they don't stay long on my used book shelves. It's another warning that farmers and their stories shouldn't be taken for granted.

Land Found by the Self-taught and Audiobook Island

There are taught and self-taught methods for learning, depending on a person's desire to explore. Sometimes I imagine being brought up with the internet. Exploring. Rather than a library of books, there are myriads. As a child, I went from authors to genres in my search, fairytale, animal novels, magic, and finally mystery. Few juvenile books are made into movies. I'm sure audiobooks would attract a younger me like islands viewed from land.

So I released my first audiobook, TheWide Awake Loons, narrated by Aven Shore. Promo codes for the free book can be requested at Message on its Facebook page.

One thing I learned from memorizing Peter Rabbit so that I could point at each word was that my four older siblings and my parents weren't all that interested in picture books. The advice for relationships is to find joint interests. Pictures with headlines came daily in the newspaper and weekly in Look, Life, and Time magazines. Sitting next to someone on the couch, I picked up words like flood, ice cream, or win and won accompanying pictures of local basketball stars. 

 

Drawn on as a reader, I was eventually forbidden to use my allowance money on comic books, Superman and Archie bought at the Piggly Wiggly supermarket. No more tilting graphics. What if there had been audiobooks to give a children's novel more sensation? Reading and watching movies don't go together. Reading along with an audiobook would feel like a shared experience and give a sense of involvement.

A reading specialist explained findings in a Scholastic article “Why Audiobooks Are Great for Kids”:

“She’ll be able to delve deeper into complicated topics and listen to better-quality books than she might find at her own level. That exposure strengthens comprehension skills,  particularly for children who have reading difficulties, says [Mary Beth] Crosby Carroll [reading specialist].”

Here are statistics from a The Booklist Reader article, “New Research Shows Audiobooks Have Powerful Impact on Literacy Development”:

Listening to audiobooks:
• Increases reading accuracy by 52%
• Improves comprehension by 76%
• Increases recall 40% when combined with print materials (vs. print alone)

The first audiobook I heard was in a set of Tolkien, found at a book sale. That was wonderful since I read all of his fantasy series. And I actually preferred the audiobooks to some of the movie material.

Ever since the VHS movies became available, I have found that I can switch from books to another medium as easily as anyone. I've realized that story is all for me. However I continue as a used book dealer to explore and buy books that are new to me, even when they are decades old.

Audio is sometimes silent hearing so it is a part of reading. I hadn't expected to read the ancient historian Herodotus until I was savoring a voice with the rare quality of Socrates in Plato's Republic. Then I wanted to find out how Herodotus achieved his travels north to Thrace, east to Persia, and south down the Nile in a dangerous time. At Google Books I found an “imaginary biography”, written in the 1850's. I hadn't planned to read much of that either but once I got started with the author James Talboys Wheeler, I couldn't put it down. Scenes with dialogue and description enhanced the ancient world. That happens when exploring. Subject is land where, if a person disembarks, they might stay awhile. How much better to experience it in more than one dimension.

My new cat Irene, a Maine coon mix, was a rescue from the North Woods resort region. This winter she is ten months and responding to “Wild Sounds of the Northwoods” by Lang Elliott and Ted Mack. As if this tape was made to be a cat audiobook. Cats are among the greatest of animal explorers!

The Wide Awake Loons is now an Audio Book

The Wide Awake Loons is now an audio book at Amazon, Audible, and iTunes.

Promo codes are available for the free book at Audible. To obtain one, go to the Wide Awake Loons Facebook page, please like it, and press the Send Message button. There you can ask for the promo code.   

Here is a handy link that takes you to the book and a sample of it at Audible.

 

I had to wonder why I chose The Wide Awake Loons as my first audio book. It was a favorite book to write but it did have an unusual spectrum of voices. At ACX where books can be turned into audiobooks, I was surprised to receive more auditions the first week than expected. It was hard to choose between them.

I felt very fortunate to have Aven Shore as narrator since she has more than sixty audio books to her credit. She lives in Canada where loons can be as familiar as they are in Maine and Minnesota. At her blog  , she gives useful information about the narration process. While working on The Wide Awake Loons, she wrote:

“It’s a delightful dual POV story, of a little girl at her parents’ cottage, trying to get her canoe permissions extended, and the loon couple raising their loonlings on the lake in the wildlife community. Sometimes, their stories intersect! Dramatic, sensitive, well-written, FUNNY, and realistic. This author knows her loons.

I’m having a ball voicing all the characters - the dramatis persona includes the regal and superior loons, Chip Chap the chipmunk, Spotted Croak the mink toad, the gulls, the pine siskins, and more.”

An audio book seems like quite a challenge for performance stamina. As a flute player, I know the difference between playing Bach solo and playing flute parts in an ensemble. Take a deep breath because there are few breaks. I am impressed at the ability it requires to change voice between different characters and the narrator's. It seems similar to a ventriloquist's talent. Anyway, I would not attempt narration of my own books.

I began to read after listening to Peter Rabbit repeatedly and eventually pointing at the words as they were said. Teachers and students read aloud as listeners follow text. But when it comes to longer stories, chapter books, and novels, children have to leap into reading all alone. At school, teachers might read aloud a longer book but it has to please the crowd. An audio book can be a personal choice and it can also be a reading method where progress does not feel intimidating.

When I think of the advent of the children's novel, I visualize a hearth and family members sitting around it, the way they sat around a television later on, one of them reading aloud. This would account for the difficulty of the 19th century juvenile novel and the fine plotting that made it family entertainment. If a child didn't understand a word, they could ask. Discussion probably aided comprehension. With an audio book, a child can follow an e-book or paperback, read along or dip in and out. To me, this all provides an enjoyable learning experience, and one with options. Or there is just the enhancement of the dramatic voice enlivening the story.

3 literary journals: Ginosko, Animal, and The Courtship of Winds

An illuminating experience of being published in a literary journal is how I become more familiar with that journal and its contributors. A plethora of lit mags, now on the internet, present quite a dilemma if a person chooses to read new writers. With more publication, I've enjoyed a wider range of journals. These are my recent publications and reads.

Ginosko is a semi-annual litzine based in California since 2002. I have six poems in their Summer 2018 issue, #21. This is a big issue, about 250 pages that can be viewed online . A definition for this Greek word ginosko, "The recognition of truth from experience", tells my absorption in reading.

A short story about a lawyer and his wife, “Two Secrets” by Norbert Kovacs, really hit the spot this last month. I also savored "On a Sweet River" by Elizabeth Buechner Morris, about a young Guatemalan, and "Assembly Heart” by Laura Valeri where an inner reality is told to the paranormal. Doug Mathewson's short shorts expressed the vitality of today's West.

James Grabill's poetry uses scientific imagery in a flowing style that gives sense to his themes. The strong thoughts in Jonathan Jones' poetry are rendered with interesting sound patterns.

There is so much more in this issue to peruse for readers of varied tastes.

Animal:A Beast of a Literary Magazine has, since 2012, been publishing monthly creative work about human encounters with animals, “on the divide between wild and domestic.” My short story “The Recluse and the Raccon” was published last May.

The reading, I found, was at that edge, providing unusual insights into our interface with the natural world, and unique from the personal perspective. I was drawn to a short story about octopuses by Brigitte McCray and how they affected a musician's decisions while she lived in Greece. There are stunning and disturbing images of box turtles in traffic - non-fiction by Allan Stein - and cougars - fiction by Heather Durham. Judith Roney maintains surreality in her poem, “Bird in a Brick House.”

Upcoming for me is The Courtship of Winds publishing two poems. William V. Ray, the editor, has re-launched this bi-annual literary journal to digital. His contributors come from fascinating backgrounds which are reflected in the poetry there. I also savored the fiction in the last issue, especially Denise Kline's moving and ominous story about Ali, a young herder who crosses the Mediterranean as a refugee.

At The Courtship of Winds, Ray provides statistics about digital literary journals and readers. I keep lists and then want to branch out again, discovering reading and opportunity that was once confined to small press print and fully stocked bookstores.

One of my ideas about literary work is that it handles the news that couldn't be published as news. While I like highly imagined work, I still appreciate a work of literature for giving the sense that it really happened. In a time when people can press a few buttons and see hard facts or false accounts about the globe they live on, reading convincing details from inner or personal angles often provides another tether.

A cat, T. S. Eliot, and rare literary journals

My eighteen-year-old cat Claudine died recently. A tortie tabby or tortoise shell tabby, I had called her the Welsh Terrier Cat because her markings were similar to a dog breed I would like. She often sat near me when I wrote rough drafts. Despite kidney disease, she was spry up to three days before her end.

Claudine in 2018 with scratch paper

Watching her, I opened up poetry I hadn't read in years – T. S. Eliot's “Four Quartets.” The poet who provided lyrics for the musical Cats felt like good company.

Being involved with new journals and new poets, I probably don't read poets that fascinated me in college often enough. I had a seminar on T. S. Eliot however I read his “Four Quartets” again during a winter break. Lines from it stayed with me for years. The first stanza beginning with “Time present and time past/ are both present in time future,/And time future contained in time past” had a philosophical content that spoke to me when I had separated from home and my earlier years.

Four decades later, I found the poetry not only philosophical and written in a style that mirrored the deco era, but more understandable in its confrontation with time. It was about waiting and suggested a possible undiscovered dimension, pointing to physics. The flourishes and sudden everyday images in these contemplations, even though cats were not mentioned as they were in “Prufrock”, had a feline solemnity.

I had written an observation about Claudine and included that as the third section of a long poem, an after thought. Later on, I felt the linkage was weak so I revised the poem with only the two sections. I had a fragment, a revision project because there were a few lines I couldn't discard.

In this mood, I was reminded of the summer's best finds for my internet used bookstore. I obtained a number of The Dial back issues at a library sale. The Dial was the main literary magazine during the 1920's, during my favorite era of literature. No, I did not find the issue that first published T. S. Eliot's “The Wasteland”, darn. But I have issues with “London Letters” from T. S. Eliot, letters to The Dial about the literary scene in England.

The eight issues I still have contain an array of writers and artists still extant in our literary memory. I immediately read a poem by James Joyce, “A Memoir of the Players”, which describes a stage kiss. I'd read Chamber Music, a thin book of Joyce's poetry which reminded me of Stephen Dedalus's villanelle in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. This poem was different!

In the issues I have are poems by E. E. Cummings before he committed his name to lower case, D. H. Lawrence, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Sterling North, and Hart Crane. There's fiction by Thomas Mann and A. E. Coppard, essays by Virginia Woolf and Liam O'Flaherty, and a long piece by William Butler Yeats in which he seems to feel obliged to explain his work relationship with Oscar Wilde. An essay by Maxim Gorki is titled “About Murderers” and also refers to the cinema. There is art by Picasso, Kahlil Gibran, Rodin, Georgia O'Keefe, and Jean Cocteau.

Sanguine Drawing by Picasso in The Dial

 

The Flagpole (First Painting) by Georgia O'Keefe in The Dial

I don't know what it means for an artist to have a photograph of a work put in a journal. The value a famous writer's first publication or first printing of a literary piece is something I can better appreciate as in a gallery. For some, it might be beyond value, like the first memories of a person or a  pet after you've spent years with them.

A response on child separation

Reading about children being separated from their families at U.S. borders, I was stunned to learn that the U.S. was the only country in the United Nations who had not ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child. This was noted by the spokesperson for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Ravina Shamdasani, when she was interviewed on that commission's criticism of the U.S.'s recent actions.

c Vitma1978 / Dreamstime Stock Photos & Stock Free Images

Other articles told of the numbers of children already moved to Michigan and Chicago where they were to be given to foster parents. The other night, I saw network news coverage of a temporary holding building where, for some reason, the faces of the children and their caregivers could not be photographed.

The United States maintained that there might be false claims of parentage, that some adults were using children in order to gain entrance into the U.S. I couldn't understand why DNA tests weren't administered before a child was forcibly taken and admitted to a plan for food, shelter, transportation, and foster care. An individual can obtain a paternity test for about $70. At any rate, if the child was taken by an adult that wasn't its parent, then the child is someone else's, not the possession of the U.S.

c Blojfo / Dreamstine Stock Photos & Stock Free Images

In a country where children are afraid of sitting in schools because of violence, and where abuse by foster parents is a real factor, this all seems pretty atrocious. 

 

The United States probably has had the highest statistics for their own children being separated from parents because of divorce and foster care. Whatever the advantage of this contemporary shift, the fact of separation remains. Perhaps people in the U.S. are in a routine of callousness towards the feelings of children. 

Children are separated from parents when foster care is the decision. This seems premature if a child was indeed kidnapped, and without looking for their real parent or parents.

I fail to understand why the U.S. does not work with other nations in establishing the identities of people seeking entrance into the U.S. Because those people lived somewhere else, it would seem that the native nation should be involved.

 

My book Tug of the Wishbone, set out to explore the longterm affects of divorce for its protagonist and how they changed perceptions about relationships and family life. An adult book, the first chapters centered on specific events, skipping time from one chapter to the next, until Maureen was a teenager. I did not want to dwell on her childhood, but to give enough of it for an underpinning to the main story. 

 

In one early chapter, Maureen refers to scenes of separation from her father. Because I wanted to show how a child of divorce survives, I didn't want to milk the trauma. This was because of my own feelings about child characters in an adult novel. I attempted to write her into the story as the character she really was. The problems were adult so I chose to concentrate on the active scenes with her family at the outset. The fact is, a younger child has little power and is usually not the hinge of the family scene, especially when larger issues reign. Such a child might not be thinking of themselves. They don't know what to think.

c Paha_l /Dreamstime Stock Photos & Stock Free Images

I preferred a Dickens handling of the child in an adult novel. Although I wrote from Maureen's point-of-view, I depicted the family and neighborhood scenes in a dramatic way instead of a narrative way. This fit with the idea of the novel, to show a child-of-divorce in relationship. When Maureen thought like an adult, the book shifted into her individual story with more of her interior. If there was a lasting trauma from divorce, then I decided to explore how that came out later on.

Life goes on. The story of child separation is gripping and the scenes important. The next problem is that children get past trauma and they survive as they can. They won't be coddled because of a past experience with agony, and they might deal with expectations that cannot be tailored for them as individuals, especially with displacement. Lucky children have parents who plan for them and provide an undisputed home. Unlucky children have to be heroic, too often, in order to be happy.