Book Tour 2014: Getting Your Work Out There

Now is a great time to be a broke ass writer, and there never was a better kind of broke ass writer to be than a poet.   There are always lots of writers groups around.  I belong to an interesting group of poets who publish a magazine during the winter months.  There are nine of us and we publish only nine editions of nine volumes.  Each of us writes a poem a month, and we send it to an appointed editor for the month.  That editor copies the poems and makes up a cover and mails (that's right actually mails) a physical copy of the poems out to each poet.  If we feel like commenting on the poems we do.  Mostly we don't.   All of the poets except for two, I think, are professors at various universities.  I think they are very fine poets.  I was invited in by a poet who was teaching in Fairbanks, and when he didn't get tenure he hoofed it back to the midwest and invited me in to keep in touch with some of the people he had met up North.  I'm not mentioning all their names because I don't have their permission to talk about the group.  I guess it's kind of like Fight Club.  I'll probably be killed at the first meeting.  If there ever is a meeting...if there really is such a club.  

I only mention this because it's a great way to create your own zine, and it's a good way to discipline yourself.  One poem a month doesn't sound like a lot but...you would be surprised particularly if you get good poets in your group it ups your game.  My book of poems for my book of poetry was 75 percent filled with poems I wrote for this group.  

Here is my poem for February,  not all that great...but I got it done. The title comes from the story Teddy  by J.D. Salinger.

                IT WILL BE HERE OR SOMEWHERE ELSE 

Wind in the desert

and sand rises above the ridge lines

so that the moon, when it rises

shows itself first, as blood orange

on the horizon. 

A raucous bird, I do not know 

mocks me from a Palm tree 

and a pack of coyotes yip in the dark.  

I am far from my home country

and I hardly know who I am.

Yet, I believe this is the same moon 

that has chilled my bones 

up north so many times before

and this is the same night that will cover me 

like the shadow of the owl’s wing 

lifting from the island

in my home country

or someone else’s

country all together. 

John Straley, Borrego Springs, CA

Book Tour 2014: Reading and Writing

Windy here.  The dust sweeps up off the desert floor so that the sky is hazy.  The moon, as it rises is a bright orange lifting over the horizon and launching into the black night.  

After a walk up into a narrow canyon I settled onto the porch and read my sister's copy of The Sun Also Rises  by Ernest Hemingway.  This fall Jan and I went to Paris, France, for the first time, (as opposed to Paris, Texas, which I still  haven't been to)  so I thought I would give Hemingway another tumble since my high-school reading list.  It was a little disorienting reading about Jake Barnes,  waiting for Lady Ashley at the Cafe Select,  while sprawled out on a cracked concrete floor listening to a dove sing from a smoke tree down the road. Jake Barnes drinking beer and Pernod, and wine...and whiskey...and absinthe and more wine. 

Hemingway was said to write standing up.  He wrote in pencil.  He was quoted as saying he didn't write while drunk but then the longer he lived, he had a difficult time finding those times when he wasn't drunk.  

Writers and drink.  It used to be a self-defining occupational hazard.  The more we've learned about the lives of some of these writers the more the picture gets hazy.  PTSD and classic depression seem to have been a factor.  The Lost Generation writers had seen the First World War, and Hemingway had taken a peek at the beginning of the greatest killing event humanity would ever see.  When I read him now, I don't see him as the bullying alcoholic.   I think he was then, even in Paris, at the beginning, a sorrowful man.  

This is something I know about; sorrow and depression.  My own father was a Hemingway man, a drinker who would not turn against his style or his manhood.  I learned from his example and have sworn to choose another path.  Avoid Self Pity Like the Plague  as Nelson Bentley would teach...but also avoid repression that turns to bile.  

J.P. Seaton the remarkable translator of Du Fu  and Han Shan among other great Chinese Poets describes the wonderful quality of Du Fu's poetry as "melancholy joie du vivre"  this is what I try to capture in the Cecil books.  This is what I tried to capture in Cold Storage, Alaska. 

That's for me:  life is bound by suffering, yet it is over far too soon.  

Warm day, moon rises

becoming a fragrant orange

floating on the Seine. 

jhs--Borrego Springs, CA

Book Tour 2014: The Virtual Tour Thanks

If you've been keeping up, you've caught on that this is not your usual book tour at this point.  No hotels, no media escorts, or Lincoln Town Cars waiting in the Lobby.  This, I have to say, is a good thing.  The book business is different than it used to be and it's silly to spend that kind of dough on tours any more.  

It's much smarter to learn the ropes of the virtual world and take the reins of the social media and try to reach out to as many people as I can from one pleasant location without burning a hole in anyone's pocket and the ozone layer.  So...here I sit in the desert with a group of people I love and type away and try to learn the ropes. 

I'm excited to see new reviews come in: one from Saint Louis yesterday, with comments about how "if you think it's chilly here, you should check out Cold Storage, Alaska," which almost made me feel guilty for walking around the desert in 86 degree weather...but not quite. 

I do have to say something in favor of physical proximity.  On Thursday night, Jan and I taught our University Humanities 120 class from here.  We went to the local middle school and we connected up to their phone system and we connected with our students who we usually talk to on the phone from Sitka.  This week we were talking about John Haines and the first chapter of his book:  Living Off The Country. Haines was Alaska's preeminent poet, in his book he was concerned that "Alaska" itself was in danger of being replaced by the "cliche of Alaska."  This can happen when we lose familiarity with the actual, and become lazy with our ideas of what we want to believe about a place.  We discussed this in our class.  We had students in Wasilla and Juneau, and in the village of Buckland, and in Oregon and Washington.  As Jan and I walked out into the dark, desert night there was a Great Horned Owl in a palm tree guarding her nest with at least four fledglings.  

Laziness.  This scares me...because I am lazy by nature.  Being on vacation reminds of this.   I have to be pushed...often by myself, often by the people who love me...to be attentive to this world.    Anyway...I have always been skeptical of the "virtual world."  I've even been known to say,  rather haughtily:  "There is no virtual world, there is one world with different sets of tools used by different sets of people."  But that was one of my fathead opinions.  

So this virtual tour is new ground for me.  Here are my thanks for going there: Juliet Grames,  Rudy Martinez,  Madison Kozma who keeps the likes coming.  Thanks too for all the reviewers who choose my book over the hundreds of others that pile their office floors.  

A profound thanks to Curtis Alan Edwards, my oldest and dearest friend who has always embraced technology and by doing so, has kept me in the world.  He designed this web site and I think it is just the bee's knees.  

So keep tuning in.  Each post will not sound like an awards show but I need to show my appreciation for fear that Toto will pull back the curtain. 

Song birds in the Palm

singing to the desert night. 

I reach out to you. 

jhs   Borrego Springs CA

Book Tour 2014: Love and Obedience

Another fine warm day. We walked down an old family favorite wash in the desert locally known as "the slots".   A beautiful geologic formation where water periodically grinds the mud and stone down the narrow rock walls of the canyon so that over the years there has become a very slender pathway to squeeze through on the bottom. 

This morning my family... including friends of such closeness they might as well be family... tumbled down the path chattering like a bunch of magpies.  I squeezed through the narrow spots with a little more difficulty than I have in the years before and labored up the hill with more effort, confirming that my body does not change at geologic rate.  

I'm sixty years old now. I first started coming to this desert when I was six years old.  My parents loved it here with intensity.  They tried living here year round but the summer heat and the expense of it beat them back.  I was only here once in June and I thought someone was kidding me when I stepped out of the air conditioned car: Blast Furnace on a reflective surface.  It was an earth not meant for humans.... but of course it was,  just not me.  

Someone asked me about Cold Storage, today and why it was dedicated to Sophie Rosen.  Well...  Sophie is a fan of my books who wrote to me after I published The Big Both Ways.  She was at that time a Librarian in British Columbia and she is a very perceptive and sympathetic reader.  Her criticisms were always on point but kindly put, very bookish, and learned in a very sweet and generous way.  She is wonderful to correspond with.  I have only met her once and I don't really know much about her personal life.  We have almost always discussed books when we communicate, not always mine, but books we like.  

I asked Sophie to read an early draft of Cold Storage, Alaska and she commented on the number of biblical allusions there were in the novel.  To which I learnedly responded,  "huh?"  Then she asked,  "Would you mind if I pointed some of them out?"  and this time I responded, "Not at all."  This was how I became reacquainted with the Book of Numbers and the story of Baalam's Ass, who only speaks to his master before being kicked for the third time.  

I had studied the Bible as Literature with Nelson Bentley at the University of Washington in the seventies, and Nelson was a generous and lively soul.  Nelson's first rule in his poetry group was, "Avoid Self Pity Like The Plague!"  and I suspect he saved the life of many young poets.  I know he did mine.  I still keep a Bible on my desk. 

Sophie Rosen is a generous Christian woman.  I can tell this from her tone and from her generous nature and from a few of the things she has said.  Never has she proselytized. Once as we were talking about Scripture I mentioned that I had problems in the Bible between the two   aspects of Scriptures,  "I'm good," I told her,  "with the love part, but I'm not so good with the obedience."   

And Sophie chuckled.  "What are you laughing about?"  I asked.  "It's just funny," she said.  I wrote the book and years later I realized what she thought was funny.  

So, if you are reading my new book and are wondering about my relationship with Christianity or Buddhism or any other organized religion.  I will try and express it here: I'm a student of Literature and not an advocate of faith. I love people I meet and communicate with.  I love Sophie Rosen,  I love the pieces of ground within the context of my own short round feet.  I'm the fat guy walking in the slots.  I am a writer who does not walk among the Gods.  I am the writer who walks with the un-kissed frogs: pursing my lips. 

Slowing Down: Book Tour 2014

Slowing down…Book Tour 2014— Borrego Springs California

Sitka for the book launch:  lots of friendly people but no books to sell them.  Anchorage had a great number of people and a only few books to sell, and Fairbanks had a few people and no books to sell, plus it was thirty below zero.  Since I don’t understand the book business anyway,  I came to the desert in California where there are no fans for my books and no books at all PLUS it’s ninety degrees Fahrenheit above zero in the sun, which is more exotic than being naked in the middle of Paris, France.

I have a conviction that place, that is, actual landscape, shapes culture and therefore character.  I have become an Island rainforest person,  that is,  I get a little nervous if my skin gets dry, and I’m always considering my escape by sea. 

 Don’t get me wrong,  I love the hot and dry… I just don’t know who I am in the hot and dry.  It’s as if I’ve undergone one of those science fiction mind wipes that happens periodically to characters on the starship Enterprise, I am perfectly relaxed but blank in the heat, the memory of my other life, in the cold and the damp… is dim.  The fact that I have a book out about unhappy people who live in a wet world on the North Pacific is a wonderful memory to me now, a hazy dream like the recollection of a party I went to and ate someone’s marijuana baked goods by mistake.

I am a soggy person wandering in a strange land. Desert people seem to like small dogs and loose fitting shorts.  Their knees have extra skin, everyone looks older than their stated age but that’s okay because it’s not a race after all.  Happy Valentine’s Day everyone.  Forget the reading. Today is the day to round off the edges.  Let the Buddha doze and give in to the heat.   jhs

Appearances

I will be reading from and signing my new book, Cold Storage Alaska, in Alaska and Seattle in February. Here's the schedule:

• 2/4 - 7PM - Sitka, AK Library
• 2/6 - 7PM - Anchorage, AK - Great Harvest Bread Company (reading for 49 Writers)
• 2/8 - 7PM - University of Alaska Fairbanks
• 2/21 - 6:30PM - Third Place Books, Seattle, Lake Forest Park store on Bothell Way
• 2/22 - NOON - Seattle Mystery Bookshop, 117 Cherry Street, Downtown