Talent doesn’t write one page; it writes 300 pages. The strong do not hesitate. They exhaust ink. They use up paper. In Literature, there are only oxen

 — Jules Renard

I.
I’ve independently published nine books of my creative work so far in 2026: poetry and essay collections, a novel, three travel guides and a writing guide. I have seven more books I want to write, and those are the ones I know about today.

Blame the well out back, which never dries up and constantly refills, the more I use it.

Writing has become habitual, and addictive, in a good way.

As soon as I finish one project, I move on to the next one, like a chain smoker lighting one manuscript off the embers of the previous one.

II.
I live alone and the solitude serves me. I travel frequently (20 weeks away from home in 2025, 8 weeks away so far in 2026, with 6 more weeks of travel planned Sept - Dec). Yet when I am home, I hunker down and write.

Laying low is my superpower. Instead of reading new work on a group Zoom call of poets, I prefer to write. I don’t attend writers conferences or weekend “write-ins” at coffee shops, for the same reason.

If you’re launching your new book, I will show up to the signing and reading. I’ve done that for several authors several by taking red-eye flights cross-country. Those events should not be missed.

III.
One winter in North Carolina, I was a bear. I hibernated. I read big books from the library (biographies of Josef Stalin and James Dean, and a Levon Helm autobiography). I watched several classic movies for a second time (Giant, East of Eden, Dr. Zhivago, and Reds. I checked out other movies on DVD, and watched them for a second time, with the director’s commentary on.

During those winter Carolina days (sometimes snowbound), I thought a lot about my 20’s and 30’s and the Gail Sheehy book Passages that I read in college.

During that hiatus, I worked on two “chapbook memoirs” a sub-genre of the memoir. Briarcliff: A memoir of 1985-1993 is dedicated to my eldest daughter. It is only 68 pages long, so basically an extended essay about the first Greensboro house we lived in when she was born.

My younger daughter Liz asked, “where’s my book?” I set to work on The Harbor: The Era of Innocence Before 9/11. Weighing in at 76 pages, I wanted her book to be about the innocence prior to 9/11, our suburban family story mirroring a naive nation. The Twin Towers collapsed and our family unit dissolved about 20 months later.

I’ve covered some of this same territory in my poems and essays. It’s not cheating and it’s not plagiarism. It’s exploring the territory. As the author, I own the material. I can format or repurpose it however I like.

During that hibernation, I began work on stories that I included later on in my third collection of short stories, which became Inflection Point. I wrote poems inspired by Dwayne Newton photographs, which became the core of Siren Call SF in 2019.

In my daily writing, I nudge many of my book projects forward, one to two pages at a time. The result is quite a few books, when one is writing 200-300 pages of literary-journal quality work each year, even at tortoise pace.

IV.
On this Sunday morning at the end of August, I am writing this blog.

I wrote two poems this morning. One poem was about some disastrous events in my kitchen yesterday (a seemingly orchestrated revolt of implements and appliances). I also wrote a memoir poem about my transition as an eleven-year-old, from Little League baseball to surfing, due to my August birthday, my small body size and a lack of sibling or paternal “driveway” coaches who would help me improve my game.

Told not to swing or bunt, to get on base with a walk, I took a lot of called third strikes at the plate, placed in right field in the final innings, the Siberia of the baseball field.

I wanted more for myself, so I took up surfing, which involved a much larger playing field (the ocean), but elements I could control, my paddling, wave selection, pushing up and balancing on the board, on a moving thing (a wave).

V.
I think back to a fallow period, from 1996 to 2004, when I hardly wrote anything. I was busy raising a family, aerating and mowing the lawn, coaching youth soccer, working on my career, buying and running a business with seven full-time employees and forty seasonal workers.

Now there is time and urgency to write. I just turned 68. I’m an empty nester who works from home. I write every day.

It’s like a well I can keep coming back to for water; it never dries up.

And that well is supplied by a very large reservoir, that you can’t see because it’s over the hill and behind those trees. And that reservoir is fed by an underground aquifer, like the one that’s beneath parts of Florida and Georgia. Simply stated, that well is never going to run dry.

“What is that you do?” People will ask me.

“I’m in the well business,” I tell them.

We write books because our children are not interested in us. We address ourselves to an anonymous world because our wives plug their ears when we speak to them.

— Milan Kundera

I.
I’m an Author, with a capital A.

For over three decades, I was a writer. I earned a BA in English and an MFA in Creative Writing. I wrote many poems and short stories, plus monthly book reviews for the Greensboro News & Record (and one short fiction review for the NY Times).

In 2015, an ischemic stroke, in my sleep, was my wake-up call.

There is no bouncing back from a stroke. Resilience is not an option.

I learned how to walk, swallow and speak again. I learned how to type on a keyboard, despite my left hand aphasia (all the good letters are on the left side: W, E, R, T, A, S, D, F, G, C.

A year later, with a friend’s help, I brought out my first full-length collection of poetry, The Reassurance of Ghosts.

Three months later, staying with another friend in coastal Mississippi, I published The Winter Practice (30 short stories) and The Low Wire (35 essays).

And then I was off to the races, writing and publishing twelve books in 2017 and 2018 (poetry, essay, short fiction, a full-length memoir and writing guides).

I made the leap from Writer to Author. A near-death experience will do that for you

I learned how to use Amazon’s CreateSpace publishing platform (now Kindle Direct Publishing). I learned how to format a 6” x 9” paperback book perfectly, using Adobe’s InDesign, which seemed to make the Amazon print-on-demand robot happy with the PDF print files I uploaded.

I use my own images for the book covers, using the free Amazon Cover Wizard feature. Since I own the images, there’s never an issue with a copyright, permission or sourcing a stock image. Plus, I enjoy walking around with my iPhone, searching out potential cover shots.

II.
I write and I enjoy writing.

I write most days, averaging about three to four pages of literary-journal-quality output each week, be that poetry, short fiction or essay (Substack posts don’t count).
Over the course of the year, that means I have 150-200 pages of high quality work available to me, usually across several books.

I submit my creative work to highly competitive literary journals. On average, I have a 5% success rate with submissions (about 1 acceptance for every 20 pieces submitted). I don’t let a rejection slip discourage me. I just mark the non-accepted poem (or story or essay) “available to submit” and move on with my day.

For the Book of Jobs occupations anthology (Penn State Press), there were 3,600 entries, and my poem was one of 135 selected. I’m a three-time Finalist for the highly-competitive Applewhite Poetry Prize, sponsored by North Carolina Literary Review.
Santa Barbara Literary Journal took all three poems I submitted recently

I write and I publish my books, almost fifty since 2016.

I don’t wait for a publisher to tell me when my publication date is, based on their marketing schedule. The publisher would not allot any marketing funds for me anyway. I’m not a blockbuster author, or notorious, which would drive sales and profits, and make shareholders happy. I’m happy with my Amazon royalties. I have a day job.

I write.

And from what I’ve noticed, the quality of what I write each day is improving. As we age, the number of brain cells diminish, but the number of dendritic connections increases, which must mean something.

III.
My mother was an accomplished pianist, a gospel quartet accompanist, an arranger and composer of Christian music. We had a large Cezanne framed print in our living room, and art books (Rodin, Monet) on the coffee table. At age ten, she took me, quite reluctantly, to see the Impressionists at the Chicago Art Institute.

My father was a witty accountant, who loved riddles and puns. He had been an English Major, yet his college Milton textbook sat unopened in a bookcase, next to the World Book Encyclopedia (which I devoured, one letter at a time), Late in life, my Dad had a surge of creativity, restoring a 1972 911-E Porsche, taking zumba classes and volunteering as a state park ranger north of Tucson.

Perhaps writing skips a generation, or two.

My grandfather Grey, an elevator operator, WWII aircraft bomber assembly worker and produce clerk at a Von’s grocery store, typed Ogden Nash-style poems for me on special occasions like my birthday. Maybe my granddaughter Eleanor will have children around the year 2052, and those offspring will pick up the pen.

IV.
I don’t know where this writing thing came from.

Writing chose me.

There was never an official coronation, an onboarding, an orientation, or a launch event. There was no Road to Damascus or Belly of the Whale conversion. The Writer/Author thing formed, like a sandbar from river sediment, or a barrier island from longshore silt, over time:

I’m home sick in 4^th grade. I sneak an index card into my bedroom and write down a simple stanza, a pair of couplets about Christopher Columbus. I’m proud of the rhyme scheme: knowing/showing, New World/unfurled.

In college, we read John Updike’s short story “A&P” on a warm Montecito autumn afternoon. The windows in the classroom are open. The prevailing westerly breeze rustles the leaves in the eucalyptus. We can hear the tennis team practicing on nearby courts, the plock-pause-plock, plock-pause-plock of steady forehand returns, an echo of Updike’s musical supermarket cash register.

I decided that I want to write a story like “A&P.” I wrote “The Day of The Red Snapper” later that day, which lives on as a fragment in a short story “Graven Images” in my 2017 short story collection Centripetal Force.

A year later, I was up at dawn for an early morning hike to a low peak above Edinburgh, Scotland. I’d been observing spectacular sunrises for 20 years along the Southern California coast.

This sunrise is different. The city below me was 850 years old. My parents had just divorced. I’d been seeing four plays a day at the Edinburgh Fringe, drinking Carlsberg Elephant lager, and I still had jet lag.

The rain clouds remind me of a blanket. Now I have a metaphor.

I rhyme the setting, the Firth of Forth with “Athens of the North,” the Enlightenment Era moniker given to Edinburgh. Something clicks. My first literary poem, “Arthur’s Seat,” is born.

V.
I may not ever make more than $300 a year in Amazon royalties. I don’t care about fame; it will be less than two minutes, hardly fifteen.

Maybe the best I can hope for is to be able to read one poem at a monthly open mic night in a literary hotspot like Chapel Hill, where the sign-up sheet goes out at 5pm (for a 7pm reading), with limited slots, where the organizers will only let me read one poem and only its title; any background sharing (or reading the epigraph) will get me a stern look from the open mic host. It’s a fair trade-off, given the audience, mostly other poets.

Someone once said “Poetry is the size of a dance floor, and there’s not much room out there for very many poets.”

There might never be accolades or agents.

There might only be this perpetual impulse, to populate a blank page with what interests me that day, with what I can render elegantly by sundown.

To quote Auden on the death of Yeats, on Yeats’ gift for writing poetry: “It survives, a way of happening, a mouth.”

VI.
Why do you write? What motivates you?

Are you at the beginning of the trail, as someone who wants to write?

Or, are you halfway up the mountain, climbing stedily on the switchbacks, within sight of the peak?

Are you looking to make the transition, the leap from Writer to Author?

If so, let’s talk. I have a few ideas and some formal guidance.

We write to taste life twice.
— Anais Nin

I.
Accidents, mistakes and gaffes move us forward.

In 1946, Raytheon engineer Perry Spencer tested a military grade magnetron in the lab after lunch. Clocking out, he realized that the chocolate snack in his pocket had melted while he’d been trying to improve the power level of the magnetron tubes used in radar sets. Absentminded Spencer accidentally invented the “radar range,” or as we like to call it, the microwave oven.

Like Spencer’s melted candy bar, some of the best writing can be accidental, the result of playing around or distraction, like an arrow completely missing the target (and the hay bale), soaring into the field behind the archery range.

You sit down at your desk (or kitchen table) to write on a topic that interests you, or perhaps intrigues you (Plan A). An hour later, a tangent has taken you off course by miles. Trust the detour. Plan B (guided by the subconscious) is almost always better than Plan A (a construct of ego).

II.
Serendipity should be our default mode as writers.

Just ask the three princes from the island of Serendip (Sri Lanka), who were always stumbling, assbackwards, into memorable new adventures. Their escapades and exploits became known as serendipity, a word we use frequently, coined by Horace Walpole.

Maurice Sendak’s children’s book bestseller Where the Wild Things Are, was originally called Where the Wild Horses Are, but Sendak couldn’t draw horses, only things. So there you go.

Samuel Richardson owned a printing press. To test its capabilities, he wrote sample letters for an etiquette manual, including letters to help servant girls deal with lecherous employers. He eventually developed his pamphlet into something called Pamela, a bestseller that is now considered the first modern English novel.

Atlanta resident Margaret “Peggy” Mitchell twisted her ankle. She couldn’t leave the house. She asked her husband to go to the library to pick up more books for her. Exasperated at having to haul the heavy hardback books home, Mitchell’s husband joked, “for God’s sake, Peggy, can’t you write a book instead of reading them?” Her response to him was writing Gone With The Wind.

In 1966, John Fowles had another novel in the works on the day he absentmindedly spotted the enigmatic woman in the dark cape staring out to sea from the quay in Dorset. His literary detour became the greater known French Lieutenant’s Woman. I don’t know what happened to the book he abandoned.

Fowles later wrote of this second novel: “You are not trying to write something one of the Victorian novelists forgot to write; but perhaps something one of them failed to write.”

III.
A decade ago, a San Francisco publisher asked me to write a series of six blogs, on the theme of writing, for his website, to boost the site’s content and increase search engine optimization by featuring original content.

Adult-onset Attention Deficit Disorder (AADD) just might be my competitive advantage as a writer.

If six eggs make a delicious and filling Denver omelet (for two), and six Vegas showgirls make for a memorable weekend, then six blogs is critical mass for something.

As I wrote the blogs, the word “that’s a book” flashed into my brain, like the garish neon sign outside Caesar’s Palace. I heard the Universe give a hearty chuckle, and my muse gave me her usual “You’re such a dweeb” look.

IV.
My solar-eclipse-inspired writing guide Myriad (2017) covered 48 writing topics, most of them standard fare: feature writing, travel writing, poetry, fiction and self publishing.

I’m wanted to tackle another book about writing, as a form of self-validation and shared wisdom for other writers.

I often include a section essays about creativity and writing in my essay collections (The Low Wire (2016), Laying Low (2021), Hear Me Out (2024) and Migratory Patterns (2026). I wanted a book that served as my illogical omnibus, a plate of reheated leftovers (in Perry Spencer’s microwave), representing deleted scenes from a feature movie and a gaggle of red-haired stepchildren.

Entrepreneurs talk all the time about how launching a new company is the dual act of both building an airplane and flying an airplane and how it’s hard to do both at once.
I think I can pull it off.

V.
I’m bringing you the wisdom of a 68-year-old writer and author, with over forty-five independently published books to his credit, plus twenty more books written by others where I served as a writing coach, developmental editor, line editor and publishing consultant.

I’ve made a lot of mistakes along the way.

I hope you will benefit from the majority of them.

listen to my heart break every time she runs away


I.
Bruce Hornsby’s song “Mandolin Rain” takes me back to an idyllic time in my late twenties.

That simple piano intro and refrain is an opening into an earlier self.

I was a newlywed of five months and had just returned to full-work after earning my MFA in Creative Writing. I was working an entry level clerical job in the loan servicing department of a bank, processing mortgage loan payoffs.

From a green and white-lined print-out report, I would make sure the Deeds of Trust were cancelled at the Guilford County courthouse, then notify the mortgage-backed-securities investors (Fannie Mae and Ginnie Mae) of the payoff, arrange final settlement for the MBS pool, cancel the private mortgage insurance and issue a refund check to the homeowner.

After two years of writing workshops (brutal in the level of critique of my poems and stories), I welcomed this quiet, clerical job in the backwaters of the bank, my 35 work colleagues (accountants, collectors) and the twice-monthly paycheck.

II.
I wore glasses with very large frames, which gave me a studious look.

I was running again, 8K and 10K races at a pretty good pace, averaging seven minute miles, which was not going to win my age group but were still pretty decent times on the tree-lined courses that wound through the Greensboro Country Club and finished downtown.

I was also playing fullback and left midfielder, on a summer adult soccer league, for a team called Holland (we wore orange, like The Netherlands team did). We had a former UNC Tar Heel scholarship player on our team as center forward, came in second place one season, when I scored a goal in a final match that we lost.

The soccer field was sub-par, a chopped-up, chunky sloping affair belonging to a Catholic Church school, where you played downhill one half and uphill the other half. It was easier to score running uphill, because you had more control of the ball, and the defending players had to run uphill backwards to mark you.

III.
My former wife and I had just bought a house on Briarcliff Road, a two-bedroom, two-bath, two-story saltbox with round dormer windows upstairs, and a “one-butt” galley kitchen.

The front yard was tiny. There was no driveway and the grass was easy to mow, even in the small, sloping backyard. I remember a non-poisonous snake dropped out a tree right in front of me one time when I was mowing.

There were yellow jacket nests in the gopher holes, which led to stings on the back of my calves. One Saturday evening, I poured gasoline down a gopher hole in retaliation, and when I lit the match and dropped it, I did not the realize that our entire backyard was riddled with gopher holes, as the entire backyard erupted in underground flames, spidering outward and leaving singe marks in the grass for months.

IV.
It was very much a time of innocence. We lived in my former wife’s hometown, and her mother lived just a few miles, cooking us delicious meals all the time, things like a chicken casserole or steak, baked potato and salad.

On Sundays, we might drive an hour away towards Charlotte, to have a large dinner with my former wife’s grandfather Glen, and his second wife Lucille, with green beans, creamed corn, mashed potatoes, and fried chicken that we picked up from Hardees on the way in off highway 52.

I had a car for the first time in my life, at age 29, a little beige Mazda hatchback.

V.
Our daughter Katherine would not be born for another three years.

We were just getting to know a lot of our Latham Park neighbors, other couples our age. We belonged to the downtown Episcopal Church, where we had been married in late 1985.

We’d been invited to join the country club, but passed because that really wasn’t our style.

We did join a small neighborhood swim club over in my mother-in-law’s neighborhood, with fairly inexpensive buy-in and annual dues.

VI.
I was reviewing books by then at the Greensboro News & Record, about ten books a year for my editor Bob Gingher, fiction by John Updike, Alice Munro and William Trevor, and some of the new titles coming out of Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.

I was writing short stories again, typing them up, then making a back-up copy on the bank’s Xerox machine, and storing them in a three-ring binder. I was using WordPerfect software at work, but still used my Smith-Corona electric at home.

I don’t know where those short stories are now, because only one or two of them were fit for publication: “Hot Dog” in John Miller’s start-up national magazine, Equator, and “Confessions of a Pacifist,” which novelist Clyde Edgerton selected as a finalist for the N.C. Writers Network Fiction Syndication Competition, appearing in four newspapers statewide.

I’m not exactly sure why that wistful Bruce Hornsby song (released April 1, 1986), makes me think of that micro-era.

I was twenty-eight years old at the time, when you really “don’t know what you don’t know.”

I had matured and was settling down in early adult life after a chaotic childhood and processing my parents’ divorce, navigating through a brave, new world, aspiring to be a writer (with raw talent, but not real body of work, an agent, publisher or a novel in the works)

Perhaps I was projecting forward in time, a prescient wistfulness, anticipating future loss, and the shedding of youth.

The baseball gloves mounted
in the back room at the Double Play
bar on Bryant are a pantheon

of second outs, of crisp throws
from short that sting the palm
of your hand, beneath the leather;

an elevated trophy case
of almost-outs: line drives
that bounced off your mitt,

or tore through the webbing,
rabbiting further into deep right.
Willie Mays once took batting practice

at Seals Stadium across the street.
He’s wearing his new Giants jersey
over a dress shirt. He’s wearing slacks

and a gold watch, with Koufax, Drysdale
and Bob Gibson, about to bear down
on him with stuff he’s never seen before.

© Jon Obermeyer 2026

(note: this poem originally appeared in the Baseball issue of Cobalt Literary Journal

“The chapbook form was revived in the 20th century by the surrealists and the Beats... as an instrument of the avant-garde and an ideological weapon." — Poets House

I.
A chapbook is a small book of poems, usually 20-30 on a single theme, short of a full collection but recognized as a holistic, published work.

For about four centuries, traveling peddlers, or chapmen, carried small, cheap, paper-bound booklets in their packs alongside buttons, ribbons, and small wares. Chap comes from cheap, but there is a wealth of content in them.

II.
An inventive rebel and gypsy, rarely sticking to my swim lane, I’ve adapted the poetry chapbook construct, into memoir and travel books.

In addition to my full-length memoir about Santa Barbara childhood, It Happens That Fast, I have also written a shorter memoir about my ischemic stroke (The Guests) and two chapbook memoirs about my two daughters’ early years, based on where we lived in Greensboro, NC (Briarcliff, a street, and The Harbor, a housing development).

III.
I’ve found the chapbook format ideal for writing about travel, covering trips to Indonesia, the Philippines, Kona on the Big Island of Hawaii, and Mexico. Letter from Veracruz weighs in at just 57 pages (and priced accordingly at $5.99 in paperback). The book was written about a four-day visit I made to eastern coast of Mexico in Dec, 2024. I typed “Mexico, no American expats, safe from cartels” into Google search, and Veracruz popped up first.

I wrote the Veracruz travel chapbook in the departure lounge at the Veracruz airport on Christmas Eve, 2024. I continued with editing and writing during my layover in the Mexico City airport, in between Christmas shopping (scarves, tequila-infused chocolates) and having dinner.

I finished the book on the four-hour-long MEX-LAX evening flight on AeroMexico, then formatted it in Adobe for Amazon at LAX International Arrivals around 11pm while waiting for a ride from my family. I caught a few hours sleep in the guest room in Ventura, then published it in the first hours of Christmas Day.

If you know what you’re doing, this is all possible with the Amazon/KDP print-on-demand platform, journal notes to manuscript to published paperback in 24 hours.

IV.
I’m sharing this author hack, as I realize many writers and authors struggle with thinking about what their next book should be about.

Start small.

It’s the grain of sand that becomes the pearl.

I believe that the narrower the topic, the greater the appeal. There are over 20,000 Civil War novels on Amazon, but only 372 Civil War novels about cavalry, which happens to be the focus of my second novel “Skirmish!” I’ve started with just seven chapters, wrote up 20 pages, and have tripled that to 60 pages in an early draft. It may turn out to be a novella, under 200 pages. I won’t really care if I’ve captured the story correctly.

V.
Start small and discrete. Stay small and discrete, if that’s all you have at the moment. Create a 24-page chapbook and expand it later in a second edition.

Writing to length is for junior high book reports and high school term papers.

Ezra Pound’s “In the Station of the Metro” is one of the best poems of the 20th century, and it is a two-line couplet. Most every Alice Munro or William Trevor short story reads like a novel to me.

“The Great Gatsby” is technically a novella, about 140 pages in one version. No one is going to quibble about that one.

VI.
When I was writing It Happens That Fast in 2017, I realized I had about 18 strong poems about my setting, Santa Barbara. I began thinking of creating a companion chapbook to go with the memoir, giving it the title of Salsipuedes, the name of a well-known street in town and an arch, comical look at my own exit in 1983 under the Spanish translation of the word: “get out while you can.”

While finishing up my full-length memoir, I wrote 24 new Santa Barbara poems to go with the 18 poems already written, and brought out both books in a thematic pairing of two genres.

In 2019, I brought out a second edition of Salsipuedes, sticking to the Santa Barbara theme with 20 new poems I’d written in the interim. And now in 2026, I have over 90 Santa Barbara poems for a third edition of Salsipuedes, the little train engine chapbook that is now looking like a full-length poetry collection.

VI.
If you’ve written 30 poems, take 20-25 of them and create a chapbook, even if none of the poems relate to each other.

Or, look for themes within your poems; pattern recognition. I have published several books of poetry that are thematically organized (occupations, nature, spirituality, painting, photography and sculpture, San Francisco, Sierra Nevada, poems that all have a title beginning with the letter D).

If you took a trip to Morocco or Prague this summer, take your journals and write a short travel essay from them, then expand that to 24 pages (the minimum Amazon page count for a paperback).

If you recently spent a year in Tunisia on a Fulbright, pull all those thoughts and impressions together, even if it’s only 30 pages (you better have 30 pages if you were there for a year).

I hope this is a breakthrough for you.

Let me know how it turns out.

Jon Obermeyer has 55 books independently published on Amazon (poetry, fiction, essay, memoir, a series of writing guides, non-profit management and grant writing guides), plus several books where he is co-author or a contributing editor.

(photo: Mt. Adams neighborhood, Cincinnati, OH, 8/13/26)

My grandfather Greyford (Grey) used to write (type) a poem to me on my birthday, and I still have one of them in a folder somewhere in storage. Welsh Poet Dylan Thomas wrote poems to himself on his birthday. This is my third poem I’ve written to myself on my birthday, on turning 68 years old.

6/8 is a time signature in music, and the Pat Metheny Group has a 9-minute song "Minuano (Six Eight)” that I just played. I also just listened to Al Stewart’s 1978 song “Time Passages” from the album Time Passages, and then this poem arrived, intact:

6/8 on 8/14

Storm debris still
on the ground,
leaves that won’t

need to turn
and descend,
twigs and limbs

ripped skyward
in a treacherous
Tuesday, the clearing

out of Greater
Cincinnati. Calm now,
aftermath of overcast,

barometer rising;
the front has passed.
Laying low

in the burrow
of a Friday morning
to think about years,

and selves: shedding
of skins and identities,
wistful momentarily,

until the coffee
has brewed. What lies
ahead is actually behind

me, unseen, unknown.
My course from
hereonout is set:

bearings, coordinates,
the unrolled charts,
fathom depths,

shoals and reefs,
celestial navigation
and instinct, mostly.

Clouds will clear,
coffee will cool,
I am set in my days.

A Parable of Water and Wilderness

Parable: c.1325, “saying or story in which something is expressed in terms of something else,” from Greek. parabole “a comparison” lit. “a throwing beside,” from para- “alongside” + bole “a throwing, casting,” (www.etymonline.com)

I.
There was once a land of walled cities and wilderness.

Thousands and thousands of square miles of wilderness, and scattered about, there were the walled cities: some square, some round and one city in the shape of an octagon.

The walled cities had been built over springs of fresh water and were heavily fortified.

In this land, you would only find walled cities and wilderness.

The citizenry thrived within the walled cities and rarely ventured out into the wilderness.

As long as the wells and springs provided fresh water, there was no need to leave.

II.
A man took a drink from the well inside his private courtyard within a walled city.

It smelled funny first, a slight whiff of sulphur. To taste, there was something mildly brackish about the water. Because it was water, he kept drinking.

It had to be a fluke.

And indeed, the water from the well returned to normal smell and taste.

A week later, he noticed it again.

He said something about it to his friends, but no one else had noticed any difference in their wells. Perhaps it is the ladle, or the bucket you are using, they suggested. Perhaps something had rusted? Even the rope used to lower the bucket was suspect.

The taste of the water from his well did not affect the growing of gardens, the washing of clothes or bathing, so why dwell on how the water might taste a little funny?

It got worse.He couldn’t drink the water without tasting the tang it had to it.

He wondered if something was wrong with his well, or the underground aquifer that fed a spring that fed his well and the other wells within the walled city.

He worried while he was awake. Eventually, the brackish water infected his dreams.

The authorities refused to check into it.

Soon, he could not drink the water at all.

III.
And so one day, he left the walled city in search of fresh water. No one had left the walled city before.

He wandered for a week.

He crossed a mountain pass and a wide valley.

He came to another walled city.

They would not let him in:

“What’s wrong with you? Our water is just fine and we don’t need you telling our people that it isn’t. Go back to where you came from.”

Another walled city told him, “We don’t have enough water for anyone else. Go away.”

Finally, he found a city that would take him in, but the water was brackish and he left the same day.

This happened several times.

He figured out that cities with pure water would not let him in, and cities with brackish water would allow him in but he had no desire to stay—it was no different than the place he’d left.

IV.
He returned to the wilderness, where he learned to let any rain catch in the brim of his hat or the cuffs of his trousers, or to hold his shirt out and capture water in a downpour: all the little tricks of survival.

And he discovered something else.

The closer he came to the walled cities, the thirstier he became.

Further away, out in the wilderness, he wasn’t as thirsty.

As long as he stayed away from the walled cities, he didn’t require as much water.

Over a few months’ time he learned that you could live without springs and wells and walled cities if you remained completely on your own.

And of course, this made him dangerous.

V.
The one time he went back to his own city, they wouldn’t let him back in.

His friends came to the edge of the wall and looked down on him:

A year went by, and then two and five and ten years. And then fourteen years. In this time, he became an old man.

He sat atop a natural sandstone bench, carved smooth by the wind, with his back to the land of walled cities, facing into the larger wilderness, as if looking out to sea:

“Should I have stayed in my home city and learned to accept brackish water?

”Was I a fool to refuse the brackish water in other cities?”

“After all this time wandering, am I near the end of my journey, or, is it possible, that I am just now at the very beginning?”

And of course, there was no answer, only the expanse of sky.

(Author note: the parable above was composed during summer months, when I was asked to fill in for a vacationing minister at his smaller, informal Sunday morning “sojourner” service. A Divinity student from a nearby seminary covered the traditional late-morning service with the larger congregation. I was raised on the Christian gospels and had always wanted to try my hand at writing an original parable.)

Crystal Mountain, North Carolina

Centripetal, from the Latin, “center seeking”

I.
I grew up on the west coast, where you don’t feel winter so much. The days are slightly cooler but never on the level of freezing cold.

A few trees might turn red or gold and lose leaves. The days are shorter and it’s the start of the rainy season from the Pacific.

In North Carolina, where I lived for three decades, there’s a pronounced, dramatic seasonal shift in November, a palpable turn towards something else, a colder period that will last a good five months and include icy arctic blasts and sometimes snow that stays on the ground for days, especially in north-facing patches that never see the sun.

Contrasted with the South’s humid sunny summers, you have an awareness as Thanksgiving approaches, knowing you’re probably going to be indoors for long periods of time.

Hibernation doesn’t seem like such a bad idea.

II.
It was the kind of wind that Ernest Hemingway wrote about in his autumn-setting short story The Three Day Blow. I looked outside. The warm, late November gusts were gnawing away at a tree of white camellias, the year’s final flowers.

Like a threshing machine, the wind took what few leaves remained in the pin oak and worked them around in a spiral, with the same torque and twisting of cyclone.

Warm Gulf air collided with Canadian blasts. Tornados arrived the Tuesday of Thanksgiving week.

The town shut down. Everything seemed to collapse upon itself, as if pulled into the earth by some great magnet.

III.
I was out of work yet again and worried about my finances. I missed my former life, whatever that was.

I found myself internalizing the transitional weather, personalizing it and hovering on the edge of depression.

From this gravity of setback, I felt myself similarly constrained, seeking the center. It was the yoke of a land not right with itself. There was much heaviness bearing down.

Some of it was caused by the absence of light, the early dark, as the top half of the planet tilted, turned away from the kiss of the sun, until spring at least. The planetary shift triggered abandonment issues.

IV.
The great black beast slouches, low to the ground. The dull swift eddy grabs and pulls me right under the rock, pins me and tries to drown me in its torrent.

It was supposed to be a social season of gatherings and parties, but I found isolation more alluring.

My depression was like a barker, seeking a shill in a fresh haircut and new shiny suit, talking him off a busy street of shoppers: “psst. hey buddy.”

This way, it hissed, pointing me to the escalator leading to the bargain basement, the abyss, all the deals to be had on a downward drift.

Welcome to the Underworld.

V.
Winter inverts our waking. Sunk by shaft to root cellar, cistern and sump, like subterranean miners we carve down the cleat and seam, to quarry the subliminal self with longwall drum.

We see the scars, the cuts of kerf and hogsback lithography, the grain of our grief.

Something miraculous happened. I kept descending and broke through what I feared what was rock bottom. I pierced through my depression and got underneath it, where it could no longer terrify me.

It was quiet down there, and peaceful.

Something new was in the making.

Those echoes in the gob I’m hearing might be the rumbling of the trains overhead or squall lines on the wind. There is a music to it.

Descend into the fosse, the poet W.H. Auden tells us. Face into fear, and descend as far below ground as you need to plummet.

Beneath the hallowed ground and holy days, the work begins.

19

“Floods and quakes strike hard and fast, like lightning. Then they’re gone. Wildfires start deceptively small, building up power, then rage angrily for days. – Barney Brantingham,

I
On a school night in September 1964, my dad drove the family after dinner to an overlook on the back side of the Santa Barbara Riviera, a foothill overlooking the town.

We were going to watch a brush fire, the same way you might take everyone by the carload to the Twin Screen drive-in theater to watch a double feature.

The fire, which began the previous afternoon from a car’s faulty muffler, had expanded to 200 acres on the foothills above Montecito.

It had not rained since February. Dry native grasses below Mountain Drive provided the original fuel for the blaze. Now, the drought-resistant, oily sagebrush chaparral that blanketed the slopes of the Santa Ynez coastal range provided a wicked accelerant.

In my six-year-old’s memory of it, boy-focused, it resembled a military operation. My Dad says a base camp for firefighters has been set up on the baseball field at Westmont College. A bulldozer is cutting a firebreak along the slope.

II.
A B-17 “Flying Fortress” bomber dove into the narrow California canyon and dropped a wave of blood red flame retardant, a chemical that my dad called borate.

My dad said it was more effective than water. I’ve learned since then that the red color of borate comes from iron oxide and the bright color helps the pilot guide the drop.

The tanker can’t get too low, because of the terrain, and the towers and power lines.

Now a family of four, my dad has traded in the cramped red VW beetle for the roominess of an Oldsmobile station wagon.

We stand outside the car, holding our breath as the bomber descended, blended in the hillside, dropped the retardant, then lifted away safely.

III.
This is an indelible, cinematic scene from childhood.

We marked the time in the half-hour increments that the B-17 bomber takes to refill the orange belly tank at the airport in Goleta.

The fire is something to behold from the safe distance of the overlook. The flames were twenty feet high in the clearings and twice that whenever a house or a eucalyptus tree went up in flames.

IV.
Below us is the dark shape of Gibraltar Reservoir. Naively, I wondered why the firefighters can’t just simply push the flames over to it and drown them in its green-blue depths.

Darkness grounds the air tanker effort, just as the Santa Ana winds (blowing down the canyon) kick up to 45 miles per hour.

My dad was itching to drive even closer, maybe park and walk into the neighborhood we see below us.

My mom talked him out of it. We drove home; show’s over.

V.
Seven hours later, I’m awake. There was activity outside my bedroom window on Old San Marcos Rd, the old stagecoach trail.

The lights were on in the kitchen. My parents are up and I can hear them talking. My bedside clock said 3:30 a.m..

I learned a new vocabulary word: evacuate.

During the night, the blaze had moved along a ten-mile front in back of the city, from Rattlesnake Canyon to Mission Canyon, and now San Antonio Canyon, where it was threatening our neighborhood and San Marcos Pass directly above us.

The fire burned 20,000 acres overnight.

VI.
I’m dressed for school. My dad carries my five-month-old sister to a car driven by friends of our family.

Our neighbors are outside, engaged in a similar pantomime: loading up kids, pets, family heirlooms and photo albums. Police cars cruise by in front of the house using their loudspeakers and several fire trucks roll by on their way up the canyon.

Our friends drove us down to their house, two miles away near the Turnpike exit for highway 101.

My dad will spend the rest of the night and the next morning in Bermuda shorts and a vee-neck t-shirt, watering the wooden roof shingles with a garden hose, keeping an eye out for sparks that might blow down from the fire storm and light the roof on fire.

He got his wish to see the fire up close after all.

VII.
The Coyote Fire (named after the road where it started), burned for ten days, consumed 65,000 acres, destroyed 94 houses and killed one firefighter in Romero Canyon on the eastern flank.

The fire made me think about the world in a new way. How could something that was a small bit of novelty and entertainment for our family, grow a hundred times in size and move that quickly across town in seven hours?

There was science behind it. In the coastal desert terrain of Southern California, the oil-laden native plants served as fuel, aided by the convection quality of the sandstone canyons and the wicked whimsy of the wind.

This was a summer barbecue or a campfire gone horribly wrong. It felt biblical to me.

There would be more wildfires in our family’s future, including the 1977 Sycamore Fire (we lived on Chelham Way), but none with such powerful immediacy to wake me from a sleep, thinking I was safe.

VIII.
There was no school that day. We returned to the Old San Marcos Road house that night. It had been spared.

My dad was still wearing his bermuda shorts and white vee-neck t-shirt. He refused to change or take a shower. He wasn’t even thirty years old, and he had been through something unimaginable.

Everything stunk, like that smell you get when you pour water on the embers in your fireplace and the smoke gets in the curtains and in your clothes.

For weeks afterward, there was white ash coating everything, as if it had snowed. The stagnant pools in the canyon creeks were crusted over with debris.

Until the winter rains washed everything away for good, the borate streaks remained on the hillsides behind town, red like the flower they call Indian Paintbrush.

(photo credit: Santa Barbara County Fire Safe Council)

Spent Minie Ball round (courtesy Cohan)

I.
I’ve written and published 16 collections of poetry, along with five collections of short stories and one highly-autobiographical novel, Dogpatch, a Gatsbyesque episodic farce about a declining newspaper and the tech and real estate booms in San Francisco in the mid-teens.

Fiction is not my go-to. I tend to write lyrical, evocative short stories, lean on plot and character.

I have written previously about war, “Banja Luka Interlude,” a short-short story about a Bosnian soldier, and “Confessions of a Pacifist,” set in Soviet-era Hungary 1954, written from the perspective of a World War II veteran’s son.

That story, 94% invention, won a statewide fiction contest in North Carolina and was published in four newspapers. I had previously edited the memoir of a Vietnam War veteran, who wrote about his November 1970 wounding in a mine blast for the first time.

I’ve never served in the military, nor did my father (too young for Korea, too old for Vietnam), nor did any grandparent or close relative.

We are not a military family, yet I accidentally discovered that my great-great grandfather Ed Welty, had been a Union cavalry captain of Company M, PA 14th Cavalry, serving under Gen. William Averell in 1863 and Gen. Philip Sheridan in the Shenandoah Valley in 1864.

Welty had mustered out in Fort Leavenworth Kansas, in May, 1865, following the Grand Review parade in Washington, D.C.

He became an entrepreneur in the West (knocking about with Custer and Kit Carson before their deaths), and eventually settled in northwest Indiana in the 1880’s as part-owner and editor of the Valparaiso Vidette.

His son, my great-grandfather Paul, was a journalist in and Milwaukee and Los Angeles in the early 20th century. This is but one thread of my literary lineage.

I do not need to write his history.

That had already been done by the Porter County Historical Society in a 1,500-word biographical sketch I found online.

Out of that short bio, there are potentially four books I can write about him. I decided to start with the low-hanging fruit, his Civil War service, 1862-1865.

II.
The literary historical novel is perhaps a new sub-genre of historical novel. T.C. Boyle’s 1998 novel Riven Rock might fit this category, set in my hometown of Santa Barbara, specifically Montecito, based on events in the life of Stanley McCormick, the son of the millionaire inventor.

Other books in this literary historical novel category include The Englist Patient, Girl with a Pearl Earring, A Lesson Before Dying, The Crucible and Lincoln in the Bardo.

This book I’m writing is not Michener or Leon Uris. It is highly imaginative and rendered literary fiction, indirect and understated even as it elevates one man’s experience, Boyle’s novel may be all I need as a predicate for my endeavor.

For ten years, I’ve been reading about the Civil War, including diaries of infantrymen from both sides (Capt Welty was a Union, and commanded cavalry, but that distinction doesn’t really matter to a novelist). I have a 12-pound Civil War Historical Atlas taking up half the coffee table, plus a biography of Union Gen. Phil Sheridan and a tiny volume: Civil War Poetry & Prose of Walt Whitman.

Although my novel is set between June 1863 and November 1864 (for literary reasons), I’ve read all on either side of those 18 months, including the events of Fort Sumter and Appomattox, and Confederate President Davis dishonorably fleeing from Richmond to Georgia on a railcar, stopping briefly north of Greensboro, NC (a matter of personal intersection).

My novel will be an epistolary one, so I have been reading about how the mail worked in those days, including delays that might occur when the mail is intended for a highly-mobile cavalry company, traversing the mountainous terrain of West Virginia and Virginia.

I’ve read about the role of cavalry in the Civil War, which evolved from the offensive cavalry charge to more subtle roles such as screening, raiding and intelligence gathering.

I’ve learned about the guns of the period, the Sharp’s repeating rifles, and the Blakeslee bags that carried one’s ammunition, bulky but highly efficient (the Sharp’s repeating rifle is basically the first semi-automatic weapon, circa 1863).

Research of this nature can become a series of rabbit holes, so the literary writer puts a stop to it at some point.

This novel willbe 20% based on my great-grandfather’s biography and regimental history, 20% based in research and 60%, the bulk of it, will be imagination on my part.

I will need to get into his head and imagine the letters he will be writing home to his mother, and to his brother Brown, an Union infantryman recovering at home from wounds suffered in battle.

III.
This is not a book about grand battles, the ones you may know about, described as pivotal to the Civil War (Shiloh, Antietam, Gettysburg, Lookout Mountain).

General Sherman does not appear in my novel, but Gen. George Custer has a cameo, as I can place his Michigan Cavalry Brigade riding out south out of Winchester, VA in September 1864, at precisely the same time, to the hour, that Capt. Welty and the PA 14th Cavalry are heading toward a joint showdown with Gen. Jubal Early at Fisher’s Hill.

This novel will be called “Skirmish!” as most everything in it will be about the minor skirmishes that I believe were just as pivotal to the war as the major cinematic battles.
In my literary approach, I’m drawing on poet W.H. Auden, who wrote in 1939:

“Nor is there any situation which is essentially more or less interesting than another. Every tea-table is a battlefield littered with old catastrophes and haunted by the vague ghosts of vast issues, every martyrdom an occasion for flip cracks.”

The novel begins in the days just prior to the battle of Gettysburg, which happens to be Capt. Welty’s hometown (he was a schoolteacher before the war).

It concludes in November, 1864, six months ahead of Lee’s surrender to Grant at Appomattox. A literary novel does not have to be present at the High Historic moments, in fact, it should eschew them.

What matters to me are those moments around an evening campfire, both before and after engagements, when my ancestor/protagonist is thinking about the tumultuous events that led to a brush with death, or could lead to his demise in daylight; the thoughts of a 26-year-old former schoolteacher, leading a cavalry company of 100 other men, into a realm they know very little about, but one that has tremendous consequences on the direction of an entire nation.

For many years, I lived in the Piedmont region of North Carolina, a five-hour drive from Washington, D.C., northbound on US 29, through Lynchburg and Charlottesville, avoiding I-95. I could almost hear Earl Hamner’s voiceover from The Waltons as I drove through Nelson County, the setting for John Boy’s fictional Jefferson County. My mood was set by taking that alternative, slower route.

Whenever, I had the opportunity to be in Washington, for work (regenerative medicine initiatives) or pleasure (being “drink dad” for my daughter’s lacrosse tournament, also Bethesda), I made a point to visit the National Gallery of Art, to spend half an hour in front of one painting: El Greco’s, Saint Martin and the Beggar (1597-99).

What is it about a four-hundred-year-old painting based on the Christian saint Martin of Tours that has created this singular ritual for me?

It’s the purity of the silver-blue sky, and the white cloud of looming horse, as the saintsoldier cuts his emerald green cloak in half to share it with the least of these; the purest gesture. He’s actually following Christ’s admonition in Matthew 25:40, to help “the least of these,” which I struggle to do consistently.

I love the verticality of the painting, more portrait than landscape. I love that the horse is in motion, front left hoof lifted, an impatience that marks all acts of compassion. We want to be fully engaged, yet we also want to be on our way.

Note the contract between St. Martin’s armor and ruff collar, and the naked vulnerability of the beggar. In a way, the halving of the cloak is only half-gesture; he still has his essential protection when he rides away. There is no eye contact here either, the beggar is looking straight out toward the horseman’s elbow, and the saint’s gaze is away and actually below his beneficiary.

There is a purity about this interaction, yet there is this indifference for both of them, which might be something of that era, or there’s an interpretation or understanding I have not made. Regardless, a meditation upon this painting grounds me.

It might be the real-life scale of it (76.2” × 41”), and maybe there’s something about the three energy fields balanced (benefactor, recipient, horse).

El Greco’s painting distills everything in our nation’s capitol. I seek no other edifice, no name-etched obelisks, symbols of democracy, or memorials to the fallen in wars.

I head home, crossing the Potomac into Virginia over Francis Scott Key bridge, recalling what W.B. Yeats’ wrote in his poem “Easter, 1916”: “All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.”

I’ve developed a similar ritual with Mark Rothko’s color field painting No. 14 1960 at SF MOMA and Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire at the National Gallery in London. These are important pilgrimages.

(photo: Bing Images)

I.
Most Santa Barbara natives have a memory of Don & Shirley’s Pony Rides, located on level terrain near Stearns Wharf and the beach promenade.

I’ve done some research and learned that Don Guenthart and his wife Shirley opened the place in 1958 and closed it in 1977. Later, he started a landscaping business and passed away in 2005.

Guenthart was known as “Pony Man” or “Cowboy Don.”

A web photograph from shows an entrance sign reading “Pony Ride and Party Place” and a 45-cent price for each ride.

Think of the impact! I’m estimating that thousands of children made that delightful circuit atop a pony, guided by Cowboy Don.

It’s one of my earliest memories, but also an incomplete one. I don’t recall the exact location but I think it was near Cabrillo Blvd and Garden Street. There’s an adobe Visitor Center and a carousel attraction there now. Behind it was the “hobo jungle,” near the Southern Pacific tracks.

I can’t remember the exact year or the occasion, but I’m estimating I was there in 1963, around the time of my fifth birthday.

Santa Barbara author Neal Graffey has pointed out to me that some of the ponies were Shetlands.

Some people even remember the names of the pony that they rode at Don and Shirley’s: Zipper, Patches, Buttons, Sir James, Sundown, Queenie, Tojo, Cricket, Prince, Pete, Dude, Lil Red, Licorice and Blackie.

Others remember that twenty-five cents (original pricing) allowed three circuits around the ring.

I thought you only got one lap for your quarter. My sister Joy remembers the place better than I do.

II.
How does this seemingly random event from almost sixty years ago remain in my senior brain?

I’m fascinated by its shelf life, impressed by the chemical and neurobiological mechanics that evolved in our human brains that allows me to save and retrieve it. What a delicious intricacy!

The pony rides came up as subject matter when I was writing my first memoir, It Happens That Fast, following my ischemic stroke in late 2015. That debut memoir grew out of a therapist’s prompt to respond to my near-death experience, by writing about my life.

Unimpressed by narrative arc of 58 years. I chose an earlier period, 1958-1983, specifically my childhood and young adult years in Santa Barbara.

Writing a memoir involves a massive retrieval of memories and other remembrances from the mind vault.

I had the guys in the memory warehouse working overtime, with pallet jacks and forklifts, reclaiming solid seminal events, plus the slippery details of school day slights and idyllic afternoons frog chasing in Maria Ygnacio creek.

III.
A memory inhabits a position of esteem, somewhere between a garage sale chicken-shaped saltshaker and a Pollock painting at a Christie’s auction.

Memories can be like T.S. Eliot’s “heap of broken images” from The Wasteland or the ash piles beneath the searing eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg in The Great Gatsby; there’s a lot of sifting you have to do.

Working the memory bank has its ups and downs. Some days it’s a gold mine; other days, a landfill, complete with rodents and seagulls.

A memory will cross cut all five senses.

It might lead to triggering buried emotional trauma, or it could be completely false altogether.

IV.
What is a memory?

Is a memory merely a chemical etching on a neurological substrate, or is it an independent thing or entity? Does it have a life of its own?

Is it possible to assign a memory financial value and trade it on a Nostalgia Exchange, like a stock or a bond? If you’ve forgotten how to ride a bike, can I sell you my memory of how to do it, like an artifact on EBay?

Memorizing a military password might have saved your life in certain situations. Remembering where you buried the gold doubloons on the island could be the difference between a keg of rum or a keelhauling.

The human brain weighs about three pounds, around 1-2% of total body mass. Yet the brain consumes 20% of oxygen intake and requires a sophisticated level of food metabolism to keep it going.

V.
Bodies sleep. The brain never goes to sleep. The brain is always functioning, without a power nap or a vacation, and much of that time it is devoted to manufacturing memories, using protein synthesis to consolidate and distribute them across the cortical regions, for future use.

A memory undergoes three functional steps in the brain: encoding, storage and retrieval.

Memories are creatures of hippocampal formation in the limbic system; they move freely among the “jelly roll” folds of association in the brain. Cortex means bark in Latin, and those squiggly tree bark convolutions serve a purpose. The ridges and furrows form in the second trimester of pregnancy, the buckling like a large blanket crammed into a breadbox.

And what is the role of memory in natural selection and advancing a species? Some memories keep us out of danger (hot stove, barbed wire, rabid dog). But what is the meaning and value of recalling an enjoyable and non-life-threatening Sunday afternoon pony ride, with the breeze coming lightly off the Pacific Ocean?

VI.
Remembering an afternoon at Don & Shirley’s pony rides is known as a declarative (autobiographical, episodic) memory in the region of the brain called the hippocampus, the center of emotion, memory and the autonomic nervous system.

There is also emotional memory in my amygdala, located lower in the brain stem, my so-called “lizard brain.” also remember how to ride a pony, balancing in the saddle and staying off the ground, in my hippocampal circuits, in my “muscle memory.”

Consider the sophisticated circuitry involved.

According to Dr. Paul Reber at Northwestern University, the human brain consists of about one billion neurons, and each neuron forms about 1,000 connections to other neurons, amounting to more than a trillion connections. If each neuron only stored one single memory, running out of space might be a problem. Yet our neurons combine so that each one accommodates many memories at a time, exponentially increasing the brain’s memory storage capacity to something closer to around 2.5 petabytes.

Unfortunately, we don’t know how to measure the size of an individual memory. Some memories take up more space than others. Some memories are forgotten, freeing up more real estate. Some things are just not worth remembering.

There are roughly 12,000 members of the Facebook’s Santa Barbara “Damn Right I Grew up in Santa Barbara!!” nostalgia group.

We’re all going to have different associations for Don’s Pony Rides, including the sounds of the riding ring, the way leather on the smooth saddle horn felt to the touch, the smell of horse dung and sawdust. Maybe it was sunny on the day you went, and in my memory the ocean fog rolled in or it rained that day.

Maybe your parents argued on the way there and mine did not argue. Maybe you were terrified of animals, or heights, in a way that I was not.

Almost sixty years later, we share memories as a kind of shorthand, a language that connects us to each other.

They live in the present.

(Auburn, CA)

“She’s breaking apart, Captain” – Scottie, Star Trek

I.
What if you got to a point in your life where you cannot not bounce back from sustained adversity?

I had such a year in 2003: chapter 7 bankruptcy, foreclosures, divorce, closing down a services company we owned, its failure directly attributable to 9/11 repercussions, losing my job as General Manager during a recession, my maternal grandmother passing at age 100, zero in savings and income, and $2,000 a month in child support to keep both daughters in private school at half-tuition (non negotiable). My total child support paid (on time or early) for 2003 was more than my 1040 gross income. How did I do it? How did I pay to live, rent, insurance and groceries?

I didn’t.

Many people have a year like that, or worse, it goes on for a decade.

When I got off up the mat from that 2003 TKO, the economic leveling of 2008, knocked me right back down and those two daughters were in college or headed toward it, followed just a few years later by two weddings. I have not fully recovered from 2003.

II.
What if you can no longer bend like a palm tree in the breeze?

What if it is all just too much to handle?

Sometimes it’s easier to shatter into a million pieces.

When you drop a wineglass in your kitchen, it not only shatters, you find rogue shards for months after (with your heel and toes), and some pieces you never find at all.

III.
Conventional wisdom tells us we should be more resilient and adaptable.

What if you bounce back into exactly the right shape and position? What have you learned from the adversity?

How adaptable you can be if you try to approach every challenge in the same way with the same rigid approach and thinking?

My teachable moments last years, sometimes decades, and I know deep-down what I’m made of. I’ve touched bottom in the dark valley of the soul, and it’s granite.

IV.
Our word “resilience” derives from re-salire (literally, to jump back). I don’t know about you, but backward is not the way I like to move. Retreat, especially in a leaping motion, is not natural. It’s like walking in deep sand at the beach wearing a big pair of swim fins.

Some people are highly elastic (“I bend but I don’t break”) That’s the problem – you went back to the same shape you were before.

Resilience does not lead to lasting insight, or transformation. Resilience leads resilience, and stasis, the status quo, “in the state in which things were.”

V.
I say disintegrate. Atomize and make something new out of the pieces, like a Lego set or Lincoln Logs. You can make it as fun, and as playful.

Cue Patsy Cline, I Fall to Pieces.

When you are atomized, you have more surface area, more coastline. When you are granular, you can pass through the sieve (or the eye of the needle) in a way you cannot when you are a solid object.

VI.

What do I mean by shatter?

Start with the root word of shatter, scatter.

Woody Allen once said “half of life is just showing up.”

Don’t show up.

Make yourself scarce. Don’t volunteer. Go to the library. Read about any subject you want. Read all the magazines that start with the letter E: Esquire, the Economist, Elle, Entrepreneur, Eco Kids Planet. Go over to the Art Section: Grab a big giant art book on Cezanne, Turner or Mark Rothko. Stare at the pictures.

Eat less. Take a normal lean cuisine and spread it over three meals. Get a 12” sub and cut into four pieces. Make oatmeal with tiny things: blueberries, dried date pieces, chopped walnuts, cinnamon.

I got rid of a car in 2019, which lowered my expenses by $500 a month, easily. I’m college educated; I can figure out public transportation, from local buses up to Amtrak. Just allow twice as long to get there. When you are leveled flat, you are wealthy in one area most people aren’t: time.

I stopped wearing socks in 2020, during the pandemic. My standard now is a pair of Olu Kai shoes, which become my coral reef water shoes as they age. Sockless, I will wear compression socks on long plane flights, which kind of socks.

Get rid of things, then go deeper. Your identity. I used to be a husband, a father, a neighbor (the one who rented the lawn aerator every October) and a banker. Now, I’m just a poet, and on some days, a grant writer, and on other days a publisher.

Here are two ways to proactively shatter your life (it’s going to happen anyway):

1. Atomize your Day

Why are meetings one hour in duration or even 30 minutes? With asynchronous communications, like email, theres’s no longer a need for everyone to sit around a table for an hour and repeat the status of everything.

Have you thought about eight-minute meetings?

What about one-sentence paragraphs?

What about an email that only has words in the Subject Line?

Why do most slide decks have 39 slides pack to the gills, and the presenter reads every word of every slide? Create a five-slide deck….all pictures, no words.

My lawyer friends understand the eight-minute meeting concept, living as they do in seven-minute billable increments, in order to make partner.

I’m always more productive when I break a major project into smaller chunks, and inject resting, reading or walking between each session.

2. Atomize your Wallet.

Go get a $20 bill from the ATM.

Now, take it inside the bank and change it for twenty one-dollar bills. Find ways to make it last.

Go to the Dollar Store or Daiso in the mall. Buy twenty things. Have fun.

Jon Obermeyer lives in a 300 sq ft studio condo on the island of Oahu. He rides the Holo bus everywhere, including Oahu’s 125 public access beaches, all with a bus stop. When he splurges, it’s on first-class airfare and trips to Indonesia, Mexico and the Philippines, to Sequim, WA and Ojai, CA, and to Moneta, VA, where his friend Billy Howland has a lake house, a pontoon boat, bass fishing rigs and bottles of his proprietary small-batch barbecue sauce, made with Roanoke brewery beer and honey.

I.
Several years ago, I was housesitting a friend’s coastal home in Beaufort, NC, a place in a residential neighborhood he’d purchased six months earlier.

Carless at the time, I’d taken Amtrak from Cary to Morehead City and an Uber to the house, stopping at the Piggly Wiggly on the way to pick up groceries. There was no car in the driveway.

I’d had a nice White Russian for a nightcap around 11am, and went to sleep. I was awakened at midnight by a flashlight in my face from a Carteret County Sheriff Deputy, whose cruiser sat in the driver, blue flashing lights swirling in the air from Harkers Island to Pine Knoll Shores, law enforcement radio crackling.

I stood there, a week shy of my 60th birthday, in my boxer briefs and not much else (small animals and small children sought immediate shelter).

Was I so-and-so? A name I did not recognize.

I explained the chain of title to the nice deputy, concluding with my friend in Greensboro, whom I was happy to call despite my midnight stupor.

He did not apologize. He seemed satisfied with my answers, turned off his flashlight and returned to his cruiser, where he sat for an hour writing up his report, swirling lights silenced.

I found out later that a previous resident was suicidal, and the Beaufort house was his last known address. I can’t blame the Sheriff Dept; they were only working with the information they had: a family member’s concern, a remembered address.

II.
A week ago, a friend of a friend stopped answering his phone. His mother had called my friend and was worried. The friend of the friend had been known to have health issues, and lived two miles from me.

As a favor to my friend, I went out of my way and checked on the man’s business. It was shuttered at 9am, with no activity all day and shuttered again at 3pm, on my way home. I reported back to my friend and we waited.

There was a key under the mat at this man’s apartment, which would let us in to check on him. I offered to help. We decided to honor his privacy and did not check in.

He was not answering his phone, but we surmised that had more to do with the battery dying and not intentional avoidance.

Finally, another friend went by, opened the door with key under the mat, found the man passed out (reason unknown), dead-man carried him out the door, and drove him to an ER (a block from my condo; I watch the LifeFlight choppers descend like dragonflies on the hospital roof, in a scene out of Apocalypse Now.)

Six hours later, our passed-out friend was back home, full of fluids and discharged post-haste (I’ve found the bum rush of hospitals having to do with their concern that we will contract their un-checked MRSA strains, which could kill us even as we seek their medical help).

All’s well that ends. Key back under the mat. Mother relieved.

What would you have done?

Would you have intervened right away, or held off even longer?

III.
An hour ago, I heard a woman muttering and shouting incoherently outside my door, below at ground level. It was 9:30am in the morning, and this is Ward Avenue, a major Honolulu connector, just east of downtown between Beratania Ave (sea level) and Makiki Heights, Punchbowl Crater, Tantalus, above me.

The street life out my window is real Hawaii, not the one you see from an outrigger canoe or at a luau.

There are times that my neighborhood (decidedly urban, but I live on Oahu, with perfect weather everyday) reminds me of Pennsylvania Avenue in Potrero Hill in San Francisco, just above Dogpatch, adjacent to the projects where O.J. Simpson grew up (9mm gunfire at night, shell casings on the sidewalk on 20th Street, a gentleman gut-knifed in the next block for not giving up his backpack).

The woman on Ward continued with her rant, crossing over to the west side, dodging car and bus traffic (#4 Holo, #123 Holo).

Like a snake shedding a skin, she was wailing about some grievanc and stepping out of a pair of white coveralls, weaving on the sidewalk on a pedestrian bridge over the H1. She was wearing all black beneath, in what looked like spandex or Spanx®.

I put down my coffee and picked up my phone to call 911. I was not afraid for me or anyone on that H1 bridge sidewalk. I was afraid for her.

By the time I thought it through (opening the keypad and touching the “9” key, like the scene in Crimson Tide, where the sub commander (Gene Hackman) is about to turn the key to launch the nukes), all had gone quiet, other than the H1 traffic pulse.

By the time I looked up, Upset Woman was moving down Ward steadily towards Kinau Ave and Beratania and HoMA, her white coveralls in a pile on the bridge.

I suspect she’s in front of the Jack in the Box on Ward right now, across from Patagonia, across from the Lamborghini and Porsche dealerships, at the edge of Ward Village, near the $7.8 billion Howard Hughes master-planned mixed-use development.


Yes, this post is an indictment on our affluence and our difference, with one trillionaire and this woman on the other side of the scale, cancelling him out.

IV.
The next time I see something like that, I will call 911.

I will call the moment I hear the ranting.

This is what we pay our taxes for, to keep her from self-harm, getting hit by a bus. This is what humans do.

Coda
There is no door code for my condo. I do not have a house key under my mat, but my on-island buddy T.K. has a copy. So does my boss on the Mainland. My home address is published on the Internet, quite easily found. If you don’t hear from me for a few days and I’m not answering my phone, open my door and check-on on me, or call 911. Mahalo.

I.
I was new to town, two weeks after Labor Day, during the first year of the Pandemic.

I was making myself at home in an upstairs furnished room in the Berkeley Hills, adding homey finishing touches that don’t ruin the landlord’s careful paint job or mess with the new area rug.

The air quality from California and Oregon forest fires that week was still poor, with an orange (“unhealthy for sensitive groups”) reading, after two straight weeks of red and purple (“very unhealthy”). On a return trip from Bend to Berkeley earlier that week, I’d driven right through the recent remains of a fire that had crossed over highway 97 an hour earlier, the roadside stumps still smoldering, mop-up crews working both sides of the road.

Most days the Bay Area sky looked ominous; on this day, it was merely haze, with a hint of menace.

II.
Marin Avenue in Berkeley is steeper than any street you might find on Russian or Potrero Hill in San Francisco.

My friend and author client, the late Lou Smith, wore out the clutch on his VW on Marin Avenue, commuting between Union Seminary in Berkeley and his home in Lafayette.

The descent to the fountain traffic circle on Marin Avenue might remind you of a double black diamond ski slope at Tahoe Heavenly, sans the moguls.

There are at least three different temperate zones as you drive down Marin Avenue: Canadian Arctic at the top at Grizzly Peak Blvd, North American in the middle at Shattuck Ave., Sonora Desert at the bottom.

I don’t understand the municipal planner logic, but at some point on “lower” Marin Avenue (a curving, less steep section), Berkeley becomes Albany.

In the middle of the block, you switch cities. There’s no natural border like a river, or even a cross street. Just a street sign announcing the transition.

Albany’s main drag is Solano Avenue. With its mile-long mix of restaurants, grocery stores and retail, it might remind you of your former downtown from the 1960’s, but with a hip, Nor Cal vibe. Small retailers (florists, bookstores) and one-off medical/dental/acupuncture practices.

At the Colusa Avenue intersection, there’s a Union 76 gas station, a complete anomaly. I’m surprised the residents allow it.

III.
Further down Solano Avenue, there’s a Zen emporium called Tenzing Collections. It’s kind of a “small box” Dick’s Sporting Goods for Buddhists, but not so branded or chain-like.

I entered with reverence, browsed and paid attention to each breath. Centered by the dharma-themed displays, I had insight into the true nature of reality. It was all very Vipassana.

I selected a Tibetan singing bowl, plus a wood mallet and a colorful sunburst batik to cover a small round table in my new bedroom, the one with four windows overlooking a canopy layer of elegant oak tree branches and leaves.

I felt terrific about my selections (maybe they chose me). I was making my new home complete.

III.
“Would you like a receipt for your purchase?” the helpful and cheerful Tenzing clerk asked.

“What is a receipt, really?” I asked my bodhisattva buddy: less Western question, more Eastern contemplation.

I thought, within a Buddhist framework, “is the receipt not a form of attachment, protecting me in case my purchase happened to be fraudulent?”

Is the receipt, though slight and easily discarded, not some form of Entitlement residue?

Isn’t it really the Ego that requires a receipt?

I’d confused the clerk, obviously.

I felt like I was being a dick, so I took the receipt and thanked the puzzled clerk for his benevolence. In this kind of store, you almost feel like bowing at the end of things.

IV.
Back in my room, the batik served as an elegant substrate for my bedroom altar: the singing bowl and mallet surrounded by river stones from the Upper Yuba and the Deschutes River in Oregon, by driftwood from Point Reyes Seashore and Surfer’s Point in Ventura.

Add a bronze surfer sculpture that my daughter Liz made me in 3rd grade, next to a cheap-ass “Guardian Angel” candle from the Hispanic food aisle at Raley’s that cost less than $3.

I’m not going to pay $8 for something with a bayberry, lavender or vanilla scent, without some serious spiritual payback.

V.
In early November, Northern California winter rains restored the air quality, like the hillsides, to green.

Despite my overkill philosophizing in the zen store, I am going to stick to my guns.

A plethora of printed retail receipts are but small paper markers for spiritual insecurity, reverse Tibetan prayer flags, fluttering in the wind, if you will.

Receipts are not only wasteful, they advance nothing.

What does the Tao have to say about receipts?

Evidently, nothing, which of course means, everything; I’m paying attention.

I’d prefer to trust the universal integrity of each retail transaction, and leave one tiny branch of one tree in a forest, somewhere, completely intact.

If you enjoyed this piece, you might want to take a look at Hear Me Out or Migratory Patterns, my most recent essay collections, with several essays published in Santa Clara Review.

(Riverfront Park, Spokane)

I.
Abraham Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Human Needs” pyramid was not even his idea. A management consultant made it up.

It’s not even that scientific.

The Hierarchy Five (from baseline Physiological Needs, to Safety, Love and Belonging, to Esteem, to the peak Self-Actualization) is a flyer, a Hail Mary pass into the endzone.

Maslow first proposed the Hierarchy in a 1943 paper “A Theory of Human Motivation,” in Psychological Review.

As a teenage surf rat taking Mr. Pfeil’s Geometry at Santa Barbara High School in 1975, I gravitated to the triangle instantly.

Triangles, Scalene et. al., have been around a while.

The basic four-level Food Group Triangle (Breads and Cereals, Vegetables, Proteins, Fats and Oils) has been around at least since 1965, when I first saw it in a second grade classroom at Foothill Elementary.

II.
In college, I saw the Maslow pyramid in a psychology textbook. In a miracle of the brain’s pattern recognition, I seized upon it.

Disclaimer: I’m an English major with an MFA in Creative Writing because I flunked out of Statistics in the spring of 1977.

I read back issues of Psychology Today in my high school library in a for-credit class called simply, Reading.

I wanted to be a psychologist but the field was beyond me.

Back to Reynolds Hall (English) I crept, tale between my legs, trading in Carl Jung for John Updike, Carl Rogers for Ezra Pound

III.
What if we’ve had it wrong for 80 years? What if Maslow really meant his theory to be visualized in a different geometric shape, other than the simplistic Isosceles Triangle

Doesn’t the concept of Self-Actualization deserve something more complex, like a parallelogram?

Like life, the parallelogram has no right angles and uneven sides.

Let’s make A, Physiological Needs, B, Safety, C, Love and and D, Belonging and Esteem (Maslow’s fats and oils, as it were)

And in the center spot, E, we position Self Actualization, the bulls-eye of human ambition.

This might be what Maslow (1908-1970) actually had in mind. We’ll never know for sure, will we?

IV.
Before I dismiss class, let’s take another look at the Big Kahuna, Self Actualization, the rarely attainable, ethereal, Mt. Everest of the Hierarchy.

From a Tao perspective, (or the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas), Self-Actualization pervades all aspects of human endeavor, as Oolong tea leaves diffuse into hot water.

As I pursue my daily veggie pita wrap, wearing my bamboo v-neck tee, my cashmere sweater and corduroy Carhartt cattleman’s chore coat and my Birdwell surf shorts, am I not self-actualizing?

As I show up to Zoom meetings three minutes early, and fill out my monthly expense report, in pursuit of job security and pension security, am I not self-actualizing?

Self-actualizing is nothing spatial, simultaneous to all other needs, and thus, we attach a small block of plastique to the poser Pyramid and light the fuse. Fire in the hole! (Shadoobie, shattered).

V.
As a creative, I’m deeply committed to the pursuit of self-actualization.

By writing, independently publishing and sharing an oeuvre of over 40 books of creative work (poetry, essay, short fiction, memoir), plus writing guides, I’m fully optimized, firing on all cylinders, as they say.

Look at the etymology, actualization from the adjective actual, deriving from the Old French actuel (“existing, up to date”), a descendant of the Latin actus (“doing”), all the way back to ancient PIE root ag (“to drive, draw out of”)

Self-Actualization is quite simple.

It’s 6:40 a.m.. Greet intrusive Sol and his pesky sunbeams.

Don’t hit the “snooze” button. Put your feet on the floor.

Shower. Dress. Get the kids out the door. Heat water. Grind coffee beans. Find a #2 paper filter. Put the coffee grounds in the compost bin.

Look at you, self-actualizing.

If you enjoyed this piece, you might take a look at Hear Me Out or Migratory Patterns, my most recent essay collections, with several essays published in Santa Clara Review.

.

I. Gifts
Nature constantly presents us with indelible images, easy to walk right past. I turn them into poems, to tell a larger story.

Being a writer is less about talent and more about paying attention to the world.

We love our families. We love animals. Is it possible to love an inanimate object, to get to know it intimately and its uncover a connection to the world?

Of course.

Ask a painter. Ask a scientist. Ask a poet.

We know exactly what to do with what we've been given.

II. Northern California
My friend John Miller and I once spent half a day at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Marin County, west of Fairfax, on an intentional group walk with an ecologist, Fernando Augeldo-Silva (a professor of biology and life sciences at College of Marin).

This was a spiritual retreat. It was far more engaging to be outside with an ecologist, then it was on a cushion inside a stuffy-air retreat center with 300 other humans, listening to a dharma talk.

First, he had has meditate in the middle of a meadow for 20 minutes. It had to have been in the Fall, as the land around us was California golden-brown, the color of hefeweizen.

He showed us how the countryside was in motion (just four miles from the San Andreas Fault in the Olema/Tomales Bay region).

That hillside above us was a wave in the ocean, cresting and about to break. The needlegrass was a transitive verb.

He taught us how a nearby creek, seemingly dry, was like a vein, connected to wetlands and the Pacific ocean to the west.

The dead salmon come up the creek from the sea, die and the dead cells imbue the roots of the oak tree.

The rotting arch of a fallen oak was actually in the middle of a subtle act of disintegrating, the tips of the dead branches released into the air as invisible particulate.

We think of a tree decomposing into earth. Our ecologist suggested that some of it becomes airborne.

Consider coastal fog, the kind that west Marin County is famous for, spilling over the hill at Sausalito, streaming through the Golden Gate at the Headlands, crossing the Bay and nosing up against the Berkeley Hills during the night.

Fog is created from microscopic airborne particles, known as condensation nuclei. The tiny particles are the seeds, allowing water vapor in cool marine air (the cold upwelling of the Eastern Pacific) to condense into the visible liquid droplets.

A fog bank, then, is not one single gray thing but ten trillion airborne, encapsulated particles that you cannot see.


III. North Carolina

Driftwood, Extra Large

Six months after Hurricane Florence,
we find the spiky, bleached tree trunk

at the edge of the surf on Radio Island,
missing roots and branches;

only the ragged middle remains.
What would you do with this bole?

Chainsaw sculpt it into a bench
that lives in your foyer? Leave it whole

and lower it as a centerpiece
into your garden? We know

exactly what to do with sand dollars,
conch shells and shark’s teeth.

What to do with a one-ton anomaly?
Let the tide return it to the sea.

“Driftwood, Extra Large” originally published in Your Mileage May Vary: Poems (2019)

I.

I don’t want to step on any toes of my friends, or their interest in poetry, but I have three poet recommendations in parallel with reading the work of the late Mary Oliver.

Though Oliver was a fine poet, who remains very accessible, these are female poets who I would recommend if you really want to know poetry.

I have a high bar for poetry, starting with Imagists T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, then W.B. Yeats and W.H. Auden, Pablo Neruda and Gary Snyder, and in our modern era, the late Philip Levine, Richard Hugo, Jim Harrison, Seamus Heaney and Charles Simic, as well as Robert Pinsky, Stephen Dobyns, Donald Hall. Let’s throw in poets I know including John Thomas York, Stuart Dischell, Terry Kennedy, Christopher Howell and Garrett Hongo.

That’s a phenomenal reading list right there. The list of names omitted is equally impressive.

I come by my poetry recommendations with strong credentials.

I’ve been writing poetry my entire life, since age 10, which accelerated in college when I visited Edinburgh, Scotland, Dublin, Ireland, the Lake District, and hiked the Wye River on the Wales-England border where Wordsworth wrote his famous Tintern Abbey poem.

I hold an MFA in Creative Writing from UNC Greensboro, where I studied under the late Robert Watson (a Randall Jarrell protege, with poetry books published by Knopf), and the late NC Poet Laureate Fred Chappell. I served as an Associate Poetry Editor of The Greensboro Review and earned an Honorable Mention for my poetry from the American Academy of Poets.

I’ve independently published 16 collections of poetry, including “Siren Call SF” with photographer Dwayne Newton and the forthcoming “Listening to the Light,” a painting-poetry collaboration with Ojai Chumash painter Brenda Mercado. I publish in small regional literary journals and national journals like The Greensboro Review, Cobalt and Santa Clara Review.

I’m a three time finalist for the Applewhite Poetry Prize, which includes publication in North Carolina Literary Review.

I know poetry, and I know excellent poetry. Mary Oliver is not at the top of my list, though she is accomplished and taps into a wider spiritual zeitgeist, along with David Whyte (for starters.)

Name links below are to Poetry Foundation poet pages; book links are to Amazon, or visit your local bookseller.

Jane Hirshfeld, The Asking: New and Selected Poems

Jane lives in Marin County. I first met her through Tom Ingalls of Missing Links Press. I heard her read to a packed room of 100 people in Santa Cruz in 2023. She is phenomenal, maybe one of our best.

Sara Lindsay, Twigs and Nucklebones and Debt to the Bone-Eating Snotflower

Sarah was in my MFA poetry workshop, and we read together last June in Greensboro. Both those books are published by Copper Canyon Press.

Mary Karr, Sinners Welcome: Poems – A Hilarious Catholic Conversion Story of Faith, Loss, and Irreverent Prayer

Yes, that Mary Karr, memoir author of The Liar’s Club (1995), Cherry (2001), and Lit (2009). I’m reading Sinners Welcome right now, and enjoying it.

Poetry is a tiny genre that most publishers won’t touch. Siren Call SF, my poetry-photography collaboration with Dwayne Newton, has sold out its first print run of 400 copies. We are printing 1,000 hardbound copies of “Listening to the Light” but that book will contain 30 of Brenda Mercado’s oil paintings, alongside my poems inspired by them. Those are impressive numbers, yet my own collections of pure poetry have sold less than 50 copies each, which is why I’ve always had a day job, be that a banker, business owner, marketing executive or grant writer. Poetry is an avocation.

Auden, speaking of Yeats’ death, wrote:

“For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.”

Decidedly non-commercial but infinitely meaningful, poetry has much in common with obscure hobbies like rock balancing, tamari ball embroidery, wayang puppet making, paper making or bonsai cultivation. Not everyone does it, few understand it, but the value and meaning is unlike anything else we know.

Next up: Eight Hawaiian Poets You Should Know (one for each island), starting with Garrett Hongo, who publishes in The New Yorker

(Rincon Point, 1974)

I.
If you want to know the Montecito of my high school years (1974-1976), Nixon to Ford to Carter, watch the movie 20th Century Women, starring Annette Bening, Greta Gerwig, Billy Crudup and Elle Fanning. Director Mike Mills, you did it. Any movie featuring a VW bug parked next to the pink wall is the real deal.

Oprah ruined Montecit…

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