Red often runs right into the back door in his hurry to get to work. He ran over a chicken this afternoon when I yelled “come, bye” but she squawked and survived. This morning, at the chiropractor, I stepped into the bathroom and when I came out Red was gone. Where is he?, I asked Caitlin, the receptionist. Oh, she said he went into one of the other examining rooms to visit the woman who he met here in the waiting room. I knocked on the door, and it opened and Red came skittering out.
He seems to be developing a friendship with Lulu, one of our donkeys. Other dogs just do not do this. She joins him when he is watching the sheep, and he doesn’t seem to notice. But more and more they are together and Lulu seems to love watching Red herd the sheep. Where is this friendship going? Border collies are wonderfully strange, they live inside of their own heads and hear and see things we will never hear or see.
They say that artists return to the same scenes time and again, and I think that will be true for me going back to this farmhouse, I just am drawn to these dignified barns and they somewhat emotional way they line up with the farmhouse. I’ve gone back there twice now and hope to visit it through the Spring and Summer.
Some of you may not yet know that Strut, our rooster and a charter member of the Bedlam Farm Men’s Club, was dispatched last week after he attacked me and Maria, and drew a bit of blood. I hardly know anyone who has had a rooster or been around one that didn’t have to get rid of them, one way or another. I’ve had some good and gentle ones, but mostly, they turn mean when they get older and bigger. A testosterone thing, it happens to many men.
The death of Strut marked something of an evolution for me in my writing, and for the blog and people who follow it. I think there is a much greater understanding of what the life of a farm is like. I am not a farmer, but I do live on a farm, and my idea of life is not to have me, Maria or the many people, including children, who visit here, get scarred or assaulted by a rooster, even though he is just doing his job. I found that this time what was different is that I didn’t have to explain this, it wasn’t one of those Internet hysterias. You may recall the raging controversies swirling whenever an animal dies here or was put to death. I live on the curious boundary between pets and animals and I work hard to bridge that gap. Sometimes I do, sometimes not.
In America, there are now very many people who value animal life as much or more than human life, and who find death in any form unacceptable. While I wish they were running the government, I’m glad they are not running my farm.
Strut was a good rooster, a beautiful and dutiful creature. Only one person wrote me an angry message, suggesting I didn’t value life and also venturing the idea that I’d probably kill Zelda if she knocked me or Red down again. She took exception to my saying I had become a good shot, no doubt thinking I was crowing like a rooster. But I am glad I am a good shot, as the animals I have to shoot do not suffer. She said she was taking a sabbatical from the blog. A good idea, I think. I have come to believe in cooling off periods. Still, I take responsibility for putting up appealing photos of these animals, and I understand why it is a shock to people when they die. As I wrote last week, photography is an intimate art, and when you photograph something as often as I photographed Strut, I feel it in a particular way. I try and remember the animals who are gone. It is a long and glorious list.
The farm is the Mother, it has taught me so much about life and death, acceptance and ethics.
Scott Turow, the head of the American Author’s Guild has written an angry and passionate piece in the New York Times this week lamenting the “Slow Death Of The American Author,” citing the digital revolution, e-books, pirated books, Amazon, the corporatizing of publishing, foreign imports, recent court rulings, the plummeting price of books and shrinking royalties. Turow, a gifted best selling novelist, was both angry and dire in his prediction that new and mid-list writers (me) would not be able to survive all of these legal and digital and economic changes.
The piece is pretty grim, I have to say, yet I also have to say I don’t feel about my future the way Scott Turow does. Writing and reading and story-telling are flourishing as never before, I am writing more than ever before, and steadily building a whole new kind of audience. If I do my work, they will support it. For me, the challenge of the writer is to change, not to vanish from the earth.
My writing life has surely changed, and I’ve shared some of that with you. Even without owning two farms, revenue from advances and royalties has shrunk as the digital revolution hit the writing life like a tsunami. My royalty checks buy us a few meals at Momma’s. I think when people like Scott Turow, who is conscientiously fighting for the writes of embattled authors talks about the author, he is talking about people who used to take several years to write a book, could live off of the revenues generated by advances and royalties from hard cover books. That has changed. I can’t simply write a book every year or two and live off of that. Books are too cheap (or free) for me to compete with in the wold way. I need to develop new and diverse platforms for my writing, story-telling, and to take more responsibility for my own marketing.
I began doing that five or six years ago. The blog is part of it. So is social media. The videos are part of it. The photography began as part of it, and has evolved into something else. I am planning to begin a series of podcasts soon, another way of reaching current and prospective readers. My life is not the same as it was, and I am a New York Times bestseller (five different times). But to be a different kind of writer, a new kind of writer isn’t the same thing as being a vanishing writer. I am getting where I need to be. My blog is not just about selling books, it is about my life – and in many ways, yours.
About 30,000 people visit my blog every day. More than 10,400 people follow me on Facebook, more on Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest. I average 4,000 views a video on YouTube. None of these statistics and outlets would have been considered a part of the writing life of John Updike, Philip Roth or F. Scott Fitzgerald. They will be part of the new author and his or her life, the new scorecard, more important than reviews or literary luncheons.
There are so many opportunities now for writers to share and sell their stories, even in all of the chaos of change. More stories are being bought and read by more people in more ways than at anytime in human history. If I can’t make a living in that environment, then I deserve to go the way of the dinosaur. My challenge is to evolve, not complain, to survive, not disappear, to see my writing future as vital, not over. I accept the reality of the Internet. It is here, and I can either get hit by the train or jump aboard. I haven’t noticed any publishers going broke. Freed of the constraints of returns, packaging and shipping, publishers are making boxcars full of money. Writing is not a dying industry.
Scott is correct that the Internet has obliterated traditional publishing notions of publishing, royalties, payments. Writers will not be supported by generous publishers or subsidized in their lives any longer. Maybe that is too bad, but for me, this is what creativity is all about. Being creative. I think too much of the American author to think they will roll over and disappear. We are a stubborn and inventive lot.
I have no crystal balls and can’t say for sure if I will survive as a writer. I plan to. My agent says I have positioned myself well to move into the next chapter of writing, and we’ll see about that. I intend to remain both relevant and creative. I think reports of my death are premature.
I was talking with a friend yesterday and she turned to me and said, “you know, Jon, I can’t help but notice that you seem so grounded these days, you seem to be at peace.” I was surprised by this, I have never thought of myself that way. My mind is quite often a raging inferno of images, regrets, resentments, obligations and worries. But when I thought about it, I saw that she is right in some ways, to some degree. In many respects, I have never been more challenged in my life than I am now. In others, I have never been more at peace.
I do not panic about life any more, I am more accepting of it. I was never great at being young, I like being older in a lot of ways. I am finally understanding my life. No one can predict how life will evolve, but as of today, as of right now, I am closer to peace than ever, and peace of mind has was one of the prime goals of my spiritual life. And what do I mean by peace?
I have fewer big decisions to make about my life. I know who I am going to be with, I know where I am going to be, I know what I am going to be. I have come to see, rather than just say, that the perfect life is not perfect. I have plenty of things to face in my life, great challenges, the great drama of aging well and wisely. I intend to be an author, to be relevant in the face of radical change. I intend to control the process by which I grow older and eventually die, and one of the great creative challenges will be to have a good death, not a death that others define for me. More importantly, I intend to live well and fully in the meantime, and to do good creative work for a good while.
So peace for me means clarity. And confidence. I have learned what it is to be authentic, or to try, to face up to myself, to find love and to learn to be honest. I am not struggling with me, or with my relation to the world. It is peaceful. It feels good.
