20 October

Coming Home. The Gift Of Missing

by Jon Katz
Coming Home
Coming Home

Maria and I just concluded our longest separation from one another since we met fix or six years ago. We talked about missing each other, and I told her how lucky I felt I was to have someone in my life that I missed, that life is hardly worth living if you don’t have anything to miss. I missed Maria, but I was too busy to dwell on it, and so was she. She has a lot of friends, and she ran around with most of them all day Saturday.

She and Red did a lot of sheepherding together, and there were no signs that he missed me either. I never make a big deal of coming or going, so my dogs don’t either. Lenore did bring me a smelly rawhide, and I got a tick off of Frieda’s neck. Ah, home…Minnie has to stay in the house for another week, says the vet, she hasn’t quite learned how to hop up on things yet, and besides, she is finding Maria’s lap a warm and inviting place to be. More on that tomorrow,

In a sense this was an important weekend for Maria and I, we did miss one another, and quite a bit, but we are also reminded that life has it’s own story and pace, and life goes on. Still, when I saw her waiting for me at the Albany Airport, I just wanted to melt, I thought, is this my girl, is this girl mine? And I didn’t wake up from the dream. We talked 100 times during the trip and texted another 100 but we had another hour-and-a-half of catching up to do on the way home. Dinner in the car was popcorn from Garrett’s in Chicago, an apple and some water.

Tomorrow I have to pick up my mail from my P.O. Box 205 and resume Minnie’s Journal. The saga is not over yet.

 

20 October

Woody Guthrie Center And Museum

by Jon Katz
Woody Guthrie Center
Woody Guthrie Center

I was very happy to learn of the Woody Guthrie Center near downtown Tulsa, it opened recently and is a beautiful space filled with Guthrie’s guitars, original songs, sketches and paints and recordings. There is a gallery devoted to photographs taken of Guthrie and Bob Dylan, each at opposite ends of brilliant careers.

Guthrie was born about 100 miles from Tulsa and I found the museum to be a powerful experience, I have greatly admired Guthrie for his compassion and writing. I suspect he would be writing the same songs if he were alive today, America, I think, doesn’t really ever change all that much. Photograph is banned inside the museum but I did get off a few shots and will share them over the next few days.

20 October

Cain’s Ballroom, Tulsa: A Cookie Story

by Jon Katz
Cain's Ballroom: Cookie Story
Cain’s Ballroom: Cookie Story

So here’s the story, I got up and out early Friday and was driven to Cain’s Ballroom in Tulsa, a sacred spot considered one of the birthplace’s of country music. The ballroom has been restored and Friday night, the band “Blue October” was performing. I asked these three young women if I could take a photo of them – they had been sitting out in front of the ballroom all night so they could be first in line to get a spot close to the band, which they love.

They drove to Tulsa from Wisconsin, all through the night and Friday was an unusually cold day in Tulsa, the three were huddled in blankets on lawn chairs in front of the Cain’s box office. They graciously permitted me to photograph them, and then I left, but I have to say I was worried about them, I couldn’t get the image of them huddled out in the cold all night out of my mind. So after I went through the Woody Guthrie Center and Museum,  I stopped at a nearby deli and bought some cookies, and then Leslie, who was driving me around and I went back to Cain’s and gave the cookies to the girls, who agreed to post for me once more. I loved their faces, they spoke of the joy of being young when driving through half the country all night to sit and freeze all day to get close to your favorite band is nothing but fun.

20 October

Portrait: Francine Ringold

by Jon Katz
Portrait:Fran Ringold
Portrait:Fran Ringold

Fran Ringold is retiring after 47 years as editor-in-chief of Nimrod, a prestigious literary magazine sponsored in part by the University of Tulsa. She has encouraged, discovered and nurtured countless writers and was at the center of a literary culture that has nearly vanished in America. We had a strong connection, the two of us, even though I felt distinctly out of place at a Literary Conference, Fran and I had breakfast together and I felt as if I had known her much of my life. She is thinking of starting a blog in her next phase of life, she is 79. I had no doubt she will get one up and it will be brilliant.

Despite her constant pestering me to meet her dog, I felt the strongest connection with her, and I cannot begin to say why this is so. She lost her mother when she was eight, was adopted by her Aunt Bea, a vaudeville star and she is an accomplished poet (twice the Oklahoma Poet Laureate.) I don’t know if I will ever see Fran again or talk to her, but I got the portrait of her that I wanted as she stood in the sunlight outside of the conference meeting rooms, she was exhausted and fighting off a migraine.

20 October

Journey To Tulsa: Yearning, A Parade, Woody Guthrie, Cold Shoulders. Identity.

by Jon Katz
Journey To Tulsa
Journey To Tulsa

I confess I’ve never had a parade before but I got one Saturday when a Nimrod Literary Journal intern carried a “Follow Me To The Memoir and The Blog” Master Class at the Nimrod Conference for Writers and Readers in Tulsa. My students followed the sign to our classroom across the barren plaza. I loved Tulsa from the first, a viscerally American town – Native-Americans walking the streets in braids and tasseled shirts before dawn, art deco neighborhoods, giant Churches,  the haunting new Woody Guthrie Museum, the feeling of a Western town, an oil town, a flat and ugly landscape, a town in transition –  surprisingly hip now, full of culture, concerts, old neighborhoods getting re-discovered wonderful old architecture. I could not, alas, find time to go out and photograph it, there just was no way.

On Friday, I got to ride around a bit, saw the storied Cain’s Ballroom, the new Woody Guthrie Center ( I almost broke down when I saw the original version of This Land Is Your Land.

I loved my memoir and the blog class, we could have gone many more hours, the students were focused, eager, smart, filled with questions. But it was a bittersweet weekend in some ways, I had that old familiar feeling of being outside the tent, outside the circus, out of place at the conference, which was a very literary thing, and I have never really been all that easy around literary people (or border collie snobs, either), nor are most groups ever – ever – at ease around me. I make some people nervous and click with others right away, this life I suppose. Like the joke goes, there has never been a group that wanted me to join, or that I really wanted to join.

I clicked right away with the yearning audience, I could almost touch their passion to be writers, their eagerness, openess. At the panel discussion on publishing, these anxious writers were desperately trying to understand the new publishing landscape, and I figured I might as well set the stage, I didn’t go to Oklahoma to give them a lot of BS, I told the first questioner that I had just finished Brad Stone’s new book on the rise of Amazon – I will review it in a day or so – and I was struck by Jeff Bezos’ comment that Amazon did not change publishing, the future changed publishing. I said my blog had become the most powerful memoir I could possibly have written or be writing and people reading my blog had a greater understanding of my  life than many people who only have read my books. I urged them to face the future, not the past.

I said the blog was a book, I urged these writers to get their stories out to the world, to not worry yet about agents and self-publishing versus commercial publishing, they could move around the gatekeepers and find their voices, take their chances, as writers have always done.  I said 15 years ago, only one fifth of the country ever went into a bookstore, and now more than 50 million Americans are reading books in one form or another. I told them that lots of people are worrying about bookstores, writers and publishers, but hardly anyone  seemed to have been worrying about readers and understanding what they wanted or needed all this time, and I said that change is always painful and difficult, but it is neither good or bad, it just is, I do not wring my hands about the changing world, that is both pointless and unproductive. I guess you don’t hear that that much at literary workshops.

I’ve been saying and writing this for years, and no one in the publishing world has ever paid much attention to it, but as the panel went on, I could almost feel the scrotums tightening around me, the lips pursing, the fingers gripping the tables.

One writer said that she could never share her life or work outside of her paper books, she simply could not let anyone see it until it was ready, she had to hold it within herself. Another gave the writer’s this advice: read poetry every night. I don’t think Jeff Bezos was the person they really wanted to hear about or my ideas about blogs something they wanted to talk about  (one poet, who is also a psycho-therapist, has been selling her poems online for several years – I think the people in the audience grasped the meaning of this, I could see it in their eyes.) I must confess, the reality of writing has changed so profoundly, there is a sense of urgency for me to talk truthfully to new and young writers and help prepare them for it. And it is by no means all bad news, there are more opportunities to write – and read – than ever before in human history.

After that, I taught my memoir and the blog class, and it alone was worth the trip to Tulsa. But I have to be honest – I always ask my self how do I feel, and is it the truth when I blog – it was not always comfortable. I rarely have trouble talking to people, but there was a big chill around me after my talk, the literary writers – I write commercial fiction and non-fiction, I do not consider myself a literary person – just stopped talking to me. All day, they would gather to sip coffee, compare notes and they just stopped speaking to me, moved away when I came by, said nothing in the car on the way  back to the hotel, and pointedly did not chat with me or invite me into their discussions or coffee sessions. Definitely outside the tent, with the flaps closed.

What, I wondered, am I missing? If I am not comfortable with my fellow writers, then who?

It was interesting and ironic. Everywhere I went, I was introduced by the organizers as “the dog guy” and people asked me if I wanted to go to their homes and meet their dogs, or look at the photos they carried. I often find myself wanting to say that I love dogs, but that I am not defined by dogs, it is a part of my work, it is not my identity or my existence. I do not need to meet everybody’s dogs, this does not define them either.  Why do I find this assumption patronizing? If people ask me who I am, I don’t say “I am the dog guy,” I say I am a writer. Maybe I should just get over myself and accept life as it is, not as I wish it to be,  always a healthy exercise. But identity is important to me, I have worked hard at it, and worked hard at being a writer ever since I was eight, and I don’t care to be called anything else.

The truth is, I am pretty happy with who I am these days, I don’t think I’ll give that away to anyone again.

Perhaps I was supposed to talk about dogs at this conference and urge the yearning writers to follow the rules and study Jane Austen and Proust and read poems aloud to one another. I I read three of mine at the afternoon invitational reading – more silence. Maybe they thought I would not get into my views about changes in publishing, and the impact of blogs and memoir.  Perhaps, more likely, they had no idea what my views are. My blog is my living memoir I said, and the audience sort of gasped and there was stony silence alongside of me.

There was much I enjoyed about the visit, I especially connected with the brilliant and legendary Fran Ringold, the retiring editor of Nimrod after 47 years. She brought me a book of poems called Dog Days: A Way Of Speaking, the first third of the book is about her rescue dog Pete, who she urged me to meet. At the party, people were dragged over to me, usually with this introduction: “oh you should meet Jeremy, he loves dogs,”  as if that would seal a friendship and nothing much else would matter. At the farewell party Saturday night, Fran drove to her house to get Pete and bring him to meet me, then drove him right home.  Pete, an easy going mutt, a rescue of course,  more or less reacted to me the way the other writers did – he was not impressed. As I left, the hostess stopped me and asked me if I wanted to and meet her dogs upstairs, they were waiting. I said I was tired and had to go pack, thank you, maybe another time. I felt guilty. What am I missing? Is a farm in upstate New York the only place I can be myself?

It was great to go to Tulsa – always healthy to see something different – and I will write more about it. I loved teaching the class, I enjoyed meeting Nancy Gallimore, one of the members of the Open Group at Bedlam Farm, I was touched by the heartfelt passion of so many people who came to my class to be writers, to be published. I wished I could give them the names of agents and wave some magic wands for them. Many of them had never even heard of a blog, had no idea how to create one or what to say when they did, clearly no one had ever suggested these things to most of them. It is a gift to ignite those sparks, I saw all kinds of light bulbs go off when I said writers don’t have to just sit and wait for agents and editors and publishers to anoint them, they can start writing right away deal with their  big decisions later. And of course, it is a selfish thing, I remember no one did this for me.

I said their stories are important, their lives are interesting, and they should take the plunge and share them with the world. That message is, I think, my calling, my purpose now that I have learned something worth sharing. People have to make up their own minds, take their own path, but at least they ought to know how the deck is stacked. I saw their eyes open and could hear the wheels turning in their mind. This is not the end of writing and stories, I said, this is the beginning, a Golden Age and they have many of the tools they need to begin right at their fingertips. If just one hears this message and grasps it, if one finds his or her voice,  the trip will have been more than worth it. At the end of the day I called Maria and told her much I enjoyed the class but that the reaction of the other writers made me feel like I was in Middle School again, all kinds of groups clustered around me, none of the wanting me in or letting me in.

Over time, I came to learn that I didn’t want to be in, didn’t belong in groups and also that there are so many of us who are like that. They are my group,  my community, the tent I can walk inside of and feel at home. And this is the power of identify, you learn just as much about yourself from the people who don’t talk to you as from the people who do.

 

 

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