Day: March 30, 2018

I remember when I first showed up at RISSE five or six months ago, a big man with a big camera, some of the staff were rattled and uncertain over what to do with me.  I was uncertain as well. Nobody knew who I was or what I was doing there. Neither did I, although I was very determined to get to know the refugees and immigrants and write about them, and my former editors will tell you that when I am determined, things usually happen. I always got the story, it was a source of great pride for me.

This  big and smiling man came up me, introduced himself as Amjad Abdullah – “Ali” – and took me under his wing, showing me around, introducing me to people, reassuring everyone it was all right for me to take their picture if they agreed. Ali broke the ice for me, made me feel welcome, sensed right away what it was I wanted to do and how it was I wanted to do it.

We became friends right away. We just got each other. Ali has brightened many lives, he loves the RISSE kids and is a brother/father/friend to them Every week, we sit down together in the noisy RISSE cafeteria, or in a musty old church meeting room and talk about what it needed, what it is I can try to do for Ali and his soccer team and for the other children in the RISSE program.

Next week, for example, is Spring Break. Ali doesn’t like the soccer kids (and some others) to have nothing to do, he worries about them hanging out in the streets, some of them have already gotten into some  trouble. He is building a sense of community, teaching them strong values. He reminds them to look out for one another, and work hard in school

So we plan things when there are empty days. When Ali finds an activity – he wants to go to Sky Zone with the kids on Monday, an indoor gym and trampoline center in Albany, N.Y. Usually, I call up the facility and try to negotiate a good rate for the team. Sometimes I get a discount, sometimes not.

On Monday, no discount, it’s $10 plus a small fee for each kid. Tuesday Al is in meetings all day at RISSE. Wednesday, they are going ice skating, a smaller fee. One of the soccer kids is having a birthday, and since their families rarely have the money for gifts or a party, we sponsor a gift and a party.

The rest of the week, the team goes to the Sportsplex Indoor Soccer facility to  practice for the ongoing tournament (they won 15 to 0 last week). That’s already paid for, as is the pizza and soda after practice.

We have every day of the week except Tuesday covered. We sat down with our Iphone calculators and figured out the cost for all of this, it’s about $400. I write a check and Ali takes it from there. One boy is being teased in public school for is shabby clothes – his single mother can’t afford to buy new ones.

I will write another check in a week or so. Sometimes there is money in the fund, sometimes it is getting too low and we have to slow things down. Right now, there is about $3,000 in the fund, much of that is spoken for, including the check I wrote for next week, and the May retreat at the Powell House, which cost $2,100. I’ve already paid about $1,500 of that. The same fund covers my work at the Mansion Assisted Care Facility.

I like to keep the fund around $2,500. We are small, we do small things, small acts of great kindness I call them. Thanks to the Army Of Good.

I am changing the name of the fund to the Gus Fund, my bank says it’s okay to use that name. You can contribute to this work by sending a donation to the Gus Fund, c/o Jon Katz, P.O. Box 205, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816, or via Paypal, [email protected].

I much look forward to my meeting with Ali, we are surrounded by curious and screaming children, and we trust one another completely and communicate honestly and easily. The work is a great gift to me, as is his friendship with me, and  his trust and respect.

At RISSE, Ms. Emma gets a hair comb and braiding over the dinner. The relationship between Emma, a teacher at RISSE, and her students is touching and beautiful a ballet of love, patience, trust and connection. It is a wonderful thing to see. By the way, the new RISSE Amazon Wish List is down to some coloring books and a food bin for lunch. Items for as little as $3.99. Check it out.

When you live with an artist, you live with a curator, and every room, every windowsill, is a gallery of one kind or another – old toys flowers, dead snails, rocks, pieces of glass. Wonder Woman is the centerpiece of our Windowsill Gallery in the kitchen.

I never see her put things up, I never see her take them down. I rarely even know where they come from The Bedlam Farm curator is exotic and mysterious, her tastes evolve,  as does our live.

When people like something I write (thank you), they often suggest that I should sent it either to the New York Times for publication as an op-ed piece or write a book about it. I am told at least a dozen times a week that something I am writing about should be a book.

And for much of my writing life, they would have  been.

The Mansion residents, the RISSE refugees, life on the farm, the Army Of Good, my life with Maria in the post-Trump world. Each of those things would have required only a simple phone call to my editor.  He would have jumped at any one of them. They are great subjects, there is much life and drama in them, there is much interest in them.

But in the new world,  they will never be a hard cover, commercial book, and frankly, I would never want to write a hard cover paper book about them.

Somehow, over the last few years, the blogging part of me grew, and the book part of me has shrunk.

I don’t know if publishing left me or I left it.

A kind reader posted this message on Facebook the other day: “I wonder if a book about this group and what they do would be a possibility, with profits going to their support. I love seeing their pictures, reading about their progress and the good work done by the Army of Good. Your pictures + their courage and spirit + your gift of words = pure gold. What do you think, Jon Katz?”

I wrote back that this was a lovely thing to say, (although I do wonder, Kim, how I am supposed to live if I’m writing books for free) and 20 years ago, I would have completely agreed, or already be working on such a book. I wrote a book every year for 26 years, and few few of my ideas were turned down.

Writers were supposed to come up with their own ideas.

I can’t think of a better or more topical non-fiction story or stories than the ones I write about every day.

But the truth is that very few publishers want books like this any more, they would be hard to sell, hard to publicize, tricky to market. They would not sell the big numbers corporate publishers want and need.

The truth is,  I am too small a fish to swim in their pond. Most mid-list writers like me are no longer publishing books at all.

Marketing departments, which have replaced editors as decision-makers in big publishing houses, don’t care for books like the one Kim is suggesting, they are not controversial or upbeat or sexy enough.

I finished a book last Fall and sent it to my publisher – it’s called Gus And The Lessons Of Bedlam Farm, and I like it a lot.

It includes material about the Mansion residents and the refugees. But if I didn’t center the book around Gus, it would never have been purchased at all. And seven months after I turned it on, my editors have not even acknowledged getting it, have not paid me for it, or set a publication date.

I doubt I will ever actually speak to the person who edits my book, i’ll get an e-mail file to edit, and unless I call (I am perverse sometimes) I will never hear from anyone there. It could not be a colder or more remote process. I do not rant about the past, but I never imagined having an editor I would not recognize on the street.

I’m explaining, hopefully not complaining. This is standard practice in corporate publishing now, I am no victim.  I’ve had a great run of 26 books. I am one of the lucky ones. My book will get published, I will eventually get paid for it, but I don’t like that life much anymore. I love the collaboration of a book, that used to be the idea.

I love what I am doing.

So I’m moving on rather than whine or complain.

I don’t waste much time on nostalgia or pining for the old days, I think nostalgia is a trap.

I started moving forward right away when I saw which way the wind was blowing, and my blog is now the center piece of my creative life, the base for most of my writing, the home of my photography, and the source of the income (voluntary payments and donations) that are the foundation of the new writer and his or her financial life.

I kept my focus on dogs and animals, but was now free to branch out and write about other things as well, things I used to write about and want to write about. In contemporary publishing, nobody would want my ideas on anything but a dog.

I think my younger readers know this is different from a paper book, but still a book. My audience is bigger than most books get, and much larger than the New York Times readership. This, my good people, is the book Kim was suggesting I write – it’s the blog.

The voluntary subscriptions and donations are the new income model for independent writers who wish to be free and exist in the new writing world. I was, to my surprise, prescient. Without my blog, I would not be a writer today, there is not enough income in commercial publishing for writers like me to survive.

I guess it’s time I declared my independence.

The writers who turned up their noses at blogging are mostly gone or looking for adjunct teaching gigs in colleges or online. I am still here, more relevant than ever, writing more than ever, with a wider audience than ever, loving it more than ever. I thank all of you for that.

But the truth is, as I told my friend on Facebook,  my blog is now my book. I have no  reason to go to a commercial publisher.

It is my life’s work. It is my living memoir. I believe it is the future of writing, and it fits me and my stile, and I am doing  the best writing I have ever done, typos and all. A paper book takes years to write and publish, is heavily edited, and is outdated the minute it appears. There is no money in publishing for color photographs, fewer reviewers and little media attention.

Even the most successful books don’t sell many copies any more, and most books sink and vanish without a trace. This isn’t to say books are dead, they are not. Independent bookstores are making a comeback and people like me love to read books on paper. But the writer’s world is very different, and woe to the writer who doesn’t get that and change.

People are always writing me to say they are shocked at how open I am, how authentic they believe me to be (thanks again).

But if I wrote a memoir and published my blog reports as a hard-cover book, everyone would oooh and aaaaah about how open I am, and how literary and bold a thing it was I am doing.

Openness and honesty is precisely what a good memoir is supposed to be. Why is it shocking to find it here?

I know the answer. The literary snoots and snobs are uneasy about blogs. The older ones still believe they are not for the serious writers. Maybe that’s so, I am a happy writer, I can’t say I am a serious writer. That’s for someone else to decide.

I do think my blog is bold. When I started it in 2007, very few  writers saw the potential of the blog, it was considered a tacky promotional tool to sell books. My editor and publicist were both horrified, one told me my blog looked like a Hallmark Card at Christmas. This is still true, except for the new generation, they grasp the meaning and potential of the blog.

I always saw the blog as a living memoir, and decided to be open and honest about it, that would make it different from all the hype-driven blogs writers were putting up, and the writers with money often paid someone else to write on them.

Of course I’m open. If I wasn’t open, if I wasn’t authentic, if I did not share my life good and bad, what would be the point of the blog at all? I’d just be some other writer trying to sell books, and many people in the world no longer read hard cover books.

I bet on the very scary idea that people would want to follow a life, rather than a book, if it was genuine.

I love the blog form of writing. It is not polished or self-conscious, I don’t have much time for proof-reading and I love the freedom of it. I love the immediacy. My writing is real, and present. My life is here in the moment.  I even love the interaction with my readers when they are not telling me what to do or accusing me of murdering my dogs.

So thanks much for following this blog, and thanks for thinking highly enough of me to suggest I be published in the New York Times or write a book about my life and work. I am flattered. But I think I’ve moved on now. The truth is,  I don’t really care if I’m published in the New York Times (done that), and they have no interest in me or my kind of writing.

I am proud of my audience. Many people stick with me in a very competitive and distracted world. That means something to me. My voice and strange ideas  reache people all over the country, so do my photos.

And I have the greatest gift in all of my writing life. I can write what I want, when I want, and take whatever photos I like for whatever reason I like.   I can tell the nasty jerks who feed on the souls of people to go to Hell.

None of that was true when I was a book writer.

For this writer, there is nothing better than that anywhere in the publishing world. And thank again for paying attention.

Many of you know Mary from her readings at our Open Houses, and for her three wonderful books of poetry. She fell down in her home a week ago and broke her hip and is doing well in rehab, but will be there for a couple of weeks. I know she would love to get letters, there are hours to fill and she loves to hear from people.

Even in brutish weather, Mary would always go out twice a day to whistle at the deer and give them some sweet feed. It was after one of these encounters in frigid weather that her boots got slick and she fell down in the kitchen.

Her address is the Washington Center For Rehabilitation, 4573 NY-40, Argyle, N.Y., 12809, if you wish to write her.

Mary is 88 and l iives along on her 30 acre farm. Her family lives just down the hill, but she is ferociously independent and committed to living her life. We don’t try to nag her into being someone else, she will govern her own life to the very end.

I am honored to be the first human being Mary trusted to read her poetry. She returned the favor by urging me to marry Maria when so many fled after my divorce and vanished from my life. She told me “great, she will keep you in line.” This was true.