My Writing Strategies - FAQs

Recently, I have answered a surprising number of DM questions about how to become a poet/writer (in a practical/business/branding sense, not a learning the art/craft sense).

How did I get started publishing? What advice would I give someone trying to build a following? How does one monetize poetry?

So, I’m making a bit of a messy FAQ.

I don’t feel like an expert, but I do have over 200k followers across platforms and (absurdly) poetry pays my bills right now, so I’ll offer what I can.

Question #1: Do I recommend sending to magazines or publishing work on social media?

Truthfully, I'd work on your social media following first.

This doesn't mean you can't also submit work to magazines (the work you haven’t posted publicly), but... here’s the thing… I've published in magazines. Quite a few magazines. They never gained me any real attention or interest (and sometimes you wait over a year to learn if they will publish your submission and some of them charge frankly predatory "reading fees" to writers desperate to be noticed).

Gang, unless you’re trying to work in an industry that values conventional publishing credits, submitting to poetry mags might not be the best use of your time.

A decade ago, I wouldn’t have imagined writing that last sentence, but experience changed my attitude.

Poetry, especially, is made for social media. A tight, agile, jab of an artform that can connect with a reader accustomed to short/punchy posts.

The magazines and journals seem like the obvious way to go because, especially when you are first starting, it feels good for someone to tell you that your stuff is worth publishing. Most writers struggle with feeling like an imposter. But how much is that ego boost really worth to you in terms of time and effort? I never received any significant interest from book publishers, agents, etc, until I built my own audience through posting and podcasting.

Even if your eventual goal is traditional publishing, I would start with social media. I did the work of proving that my writing was marketable first and the interest from publishers followed. I think this makes perfect sense. What better way to show that you’d be a good investment/business partner than showing an aptitude for the business of attracting/engaging readers?

The practical career aspects aside, posting consistently via social media is a real-time/dynamic conversation with your readers… which can teach you quite a bit about what connects and what falls flat in your work. Poetry, when it does its job, has impact. Good prose has impact. Instant reader feedback can help sharpen our art as writers/communicators. Compare that to having a poem tucked away on page 64 of a university journal that prints 200 copies.

If you want to start "building a brand" as a poet, I'd suggest creating a Twitter, a Facebook Page, an Instagram, and maybe Tumblr (readings on TikTok might make sense too).

When you write something, post it to all of your accounts. Use hashtags to link with other poets and poetry fans. Things like #poetry and #poetrycommunity. You could even try to write poetry that is in conversation with another poet’s work and tag them.

While you’re at it, comment on other poets' work. (This is how you join a community and begin to build a following.)

This isn’t crass or tacky. This is honoring poetry as a living artform that has value to a broad, modern audience, not locking it away in niche, esoteric volumes yellowing on a bottom shelf of an English Department computer lab.

The thing "legit" publishers/publications are supposed to do for you, in theory, is connect you with readers and market your stuff. Traditionally, that’s why we want to work with publishers. They help build our brand and connect us with an audience. Small poetry magazines probably aren't much better equipped than you are to put your work in front of potential readers (and they won't care about accomplishing this goal half as much as you do).

So... put yourself out there.

You don't need to wait for gatekeepers to grant permission to share your work or to call yourself a poet. I sort of feel like I wasted years trying to impress the magazines and literary presses. And even when I had successes, it didn't seem to do much for me. A momentary pat on the back. A fleeting taste of approval. I found actual success and fulfillment when I stopped chasing "legitimacy" and started sharing my own work with the world. When I stopped focusing on trying to be impressive and started focusing on trying to connect with people, it all clicked.

It also helped when I stopped thinking of my writing as "a product" or an “IQ test” and started thinking of it as a service or a conversation. My audience isn't an afterthought. I'm writing for them. So, meeting them where they are is part of that relationship. Prestige and/or money, if they come, come later in the process. The art first. Service first. Audience first. Connection over commodity.

[Caveat: Different goals require different approaches. If your goal is, for example, a career in teaching creative writing in academia, then University managed magazine credits are more relevant to you. Are you trying to build a CV or are you trying to build an audience? When seeking advice, go to people who are doing the sort of work you would like to do. There is no one right answer about how to approach/manage your creative efforts.]

Question #2: But if I post my writing on social media, how do I protect my copyright and stop people from stealing my work?

In short, you have copyright protection just by virtue of writing/creating something. The FAQs on the US government Copyright page states, "Your work is under copyright protection the moment it is created and fixed in a tangible form that it is perceptible either directly or with the aid of a machine or device."

https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-general.html

Posting it publicly gives you the added bonus of a time-stamped record of when you posted it.

No, you typically can’t sell/submit poetry you’ve posted on social media to magazines because it will be considered “previously published” (see my answer to question #1 for why this doesn’t bother me).

Yes, anyone could plagiarize your work, which is also true if it appears in a book or magazine. If they try to make money from it, while claiming it as their own, you have legal recourse (as I understand it... I'm not a lawyer).

It becomes a bit of a philosophical question. Do you want to connect with an audience more than you're afraid of being robbed? Yes, sometimes I see folks posting my work without attribution. This is annoying, but not exactly devastating.

I never run out of words/ideas and it isn't exactly difficult to prove I wrote/posted something first (if I really want to bother with such things). As far as I know, nobody ever made a successful writing career via direct plagiarism and learning to shrug off the copy/paste culture of social media hasn't harmed me in any way I can detect.

So, for me, posting my work serves my goals.

Question #3: How do I monetize my work?

The answer to question #1 is deeply relevant here. Audience comes first. In all honesty, I didn’t create a Patreon page or think of publishing poetry collections until I had readers/listeners actively asking me for such things. I didn’t start with products and aim to generate demand. I generated demand, through sincere engagement, and then created products to suit that demand based on reader/community input.

Audience first.

If your primary goal is income, may I gently suggest that poetry isn’t the place to spend your time.

Question #4: How did you publish your poetry collections?

In short, I self published them when my audience was large enough for that option to make sense to me.

So, I am not tech savvy in the least, but the person who formats/publishes my poetry collections uses KDP (via Amazon). It takes a bit of skill to get the formatting/setup correct, but I recall seeing a variety of freelancers who will do the formatting work for a fee (and you should absolutely pay for such services). The other challenge is cover art, but there are endless options to tackle that. It’s fun and easy to connect with artists you admire and ask about their availability/fees for commission work. Be polite, communicative, and upfront about your budget and timeline. You can likely find an artist within your budget, but absolutely plan to pay for your art.

(You may well also want to hire a reputable freelance editor. I’m lucky to be married to a gifted poet and writing professional, so I can trade baked goods for editing services. If this wasn’t the case, I’d hire an editor.)

I think self publishing is a great option, especially for poetry. In fact, I contacted one of my favorite authors for advice (hint: he posts lots of raccoon photos) and he told me that there is really no downside to going the self-pub route for poetry. Most big publishers don't want poetry (unless you’re already famous) and the small publishers who do publish poetry take a large cut of your profits without giving much in return. It's not like they have big marketing budgets or giant followings to help sell your book, so why share your profits? Legitimacy? Friend… let go of legitimacy. It doesn’t have your best interests at heart.

So, despite the pretentious old academic in me who still gets itchy about the very idea of self publishing, it makes a lot of sense for poetry… especially if you have built an audience first.

[Note: It may start to sound like I have no love for traditional publishing. That’s not true. I am working with a couple traditional publishers as I write this. It’s just that context matters. Think of publishing as a business partnership. Ideally, a long-term partnership. As a writer, you know what you are bringing to the table (the work). So, ask yourself what your potential publisher is bringing to the table and what you are giving up in return. This equation needs to balance. It needs to make sense for both partners.]

I plan to expand this post as I receive more questions. Please comment with anything else you would like me to mention. I hope this is helpful.

Seeking Peace while the Work is Unfinished

As I continue my lifelong work to understand my own mind, I've been thinking about the difference between constructive and destructive mindsets.
The difference between fighting and building. Opposing and cultivating. Condemning and celebrating.

It's no secret that we need our destructive mindsets to oppose injustice, fight those who do harm, and speak out against abusers, bigots, fascists, etc.
We also know that social media uses our innate prioritization of threats to hold our attention and keep us scrolling.

And yet... I think it's clear that what makes the world (and the inside of our skulls) a joyful, livable, sustainable place to dwell requires constructive mindsets. Building shelter. Building communities. Food. Art. Education. Childcare. Science. Medicine. Fun and leisure.

For me, it seems that the default structure of our current media/cultural climate pulls toward a destructive mindset. This pull is very hard on my mental health. However, it's a nuanced thing to discuss because the forces I want to resist legitimately should be resisted.

It feels complicated because both reason and a respect for my own sense of wellbeing tells me to intentionally turn toward a constructive mindset, but in doing so I must make an active choice to turn away from unaddressed threats/problems/injustices.

Like many issues that feel complex, the problem arises from dichotomous thinking. The idea that we dedicate ourselves solely to one or the other, to constructive or destructive thinking. It's a false choice. We can't do two things at once and we need to make room for both.

The balanced approach seems simple enough, but I think finding that balance requires me to acknowledge that there are vast, sophisticated tools/algorithms/financial interests pressing down on the 'destructive mindset' side of the scale.

The problem is exacerbated by the abstract, placelessness we feel as citizens of the internet and people who have been cut off from our physical contexts by the pandemic (and other factors). We become inhabitants of social media. It becomes our environment. Threat as place.

So, the deck is stacked against us when we seek ways to exercise constructive mindsets, to find hope and pleasure. But, here's the thing. I suffer from painful, chronic depression which, paradoxically, gives me some interesting tools to fight back against these forces.

I am well acquainted with insidious pressures trying to steer me toward hopelessness. I am well acquainted with having to make a conscious effort of will to turn toward positivity, to go outside, to recognize when my dread stems from forces beyond my immediate control.

Revolutions may need to fight, but they also need to feed people, to make life worth living, to present a vision of a world that feels worth inhabiting. Destructive mindsets have their place, but we miss the point when we let them define our identities completely.

So, I seek out things that make me feel hopeful. I stubbornly allow for the idea that many of my fellow humans are good, are smart, are worthy, are interesting, are enriching the world. I recognize that social media isn't a trustworthy representation of our reality.

I adopt the self-care stance that in this flawed, complicated, temporary world, the local trees and birds are also deserving of a portion of my undivided attention and that giving it to them is neither a surrender to evil nor an immoral act of self-indulgence.

We are all different and we need different things. But I argue that, regardless of context, each of us deserves/needs rest and peace and pleasure. Sometimes, the portion of nature for which we are best positioned to care and preserve is ourselves.

Yes, I think we should oppose evil. We should take action. We should do good works. But if you find yourself living in a state of constant dread or hopeless anger, I want to recommend that there is a healing balance to be found between destructive/constructive mindsets.

We are all fundamentally worthy of seeking this balance. Of finding our hope. Of rediscovering our place and peace. Of forgiving ourselves for what we do not control. Of allowing ourselves to be simple, natural animals enjoying the beauty of this flawed, lovely world.

Poetic License

There are sensible criticisms of viewing nature through poetic comparison.

 The Earth, its complex web of interconnected life, its tons of molten stone, its invisible pull of gravity, of magnetism, is not literally our mother.

 Yet also, it is.

 Every facet of our species is shaped by the physical and chemical characteristics of Earth.

 Calling the Earth our mother is a concise route to an overarching truth. It’s an accessible way to describe a complex concept. That’s the virtue of metaphor.

 The drawback would be in using poetics to shut down curiosity, study, or specificity.

 To say, “the Earth is our mother, so let’s close the book on geology, chemistry, and biology.”

 This would be a misuse of metaphor. This would be painting a landscape over a window.

 I believe we need the poetic lens because understanding the physical realities of iron isn’t quite the same as weighing the significance of how the iron in our blood connects us to the planet beneath our feet, to the heat of ancient stars.

 Plain fact isn’t always the best ambassador of truth or the surest path to meaning.

Letter to My Past Self: Shame and Depression

Dear Young Jarod,

I picture you reading this high in your favorite maple tree, the one that makes you feel secret and special. The one where thirty feet above the ground you lay astride a great forking limb like a big cat in the dappled sunlight. The one that, forty yards off, looks into your childhood bedroom. Let’s say you’re thirteen and that from a distance it would seem that your thoughts would be as light as the pale green leaves fluttering around you. But, of course, we both know that’s not true. You are carrying two very heavy stones. One of those stones will take a great deal of work to chip away over time. The other, with some courage and persistence, you can set down right now.

You are struggling with both chronic depression and the shame you feel about your illness. I don’t need to tell you that depression is brutal, but what you often overlook is that the shame itself is, in some ways, worse. Depression piles pain upon pain on your shoulders, mental and physical. You know this and that’s not what this letter is about. This letter is about shame. The shame is, in some respects, more insidious because it tells you that your depression is the natural result of being an inherently broken person. The shame tells you that the depression is a natural symptom of being a weak and flawed creature. In this way, the pain of depression becomes the punishment you’re owed, not the enemy you resist.

We’ll get back to shame in a moment. Let’s talk about our mental health in general.

Mental health is work and if there is a way to master it permanently and decisively, I haven’t found it yet. I expect that’s hard to hear at your age. I get it, but it’s not all bad news. What I have found is skillsets and support structures that strip away that feeling of powerlessness that accompanies depression. If depression is akin to weather, then I’ve found a reliable source of umbrellas and a good supply of sturdy outerwear. It’s progress, but the real progress came after I found ways of addressing the shame and secrecy surrounding my illness.

Part of my shame has always sprung from a mix of pride and fear. Pride in my talents. Fear that those talents are fake, inconsequential, or utterly outweighed by my shortcomings. In school, I was called gifted. In writing and poetry, I was even called a prodigy. What do you notice about these labels? Gifted? Prodigy? Well, they had nothing to do with effort or skill and everything to do with innate qualities. So, that suggested that my achievements were not about choice or effort or exercising my agency. No, they were a natural function of who or what I am. So, if that’s the case for my successes, what does that mean for my shortcomings? It means they aren’t the natural mistakes made by every human being. It means that my failures are woven into my identity as surely as my talents.  Either I am success, or I am failure. Shame can grow from many seeds, these are just a few of mine. Still, you haven’t noticed these things yet and I hope that noticing helps. I hope you recognize the source of that fear when you shy away from trying something difficult or taxing. That fear is the fear of being imperfect, the fear of being human and, like depression itself, it’s isolating and withering.

What is it about depression that makes it such rich soil for cultivating shame? I think it has to do with the nature of mental illness, specifically the mental part. When we suffer from an ingrown toenail or a toothache, we rarely jump to the conclusion that the illness is evidence of a flawed character. That’s because these aren’t maladies of the mind. We like to imagine our bodies are just the machines that carry around the ‘real’ essence of who we are, they are the houses we haunt. Bodies get sick. They age. They fail. That’s intrinsic to their character and that reality is bound up in what we understand to be the human experience. The mind, on the other hand, is supposed to be the ‘real’ us, the part of us that is not so crude or mundane as meat and blood and bone. So, if the mind is sick, that’s an indictment of our “who,” not merely our “what.” It means our identity is sick, not just our substance.

This makes a kind of sense, except that it’s completely ridiculous.

Your brain is a special, fascinating miracle of the natural world, but it’s also an organ of the body. It’s flesh and water and electricity and the fact that it’s the seat of your thoughts does not make it immune to malady. Depression is, without any doubt, an illness and should be thought of as such.

If a virus hijacks the machinery of your cells to manufacture more viruses, you wouldn’t take ownership of the decision to produce viruses, would you? If you have an allergic reaction to poison ivy, you wouldn’t measure your self-worth by the itching of your skin, would you? No. So how is it that self-worth and the value of your personhood becomes tied to the painful negative thoughts that you neither willfully created nor invited into your skull. Depression is not a mirror of your identity nor a yardstick with which to evaluate the quality of your personhood. It’s the flu. It’s a poison ivy rash.  It’s the emotional equivalent of a persistent headache.

Of course, poison ivy doesn’t usually make its victims wish for death and depression often does. That’s part of the problem.

I’m sure, young Jarod, that my metaphors make a kind of logical sense to you, but we both know that depression doesn’t always obey logic.

Well, In fact, it does obey logic, but it obeys logic in the way stone obeys water. The process isn’t a sandcastle being swept away by the tide. It’s more like the slow erosion that carved the Grand Canyon. It takes a steady, willful application of this kind of logic to make a dent in shame and depression, and the whole time the depression will be insisting that resistance is both exhausting and ultimately pointless. It will insist that it isn’t really depression because you have legitimate reasons to be miserable. It will insist that bone deep sorrow is what you deserve or what this world merits.

Despite all the illusions that depression can conjure, your brain is still your best ally in this fight. Yes, it’s the seat of the disease, but you need to trust me on this most vital point: depression does not own all the real estate of your brain. It wants you to think it does. Through the mechanism of shame, depression will tell you that the entirety of your mind has been coopted and rewired to produce only doubt and hopelessness and pain, but that just isn’t true. Your brain is more complex, resilient, and expansive than that. Depression is an occupying force in the castle of your mind, but you have a wide variety of secret passages, hidden rooms, and sliding bookcases from which to wage a guerrilla war to take back your skull.

The main progress I have achieved at this stage in my life has been thanks to medication and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Except it’s not quite that simple. It wasn’t one medication. It wasn’t one therapist. It was trial and error and then more trial and error. You have to approach the situation as a scientific question. Hypothesis. Experiment. Data. Conclusion. Repeat. This is the messy way we learn and grow.

The thing is, you can only do this kind of work once you step out from the shadow of shame and that paralyzing fear of failure. The good news is you don’t have to do it perfectly. You hear me, you stubborn arboreal weirdo? If you have to go at it with an all or nothing attitude, then try this -resolve to do an imperfect job on your quest to escape shame and build coping skills. There, now you can be perfect in your pursuit of imperfection.

If you think that’s nonsense, let me tell you some things I learned later in life.

Down the line, you get pretty interested in weightlifting. In the pursuit of that very physical hobby, you discover some very nonphysical quirks. For example, when lifting heavy weights and counting reps, it’s easier to count to five twice than ten once. Why? Because the higher numbers seemed to que my body to prepare for failure, whereas the simple trick of counting to a lower number multiple times short circuits this issue.

Similarly, I used to put a checkmark on the calendar when I met my writing goal for the day. This became more motivating and more fun when I switched the checkmark for writing VICTORY!

Simple? Yes. Silly? Sure. But if you haven’t figured it out by now, words are actual magic. Language is actual magic. I think you have always known that, but you have yet to ask for its help with your own inner life and struggles. Please do so. You can use language against shame. You can use words against depression. Language can be both your art and your ally. Doesn’t that feel right?

I known that change is scary. I know that trying is scary, not least of all because the hope of recovery is such a bright and fragile thing that it hurts to look at and seems too precious to touch.

Well, remember years ago when you were afraid of the woods at night? How did you deal with that fear? How did your comfort in the dark woods finally become a point of pride and a quiet pleasure? You remember. You stood at the edge of the dark trees, not once, but night after night and, little by little, you went in until the unknown and seemingly unknowable lifted like morning fog. This is a bit like that. Walk into those dark woods and discover a new kind of secret peace there. Fear is the monster that guards the treasure.

Am I Worth It

I know some of you worry that your life is not a net gain for our world. You worry if your existence is worthwhile in terms of bringing forth goodness and balance. If just being a living human in our modern context is immoral. If the Earth will gain a return on its investment for the air you breathe and the food you eat.

But existence just doesn't work that way.

Life doesn't work that way.

You aren't an investment and can’t be evaluated as such.

You weren't a calculated risk aimed at some form of profit.

You didn’t invent the processes of life that brought you here nor can you edit them.

You certainly didn’t choose what sort of lifeform to be.

Unless you photosynthesize, you're living off of other organisms. You didn't create this system. No one asked you to sign on to this fact. Life exists in myriad forms and its existence is its own justification. There is no "best" way to do it or "ideal model" for the planet. We are temporary. The planet is temporary. What is ideal for one species is less than ideal for another.

This isn't me suggesting we all take our hands off the controls of our lives and shrug. Our choices absolutely have weight. There is balance to be achieved and I think it should be our task to seek it.

I imagine these issues all feel different for humans because of our executive function/agency. We think about patterns and the big picture. We create systems. We impose order. We fall into the trap of thinking of reality as a machine. But weighing the value of our fundamental existence and our life-minutes isn't like finding the most efficient way to load the dishwasher.

There is no perfect version of ourselves or our world to achieve.

I think we should lay our hands lightly on the things we can influence and press gently toward our values. We should do this within the vital constraints of honoring our own limitations, happiness, and mental/physical wellbeing. We shouldn't dash ourselves against our hopes for a better world.

In the scales of my judgement, the quiet, gentle, tender moments deserve as much (or more) attention as our dramatic, strenuous, industrious moments.

Lives are mostly quiet, small, fleeting things and it feels like a mistake to spend them wishing instead that we were huge, enduring, planet-shaping things.

Context.

Acceptance.

Cultivate love for what is and hope for what could be, all while sparing a bit of awe and gratitude for the massive, unknowable, unlikely forces that culminated with your own odd, unique, singular presence on this planet.

Yes, own the small concrete good you can do, but reject the idea that the fate of the world is in your hands. Reject the idea that you need to justify the breaths you inherited from natural systems older than we can imagine.

Understand that not even the fate of this fleeting moment is in your hands. Yet, you should endeavor to love this moment and, by doing so, learn to love yourself.

A Few Thoughts on Appreciating Nature

I have always loved being outdoors. My parents were not particularly religious people, but most every day of my childhood I took a “nature walk” with my mother. There was a semi-spiritual/meditative aspect to this daily stroll. I think that old practice stuck with me, forever marrying the concept of the outdoors with bigger ideas about purpose and life. I grew up in a small, semi-rural town in Ohio among sassafras and maple, dogwood and oak. The woods were where I went to play, to think, and to discover. The shade under the trees was a little bit mysterious, a little big scary, a little bit magic. I spent years poking around in rotten logs and peering beneath rocks and still I would encounter plants and animals that I had never seen before. My neighborhood friends would just drop by the woods I haunted and could reliably find me sitting next to a campfire on weekend evenings or sitting with a book high in a tree.

You get the picture. I was a very outdoorsy kid.

Somehow, there came a time in my life during which I lost touch with my love of nature. Grad school. Financial worries. Family concerns. These things piled up until the woods became an old friend, someone of whom I thought fondly, but was no longer an active player in my life. I think this is a pretty common story. Lots of us have a closer relationship with nature when we are children, when the world is new to us and we have a seemingly infinite supply of time and curiosity. We grow. We change. We let the natural world become old news.

Now, if you’re reading this, it’s probably pretty obvious to you that my love of nature is still alive and well, but that love was something I purposely rekindled. It wasn’t hard. I think I have always felt most at home among the trees. But, rediscovering my love of nature as an adult did require some conscious effort. Primarily, it was a matter of curiosity and complacency. I fell in love with nature again when I started to take an active interest in what I was seeing, an adult approach to the old mysteries.

It’s one thing to go for a hike and simply bathe in the beauty of the landscape. (There’s nothing wrong with that.) It’s something else to realize that you don’t know the names of the trees you’re passing and to actively pursue that knowledge. This is how I reinvigorated my love of the wilds. I stopped letting myself off the hook. I stopped catching a glimpse of a bird I didn’t recognize and simply shrugging and accepting my own ignorance. I started to invest myself in understanding what I was seeing. I started tracking down the mystery of what kind of salamander I saw beneath the log, what kind of fish I saw jumping out of the lake, what sort of animal left that footprint in the soft mud. When I began caring enough to hunt down the answers to such questions, I found my old excitement about leaving the pavement and setting off into the wild. That old excitement was alive and well, just waiting for me to take an earnest interest.

So, my advice is this: If you feel your relationship with nature becoming stale, focus on deepening your understanding. Identify the things you don’t know and then work to find the answers. Step outside the role of passive observer of the countryside and take an active approach to understanding what you’re seeing. Understanding is the first step to loving. 

Living by the Cemetery

When we bought a house by a cemetery, I made my share of jokes about haunting and zombies. Truthfully, I have never thought of cemeteries as creepy places. I loved taking night walks through Athens, OH cemeteries when I was in grad school. When I mentioned that fact to Leslie, she told me that she has always thought of cemeteries as "adorable" because they are huge, impractical monuments dedicated to humans remembering each other. It's true. My office window faces the cemetery and three times now I've seen someone park, get out, pick leaves and weeds from a loved one's grave and then just stand or kneel with a hand on the stone. One, I think, was praying. One just knelt there and seemed to be chatting. One left fresh flowers. Occasionally, I see these visitors look around half-embarrassed to be doing something clearly intimate in a public space. Living next to a cemetery ranges from adorable to moving to contemplative. I am not a religious person, but it's hard to deny my own associations between burial and the sacred. The association isn't necessarily about the dead. It's more about the living and seeing ritual at work, ritual in a very basic form that seems rooted in thankfulness and love. It's also about people grappling with the impermanent and employing hard stone as a barrier against transience. I've always felt like cemeteries are special and living next to one is really prompting me to examine why. The only places I've ever felt a "spiritual" connection to are wild places outside of civilization. The cemetery next to me is also an arboretum. It's an interesting mix of wilderness and structured religious practice. It's a peaceful, thoughtful place and so far I enjoy sharing a fence with it.

Vacationland: True Stories from Painful Beaches

I enjoyed John Hodgman’s Vacationland: True Stories from Painful Beaches on an emotional level. Maybe that’s too obvious a statement, but I say this upfront simply to warn you that I have no pretense of objective evaluation in this review. I was and am moved by this book. It spoke to me in my current context (entering my late 30s worried about family and future) and asked the questions I ask myself. I found the book to be insightful, moving, and funny, but I’m not sure that it is (or wants to be) universally so. Okay, enough lame caveats. I liked the book and you should too. Not sure why I’m worrying about the book review police throwing me in book review jail.

Vacationland is a fast read, but leaves a lasting impression. It gave me one of those magical time-travel evenings in which I sat down to read and suddenly five hours were gone and I stared at the final page thinking, “wait, how did you do that?” Those experiences, at their best, leave me feeling fundamentally changed in some way. It’s also the kind of book that, once finished, prompted me to sit with the big questions and leave my warm house on a cold, damp night for a rambling 1AM drive to think about the nature of human endeavor and impermanence. Am I selling this as a fun book yet? Because it is. It is a fun book. It’s just not fun merely for the sake of fun like many of Hodgman’s earlier works (which I also enjoyed). Vacationland is fun in an honest, real life sort of way that marries silliness with tragedy and pain with absurdity. It is, in my opinion, what grown-up American humor should be at this moment in our history, a moment when earnestness and sincerity seem to be on the ropes at the highest levels of government and public life. This book is not one man’s truth used as a cudgel to beat back any opposition. It is an essay in the original sense of the word, a work of trying, a strenuous attempt to find a truth -personal or universal. It isn’t hard to understand how in the current political/social context, Hodgman isn’t interested in throwing more fake facts onto the pile. You sense him living with the question of, “okay, what now” in these pages, and that’s a question that resonates with most of us.

The last point I want to make is that Vacationland is one of those books that works (in part) because its author is just good company. John Hodgman has a voice and knows how to use it. John is brilliant and observant and self-deprecating and aware of his own nonsense. He can go from truly poetic to ridiculous in the span of a sentence and the tension between those peaks and valleys creates an enjoyable narrative rhythm.

This book made me cry. It made me laugh at surprising moments. It made me want to walk out onto the sharp-edged Maine beaches of my own uncomfortable questions and wade out into the nickel-gray water and find myself stronger and more whole from the experience.

John Milton's Influence on H.P. Lovecraft

Lately, I've been revisiting the works of H.P. Lovecraft. I adore Lovecraft and I don't think I'll be saying anything terribly surprising or controversial if I refer to him as the father of weird fiction.  He gave us elder gods waiting on the doorstep of reality, waiting and eyeing our sunlit existence with hungry malice. It makes me all warm and fuzzy with happy reading memories just thinking about it. But, it also calls to mind a great literary tradition of cosmic otherness and outsiders.

The speculative fiction trope that calls on us to question the nature of our own existence by placing that existence in stark contrast to something else, something horrifyingly unknown and ineffable, has always been my favorite brand of cosmic epistemological horror. It's the thing that drew me to Lovecraft in the first place and has kept me coming back again and again for most of my reading life. That said, Lovecraft isn't my favorite master storyteller to place angry monsters in the grumpy waiting room on the cusp of existence. No, that title goes to a certain blind poet who, I feel sure, probably ranks pretty high on Lovecraft's heart-doodled list of dreamiest writers. Mr. John Milton.

Now, I haven't combed through Lovecraft's papers. I like to think they probably smell like a basement and are mostly geometric nightmares densely covered with eldritch runes. But, I haven't studied them. I haven't visited his boyhood/manhood home or tried to dig up corroborating extra-textual evidence of his literary influences.  I haven't done my academic due diligence here, but I would like to make some suggestions about the debt Lovecraft owes Milton.

Let's start with an explicit example in the form of a fishy-fan-favorite. Our buddy Dagon. Certainly, Milton didn't invent Dagon. Dagon goes way back, like Mesopotamia way back. And, while there is some debate among scholars concerning the original depiction of Dagon as part fish, it seems he has always been related to the sea and fishing. Yet, the idea that Dagon is actually a demon "sea monster," well, I'm gonna give that one to Milton. Like much of Paradise Lost, here Milton starts with the Bible and builds upon it:

…Next came one
Who mourn'd in earnest, when the Captive Ark
Maim'd his brute Image, head and hands lopt off
In his own Temple, on the grunsel edge,
Where he fell flat, and sham'd his Worshipers:
DAGON his Name, Sea Monster, upward Man
And downward Fish: yet had his Temple high
Rear'd in AZOTUS, dreaded through the Coast
Of PALESTINE, in GATH and ASCALON,
And ACCARON and GAZA's frontier bounds. (1.457-466)

In the Bible, Dagon is simply the false god of the Philistines. In Paradise Lost, Dagon is counted among the demons who fall with Lucifer and he's listed among the fallen who are particularly successful in luring human followers into unholy worship. A sea monster who seduces human followers away from God? Remind you of any Lovecraft tales? Me too.  And, of course, Lovecraft alludes to Paradise Lost directly in his short story Dagon:

I felt myself on the edge of the world; peering over the rim into a fathomless chaos of eternal night. Through my terror ran curious reminiscences of Paradise Lost, and of Satan’s hideous climb through the unfashioned realms of darkness.

    Okay, so that's a somewhat superficial example. I would also like to examine those "unfashioned realms of darkness" as portrayed in Paradise Lost and suggest a deeper level of influence, an influence centered on that favorite trope of mine. Existential Otherness. In Paradise Lost, Milton does something truly fascinating; he builds a narrative universe in which sentient beings with their own lives and agency exist outside of the created space of God. He builds a space for otherness, for outsiders. In essence, I'd argue that Lovecraft's nameless things owe Milton for the doorstep upon which they sit.

Lucifer is not the only enemy of God in Paradise Lost. Chaos and darkness are ancient, living, thinking beings and they are not happy with God who, in their eyes, is a hated usurper. Personified Chaos co-rules his realm with personified "eldest Night" (2.894), a character described as "eldest of things" (2.962), not simply the eldest creation of God. In addition, the poem refers to "the wide womb of uncreated night" (2.150). Similarly, the realm of otherness is a "wilde Abyss, / The Womb of nature and perhaps her Grave, / Of neither Sea, nor Shore, nor Air, nor Fire, / But all these in thir pregnant causes mixt" (2.909-913). Otherness is uncreated; it is eldest; it is very different from the works of God. In short, Paradise Lost presents a kind of existence outside of human perception and understanding, yet it is awake and aware and doesn't much like us. This is a foundational concept for Lovecraft.

It's hard for me to believe that Lovecraft's concept of old gods, ancient and other and outside our reality, isn't informed by Milton's depictions of Chaos and Ancient Night. Consider Lovecraft's depiction of Chaos as a mad ruler in his sonnet Azathoth.  "Till neither time nor matter stretched before me, / But only Chaos, without form or place. / Here the vast Lord of All in darkness muttered."

Don't get me wrong. I'm not suggesting that this creative relationship takes anything away from Lovecraft. For me, this observation doesn't water down the accomplishments of the godfather of weird. Rather, I'm suggesting that Milton provides a really interesting lens through which to read stories like Dagon and The Call of Cthulhu (among many many others).

Lovecraft is awesome and Milton is awesome. I just hear a lot more talk about Lovecraft than I do about old John Milton these days. Maybe I get a little indignant on Milton's behalf.

So, beyond my suggested link between Lovecraft and Milton, I might also be suggesting that, if you haven't for a while or if you hated it in English class, maybe you should give a second look to Paradise Lost and the other works of John Milton. The language can be dense and difficult, but if you like speculative fiction I think you're going to like Paradise Lost. It's got angels and devils and war in heaven with uprooted mountains being tossed around and fallen angels mining minerals to build giant weapons of war.

If the language gets in your way, try listening to an audio version. That's what hooked me. I like the version read by Anton Lesser. Try it while playing video games. If you think slaying dragons in Skyrim is epic, imagine how much more epic it will be when you're listening to an account of demons plotting to overthrow heaven. Trust me. After all, just look at what it did for Lovecraft.

Originally published in Innsmouth Free Press.