Hugh Hollowell

No Relation, by Paula Carter

As I said yesterday, I’m playing with flash writing. I struggle, because I love words. But that is probably because the writers I have been most informed and shaped by also loved words. I love a good story.

In other words, I need to read more writers who tell stories with economy.

Several websites pointed me to the memoir No Relation, by Paula Carter (https://bookshop.org/p/books/no-relation-paula-carter/12167871). It’s 147 pages, and it’s a small format book – slightly smaller than a trade paperback. The synopsis, from the publisher:

When Paula first met James, she was 26, in graduate school, and not ready to be any kind of mother to his two young sons. But, years later, after caring for them and watching them grow, she finds herself unsure of what to do when her relationship with their father ends. In a collection of striking flash essays, Paula reveals the complexity of loving children who are not her own and attempts to put language to something we have no language to describe. No Relation is a deeply personal, beautifully rendered account of a seldom-remarked on kind of love and loss.

I did not expect to like this book, being someone who doesn’t generally read relationship memoirs, but it was a pleasant surprise. It turns out, I had a lot of resonance with the author, being someone who was once in love with someone who came with kids.

But the reason I bought the book is because while it’s a full memoir, it’s made up of ~85 very short (all under 250 words, I think) standalone flash essays, and I wanted to see how she did it.

It was well done, and it had that feeling like you are watching a magic trick, and you know you are watching a magic trick, but it doesn’t feel like a trick – it feels real. Put another way, the technique faded into the background, as it should.

Recommended both as a memoir, and as an example of the flash-essay-as-book technique.

Flash writing

In 1964, US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said, when attempting to define obscenity, that while he didn’t know how to define it, he knew it when he saw it.

I’ve been playing for the last week with Flash writing, specifically Flash Nonfiction, and as I’ve attempted top explain what it is to other people, I keep running into the same problem Justice Stewart had – Flash is easier to recognize than to define.

That it is short seems to be a thing everyone agrees with – but just how short is the question. Some say 1500 words, while others say 150. Arguments are made for everything in between.

It also needs to be a complete story – a beginning, a middle, and an end. In that way, it’s not an excerpt, or a snippet, or a vignette.

I was introduced to it in a memoir writing class taught by Janice Ray, and I fell in love with the format.

I like that it has constraints – similar to how Robert Frost is said to have said that free verse is like playing tennis without a net. One thing I loved about Twitter when it came out was the 140 character limitation. It made me a better writer, and communicator. This feels like that.

But one thing I really like is that I can do a first draft in like 15-20 minutes. Not a good draft, or even an adequate draft, but enough to see if the project will work.

I posted, without context, the first one I ever wrote last week. This was entirely written and edited in less than 30 total minutes. It’s not amazing, but it’s good, and encouraged me to keep trying.

Expect to see more Flash writing here in coming weeks. (Members got another piece of Flash Memoir this past Saturday.)

Kottke shoutout

My work on the web has always owed a lot to Jason Kottke. When I first started blogging at the end of 2003, he was my age, but already an elder on the blogging scene. A lot of my thoughts about blogging, the open web, owning your content, and publishing on your own site were shaped by or originated with him. And in the last few years, he’s been supportive of me and my work.

In fact, some of y’all only know who I am because you first heard about my work via Kottke.org. A couple of times over the last few years, my newsletter Life Is So Beautiful has gotten linked to by Jason. And when he went on sabbatical a few years ago, he put my newsletter on the list of recommended reading for folks while he was gone.

And now, my site is on his new blogroll, or what he’s calling the KDO Rolodex.

I have been tempted for years to put up a blogroll of my own, but it’s a pain to keep them up to date, and I’m an ADHD human, and it just feels like a recipe for letting people down.

No takebacks.

The late afternoon light streamed through the large windows of the Starbucks. We had not spoken to each other in weeks. We were here to euthanize our relationship.

“How are you?” she asked. She smiled, paused, and then looked down at the table to break eye contact.

“I’m fine.”

I rotate the cup in my hand while it sits on the table. She and I both stare at my hands as the cup spins, silently, to my right.

“Where will you go?” she asks.

“North Carolina. I have some friends there.”

There. I’ve said it. No takebacks.

“What will you do there? Do you have a plan?”

If I were the sort of person who had a plan, I would not be in this Starbucks.

“I do. I will get a part time job somewhere, and work on my writing.”

She laughs. I notice the chip on her eye tooth.

“That’s cute,” she said. “Now I remember why we broke up.”

I feel that in the pit of my stomach, like an injection of ice.

No takebacks.

“I’ll be fine,” I said.

We must learn to love each other or die.

My neighborhood in Jackson, MS is lush and verdant year-round, which is one of the best things about living in the humid subtropics. The birdsong is constant, and the symphony of katydids rises and falls, and has at times arisen so loudly I had to go inside to be heard on the phone.

I walk the same 2.5 miles most days – the dogs along the route know me, and I in turn know the trees where the cedar waxwings can be found, and the pine tree where the hawk that terrifies my chickens lives, and the house where the angry man who voted for our President lives, and the house where the bougie bohemian folk live, and the house where the man who came here to live from the Caribbean decades ago lives, and the house where the prominent Civil Rights activist lives, and I love that my neighborhood is big enough to hold all of them safely.

It has been said that Southerners love individuals and hate classes of people, and I admit to the truth of this, even as I work to overcome the fault in myself. There is something tribal about growing up in a small town, and these are “your people” and the outsiders, however that is defined, are the ones you should be afraid of, even when “your people” are of the same class as the outsiders.

No doubt in the past, this sort of tribalism was valuable as a safety against marauders. But in our current world, where teenagers have friends who live across the globe, and where a tragedy in Europe can have implications in Ohio, its usefulness has run its course. As Auden said, we must learn to love each other, or die.

Program notes

I’m sharing my personal writing in three main places these days.

I have a weekly newsletter where I write a short (~500 word) introductory essay about where I found beauty that week. The newsletter also includes links to five things I found that week I thought were beautiful, as well as links to other things I though were worth sharing, or things I want to lift up. You can sign up for that, or learn more, here.

Every weekend, I send all my paying members (regardless of level of support) an original essay , that is, one that hasn’t been published elsewhere. The topics are wide ranging, but on brand. If you like the sort of thing I write, you will like it. You can learn more about being a member here.

And lastly, there is here, the blog you are reading now.

This blog is a catchall place where I can have artistic freedom to write about whatever the hell I want – anything from birds to gardening to mental health to gumbo to some random poem I liked.

I’m relearning how to blog for fun – this is my playground.

For more information, check out the About page. You can sign up on the Subscribe page to read this in your inbox.

More influential than successful

I had a busy day planned to clean up my very overgrown yard, and spent about three hours doing that, when I was attacked by some sort of stinging insect and took two Benadryl as a result.

This led to a 4 hour nap, and a hangover that is leaving me melancholy with the sense I wasted a day.

There is this piece of dialogue from the movie City Slickers that made me gasp when I first heard it decades ago.

Mitch: Have you ever had that feeling that this is the best I’m ever gonna do, this is the best I’m ever gonna feel… and it ain’t that great?

Station Manager: Happy Birthday.

In the NYT obituary for the comic Jonathan Winters, he was described as “more influential than successful”.

Now in my fifties, well into the second half of my life and work, I think about that line a lot.

More influential than successful.

One day you wake up and you look at all you have done and how much time you have left to do more, and you wonder if you wasted all that time.

A mentor told me once that he rose early because he begrudged the time spent in bed – he only had so much time left.

It feels like I’m running out of time. Did I make a difference? Did any of this matter? Did I sacrifice for the wrong things?

I look around at the state of the country and wonder if I will see the end of this experiment in democracy in my lifetime.

Social media makes this worse, of course. Because the likes and clicks and all that are visible, so you can end up feeling neither influential nor successful.

I love so much about social media – honestly, it’s made my life and career possible. But it is also bad for my mental health. I feel like the food critic who said the restaurant’s food was horrible, and the portions were small.

No pronouncements here, no actions as a result – just a drugged-up middle aged man’s melancholy, asking himself questions while on the couch.

Did any of it matter? Did I waste my shot? Did I make a difference? What do I do with what I have left? Is there any ice cream left in the freezer?

A search engine in a trench coat.

I am not a Luddite. I don’t dislike technology – in fact, almost every dollar I have earned since 2003 or so has been made possible by the Internet, and you glorious people who inhabit it.

I have a Google Pixel phone. A Lenovo ThinkPad. Fiber Internet service. I manage several websites. I have a newsletter that goes out by email to three continents.

I am not afraid of technology.

But I absolutely hate Chat GPT and it’s ilk. It’s not intelligent – it’s a search engine in a trenchcoat, but without the attribution. It’s a job thief. It’s a plagiarism machine.

I was in a meeting the other day, and the need for a communication plan for this organization came up. They’ve needed one for quite a while, but they don’t have a communication person, so since nobody was responsible for it, nobody had done it.

“We don’t have to pay anyone for that,” one of their officers said. “ChatGPT can write one for us in 30 seconds.”

Then, to prove his point, a minute later he dropped the results in the meeting chat.

How successful would such a plan be? How much thought went into it, how much concern for the recipients? How much empathy was involved for the audience? How aligned with the mission of this organization could this robot* possibly be?

And how invested can the organization be in the outcome?

And how many people did not earn a living because of the seconds spent creating a “marketing plan” this way? What is the environmental cost of that computation? What harm to the thinking processes of the person entering it into the robot?

And perhaps most critically to the organization- if it is really that easy, why did nobody do that before?

“My wish simply is to live my life as fully as I can. In both our work and our leisure, I think, we should be so employed. And in our time this means that we must save ourselves from the products that we are asked to buy in order, ultimately, to replace ourselves.”

― Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

Not writing.

Type, type type… delete. Type, type type… delete. Type, type type… delete.

For the last hour.

I’ve been working on some negotiations the last few days that have been whipsawing back and forth, and as a result has dramatically affected my mood. As a result, my sleep has been awful.

It’s a heat index of 103 outside.

My wife is ill. She’ll be fine – it’s not dangerous, but right now, it sucks.

Our country is being ran by an insane person, but he is being supported and enabled by very sane people who are manipulating him for their ends.

I’ve been on the road a lot over the last month, and that always hoses my routine. I desperately need a routine to be at my best.

And I sit down to write, and it’s type, type type… delete. Type, type type… delete. Type, type type… delete.