Last Fall Images / Imagine the Last Fall

I find the garden much more visceral as I think about this, potentially, being the last autumn here. Or not. You never know. I will go where the door opens. At least November in zone 5 Nebraska still provides breaths of fresh air--one day it's 30, the next it's 60. This makes winter seem more manageable to me, since really, things start to warm noticeably come late February. Just enough winter to make spring worthwhile.

Some winters the weeping bald cypress dies half back. Stinks.

Tossed a bunch of seeds in that black pot. We'll see.

Rare view from the other gate.

I had a surprise call this week from UNL and was offered to teach a few classes this spring. Truly a godsend, both for the money and for the fact I miss teaching. And bringing the research together for my next book is taking longer than expected, so I now hope to begin writing the memoir in January and have it done by mid spring. Really need to have that first draft laid out asap. Isn't this an exciting blog post? Well, this next book will be rich, I tell you, rich like the finest dark chocolate mousse. It's my great American memoir.

Me + Orion Magazine = Bam!

I'm going to have a picture and a short block of words in the July / August issue of Orion. It's one of my favorite publications, and now I've got my foot in the door. It's just so cool, you know?

The image is of my wife on a gravel country road trying to get close to some of the 500,000 sandhill cranes that come through here every spring. Link to this post to find the image.

Monarchs in the Act, Mantis Dinner, A Sage Hummer

The Deep Middle has eclipsed 100 monarch chrysalides this summer, and eggs are sporadic outside (peak migration in SE Nebraska is 9/8-9/20). Inside, several dozen larvae await their chance to turn the color of baby boogers, while 31 freshly hatched cats are alive and well--the last of the broods. This week also marks the first time a monarch died in the chrysalis after turning black, and the first time a monarch couldn't get her head off of a torn piece of chrysalis for hours. This female ended up not fully inflating two of her wings (and so is doomed), but I released her anyway, and within hours this tattered fellow had her in his clutches:

She's hanging on by an abdomen 

Tis better to be in the grasp of love than the grasp of a mantis, though:

Headless silver-spotted skipper

For a week I have timed the on again off again appearance of a hummingbird. Precisely 1 hour before sunset he comes, beaming in and out like some Star Trek tease, and I finally got some photos. Thus, as eco theorists might say, I now own the hummingbird and have made it an object, a possession, and so devalue it. At least I don't mount them above my fireplace (wouldn't that be a little bit cool, though?).

Hummer on 'Nekan' sage

Sage 'Nekan' on hummer

Mr. Hummer had interesting flower choices: pink althea on a standard, purple morning glory, white boltonia, and blue sage. Quite the hodgepodge. Maybe the red sunflower was at least a lighthouse of sorts calling out to him?

Finally blooming after bouts with black stem weevils

The caryopteris is also blooming. I'm sure it isn't blooming anywhere else, and so this image will astound and delight you. I like to click on and expand it, to see the bee and the stamens tickling the air:

Is my negative space working for you?

The grasses are looking good. And since this once was a tallgrass prairie, I have some... that go on to flop all over the place with lack of neighborhood support (you should see my big "30 leg octopus" bluestem). But the heads are fascinating, as on this indian grass:

Better negative space in this photo?

And finally the arbor, adorned in 50% less clematis virginiana than last year (why?), but harboring blue lobelia and pink turtlehead at its base:

Trees in back are nice borrowed scenery

The school year is on to week 3, so I start grading in force. Submissions of the garden memoir to agents and presses masochistically continue, quasi positive rejections keep coming from them and journals that have seen shorter bits, and I'm taking baby steps jumpstarting research for my Great Plains historical memoir opus. Oh, and the full-length poetry collection is a finalist for a book contest, in the judge's hands as we speak. Amidst this all is my 9 month thinking-ahead panic of June's garden tour, and some plants I really should get in the ground this fall--probably my favorite time of year to dig (it's yours too, right?).

Robert Bly Rocks Me

Been editing the memoir, and still love coming across this quote which begins part 2 of the book:

"There is an old occult saying: whoever wants to see the invisible has to penetrate more deeply into the visible. All through Taoist thought, there is the idea that our disasters come from letting nothing live for itself, from the longing we have to pull everything, even friends, in to ourselves and let nothing alone. If we examine a pine carefully, we see how independent it is of us. When we first sense that a pine tree really doesn’t need us, that it has a physical life and a moral life and a spiritual life that is complete without us, we feel alienated and depressed. The second time we feel it, we feel joyful."

— Robert Bly, The Morning Glory

Extinction--Oklahoma, Flora, Fauna, & Culture

Last night I went to hear a friend / colleague / previous PhD committee member (has it almost been a year since I graduated?) read from his new book, Pieces of the Plains. John Janovy is a biologist, so his perspective on life is much different than mine--microscopic (studies parasites and such) and lots of method. Lots of being in the trenches. He was also born (as was I) and educated in Oklahoma, which is the subject of my next book. But more on that later. 

Janovy was asked about the current extinctions we are beginning to witness of species, and if he saw a curtailing of that being possible. No, he said flat out, no, no way--not with how humans kill each other, not with how we kill for oil and in the name of god. Then he told the college students there that when they reach his age, in about 50 years, they'd be living in a far different world of hunger, lack of water, homelessness, global government chaos--all as oil runs out. I got that from watching a recent episode of World Without Oil on National Geographic (title?). It was frightening and only the tip of the berg.

Back to extinctions. I am still young, I still have some hope, but it's dwindling fast. Janovy said he is in the top 1% of humans who ever lived that have witnessed such natural diversity on earth, and that such diversity will very shortly come to an end, so enjoy it while you can. Species will weaken as the gene pool shrinks.

We've had other significant, 90th percentile global extinctions, but this 6th one as many folks call it--even if overcome--would take millions of years to repair, to evolve back to what we see now on the planet. It took millions of years before, it will again, if it happens.

I wonder if I should spend every waking chance I have to sit on my deck listening to the cardinals, blue jays, finches, sparrows, mourning doves and others before they vanish. 1% of bird species go functionally extinct each year. I wonder if I should sell my house and buy those 100 acres now and live in a tent so I can enjoy and interact more fully with nature while it is still here. I wonder if our natural descriptions today will seem as foreign to someone in a few decades as the pioneer descriptions I read of buffalo and elk wandering through wheat fields.

I wonder if this all has to be so dark. Humans are like my students and procrastinate until the last minute, until they have no choice but to do the work. I wonder if that's genetic, or if it's the same old song and dance of capitalism, of self-preservation, of blah blah blah.

I wonder if my next book will matter, if I should even write it. Last night Janovy quoted Oklahoma historian Angie Debo, whose 1930-ish work slapped the country's collective face as to Indian policy in Oklahoma territory and its early statehood years. Keep in mind, in 1930, many folks who instigated those policies were still very much alive. I quote her:

"Oklahoma is more than just another state. It is a lens in which the long rays of time are focused into the brightest of light. In its magnifying clarity, dim facets of the American character stand more clearly revealed. For in Oklahoma all the experiences that went into the making of the nation have been speeded up. Here all the American traits have been intensified. The one who can interpret Oklahoma can grasp the meaning of America in the modern world."

As I look at the history of my Mennonite family coming over from Germany and Russia in the 1870s, I am caught in an impossible vice: their faith, hope, and work ethic was unique, was incredible, was and is so praise worthy I can't put it into words. And yet, either as government pawns and / or willing paticipants through missionary work in Oklahoma territory, they helped to so efficiently destroy the ecology of native flora and fauna and dozens of Native American cultures within a few decades--if not within one decade.

This very fine line scares the heck out of me, and I have to have faith that as I continue to research books and family stories, it will play itself out in the right way--without guilt, blame, or condemnation, but with honest and direct light, and somehow with the same hope and faith my ancestors had facing a world of incredible uncertainty. Phase 2 begins next week.

P.S. -- It's snowing hard outside. That doesn't help things.

The Birds, The Sun

Outside it is 22. This morning it was 0, and will be again tonight. But something has shifted. Standing in my socks and sweater on the steps out back (pants too), it didn't feel cold. I could see my breath, but I could not feel the dry cold in my throat. I've not felt real sun in days, maybe a week (what a busy week), and though I am not really a sun person, feeling it meant something today. I was cold, yet I was warm, and it wasn't just the sunlight.

Dozens upon dozens of robins and chickadees, sparrows and blue jays, dart from ceder to elm to gutter's edge, their feet on the metal echoing down into the house. I hear a woodpecker from somewhere in the stand of trees. Chickadees chase and call each other, meticulously tracing each other's path like a snake's body. There are more geese at dusk, larger flocks pacing west toward the open cornfields and farm ponds.

It's not spring, we are 20 degree below average, and this is fine. The 6" of snow in the garden is lovely, keeping my fall transplants safe. Along the house's south wall, where the snow is gone, the preserved green of tansy and penstemon and agastache nearly fool me into believing it is April. It's not spring, and this is fine.

Inside I'm laying on the couch, sunlight warming my feet only, not reaching in to the living room as far as it did just one month ago. I'm reading a book. I'm thinking about both of my memoirs--one ready, one in the research stages. I'm wondering what I'll find in Kansas. I'm daydreaming about planting yellow twig dogwood and carex and liatris. Will I find any trace of my family? Of myself? Two robins scrape the tree line and settle on the roof--I hear them chasing each other across the asphalt shingles. It is a spring rain. The rejection letters in the mail are almost always positive now. We are in transition. The lines are blurred. It is winter. And so it must be spring.

Trip To Oklahoma Homesteads

Mine, my father's, my grandparent's, my great grandparent's, and my great great grandparent's. It's taking me some time--my whole life--to come to terms with the fact that Minnesota is not my homestead, but Oklahoma is. Usually, upon entering that windy southern state, an immense dread, heaviness, and darkness pulls me under as if I were drowning in tar. This time it was different. Maybe because I was older, empowered, on a mission to do research for my next book, I don't know. But here--in many photos--is some of what I found, and most of it is only the tip of the iceberg I'll never know.

I come from German Mennonites on my Dad's side, who escaped the Spanish inquisition in the Netherlands by settling in northern Poland (Prussia at the time), and then escaped Prussia by going to southeastern Ukraine near the Black Sea in the late 1700s. They wanted religious freedom and nonviolence, i.e., no military conscription--this last reason is why they were constantly on the move, and why, in 1874, my great great grandparents (20 and 21 with a 1 year old son) came to Kansas via Castle Garden / Battery Park in NYC (pre Ellis Island days), then to Oklahoma in 1894 in one of the many land runs that displaced the last of the crammed-together Native American tribes in Oklahoma Territory. You should see the pictures--men on horseback and families in wagons on a starting line, then screaming south in clouds of dust at breakneck speed after the gunshot. So begins the pictorial narrative.



















Great great grandparents, Abraham and Elizabeth Janzen, who I put money on never spoke a lick of English. Abraham was her second husband who she married in Kansas, after her first husband, Peter Kliewer, died of a fever just a few weeks before their first daughter died of it, too--daughter was 3 months old, and wouldn't be the last infant to pass away.













A small part of Washita County in western Oklahoma, centered around the town of Corn (Korn prior to WWI). The green squares are individual Native American quarter sections (80 acres), and the tan 80s belong to white settlers.

I struggle with the depiction and oral retelling from family of white settlers as brave and such. Yes, no doubt they were, I have no idea. And no doubt they were a product of self-serving religious and cultural mantras that lead to events like the 1st dust bowl (when will the 2nd one be?). I find it hard being both a product of too much higher education and a good Mennonite descendent. But there's more to the story than this--I just haven't found it yet.

(I'm also afraid that whatever I write on will not be the positive, rosey-glasses sort of thing everyone down there might want to read or expects to read. It won't be. It will be. But it won't be.)


















Elizabeth earned her living--and supported her family in tough times--throughout her life as a seamstress, and this is the sewing machine she bought in 1875. It's in the Corn Museum on loan from the family.













The Janzen homestead today, home to great great grandparents, great grandparents, and grandparents. It is stunning how all across the plains the last reminders of these places are windmills. Not silos, not stone walls, but in the end just thin metal towers that beat tornados and lightening and fire (which all took a surprising number of family barns, churches, and other landmarks).


















The Janzen place as it stood, perhaps in the 1920s or 1930s. Not sure. Someone is. (not sure why it wouldn't load correctly, either)













Pic of me, grandma, and my sister on a forced pilgrimage to the homeplace. It was burned down by a farmer in the 1990s or so when cows got stuck in the cellar, died, stunk it up, and as with all structures, was buried with topsoil and farmed over. Lost forever.














The Bergthal Church cemetary where Abraham and Elizabeth are buried. It stands across the street where another prairie disgrace happened.













Apparently locals were tired of windows being broken and vandals getting in, so they just gassed the thing a few years back. This pisses me off to no end. What is it in us that insists on razing our lives, physically and emotionally? There is so little left of us, and especially of those before us. We pushed millions of bison to within extinction down to a few hundred head, wiped away millenia of Native American culture, and now do the same to our own culture and sense of place. No wonder we are crazy. You won't find any historical markers, except here at Bergthal, ironically. Someone may remember just by chance where something was, or some old cedar tree might still mark the location of the first sod post office in Corn in the 1890s, but that's it. Poof. How long will it be before some farmer cuts the cedar down for a few more square feet of wheet or maize (or milo, as I heard).














My great grandparents, John and Katie Janzen. John quit smoking when he found the lord. Also died of a heart attack trying to get his car out of an icey / muddy / snowy country road one January. Someone found him there soon after.













Here is Gyp Creek (lots of gypsum) where John often fished, about 1 mile south of the Janzen homeplace. Catfish, I think.













And under the nearby cement bridge are mud swallows and their poop.


















Here was a (in)famous tree, the Hanging Tree at Big Jake's Crossing, where Native Americans were hung after burning and skinning cowboys who had first retaliated against (read killed) the Native Americans who stole some of their cows to feed their starving families. History is rich, isn't it? Eye for an eye for an eye for an eye.... I was also suprised at how older folks still very much harbor stereotypes, ones I can only imagine as a Saturday morning cowboys and indians cartoon.


















Where my dad spent his first 6 or so years. The house was moved to Weatherford. I went inside the barn, disturbed a huge owl, and saw lots of rusting things.













Where they kept the baby chickens / brooder house.













Also, apparently, where they kept the lawnmower.













Chicken coop, which was filled with roll after roll of barbed wire.













The only few sunny hours of the damp trip. Last remnants of the front lawn.













A rusty old driveway grader.













The wash house.


















Wash house with pressure tank. In the back corner you can see the area where they once had a fire to heat a water basin hanging above.













Rusty old storage tank.













Crumbled milking barn. This is our equivalent of castle ruins, I think.













I know I'm a bleeding envrionmentalist. Whatever. I like this picture with the mid 20th century electrical stuff, and in the far distance, a large wind farm (click to exapand).













I like this shot, too.

Here are some final pics of other houses in the area:

















That cow on the far right would NOT stop staring. I mean a straight on, vacant-cow-disturbance-in-the-force-telekinesis kind of stare.

-Fin- (for now)

I Know I'm a Whiney Jerk But....

If you've had sod for 1 month, should you be fertilizing it already? In August? I can feel the synthetic, polluted runoff making its way to my tap then collecting in my organs. All this just from watching my new neighbor.

A quick google search seems to suggest that sod was fertilized quite heavily at the farm (duh), and a summer (early or late) installation won't need anything until spring--maybe a winterizer at most. That lawn just can't be too green, so why not use plutonium on it? Oh, because the dog--the only one who uses the lawn BARK BARK BARK PLOP PLOP PLOP--might get sick.

In non grouchy news, I have 20 essay submissions ready to be sent out this week. I'd like to double that number so maybe 1 place will accept me this year (my odds always seem much longer than other writers I know), but it's just so darned exhausting... and that's not what this fall is about.

I need to go move some ironweed now.

Creative Nonfiction is No Longer Creative

I've spent years sending my prose work to literary journals, almost two decades sending poetry. Here's what I've come to believe are the expectations of literary journals (and average readers) when it comes to creative nonfiction:

1) Creative nonfiction must read like fiction. This means it must have a clear beginning and end, a narrative arc, a denouement or peak moment of energy / tension, some reflection, and blatant emotion.

2) By emotion I mean that the market / expectations dictate sensationalism--to a degree. A degree which I, personally, can't and won't deliver in less than 5,000 words. Nonfiction seems to be a genre that is shrinking into quasi confessionalism, especially if it's from a unique or under-represented cultural / social / economic perspective. What's more, I think cnf also has to be super neat and super tidy because it is true--or this neatness will in the least validate any possible exaggeration or hazy memory.

3) I get the distinct sense that very few journals, and obviously fewer readers, want to see lyrical meditation or reflection, let alone any sense of the "poetic" moments in life. I've had journals tell me my writing tells too much, but that's the only stuff that gets accepted, too (seriously). I find MUCH more value in prose that involves the reader--maybe not through showing--but through a lyrical tightness and metaphorical leap more common to poetry. Through silence. Through pensive reflection. Even my better writing students have recognized this on their own.

4) If creative nonfiction is more than narrative--and most folks will say that's the case--where are the non-narrative journals? Where are the experiential pieces? Where is a literature that goes beyond "as told to" story? I'm thinking about the many lost oral traditions. I'm thinking about story as a rich weave of narrative, metaphor, imagery, silence, and negative space. Too much nonfiction leaves little to the imagination, and as a result too little to the meaningful experience of the reader. A good story is not enough, I believe, yet it appears to be plenty at the moment. Maybe this is why we feel disconnected.

5) So it would seem I'm saying, "Hey, I write in a hybrid style, mixing genres and approaches, publish me." Well, maybe. But what I really want to say is where is true creative nonfiction? Where are the subgenres flirting with each other within creative nonfiction? What happened to the creative? What happened to the excitement of learning / discovering in prose, seeing the world through multiple lenses at once--and as a result, seeing much fuller and farther? Maybe I'm simply asking this: what happened to our closeness with a diverse world, our wonder? Why has our writing become so formulaic, expected, one dimensional, and distilled? Has it?

Anyone out there?