Category: Writing

Writing about writing, autobiography, cross posting selected work from other places.

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Writing

Places to Create

Writing space at Five Points in Davenport, Iowa, 1980.

A writer needs a place to work. Somewhere safe, secure, and with adequate room to spread out. I’ve written in my share in public places: restaurants, coffee bars, grocery stores, and parks. These locations serve for a moment, but eventually we need to return to a home base. Since 1974, I found many of them, including my drill sergeant’s office at Fort Jackson, S.C., an apartment not far from the Mississippi River, in the lower level of the first place we lived after our wedding, and others. Five of them stand out.

Five main places I wrote, where I felt I had a writing space, are as follows: In my Bachelor Officer Quarters in Mainz, Germany; my apartment at Five Points in Davenport; my apartment on Market Street in Iowa City; in the garage behind our house when we lived in the Calumet; and finally a very long spell, maybe 30 years, in the room I built on the lower level of our home in Big Grove Township. All of them afforded reasonable quiet, and freedom to write what I wanted. I took advantage of the spaces as best I could.

After seeing the Pablo Picasso retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1980, I became enraptured by his artistic process. Before his 1973 death he was exceedingly successful. David Douglas Duncan’s 1980 book Viva Picasso: A Centennial Celebration 1881-1981 depicts Picasso as he created his work. From these photographs I took inspiration for my own studio stolen from small spaces where a busy family lived.

When I lived near the main railway station in Mainz, Germany, my apartment had two large desks which I pushed together to use as a writing place. My apartment was at the end of the hall in a building called the Bachelor Officers’ Quarters. As a corner room, it was fairly quiet. My schedule had me away from garrison for two to three weeks at a time so part of what I did there was spread out mail and make sure what needed addressing was. I received and wrote a lot of letters. I had a big map of the region pinned to the wall. Next to it was a large bulletin board, and then an American flag I used when we road marched with armored equipment on the German Autobahn. While I wasn’t there much, I felt like a writer when I was.

I left the Smith Corona portable typewriter Mother gave me to use at university in storage and bought a new Olympia portable typewriter in Mainz. I used a blue three-ring, loose leaf binder to keep my journal. The chair had a straight-back, dining room-style. Behind the desk was a bookshelf I made from planks set on wine bottles I had emptied out by drinking the contents. My source of news and information was a multi-function AM-FM radio that could also receive short wave signals. I was still trying to be a musician so I bought an inexpensive guitar at a local music store. In the early years I had no telephone or television. About year into my tour of duty I went to the German phone company and had a land line hooked up, not that anyone called me while I was there. This writing space was my escape from serving in the military.

The image above is my writing space at Five Points in Davenport. I wrote previously about this apartment where I pulled my life together after serving four years in the military. I was determined to be a writer. Note the oak desk. I purchased it when I arrived in Davenport after living in Germany. It followed me until the present day, although it is used mostly for storage and layout space today.

I recently described my apartment on Market Street in Iowa City here. It was a transitional space from youth into marriage, although I had no idea that’s what it was when I lived there. I did know I was a writer.

When we lived in Indiana, the house we bought did not have space for my writing. I moved to the garage. This was problematic when it was cold because there was no insulation. I bought a construction heater and had a local propane service deliver a bottle which I leaned up against an exterior fence. It was very noisy as it burned the fuel.

I’m reading my journals from Indiana and more than any other prior period, I produced writing that stands up to the years since then. I developed the idea that a creative person had to integrate all aspects of their life into one continuous band of creativity. My garage was an escape, yet it brought together my work life, my home life, and everything else I did in the Calumet. This was a significant change.

In a discussion with our child we came up with a name for the place, The Deaton Family Workshop. I did some of my creative work on the word processor we brought from Iowa, which was located inside the house between the dining area and the living room. Still, the garage was my main creative studio.

Finally, There is my current writing space. I use a chair I bought for a dollar at an auction, and a library table inherited from the father-in-law’s estate. I described building this place in a post called, A Place to Write. It has well-served the writing process.

Each place I wrote is important. The hard part was to envision that I am a writer. Working a career in transportation and logistics distracted me from that. Now, though, I can focus on the actual writing. In the main, given a space, that’s what my life has always been about.

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Writing

Tools to Create

Writing place at Five Points in Davenport, Iowa, 1980.

When I began writing after university I used a bound journal to enter my experiences. In the 50 years since those first beginnings, the technology changed, and with it, the type of writing I did.

I migrated from bound journals to a loose leaf binder in the military. This was a faint image of the famous journals in literary history, Samuel Pepys for example. I spent a lot of time recording my thoughts and evolved continuously in how I presented myself.

When we got our first home word processor in 1987, I worked at my writing with the intent of making a completed text I would use in another application. I produced letters mostly, but a few journal entries. I also maintained the format of my earlier journal-writing. The word processor replaced the three typewriters I accumulated.

We bought our first home computer on April 21, 1996 and installed it in the kitchen where the extra phone jack was located. We connected to the internet via dial up. I had used computers at work, including for email, but having a home computer was a revolution. Thus began a period of experimentation with online writing.

In 2006, a group of consultants from Hyderabad, India convinced me to move to a new email platform called Gmail. At the time I needed a referral to get into Gmail, which the guys gladly gave. I spend as many hours drafting emails as I do other forms of writing. Email changed how I did correspondence forever and for the better.

As our child finished college in 2007, I joined the social media platforms Facebook and Twitter to keep in touch. I stayed on both for a long time, yet terminated both in the revival period of American oligarchs, Twitter in 2024 and Facebook in 2025. Social media became a creative outlet as well as a news source. I continue to post on BlueSky which rose in the wake of the transition of Twitter to X. For now, I expect to continue.

Also in 2007 I posted my first blog on the platform Blogger. Eventually I transferred to WordPress which seemed more user friendly. Even though I wrote thousands of blog posts, I printed them out in book form using a service. The concern about hours and hours of creative effort vanishing into the ether because of an electrical failure or an errant keystroke has me seeking the comfort of paper.

Today I write book-length projects in Microsoft Word, which I began learning while I was working at the oil company. At the time, it was MS-DOS based and not nearly as functional as it is today. Microsoft Word facilitates saving single documents so I don’t lose them. It also provides a form of security that seems less available on the internet.

Creative people need tools to create. In my case it was basic pen and paper for the first 20 years. After personal computers came along, the whole world of writing changed, not only for me but for everyone. I would not want to go back.

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Writing

This Studio

This studio...
   is a place for creative endeavor
is only a studio...
      a place for solace
by my declaration...
      from this quiet place
that it is so.

     ~ Sept. 9, 1990
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Writing

Creative in Indiana

Booklet filled with automatic writing, September 1990.

The home we bought in the Calumet region of Indiana was situated in a subdivision called Lincoln Gardens. Everything was about Lincoln, it seemed. We could hear traffic on the Lincoln Highway, U.S. Route 30, a few blocks from our home. My employer was Lincoln Sales and Service after the highway. We moved there in January 1988.

The first two years were a unique time in my life. I was hired by the trucking company in part because I had been an infantry officer in the U.S. Army. My first supervisor was a Marine who served in Vietnam who was looking for a certain type of “aggressive” individual. He hired me right away. The transfer to Indiana seemed like part of the deal. It was either go to Indiana or find a new job.

I was interested in providing for our young family, so I transferred to the Calumet. I was interested in being creative. As often as I could, I escaped into our detached garage and let my imagination flow. I wrote about this in a notebook filled with automatic writing:

The garage is my refuge in a time when my life is complex and difficult. The raw materials of lumber, papers, and cultural artifacts are everywhere, along with the tools to make them into my creations. Like this booklet. I find hours of distraction possible there. A clutter of colors, shapes, textures, and cultural objects. It is no wonder the trip to the garage took so long. I was engaged in other things there, distracted from the endeavor at hand. (Excerpt from an automatic writing piece, Sept. 9, 1990).

Our family has been able to build a long history together. They always supported my creative energy even if it caused me to withdraw from life from time to time.

If there was anything aggressive about my personality it was the drive to live a creative life on my terms. I was okay if there was an audience of one, resigned to it if that had to be. Yet during that period, I tried to create things with a broader circulation. When I wrote this piece, I had left the comfort of an Iowa trucking company and began work at the ninth largest corporation on the planet. It was as if I severed myself from every Iowa thing. It was go-time as a creative artist and writer.

Comes a time when we must trod the boards and perform the role in which we cast ourselves. For me, it is a role of my own creation in a theater of my own design. The individuality of the words spoken alienates most of the people who know me in other social settings. I write for the ages, not for today’s people. I would enjoy the financial success of a Michener, a Bellow, an Updike, but that may never come to pass.

Instead, from my outpost in Lake County, I produce works, texts to be sent out. Items created in the midst of many social forces. Items that, in some cases, are so idiosyncratic that they might have little worth beyond the borders of my property. But slowly, texts are created. Not many, not quickly, but they mount up, one-by-one. (Excerpt from an automatic writing piece, Sept. 15, 1990).

I have living memory of weekends in our Indiana garage. I hoped to create an art form that would combine all aspects of my creative energy and experience yet have broader appeal. I was hardly successful. Perhaps the best success came from setting aside creative endeavor and taking our child to go swimming on a Saturday afternoon.

I was privileged to be part of a close family, one willing to do things a bit differently than other people who lived in our region. A life based on my creative impulses moderated by the logic of my spouse and our child’s youthful innocence. That nurturing environment helped me to be who I am.

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Writing

Inside the Bubble

Trail Walking on March 29, 2025.

The ambient temperature is chilly as I write. Not freezing, not spring, just chilly. I yearn to be outside working in the yard and garden. I don’t yearn enough to bundle up and brave the cold and wind. At least I got the garlic in the ground on Saturday and it rained Sunday. I’ll take little victories when they come.

I’ve been spending what seems like a lot of time writing. Each day includes writing emails, social media posts on BlueSky, and at least one blog post. All of that writing is to prime the pump for work on my autobiography. I’m on the draft of Chapter 25 of a possible 50, so the draft is half finished. Time writing is valuable for the distraction it provides. Distraction from our politics, mostly.

On Monday, Paul Krugman posted this graphic:

His comment was about the impact of economic uncertainty on small businesses. It’s not good, he said. However, there are more kinds of uncertainty during the current administration that are equally uncertain.

Will Social Security continue to provide steady retirement income? Will my veteran friends continue to have health care through a viable Veterans Administration system? Will my public library be able to afford things like interlibrary loans, websites, and other services if federal funding goes away? Will research facilities be able to create needed vaccines during the next, inevitable pandemic? When I’m infirm enough to need a nursing home will Medicaid be available to help defray costs? Life today is one big truckload of uncertainties, hence my need to be distracted from it.

As society grows more uncertain, the tendency is to withdraw into what is most important in life: family, maintaining a home, eating sufficiently well to avoid problems, maintaining physical and mental health, and more. Such concerns during the Reagan administration rose and my reaction was to withdraw into what I will call the “Reagan bubble.” Focus on what is important and the heck with everything else. Needing a Reagan bubble complicates things in significant ways.

The tendency is to conserve resources. That means less spending on retail in person and online. It also means using funds to pay down debt. Can we get by with the vehicle we currently own for a few more years? Will the washer and dryer hold up without needing replaced? Conserving resources, multiplied by a society that feels the same way about uncertainty will have negative fallout for the consumer economy. While I’m not an economist, it will be felt across the economy, not just in the consumer sector.

Living in the Reagan bubble will be good for my writing, the same way the coronavirus pandemic was. Until I finish the second book, I need that. That raises another question, though. Where will things be when I do finish the book, hopefully by the end of the year? It’s a big unknown. Those of us who have been to this rodeo before during the Reagan years know what to do.

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Writing

Schererville Terminal

Welcome to Schererville. Photo Credit – Wikimedia Commons.

Editor’s Note: This is a draft chapter from my memoir. I was assigned to the Schererville, Indiana trucking terminal of Lincoln Sales and Service for most of the time from 1987 until 1993.

On my first day of work, as I crested the railroad bridge just south of the Schererville terminal, I saw a car had driven under the trailer of one of our tractor-trailer rigs while it was making a left-hand turn onto Indianapolis Boulevard. I didn’t know it then, yet this would become the typical start of a day. During the time I worked there, about four of the six years we lived in the Calumet, there was always something happening. It was nearly impossible for a human to keep up. Thankfully, no one appeared to be hurt in this specific accident.

The Town of Schererville, Indiana is called the “crossroads of the nation.” Situated in Saint John’s Township in Lake County, it has been a crossroads since before becoming a state when Native American trails crisscrossed not far from the current location of the intersection of U.S. Highways 30 and 41. At one time, Standard Oil Company owned all four corners of that intersection. The Standard Oil Trust had lots of money and was buying desirable locations to sell automotive fuel and lubricants across the country. Locations along the Lincoln Highway, which ran coast to coast, were prime. Their corporate descendant, BP, still operates on the northeast corner which currently has a large gas station and convenience store. Our trucking terminal was about two miles north on Highway 41, which is also called Indianapolis Boulevard.

Because the company fuel island was close to the main roads traveled by our truckers, almost all our drivers stopped to get fuel, drop off payroll paperwork, use the restroom, check in with the company trainer, and if needed, get their equipment repaired or serviced. Our fuel island attendant J.J. knew Chicago like the back of his hand and gave directions to help out-of-state drivers find their customers using routes safe for an 18-wheeler in the city and its suburbs.

In 1987, Lincoln Sales and Service in Schererville was a full-service trucking terminal. During my two tours of duty there, we evolved into a driver recruiting station when the shop and fuel island were closed after a union organizing attempt, and training was moved to the corporate office in Cedar Rapids to provide a consistent, documented process when the U.S. Department of Transportation audited us. Driver payroll had already been centralized in nearby Griffith, Indiana. Our terminal staff shrank from more than 25 employees to half a dozen over the years. There was less traffic after the fuel island closed, yet it was busy enough for us to hire an outside security service. I was young and could keep up with the workload which often bled over into family time.

I described terminal operations in Chapter 18, yet I want to bring focus to the story of my work.

The many driver interviews I conducted were a story of dehumanization. Workers were laid off by companies that felt they had to be competitive, whatever that meant. It was a time of ubiquitous management consulting firms who restructured businesses to direct more revenue and earnings to owners, shareholders, and high-level managers. CRST followed this path eventually. It was busy at our terminal because most of the time I worked in uncharted territory in managing a recruiting operation with little guidance unless there was a lawsuit, workers compensation claim, or union activity.

In the crucible of manufacturing in transition, tens of thousands of workers in our area were trying to adjust. I was there listening to them and found one heck of a story. I hired some of them, doing what I could to ease their transition.

I officed in Schererville yet traveled a lot. By the end of my time there I was managing trucking terminals in Schererville and Richmond, Indiana, and starting recruiting operations in West Virginia, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Missouri. I would wake up on airplanes unsure of where I was, or where I was going.

I’m glad for the experience. I hated the experience. My life in the Calumet, and everywhere else I traveled, taught me about unionization and the consequences of change sparked by the Reagan Revolution in a way I believe gave me a unique perspective. They were days of hope for an intangible future that included success. In retrospect, I don’t know what that means. It was a busy time and there was little time and energy left for family.

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Writing

The Work I Do

Photo by Yury Kim on Pexels.com
The work I do
is not for me

so much as it is for

the friends I have come to know.

The collages
The poems
The journal entries
The performances

Not for me.

The nuns taught us.

All for the honor and glory of God.

It is a lesson

that stuck.

~ Labor Day, 1989, Lake County, Indiana
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Writing

The Real Work Begins

Writing About Apples

Drafting Part II of my memoir is proceeding well. During the last ten years I did so much work writing bits and pieces that paragraphs now fall quickly into place. I have a solid draft of chapters 1-17, which is before we moved to Indiana. Because the time is so recent (1988), and because I wrote a lot while living through it, there are ample documents and memories available. Too many, really. I have choices to make. Sadly, the choice is what to leave out.

I wrote this description of where we lived last week:

The dominant geographic feature in the Calumet is Lake Michigan. I remember endless flocks of geese migrating above our house, noise of their honking entering through open windows continuously and for hours at a time. There was “lake effect” snow that piled up quickly during winter. Outside our house, it never really got dark because of the proximity of Chicago and Gary which indirectly illuminated our yard. The hum of traffic from nearby Highway 30 was a constant white noise, muffling the broader world.

I don’t remember much of what we ate in Indiana but my grandmother gave us money to buy a stove and refrigerator for the kitchen. We bought them at Sears, which was a short drive from our house. Grocery stores were not open on Sundays, so we had to plan. We got to know several family-style restaurants, many run by Greek immigrants, where we would get away from home for a dinner out. (Excerpt from a draft memoir, March 16, 2025).

The Calumet Region can be characterized by its proximity to Lake Michigan, and being the home of the largest concentration of steel mills, oil refineries, and chemical plants in the world during the 20th Century. I adapted the name to characterize my life as “living in the Calumet.” The havoc wrought by the Reagan Revolution resulted in many tens of thousands of unemployed industrial workers who were the raison d’être for our company to establish a driver recruiting operation there. During my six years working in the Calumet, I personally interviewed some 10,000 job seekers spread out across the states north of the Ohio River. A person learns a lot about American culture while doing that.

That’s the problem. I’m stuck with getting out a literary funnel to narrow the scope of my narrative. There are simply too many stories to tell.

My time in Indiana has a fixed beginning and end point which can be dealt with. Long time readers of this blog have likely heard some of these stories, like the post Flint and Reagan’s Wake which tells about my experience in Flint, Michigan in 1988. The balance a memoir writer must achieve is in the mixture of hardened memories and rediscovering our past lives through research. Including some of the hardened narratives is a must. They just can’t dominate the overall story.

Achieving this balance is the real work of autobiography. In my early years, the stories remaining are fewer and the inclination is to include them all because it was reasonable to do so. Not so when the main work of a life begins. The issue of my ideology, combined with specific experiences that stand out is not a given. We need to turn more pages to make sure we get the narrative to align with our intentions.

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Writing

Not as Planned

Pelican migration, late winter 2025.

Ambient temperatures were in the mid-40s yet it was the wind, gusting at 25 mph, that made garlic planting impossible. I rescheduled. The soil is right, but I didn’t want to fight the wind. This year’s garlic is an experiment. It is not going as planned.

This excerpt from my journal seems apropos for today.

So be it, a life of creating starts. Here a thermometer installed on the kitchen awning. Here some seeds planted, a corner raked. A book read, a lifelong process, never ending, of small acts, viewable only with an eye more omniscient than mine: as the nuns taught, “All for the honor and glory of God.”

To live a life: this is what is presented.

Like a pioneer, I step into the wilderness. Though others may have lived here before, my presence gives new life to the present. Not forgetting what my ancestors have created, I strike a new path, and though a crowd goes the main road, I’ll take the paths still traveled by deer and rabbits and birds.

I feel the number of people who live engaged in life is diminishing. Many seem to accept that society is a prioiri. What we do takes place in a context set by others. They do not realize that we are the set designers, as well as the authors of this drama. And drama only comes as we will.

We must make a sculpture of the clay of our lives. Something created in a manner that will yield beauty and worth to the observer. Whether that observer be society’s poor or rich art patrons, or God alone. It is critical the creation be made. We must attempt it. Though only God may be watching, in his eyes, our lives, small and made of clay, have purpose, and worth. But the charge is ours, each one to live a life. (Personal Journal, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, April 13, 1986).

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Writing

International Writing Program Loses State Department Funding

Iowa City Old Capitol

On Thursday, the University of Iowa announced a funding cut for the International Writing Program founded by Paul and Hualing Nieh Engle in 1967.

The U.S. Department of State notified the University of Iowa International Writing Program on Feb. 26 that its grants through the department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs were being terminated, stating that the awards “no longer effectuate agency priorities,” nor align “with agency priorities and national interest.” (U.S. Department of State halts International Writing Program funding, Iowa NOW, March 7, 2025).

Termination of funding caused immediate elimination or curtailment of multiple planned activities. While I viewed the program as a vanity project by its founders, the IWP added to the cachet of Iowa City as a writing community. In the early days of the program, the IWP housed its writers at the Mayflower dormitory as a method of creating community. It was that. Indeed, more than 1,600 established writers from more than 160 countries have participated since the program was founded, according to Iowa NOW. The annual funding loss will be almost $1 million. That amount doesn’t seem like a lot, and could likely be made up through a new fundraising effort by Director Christopher Merrill. I hope the program endures.

I remember attending a lecture by Merrill when he described traveling to exotic locales to find writers for the IWP. I suppose his recruitment methods were considered favorably by the State Department at the time and that is why the grant was renewed year after year. In a society where many close friends are being impacted by federal budget cuts today, losing funding at the IWP is just one more thing.

When I finished graduate school in 1981, I decided to stay in Iowa City and live a writer’s life. I had no interest in formal writing programs and carried a bit of residual skepticism about the Writers’ Workshop and the IWP from my days living with some Actualist writers and artists I met in 1973 and ‘74. Instead of following a formal program, I sought to enable my native, if somewhat naive impulses and culture. I hoped to discover what that meant, yet not in the context of formal writing programs. Except for the impact on local culture, it made no difference to me whether the IWP existed in 1981, and that feeling continues through today.

It seems clear that many activities in our culture, from education to farming, to health care, to every aspect of involvement by the federal government are subject to game-changing loss of funding. The IWP can recover from this setback. What about the rest of us?