It wasn’t a whim from the great beyond that led me back to William Carlos Williams, but the practical matter of finding shelf space in my writing room. Williams has been important most of my adult life, beginning at university. In the mid-1980s, when I lived in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, a home to Grant Wood, I wrote:
Also on my mind was the idea of the professional who wrote or was creative as a sideline. Grant Wood was one, teaching at the University of Iowa to support his painting. I thought of William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens who worked as a physician and insurance executive respectively. I thought about David Morrell, whose class in American fiction I took while he was writing the books First Blood, Last Reveille, and Testament.
At that point in my development as a writer, while working for a large transportation and logistics company, I was determined to be the transportation equivalent of William Carlos Williams. I proposed to find life in what surrounded me and reduce it to words and images. I stole moments away from family and work for creative endeavor that was and remains important to me.
It is time to re-read William Carlos Williams.
The practice of medicine made Williams’s poetry possible—not as patronage, as I once thought, but through its effect on how he saw things and worked. Being a physician enabled a perspective that shaped his native impulses to write about what he saw, and what language he used. It enabled his resistance to the literary professionalism of his time, rendering him outside mainstream literary culture of the 1920s and ’30s.
What I like most about Williams is his attention to a certain kind of reality, the same reality that underlies much of my own writing. Williams clearly influenced me, although I never felt the security of a profession that he manifested in his writing.
Returning to Williams in my eighth decade is partly to better my understanding of him, and partly to revisit some of the decisions I made about the role of reality in my writing. I decided to start with these four works: Spring and All, Selected Poems, The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams, and In the American Grain. I read them all previously and hope for new insight. Let’s see where this goes… does my early read of Williams hold… or does it not?
Following is an excerpt from my autobiography in progress. This passage was written to transition from our first year of marriage into what would come next. I reprised the self I exhibited at university to come up with this at the time.
I embarked on contemplation like during my undergraduate years when I would wander the campus considering Cartesian philosophy, unaware of the real world in which I walked. From this came my ideas about consumerism, professionalism, and the courage to live a moral life.
Consumerism was part of the American condition in the 1980s. It still is. I felt we ceased concerning ourselves with production of goods and values to spend more time consuming and planning for consumption. When we took paying work to earn money, we wrote off that invested time as a necessary precursor to the consumptive act. We sacrificed for work, and in the process, alienated ourselves from the main trajectory of our hope and dreams. This was unfortunate for my writing. I concluded, there is a wealth of experience around us. The time we spend doing something is worthwhile. The knowledge we gain from our experience comes at a high price…for we give our unique life for it. We should cherish our memories, and use the gift of life wisely, for there is only one for us. Being a consumer was not what I had in mind.
This is important because delayed gratification was necessary for a career. Paraphrasing Thoreau, by seeming necessity we were employed. Looking back, in 1983 we made a decision, and that led us to a different question: “What’s in it for me?” In part, this is necessary for a family to get started. In the end, I came to reject this question in favor of others. I felt we could have gone on working for the University of Iowa and built a life based on that. We were called to do more than just live a life in Iowa City.
The interweaving of the job and the experience of the job was also important. It suggests a perspective on work we can own. By accepting and nurturing this reality, I set a wedge between our family and my job. To some extent, this wedge later kept me from full acceptance in the social network of transportation’s elite. To the same extent, I was the better for it. It was a subtle, but important aspect of our decision-making.
Many themes from my journal carried through until today. I wrote about the “professionalism of modern life,” drawing a distinction between a person’s moral life and the profession they chose. I explored this in the following passage. I used the word “woman” yet have always considered the ideas relevant to everyone. Perhaps I was influenced by the first female supervisors I had had since beginning paid work in high school.
In Going Home I hope to address some of the aspects of the women’s movement that seem pertinent to Davenport. The specific issue I feel most competent to address is the way women I know have used professionalism as a vehicle for personal liberation. They have taken jobs as librarians, bankers, real estate agents, doctors, and dentists as a form of self-maturation, a way of establishing themselves in the world. This professionalization of modern life is one of the most pernicious forces I see present in the world. Not because women are the ones who are becoming professionals, but because the life of a professional is taking the place that was left by the exit of religion. The modern person looks at life as a moment in the sun, a time in which we fill the days with activities.
Creating a profession can fill a life with activities that remove us from our hopes and dreams. I called it pernicious because of how a professional lives within a society of friends. There are networks of people and within the context of the network, their lives are defined. To a degree we all do this, but it is no substitute for living a moral life. More than many another life, it can be dictated by things that lie outside the individual. The professional can commiserate with his peers, saying, “oh, I have been through that experience,” and that might be the end of it. The professional has a way of looking at the world provided, and the tendency is to look no further for a perspective. Like so many other things in modern life, this is self-alienation: a degradation of personal experience.
I viewed professionalism with the behaviors and artifacts around it as having the potential to be a hollow shell. The danger was that if a person had no moral compass guiding them along life’s path, the results personally and for society would be detrimental. At the same time, professionalism was another way of subduing our native culture.
We accept certain behavior in the context of working as a professional that we may not accept at home. Professionalism enabled people to concern themselves with “my career” instead of with the greater society. In retrospect, I did not see the society this represents coming. Given the veneer of professionalism, something would fill the empty middle.
During the time I was preparing to write Going Home, I spent considerable time researching the idea of living a moral life. As humans, we must have one. While I did not write that book, its research helped establish who I would be as we entered the second year of our marriage.
On Sunday afternoons I take it easy. By that I mean there is flexibility in how I use the time between lunch and dinner. No pomodoros. No new projects. No major decisions. I relax and take it easy.
The rest of the weeks have been productive. I have been in the zone, moving forward with my writing and other projects. For a few Sunday hours, it is a peaceful life.
Canadian geese are getting frisky. Ambient temperatures are unusually warm, the surface ice is melting, and before dawn, they crowd along the shoreline, hundreds and hundreds of them. They are very chatty, although that is not a goose-specific term. They are flapping their wings in close proximity to others. We are definitely in the part of courtship with vocalizations and displays. It’s warm today, but if goslings hatch from the activity, many might die from late winter freezing temperatures. Totally weird weather is driving this. It also drives their over-wintering behavior, something they didn’t used to do.
With the first draft of my book finished, followed by the first re-reading from beginning to end, now begins the work of making it more readable. I look forward to this stage.
I have so much information that I just crammed it all into sentences, paragraphs, and chapters until it is likely too much for a casual reader to take in. That needs fixing. Another thing is it reads like a scientific journal that has been fully footnoted. I know the specific dates when many things happened and quote them as such. For a memoir, I don’t believe I need to do that so much. For example, I refer to seeing the early premier of the film The World According to Garp — written by the Writers’ Workshop’s own John Irving — on May 13, 1982 at Hancher Auditorium. Since the chapter is about 1981-82 anyway, I don’t likely need the specifics of this image. I suppose all this is part of the craft of writing and I’m enjoying the work so far.
I took up my Life of Photos project this week and hoo boy! This will be a beast. I began with the digital files and there are so many of them. The file for 2008 has more than 5,000 images! They are mostly mine, yet some are from other photographers. For example, our child worked as a stage hand on an Arlo Guthrie performance at Walt Disney World that year, and those images are theirs. Likewise, I don’t know who was the photographer for some of the political photos I downloaded. That needs sorting out.
What I do at this beginning stage of the project will have consequences for the rest. For now, I opened two windows, one for the working files and one for the “keeper files,” along with the photo editor. That is sort of a process, yet is cumbersome. The lesson learned is to pace myself and when I start cutting corners, stop for the day. I also need to better organize the keeper files. Just diving in has its merits, yet the process is anything but smooth.
So often I feel like a creative person. I spent a lot of time engaging in life experiences and taking photographs as part of it. It is positive in that I have lots of material, both written and photographic. I feel fortunate to have had the stability and financial support to retain these artifacts of a life and to now go through them to see how they can be used. Working with these resource materials is a different kind of creativity. It is one more experience in the life of a creative person and I welcome it.
In 1986, I wrote a friend, “A writer without agriculture is a mere ornament brought out in the cold darkness of winter’s holiday, then put away at the epiphany of his humanity.” It seemed fortuitous to find this as Tuesday was the Feast of the Epiphany, between finishing the first draft of my current book on Monday, and turning toward editing it on Wednesday.
I am consumed with passion to finish this work and make it as good as I can. I am also five weeks from planting the first indoor garden seedlings. For me, the relationship between writing and gardening is essential. I want to finish this edit just as garden planting begins.
In private documents I am calling this the “Great Edit,” a beginning-to-end reading which includes minor text editing yet holds off on major edits until I read the book in its entirety. I have read the chapters so many times in writing them, my tendency is to skip over them and thus accept them. That’s not what is needed. I must also resist the urge to make, as Grace Paley suggested in her book title, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, until the first read is done. I finished about a third of the text during the last 24 hours.
Some of the text suffers from “cut and paste-itis.” Much of it was pulled from my journals and letters and pasted without editing. The idea was I would get back to the work. That time is now.
The short version of the book is as follows: After completing an extended childhood and education (Book I), a person chooses the path of a writer, only to encounter societal pressure to postpone gratification in that metier. Along the way, family life, social engagement, cooking and gardening, and a career take precedence — until 2010, when the world finally turns toward his aspirations. He confronts the unknowns of the same social order in which he began, even as it comes apart. Words written must now be crafted to conform to these overarching themes.
I could never get to this point without writing the book. By that I mean the writing changed how I looked at my life. It is clearer now what all the struggles I experienced since 1981 meant. If I didn’t write another word, the journey would have been worth it for that outcome.
There will be editing and additional words, though. Also publication in some form, hopefully as a conventional book to match the one already published. Figuring that out is work for later.
Ambient temperatures in the 40s have been melting snow and ice, leaving a dead landscape. No spring hope. No winter cover. Except for the lake, it’s just dead. It’s a good time to turn indoors to my writing.
I have three chapters remaining to draft in part two of my autobiography. In the story, I just concluded leaving paid work during the coronavirus pandemic. If the pandemic did one thing right, it made a clean break between the workplace and me, forcing me to live on a fixed income. The final chapters write quickly because they are so recent. Today I created three of them, and next I write about the coronavirus pandemic plus two other chapters with working titles of “Beginning of the end,” and “New beginnings.” It shouldn’t take long to finish the first draft. Then begins the process of going through the whole book for the first major rewrite. I expect there will be three or four of those before I’m ready to publish.
After the book is ready for publication, I don’t know. I’ve been focusing on this work so long, I hadn’t given much thought about what’s next. I want to revise the first book to clean up a few things identified by friends during the post-publication period. I also must see if there is continuity without repetition. Next year I should be able to declare everything finished.
The biggest predictable issue in our lives is Social Security doing nothing to avoid running out of money beginning as early as late 2032. Benefits will be cut automatically by 24 percent across the board if nothing is done to prevent going over this cliff. If anything, Republicans in charge of the federal government are going the wrong way. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and the Social Security Fairness Act, accelerated Social Security insolvency alongside well-known demographic challenges to its structure. An answer to the question “How do I make up for this loss in benefits?” needs finding. Counting on the Congress to do something is not an answer.
What that says is I have to return to paid work. I have no regrets about how my working life proceeded and ended.
Physiologically I am changing. I know this because I adopted a new morning exercise regimen and my conditioning schedule is outpacing the ability of my soft tissues to recover and adapt. After a good couple of weeks on the new regimen, my shoulders started to hurt. This is self-diagnosed as inflammation, not a chronic problem. I believe I’m right about that. I have to take it easy for a while to let my body catch up with my ambition. Apparently I am no longer young.
In the meanwhile, it’s nose to the grindstone with the book. If I can finish the first draft this year, that leaves me plenty of time to publish a final text in the first half of 2026. That would clear the deck for returning to the workforce, something I am loathe to do, yet may needs do.
This is the first blog post I made about Christmas on Dec. 25, 2007.
The meaning of Christmas is derived from my remembrance of the priests at Holy Family Catholic Church in Davenport genuflecting while reading John 1:14 “And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us…” There are many translations of this verse and the idea that an omniscient God would take human form remains a compelling idea. In order for our lives to have meaning, we should live them as Jesus did, through acts in human society.
If Jesus was the incarnate God, we are something less.
If the meaning of Christmas can be found in John 1:14, how should that affect us with our imperfections?
My Christmas story is about the coffee cup that we keep in our bins of Christmas decorations. It was a gift from Jacque and printed in the glaze are five reindeer around a typewriter consulting on a message. The reindeer at the keyboard has a red nose, and must be Rudolf. On the other side of the mug are misspelled the words “Merry Christmas,” presumably typed by Rudolf. At some point I chipped the cup and each year we discuss whether we should get rid of it because of the chip. I have always said no, although I should probably let go. The chipped cup with the animals trying to put a message into human language using human technology has become part of our Christmas tradition. Because it is so similar to the meaning of Christmas, I have trouble letting go of it. We have always ended up keeping the cup and I am using it now to hold the coffee I made this morning.
We humans can use some coffee on Christmas morning, and we need to put it in something.
This post is about social media and blogging. My perspective on these two technology tools is they both require a creative process of putting together meaningful words and photographs in a way that provides insight to readers. When I use them, I am a content creator, although those two words don’t really capture my vision for what I’m doing. I seek to bring understanding to the complex and ever changing world in which we live.
I joined Facebook March 20, 2008 to follow our child. They had graduated college and moved to Colorado in 2007. While I could easily drive in a single day to visit, it was a long trip to spend much time together. My reaction to Facebook? Yikes! Here is my blog post about joining:
Tonight I joined Facebook. Yikes! Facebook connects us to people we have not thought of in years. In some cases we haven’t made contact in over a quarter of a century. All within a couple of hours. From moment to moment, the number of “friends” builds. What to say on the site? What elements to show? What pictures to place? How much time to spend? When a friend accepts the invitation, it feels good. The wave has broken, now I’ll ride it in. (On Facebook, Big Grove News, March 20, 2008)
In the end, our child quit posting on Facebook and while I developed a Facebook life, it was not good for me. Social media introduced loneliness in my days, something with which I had little experience. It reinforced loneliness. As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I am aware of being alone yet don’t experience much loneliness. I feel connected to the whole of society. If I continued with Facebook, even with all of the familiar faces and common experiences, I would feel how much apart we are. I deactivated my account in February this year.
After much experimentation, I ended up with an account on BlueSky, which is a text-based social media platform where it is easy to connect with like-minded people. My posts there have been hit or miss, yet I need the creative outlet. BlueSky is my only social media account.
My first blog post was on Nov. 10, 2007. I first titled the blog Big Grove News, then Big Grove Garden, Walking There, On Our Own, and now Journey Home. The purpose was always the same: provide an outlet for creative expression and pull in pieces I wrote for other purposes to make a record of them.
When I began blogging I had no idea where it would go. I wrote at least 5,600 posts since beginning. For a long time, it was the only writing I did each day. It has become a writer’s workshop to test ideas and how to express them. Some days the posts are cringe worthy. Some days I touch the sky. Part of me would return to handwriting paper journals the way I did before 2007. I may yet do that, but not in 2026.
In writing my autobiography I find I repeat topics often. For example, the story of the apartment in yesterday’s post has been written and re-written with different details and posted on my blog at least a dozen times. An early reader of my autobiography commented about my propensity to repeat myself. All I can say is I’m working on that.
I used to write blog posts in the early morning. Lately, especially since I began learning about circadian rhythms and tuning my physiological life to them, my best creative time is in the afternoon work blocks. I still work on creative writing in the morning but it is more the next chapter of my autobiography until that work is finished. I am more alert when I write blog posts. The quality of writing seems better. Like everything, it is a work in progress.
People do read my blogs. It is hard to believe the number of people in real life who identify me as a writer. A lot of this is due to letters to the editor and posts on Blog for Iowa. That type of feedback is rare and precious to me. It helps me feel like part of a community.
Is there a limit to the creative expression I put into my writing? If I have to get a job to make up for the percent of Social Security that will be absent after the trust fund runs out, there will be a loss of time for writing. For now, though, I’ll continue on.
Booklet filled with automatic writing, September 1990.
2025 has been a decent year for my writing. I added 26,000 words to my autobiography, posted 20 times on Blog for Iowa, and produced more than 300 posts here, including cross posting my letters to the editor. It’s hard to digest everything, especially when I’m in the middle of writing more. This post is some links to posts I believe are significant.
On January 5, I wrote Right to Repair. This post starts with a high school friend and hot rodder who was building his own car to ride the ones in Davenport. It includes my maternal grandmother repairing her stove, and ends with her parents and grand parents settling land bought from the railroad in the late 1800s. Can we get back to a situation where people know how everything in their home works and repair it themselves? This post explores that idea.
If It’s About Workforce was posted on January 7. It’s about the Iowa Legislature restructuring the regents universities to purge diversity, equity and inclusion programs in education. Among the things they did was eliminate the American Studies Program from which I have a degree. There was talk about improving the workforce, yet I don’t believe higher education is about placing people in work. I also have a modest proposal.
2025 is a year I gave increased attention to photography. On July 24, I posted A Life of Photos, which serves as my introductory process. There was a time when popular photography was used primarily in two ways: it recorded memorable “moments,” and it provided a method and technology for creative expression. A third purpose has come into being and the series that began with this post explores what that is.
My 55th high school class reunion took place in September. Afterward, I posted In the Shadow of Hotel Black Hawk on September 28. This year’s reunion was better than others I attended in that by eliminating any formal program, the planning committee furnished a venue for classmates to socialize. I found the format refreshing and actually had a number of memorable conversations. This post remembers some of them.
Are people mixers or layerers? Eating Alone — Mac and Cheese, posted on November. 10, explores the difference and in doing so created a repeatable main course dish head and shoulders above the dozens of available boxed mac and cheese meals. I have become a layerer.
When I worked at the oil company I had no idea what was behind their big move to consolidate records in Oklahoma. Time to Change Hats, posted November 12, is about that and more. I wrote, “With increased visibility of my history, I should be a better family member, citizen, and writer. It should be easier to navigate through the stuff of memories.” I’m not yet on a single platform with visibility, yet that’s where I am heading. That’s what makes this post significant.
These posts only scratch the surface of my writing. I appreciate everyone who follows along here.
Our child brought home some unused bankers boxes which I quickly put to work storing all the stuff piled on these two tables. This is a place to layout projects. Importantly my writing project as I head into the final stretch of book two, but also a place to empty boxes and go through contents for disposition. A person needs surfaces like these.
The back surface is the oak desk I bought when I returned to Davenport after military service. It has been resting in this spot since 1993 where I assembled it after moving into our home in Big Grove Township. The front one is what appears to be the top of an old drafting table I bought at auction, standing on two saw horses I built. They have not been this cleaned off since we lived here.
With the sorting surfaces I’m ready to get back to writing.
I edited the outline for Part II of my autobiography yesterday and determined the break in the narrative will be when our child leaves home for college, and then leaves Iowa altogether after graduation. This decision has been hanging over me all year and for where I am in the narrative it is the right choice. So, chronological narrative through becoming empty nesters, and then being left behind by our progeny.
I’m still fussing with the order of chapters after that, yet it will include; development of the kitchen garden, community volunteer work, board of health, bloggery and social media, my first retirement, the year 2010 (which I believe was pivotal in multiple ways), newspaper writing, the environment, farm work, and maybe other chapters ending with new beginnings after the coronavirus pandemic. My problem is support documents and artifacts are mixed in with everything, with limited visibility. Enter the sorting tables.
I’m working on the same type of organizing surface throughout the house. In the garage I put everything on existing surfaces and set up a folding table. Now I need to organize. It’s the same thing: I want visibility of what I have so I can effectively use things. The major bedroom project was similar with the bed serving as the organizing surface. My clothing is now sorted and put away. Outdoors, I have a couple of places that serve as sorting places. Those change each season as the garden gets planted. Having a sorting station or surface made my life better.
It rained Monday night. We need rain. Indoors I’m ready to go with my newly cleared sorting surfaces.
Journey Home 
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