Tag: autobiography

Ambient temperature was to climb to 60 degrees Fahrenheit on Sunday. It made it to 61. Spring is in the air, even if that thought is not rational given the calendar. I sat down and outlined the path to finalizing my book.

I finished the initial draft on Jan. 5, and am 37 chapters into the first pass of revisions. What are reasonable next steps toward publication? I laid them out.

It will take two to four weeks to finish this pass of the remaining 12 chapters. After our child leaves Iowa after college in the story, the chapters have a different focus. I wrote them quickly, now I must revise them slowly. Given three to four hours of early morning darkness, that should be doable. With each passing day, I lose darkness, yet I will persevere.

After this pass, I plan a structural review. The purpose here is to ensure the book has continuity, that it is going somewhere with intent. I laid out a sheet of 8×11 paper with a chapter title on each, and arranged them in the current order. On each sheet I will define where the chapter starts, where it ends, and then summarize in a sentence or two what story movement is included. I already see some order-switching at hand.

Once structural concerns are addressed, it’s time for a reality check. Is the book saying what I want? Is it meaningful? Once those questions are adequately addressed, it is time for a second pass with re-writing, if needed.

This pass leads to proofreading and getting the book formatted for a local printing in either spiral or comb binding. I will pick the printer and make a dozen or so copies for early readers.

If everything comes together, by Memorial Day, manuscripts have been distributed to a small group of trusted readers whose screening process answered the questions: Did they read the first book when delivered? Did they provide meaningful comments? I have a couple of new readers in mind, with whom I’ve had conversations about my book, yet haven’t read it yet. While I will be in a hurry at this point, the book then becomes potential summer reading for this group.

The next goal is to collect feedback as it comes, in whatever format it is. No later than Labor Day I enter a decision table: Do I print privately as in the first book, or take steps to use a printing service to make the book into various formats: eBook, paper book, and audio book and distribute more broadly? The answer to this question is not made and I would be happy with either outcome.

The three to four hours of writing each day leaves plenty of time for a life. In my eighth decade, every bit of life is important.

Here is the draft preface from my autobiography in progress, with working title, A Working Life: A Memoir. It is a record of lived participation in work, place, institutions, and time. The book will be as good as I can make it, and with diligence, finished this year.

PREFACE

My story resumes after returning from visiting friends in the American South to Iowa City where I would work as a writer. I just finished my master’s degree and had enough resources to get started.

The first book, An Iowa Life: A Memoir, reflects an extended childhood and education. Next, I began writing.

I take you with me as our family moved to Cedar Rapids, then to Indiana and finally back to our present home. When our child left home, and then left Iowa, the story breaks loose into individual essays about ways I lived, worked, and engaged in society.

When I began work at CRST, Inc. I had no career plan. What I learned though my work in transportation and logistics was the country was changing. Industries repeatedly restructured and I spent years listening to thousands of people explain what had just been taken from them. The experience changed me.

To indicate passages drawn from journals, notes, and my public writing, I use italics.

I have limited names and altered identifying details for those who are not public figures.

Despite issues with out current political and social environment, I must press toward completion of my book. Mine has been a life of delayed gratification, and in my eighth decade, I am running out of time to finish this work.

As I write, the administration announced repeal of the Endangerment Finding. Commentators are commenting about it, and I don’t have anything unique to say. Why wouldn’t we want to reduce and control pollutants entering the atmosphere? No one asked me.

This second book is going to be better written than the first. Maybe I am learning how to shut the world out and focus on craft. That is necessary not only in creative work, but in many aspects of our lives. While my writing space encompasses the entire world, at this stage of the work, close focus is critical. I can only consider one idea at a time, one sentence at a time, the way an air traffic controller lands airplanes. Hopefully the book will make a safe landing.

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.

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.

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.

Merry Christmas reader!