Tag: creative process

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Writing

Memorable Posts of 2025

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.

Categories
Creative Life

Taking a Different Trail

Stand of trees.

I’ve been meaning to get out on the eastern part of the state park trail and Saturday I did. When we moved here, I said to my spouse that all of the land between us and the nearby city to the east of us would eventually be developed. It didn’t happen in the first 32 years, yet it’s got a good start.

My normal walk is designed to be 30 minutes along the same part of the trail. The walk I took Saturday afternoon was much longer at 80 minutes. It was no hill for a climber.

Road leading to the Hoover Trail.

The Hoover Trail has been a tremendous perquisite for those living in the area. The paved trail is wide enough for bicycles to pass each other going in the opposite directions. It is also clean. During the coronavirus pandemic I rode my bicycle on it almost daily. One of the first things to see is this old barn.

Historic barn in Big Grove Township.

The trail was made in the bed of an old railroad track. The power lines have been moved, leaving the old poles to decay in the encroaching woods.

Trail runs along the former railroad tracks.

There are only a few glass insulators left on the poles. I found one blue one and these clear ones.

Note the clear glass insulators. These are some of the last ones left on a pole.

The worst part of the trail walk is the development. The homes in this photo were not there the last time I was on this stretch of trail.

This construction is all new since last time I was here.

In addition, a lot of the wooded and prairie areas were cleared and mowed. We are moving the opposite direction from a nature preserve.

Pond near a rest area along the trail.

There is a fancy intersection where the Lake Macbride State Park Trail intersects with the Hoover Trail.

Busy trail intersection.

Waterfowl like the east end of the north branch of the lake. Probably because the growth prevents we humans from getting too close. That and the relatively shallow water makes it easier to catch fish.

East end of the north branch of Lake Macbride.
Pelicans like the shallower water at the eastern edge of the lake.

Development may be encroaching, yet there are still plenty of good photos to be taken.

These trees were mere sticks when I first saw them.
Another view of the lake.
Heading toward home.
Sun setting.
Categories
Writing

Sorting Tables

Sorting tables.

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.

Categories
Living in Society

Shoe Boxes and Avoidance

Storage shoe boxes.

I pulled out a shoe box filled with papers from around the turn of the century as an evening project. I find I need something to do after dinner that engages me in staying awake, yet does not engage too much. Sorting through old, unorganized papers is a low-stress thing to do. After the project, I took steps to stay awake, and managed to add 20 minutes to the end of my day. Hopefully that will build until I stay up until 9 p.m. like normal people do.

I said the papers were unorganized, but that’s not true. Some circumstance of time and place gathered them together until I couldn’t stand to look at the pile. At that point I got a shoe box and put them away. In other words, I avoided a better disposition. The shoe box became an unlabeled time capsule to be opened when a whim from the great beyond drew me again to it. Sunday night was that time.

What was in it?

There were a number of cards I received on “bosses’ day.” I didn’t recognize most of the signatures on them. There were work-related holiday cards. One included a photograph of the customer service staff at the trucking firm. It was apparently a time when women used curling irons to style their long hair. The person with whom I had the closest work relationship looked nothing like I remember them. Most men in the photo could not muster a proper smile.

There was a white envelope with 8 x 10-inch photographs. I thought I would frame and display them. Some were work related: an aerial photograph of the terminal I managed in Richmond, Indiana; a staff photo at the Schererville, Indiana terminal. Some were political: me, my congressman and a county supervisor at a parade; an autographed photo of my former state representative at a different parade. There is the portrait I had done of the county board of health when I was chair. There were two photographs from my walks on the state park trail. At this point in history, none of them will be framed.

Being on the county board of health was a big deal. During that time our director left to join a child in Colorado and we held a public search for his replacement. There were clippings in the shoe box. Some of the smartest people I’ve yet known were on that search committee. We got things done and became good friends.

Trust me, I’m not going to review every bit of shoe box content in this post. Suffice it to say that we live our lives in one direction and there is no going back. I found the brochure from the Georgia O’Keeffe retrospective at the Chicago Art Institute. I remember it like it was yesterday. It wasn’t yesterday and that is my point.

The idea is to place all my possessions on a platform where I can see their entirety. It means touching every document, every artifact, at least once. There are questions to answer:

Should I:

  • Put all the cards in one place or sort chronologically or by sender?
  • What about obituaries?
  • What about young people who invited me to their wedding and then divorced? Keep the souvenirs or discard?
  • Should the brochures from events and exhibitions go together or maybe in a book by the artists if I have one?
  • There are a lot of ticket stubs and programs from theater. What about all that?

The questions could be endless, yet paramount is to avoid just putting everything back in the same box and sticking it somewhere, likely inside another box.

It seems time to address all of this and stop avoiding responsibility. Yet shoe boxes are so handy… and not that big… what could it hurt? That is, unless one has dozens of them.

Categories
Creative Life

A Life of Photos Part IX

Sunrise on the state park trail. Taken with my Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra smartphone.

If it seems impossible to curate my life-long collection of analog and digital photographs, that’s because it is. My presumption is of making a useful archive for others to use when I’m gone. However, that is an old school idea poorly aligned with the way photographs have come to be used. I am fine with sharing photos via social media and email. I also believe they have more than transient value. This is at the core of my struggle to make progress in curating my photographic work.

I am interested in technology. My maternal grandmother participated in photography culture and bought a Kodak Brownie and Instamatic 126 at the local drug store. She developed her exposed film at the same drug store. It was a creative outlet for her, creativity being something her family discouraged when she was young. When she asked us to pose in our Easter best clothing, how could we refuse? She had the camera and wanted to preserve the moment. That felt important.

In college, I experimented with a Minolta SRT-101 I bought from one of my band buddies. I got away from posed photographs to the extent possible and captured where I lived, both in my residence and on day trips to neighboring places. I bought a small 35mm camera and a dozen rolls of film to take on my 1974 trip to Europe. When my backpack was stolen in France, I lost all the film and ended up with only two rolls to develop after three months away. When I bought a mobile flip phone, I took a few photographs with the built in camera, notably one of Senator Barack Obama at the 2006 Harkin Steak Fry. In 2008, I bought a Kodak EasyShare digital camera, and then when I converted to a smartphone in 2012 the smart phone became my primary photographic method. There is a whole story in technology. My experience since the 1950s is likely not that different from other amateur photographers in my cohort.

The cultural aspect of my photographic history is more interesting. I was able to own a simple camera because I had an income from delivering newspapers. I became the person in the family called upon to record an event when Grandmother was not available. My early photographs are packed with domestic images of holidays and birthdays, vacations, and the stuff in our lives like pets, houses, cars, and more. In high school, I worked part time at a department store and had means to use photography. I accumulated photographs in shoe boxes and a few albums. Mother had a short filing cabinet on wheels where all of her photographs migrated. Photography has always been a simple, affordable, and happy thing to do. There was always a half life of attention given to photographs. However, we couldn’t bear to get rid of them.

To some extent, my photographs are a visual record of how I lived. At the same time, I have been journaling since 1974 and have given more thought to what I wrote than I did to photographs. As I write an autobiography, I decided to use only one photograph in the first book, and am not sure whether or how many I might use in the second. To avoid consideration of photography as part of my life would be decidedly wrong.

Social media changed how we use photographs. With digital cameras and smartphones, photographs have no operating cost other than the time and attention paid to them. When I take a photograph like the sunrise in this post, I make multiple exposures and edit them to pick the “best” one to post. This form of curation was not easy in analog photography, yet is basic to posting photographs on social media. I archive all my saved photographs on the cloud, yet seldom go back to them.

On social media, we get to know people a certain way. For example, on BlueSky, the 99 accounts I follow post photos and create an account ambience I came to recognize over time. This is a real thing, yet not the same as having an in real life relationship with a person. I submit I have a different relationship with someone I know in real life as compared to their social media account. Both seem valid.

Photography in 2025 does not entail a lot of curation. We take photographs, briefly edit and share them, and then forget them. Seldom do we have a processor make prints. I’m okay with that. When I curate four photos for a post on social media, that suffices to sate my urge toward a creative life. Maybe I will use the same photographs in a blog post, or maybe not. I want to believe there is more to this creative process as I look at thousands of images captured over a life and work to define their meaning and gain insights. Because of my current autobiography project, I am willing to devote time to photography. I continue to believe the words are paramount.

Will I end up with a usable archive? It may seem impossible now, yet I hope it ultimately isn’t. Figuring this out is just another part of my life.

Categories
Home Life

Glorious Autumn

Leaves of deciduous trees on Nov. 4, 2025

Despite the lack of rain, this has been one of the best autumns I remember. It is a pleasure each time I step outdoors and take it all in. With everything going on in the world, we need that type of solace.

Autumn is the time to get the chainsaw out and clear dead trees from the property. A neighbor and I felled two ash trees killed by the Emerald Ash Borer. The occasion gave me a chance to wear the steel-toed shoes I got to work in a Kentucky steel mill back in the day. They even have metatarsal protection.

Steel-toed shoes with metatarsal protection.

I took the first tree down by myself. It took some time to determine where I wanted it to fall. I made a notch cut in that direction. It is important to take the time because as the old saw goes, measure twice and cut once. I made the felling cut and the bar and chain of the chainsaw got stuck. I must have done something wrong.

Hitch to the yard tractor.

I stopped and disconnected the bar from the motor assembly, and was able to pull it out. Not the chain. No problem. I went to the garage and got out my rappelling rope, tied one end around the tree about 12 feet from the ground, and the other to a carabiner attached to the rear of the yard tractor. I positioned the tractor on the cement driveway so there would be traction and gently tugged the tree until it fell over.

First ash tree felled on Wednesday.

My neighbor arrived and we worked together on the second tree. This one had grown with a yoke separating the two main branches. If I felled the southernmost branch the wrong direction, I might take out the neighbor’s fence. We positioned the yard tractor and tied the rope to the tree about 14 feet above ground. I made the notch cut and then my neighbor got on the yard tractor and put tension on the rope. As I made the felling cut, he increased tension, although he lost traction because of the leaves on the ground. No worries the tree fell in the intended direction.

Two tree stumps.

We felled the other main branch and called it a day.

This was the most difficult part of the operation. Going forward, I plan to spend about an hour a day cutting the trees up. I made a place for a brush pile and will salvage two relatively straight limbs to use to stack firewood outdoors and off the ground. I will burn the brush pile when conditions are suitable, and hope to find a home for the firewood. A lot of neighbors are flush with winter firewood presently.

It will take me a week or two to clean up the yard. That part I can do by myself. Autumn days were made for a fellow and his chainsaw.

Categories
Creative Life

Fog at Sunrise

Foggy morning on the state park trail.

It is usually quiet on the state park trail during my morning walk. If someone is coming I hear their footsteps, or if they are on the phone or in a group, their talking voices carry a long distance. It was foggy Sunday morning when I heard young women talking. Before long, I could see headlamps bobbing above the trail. It was plenty light, yet the idea of a headlamp gained prominence over whether or not one was actually needed. I wished them a good morning as they passed me going the other way. They returned the sentiment. Even at dawn there is traffic on the trail.

I leave for the trail 20 minutes before sunrise. It is usually light enough to see and the transition period presents great light for capturing photographs. On Saturday I started walking on the boat dock to get an unobstructed view of sunrise. There was frozen frost on the deck and I slipped and fell on my backside. I let loose my mobile device and feared the worst. When I got up it was just less than halfway over the edge of the dock. I had visions of it plunking in the water, yet not this time. I am one lucky guy.

Last winter I walked the trail almost every morning regardless of ambient temperature and snowfall. I expect to do likewise this year. The state park trail is the perquisite that comes with living here I enjoy most. It also provides an opportunity to work on my photography.

Categories
Living in Society

Reunion Conversations

Restaurant where we held our 55th year high school class reunion on Sept. 25, 2025.

The combination of a punk reaction to my influenza shot and massive intake of information at our high school class reunion led to Saturday being a challenging day. I made it through the fog and by 4:30 p.m., felt like doing stuff. In quick succession, I finished yesterday’s post, canned a batch of applesauce and apple juice, and worked on laundry I started in the morning. In retirement, that makes a busy day.

Our time together at our high school class reunion Thursday night was precious. I don’t want to let go of the conversations. There are only so many of the 8.2 billion people on this jumping green sphere with whom an individual shares a life’s experience. Grade school and high school mates are unique in that regard, in my stable culture, anyway. Through conversation I became aware of developing a tunnel vision of my own history by focusing on a subset of experiences to produce an autobiography. The reunion opened my eyes to a broader experience that exists, of who I was and who I have become.

When we dig ourselves into a tunnel of memory, it seems useful and important to find our way out into our broader experience. I believe the brain captures our experiences yet some of them get relegated to places where they don’t get our attention. Too, our way of seeing filters out parts of our experience so we remember only the filtered events. John Berger said what I am trying to say more directly in his book Ways of Seeing:

Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak. But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. (Ways of Seeing, John Berger).

Our class reunion helped me be more aware of the surrounding world, one that is specifically relevant to me and my classmates.

In addition to memory, my writing focuses on journals, letters, photographs, and blog posts created over a period of fifty years. For every detail captured, there are multiple that exist elsewhere if I can summon them. Talking to people with shared experiences is one way to do that.

A five minute conversation listening to a classmate that worked for an insurance company for 40 years, or another who lived in California for a similar amount of time then returned to Iowa and married a classmate, are ways to do that. Reading an email about how one classmate recruited the widow of another to attend is the same. The easy familiarity of one with whom I played basketball in the grade school playground is another. Spending time with someone who was a neighbor to a close friend I lost in an auto accident shortly after graduation is another. All of these remind me of the broader, yet common world we inhabited, at least for a while. We now inhabit the present together, at least on Thursday night we did.

I don’t seek to wax nostalgic about my high school experiences. The recent conversations remind me of who I once was and help to become a better me in the present. It’s no wonder I don’t want to let go.

Categories
Creative Life

A Life of Photos – Part VII

Mount Rushmore on July 17, 2010. Photo by the author.

How does a photographer capture well-known sites? I would argue professional photographers whose work appears on post cards serve a useful function in capturing a personal experience.

This photograph of Mount Rushmore was created in part by my being there. Composition of the resulting image is due largely to the design of the visitors center which presented a platform from which I took it. The light is good and the talus provides context. However, picking up a postcard at the gift shop eliminates variations inherent in converting a digital image to a print. If you stick to selecting familiar images, postcards can be interchangeable with printed photos in terms of remembering the experience. I submit having both types of image upgrades the experience.

The advent of the “bucket list” likely ended a lot of meaningful photography. If Mount Rushmore were on my bucket list, I might have stepped in front of the camera to record myself with the famous sculpture. Maybe at home I would have a bulletin board where I pinned all my bucket list photographs. People are free to do what they want, but for me, the memory of that moment’s experience is what stands out more than a trophy photograph hanging on a wall or uploaded to a website.

Defining who we are in the context of our lives, and who we want to be matters more than an arbitrary list of places we seek to visit. Above all, it is about the experience. A personal photograph or postcard is a subset of what that experience is. Photos are not necessarily the most important part of it.

What was this experience about? My friend since seventh grade and I left our spouses behind and made a long road trip out west. The furthest point was Missoula, Montana where we visited another high school friend and their spouse. Mount Rushmore was one of the less interesting stops we made. We were so close to it we felt obliged to stop, so we did. It was tacked on to an experience about something else.

I am a bit old school in that I don’t see much purpose to video recording a well-know site. My aunt, uncle, and their family lived in Europe for a number of years. They took home movies on 8 millimeter film when they traveled. I recall one where they visited the leaning tower of Pisa and recorded the kids trying to push it the rest of the way over. It was a family joke, and that’s fine. I hope they bought a postcard to remember the architecture while they were at it, even if that wasn’t their interest. Life is not always a joke.

I had only one photograph in my memoir, An Iowa Life. However, I looked at a lot of them while writing it. A photograph invokes living memories and it was those memories that drove my writing. I expect to return to this image of Mount Rushmore when I get into the post-analog part of my life. For that purpose, it won’t matter if an image was one I took or a postcard. That’s as it should be.

Categories
Creative Life

A Life of Photos – Part VI

Road sign in France, 1979.

It felt like progress as I went through the prints laid out on a table from one shoe box of photographs. I bought some 4.25 x 6.25-inch brown envelopes into which I duly sorted the prints and labeled with the contents. Since prints are scattered all over the house, this should make it a). easier to find a home for loose ones, and b). enable whoever inherits the collection to move quickly through them with a clue as to what they are about. I even managed to pick a few to shred because the images were repetitive or hard for me to know what they were. There were six of those. That’s not many given the scope of the project yet it was a big, personal step. I ran right over to the shredder so there would be no going back.

The photo above was taken when in 1979, friends with whom I worked at a department store in high school visited me in Mainz, Germany. They had married while I was overseas. We drove a rental car around France, stopping whenever and wherever it suited us. We visited a number of cathedrals, including Reims and Amiens, as well as Normandy, Mont-Saint-Michel, Belle-Île-en-Mer, Bordeaux, San Sebastián, Lourdes, Carcassone, and then traveled along the Mediterranean coast to Italy. We crossed the Swiss Alps from Italy and headed back home to Mainz. The two weeks were filled completely and passed quickly.

Hard to say where this sign was located. Somewhere on the Mediterranean Coast. The places we went on the coast were not very touristy. That was one of the ideas that energized the trip. We found our own path and the trip was better for it. We went places where an American Visa card was a novelty and the clerk had to contact someone to make sure it was legit.

I shot two or three rolls of film on my Minolta SRT-101 camera. The highlight of the trip was in Saint-Paul-de-Vence where we overnighted in a small hotel. The artist Joan Miró was in residence at the nearby Fondation Maeght where he was making a film for French television. It was interesting to see the director coaching the artist about how to move for the camera. We toured the gallery and bought posters of the show to remember it by. I framed and still have mine. Alas, no photos of the artist as it wasn’t allowed.

As an organizing principle, putting photos taken on a specific trip together is conventional. None of them found their way into an album, although the makings of one was there. In retrospect, It is hard to believe I could get two weeks away from work as a military officer. Images like this one help me remember how close I was to my small group of high school friends. Isn’t that one of the purposes of photography?

~ Read all the posts in this series by clicking here.