Tag: Writing

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Creative Life

A Day Begins

Sunrise.

I wake in the middle of the night with the sun well positioned below the horizon. What light exists comes from stars, the moon, airglow, or the indirect light of nearby never-sleeping cities. I am awake, but don’t want to be.

Sometimes I get up and walk to the kitchen for a drink of water, then stand at the French door, looking at the sky. By now Earth is turning toward light as the sky begins to lose its blackness. Below the horizon, shapes blend into a singular darkness. Above, stars and planets are still visible. Light has begun to penetrate, thinning the darkness.

Our child called it “blue thirty:” the point where sunlight begins to dominate the sky. The sky is briefly a dark shade of blue. They noticed this while camping and taught me to look for it. The silhouettes of grounded objects emerge from darkness, becoming recognizable forms.

Now I want to turn on lights and wake. The horizon has become readable, and the urge to create something is present at nautical twilight. I make coffee and go to my writing place.

After donning hiking shoes, I walk toward the state park trail at first light. From obscuring darkness, the day takes shape in colors—greens, browns, and blues. It begins in semi-darkness with loud migrating birds—geese in late winter and songbirds in spring. Bird sounds surround me as I pick up the pace to increase my heart rate. I can see the trail changing from dark to light at my feet.

The sky puts on a show as dawn breaks. In pinks, reds, and golds, refracting sunlight makes the sky dance as an artist paints a canvas. Dawn arrives in colorful glory.

By the time I round the turn toward home, the sun rises. Direct light illuminates the trail, with long shadows of trees, bushes and other vegetation. The day has become clear—with things to do.

As I finish the turn, I feel my pulse and walk toward the rising sun.

Categories
Writing

Advance Reader Copies

I took back roads to the printer in Coralville to pick up advance reader copies of A Working Life, the second part of my autobiography. Getting to this point was a high water mark in the struggle to write it that began in 2010. There is a story in this book, one I hope finds broader appeal. When I arrived at the desk for pick up, workers hadn’t finished binding the book. I waited.

My first advance reader is a retired teacher whose late husband was a poet. The second is a friend from Maine with whom I attended U.S. Army basic training and officer candidate school in 1976. I’ve read the text so many times, I’m not sure the most obvious typos and grammatical faux pas catch my attention. I will move forward with this work, so I’m looking for a couple of sets of eyes to catch mistakes missed by someone too invested in the story.

Nearing the finish line is clearing space for other projects. Mostly, though, my days are falling apart. The garden needs planting, the garage wants cleaning to make it more productive, and there is an endless list of home projects ahead. I also have to figure out how we will survive if the do-nothing Republicans don’t fix Social Security soon. I have taken up some of those, yet the main question is what will I write next, given the newly found void in my mornings?

Some things I know. There will be a cookbook to standardize and put all my inherited and locally developed recipes in one place. There will be a book of poetry for the 25 or so poems I found when researching my autobiography, along with new ones. I plan a different direction for this blog, along with a new title. I plan to take older posts off line and start fresh. All of these are big projects, and will likely be enough writing work for the near term. The main push will be to have a big project for winter 2026-2027.

I’m not sure how I will get my autobiography published after early readers provide feedback. I don’t have the money, so I am looking at some form of fund raising in the fall. I paid for volume one and distributed the books for free—there are not enough funds to do that again. I may serialize the book behind a paywall either on WordPress or Substack with a big push to get people subscribed at the front end. I gave early readers until Labor Day, so I can work through these ideas this summer. For now, though, I have to get a garden in.

Thursday was a lost day because I had my eyes dilated and it took the full 4-6 hours for them to recover. I had a discussion about cataract surgery with my optometrist who has been suggesting the procedure for years. I held that off another year. Doctor talked about adjusting to aging as I slow down. I don’t see myself slowing down any time soon.

It rained Thursday night, so I could get right into the garage after sunrise and get to work. The big push to Memorial Day is on. From the high ground of finishing the autobiography, it looks like there will be another crop from the garden… and writing. The remainder of 2026 looks to be good.

Categories
Creative Life

Time Management While Aging

Footbridge over a field runoff creek into Lake Macbride.

I spent time Sunday working on how to use my time. The two parts were structuring days into time blocks and working to better define tasks listed for accomplishment. This post details some of what I did.

The natural breaks in my days at home are by time.

  • From waking at or before 4 a.m., I have a combination of routine morning things (calisthenics, breakfast, exercise, reading, writing), and unstructured creative time.
  • There are three pomodoros of 50 minutes each, beginning at 8 a.m. Each ends with a ten-minute break. I schedule activities for these pomodoros the day prior.
  • A break at 11 a.m. to have lunch, run errands, and perform household chores. Check social media, email, blog performance. This breaks up the day.
  • At 1 p.m., two pomodoros of 50 minutes each with a ten minute break in between.
  • Once the pomodoros are finished, I head to the kitchen to do dishes and begin preparing dinner.
  • 5 p.m. is a social hour with my spouse plus dinner, usually together.
  • Evening check in on social media, email, household tasks, and chores. Followed by sleep.

These time periods follow a natural rhythm developed since the coronavirus pandemic. While I need to watch the clock sometimes, there is a flow from one activity to the next that sometimes runs over. Almost always, I follow the seam toward completion if I can.

I need to learn to be more outcome oriented than task oriented. For example, clear one garden plot of debris from last season and till represents an outcome. It provides more structure than simply writing on the planner to spend time in the garden. Deliverables matter.

A main question is how will I structure more complex projects that span multiple days, weeks, and months? The good thing about the pomodoros structure is they force breaking complex tasks into do-able work units. This will be another learning process.

I was already using this structure unawares. We all need to maintain productivity and keep our daily routines fresh. When it seems like work, the system requires corrective action.

Categories
Writing

Lilacs Bloom

Lilac blooms.
Spring flowers bloom briefly.
   We take them in.

Lilacs—
   their fragrance,
      soft on the eye.

In the 1960s
   neighbors grew them
      everywhere—
        then spring gave way
         and they were gone.

I planted lilacs
   in this place:
      a fresh start
         rooted in memory.

Enough to share—
   now they line the street.

Before summer's heat,
   we pause,
      breathe them in again,
         and remember.

Copyright © 2026 Paul Deaton. All rights reserved.

Categories
Writing

Return to Iowa

Gaddis Pond Rest Area, Big Grove Township.

Following are opening paragraphs to a chapter of my work in progress, A Working Life. They begin a section on moving to Big Grove Township in 1993. It occurred to me the second paragraph should happen and I spent an inordinate amount of time crafting it. This opening stands up, I believe.

Big Grove Township was established before Iowa Statehood. The first sawmill was built in 1839 by Anthony Sells on Mill Creek. Put the big groves of trees together with the sawmill and you have us. The oak, walnut, hickory, ash, elm, and cottonwood that once thrived among numerous pure springs were long gone when we bought our lot here. What dominates is the culture we and others brought with us to an area where what was native once existed in abundance yet no longer does. There is something essentially American in that.

Also quite American is forgetting about natives who lived here for thousands of years: ancient, unnamed hunter-gatherers, mound builders, and the Oneota culture, which flourished across the Upper Mississippi River Valley for several centuries and gave rise to the historic tribes later known as the Ioway, Meskwaki, and Sauk. Oneota peoples cultivated maize, beans, and squash; built villages along rivers and streams; and moved seasonally across a landscape defined not by fixed boundaries but by ecological, social, and ceremonial relationships.

Not far from here, a small museum once displayed cases of stone points, pottery, and tools gathered from nearby fields—fragments of those lives, removed from the ground and arranged for viewing, now gone themselves.

In such context, we moved to Big Grove Township in August 1993.

Categories
Writing

On Being a Writer

Work space is more like a bivouac.

My current book is heading for home and each new day of editing brings a sense of impending completion. Being a career logistician, I consider process: By June, copies for early readers; then another edit; then fund-raising, printing, and distribution. Having written it, the work ahead is answering questions about whether it is the best it can be.

What is this autobiography, with working title A Working Life: A Memoir, about?

A man who set out to write discovers the long experience of work and of living meaningful days in the American Midwest is the life of a writer.

While this sentence needs work, it is the product of writing the book, driven by its themes. Writing, work, and meaning made a permanent structure. Until I finished a first draft I did not recognize that. Now I can stand on it.

Begun in 2010, this work is having a long gestation. As the writing and editing ends, I understand more clearly what my life is about. Soon I can move on to the next project.

More than anything, I need closure. I can see now that by Labor Day I will be ready to let it go.

Categories
Living in Society

Books, Too Many Books

Tired woman in the library.
Photo by Ron Lach on Pexels.com

We are out of storage space in the house, so something has to go.

Before the library’s March 7, annual used book sale, I donated more than 600 books. It was pleasurable seeing them laying on tables in the main meeting room while people browsed through them. I hadn’t realized how many French language books I had until I saw them together in a box on a table. The donation process continues. I named it “The Great Book Sort” and made an entry on my daily planner with no ending date.

This is a form of curation unlike others I began. My process is developing, yet the main activities were to clear my five-foot-squared sorting table and place a box or two at a time on it. As I take them out of the box, some go directly into the stacks in my writing space, others into a box for donation. The rest are divided into piles to keep, maybe to keep, books that can easily be checked out from the library, and those relegated to the garage or to the bedside table. By the time I’m done, the 3,000 spaces in my writing room will reflect my reading life, and part of my intellectual history.

I did some advance work. First, I decided the only authors whose works I will keep in their entirety are Saul Bellow, Joan Didion, William Carlos Williams, and John Irving. They rest on the top shelf to my left, watching over my every activity.

I mentioned my nine shelves of poetry in another post. There is a presidential history section which needs curating. Same with art books, regional history, reference books, farming-related books, and American Studies topics (native, black, women, and pioneer culture).

I began culling cookbooks. The two remaining shelves are ones I expect to use and the rest are either gone or in several boxes in the stacks to be reviewed once more, then likely donated. We have a project list that includes a new cabinet in the dining room for cookbooks. We are a distance from actually getting that. The recipes I keep in the kitchen are handwritten in spiral bound books and a collection of papers clipped together. Mostly this system works.

Part of this curation will be to refine the categories of what is on the shelves. Right now there are too many categories.

A home library is personal. My story in books is evolving from random collections into something more usable in daily life. I will never read everything again, yet the comfort of good books, carefully curated and surrounding me is a net positive. The Great Book Sort is a project worth doing.

Categories
Reviews

Book Review: This House of Sky

This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind by Ivan Doig is exactly what the title suggests. Descriptions of the author’s rural Montana life are vivid in their presentation of the hard-scrabble ranching life in which Doig came up. Out of that challenging youth — farming, sheep herding, haying, rural community — he became a writer giving voice to western life.

“In my Montana upbringing, I had worked in a lambing shed, picked rock from grainfields, driven a power buckrake in haying time and a D-8 Cat pulling a harrow during summer fallowing and a grain truck at harvest, herded sheep, trailed sheep, cussed sheep — even dug a well by hand and whitewashed a barn –and now I didn’t seem to be finding other people who had done any of that,” Doig wrote in the introduction.

I worked eight years on a farm that raised lambs, although not on the scale of Doig’s Montana. It was an entry point into a life I hadn’t known existed. My experience provided me a way into This House of Sky that many readers might not have. Life experiences can be a form a literacy regardless of how many books we read.

My grandmother grew up in farming communities in Minnesota and Illinois, and could likely relate to the grandmother in the book. Working from a home, while isolated on a farm, took a lot of knowledge, skills, and energy. Such women literally made a home from almost nothing. While Grandmother did not read a lot of books, I might have persuaded her to read this one.

When This House of Sky was published in 1978, many Americans still had farm connections. Today, far fewer do as that knowledge of hand work was eclipsed by mechanization. Today people don’t harvest hay the same way Doig describes before he left home.

Is there a modern readership for the book?

While I brought farm experience to the book, other readers might bring something else. This book can meet readers where they live. Doig’s detailed description of Montana has many common hooks, including the arc of his’ father’s emphysema, the culture of nine bars and saloons in White Sulphur Springs, and the role of women and men in western society.

Whatever a reader brings to This House of Sky, there is a thoughtful world to explore and briefly inhabit.

Highly recommend.

Categories
Writing

A Spring Journey Home

On the state park trail.

Songbirds are arriving: sparrows, cardinals, blue jays, crows, woodpeckers, and more. In winter, geese dominated the lakes. Some remain year-round, but now they are joined by pelicans, gulls, and a variety of waterfowl moving through on the great migration. The number and variety of birds will grow in the weeks ahead. Spring is literally in the air.

This blog is where I write about Iowa, gardening, writing, politics, and whatever crosses my mind while walking on the state park trail.

This post is for new visitors. I have been writing a version of this blog since 2007, although older posts were taken off line in 2013. I post about whatever comes to mind, yet there will be some common themes this spring.

  • Until the June primary election, I’m filling in at Blog for Iowa. Each weekend I will cross-post those pieces here. They cover what I have been doing in the Democratic Party during the previous week, along with a special Iowa politics post on Sunday.
  • The ground is not ready for a shovel yet, but I’m planning a large garden. Some of my posts will be about that. I attempt to keep things different, and I’m beyond the standard photos of emerging plants and harvested produce. Growing food is one of life’s pleasures, and I’ve been doing it since the summer after my spouse and I married.
  • I also write about writing. Some of my most popular posts are when I take some current writing challenge and work my way through it.
  • Thousands of paper and digital photographs remain in shoeboxes and on the cloud. I started an archival process and write about it in a series called “A Life of Photos.”
  • I review things — books and events I attend, mostly. I also have an informal series called “We’re Going Home” in which I reflect on generational change caused by the death of people I know or who have had a profound effect on me.
  • I walk on the state park trail almost daily, usually at sunrise. Those walks give me time to think about issues, and some of those make it back to this blog.

I’ll be 75 years in December and I’m determined to make 2026 a productive year. Watch for it here.

If you’d like to know more, check the About page, located here.

Thanks for visiting. I hope you will find something and return often.

Categories
Writing

Happy Birthday America

Flags at No Kings Rally in Mount Vernon, Iowa.

Following is a description of how I spent the bicentennial in 1976 from my book An Iowa Life: A Memoir. I was on military leave, in between Officer Candidate School and Infantry Officer Basic Course. This year is the 250th birthday of America. I’m not feeling celebratory and wish I could go back to those days when I slept on mother’s front porch through the holiday, away from neighborhood noise.

I stayed on at Fort Benning to take the Infantry Officer Basic Course and attend jump school. After OCS, life was less stressful as I prepared for my assignment in Germany.

I felt the beginnings of transformational change from being an observer of society to a participant.

I see myself more as a player in the show than as an observer and critic. I, too, am a pilgrim traveling on the road to Canterbury with the others. I am beginning to chip the yellow stains from my teeth in preparation for a big smile in greeting the people and animals I see. Life is alive again, and my spirit is tuned into the wavelength of the people again. (Personal Journal, Fort Benning, Georgia, June 6, 1976).

I spent the Bicentennial Independence Day at home in Davenport,

If you stop by my mother’s house you still may see the red, white, and blue décor where I slept this week during my leave time.

After running around the Assumption track a few times, I returned, bathed, and lay down on our ancestral glider. The glider where girls I have crooned and plots have made. I tried to read N. Scott Momaday’s Pulitzer Prize winner but nodded as I have so often done, waking with an urge to set ink to paper about an event from the past.

So, with Grandma sleeping inside and green maple leaves surrounding me, I will recount the vision I have just had.

Several years ago, while we were still in school, Tim Hawks invited me up to his family farm house near Belleview. Some friends of his from Georgetown were visiting and I brought my guitar along to make a little music. In DeWitt, I believe, we stopped and bought a kite to fly once we got out to the farm. When we arrived, we were greeted by the cat who had the house to himself for quite a while and was anxious to make our acquaintance. In we go and carry whatever it was we brought with us inside and got the heater going to provide a more comfortable evening for us. After this and a slight tour, we decided to go outside and fly the kites which we managed with little difficulty: one regular and one box kite. For some reason we decided to leave the kites out and reel them in in the morning before we left. As it got dark, we retired to the inside where we settled down making a little music together, Timothy disappearing to the upstairs after a while with my guitar to make some music on his own. When we woke the next day, we discovered several inches of snow on the ground and that our kites had come down. After a breakfast of pancakes, we policed up the kites and made our way back the treacherous road to the highway, our adventure on the farm complete. (Personal Journal, Davenport, Iowa, July 5, 1976).

When I returned to Fort Benning, I found spare time to write in my journal.