new american diaspora

Denis Johnson and a Writing Methodology for the Homeless Crisis

NSP Meditations, Writing , , ,

Someone had donated three books by Denis Johnson to a street library. I snagged them all. The prize consisted of two novels and a collection of non fiction, Seek: Reports From the Edges of America & Beyond, published in 2001. I’d read several books of fiction by Johnson, but never a word of his non fiction.

I read Seek in two sittings and annotated its pages because it stimulated my thoughts about how to write on the homeless crisis. I keep trying new methods, genres, mixing up methods and genres. I keep changing my mind because I keep walking into new encounters, interactions, or I revisit old ones with fresh insights. Perhaps, ultimately my writing about the New American Diaspora will shape shift and meander. Perhaps, ultimately this is more of a book about writing a book, rather than about the homeless crisis. I hope not! There’s too many of that type already! But sometimes a writer’s conceit overwhelms him.

It feels like every time I pick up a book, (almost always chosen at random from a street library) it shifts or enriches or demolishes certain thinking about writing on this subject.

This is what happened as I read Seek. In this collection of essays, Johnson acts as a kind of journalist, sometimes on contract for a big magazine, sometimes by sheer happenstance (like changing a flat tire). He attends a militia meeting, a Christian biker rally, a Rainbow Gathering. He reports from African civil wars, a gold mine in Alaska and a dive bar in Montana. At one point, he writes about Randy Weaver’s standoff at Ruby Ridge in Idaho before it turned deadly and said he should have visited Weaver’s armed compound and interviewed him because he was basically a neighbor, a mere 60 miles away. Johnson knew that’s where the story was but he didn’t go and blew an incredibly opportunity. He also didn’t have a fat contract to visit and write about Randy Weaver. I suppose that makes a difference to some writers.

I don’t have a fat contract to write about the homeless. Does any writer out there? I’m not attending events related to the crisis, like sweeping an encampment or a press conference at city hall. But wait, perhaps I am! I volunteer at a food pantry and street ministry. Those are regular events. I walk through my local encampments every day. That’s regular attendance at an event, if you want to call it an event.

Johnson engages with certain populations, most that are outright or potentially dangerous. I don’t want to do that. That’s not the place where I want to write from. Johnson does not try and interpret the madness and mayhem he encounters. He hints subtlety here and there but leaves the larger interpretation to the reader.

Is that what I’m doing? Is that the way to go about writing up my encounters with the New American Diaspora? I have opinions and speculations to reveal and have revealed some. Perhaps the answer is to keep probing, assaying, turning up the ground, looking under rocks and RVs and just throw everything I observe, think and write in there, including the kitchens sinks (note plural) because I’ve seen about a half dozen kitchen sinks in a homeless encampments that aren’t being used as kitchen sinks.

What about this method? I find a Magic 8-Ball on the fringes of an encampment. It will show up soon enough. I pick it up, shake it, and ask a question such as: should I write this particular incident up as fiction or essay or memoir or journalism or poetry or polemic or whatever genre pops into my mind? Then I would carry the 8-Ball around me everywhere I go, and use it every single time a new encounter with the New American Diaspora unfolds, which is every single day I live in Oregon.

What a way to write a book!

Journals

NSP Meditations, Writing , , ,

Readers: this is a recent essay about the homeless that first appeared on my Substack newsletter. I occasionally post these pieces on the blog in hope of persuading readers to subscribe to that newsletter and support this project. You can find the newsletter at https://mattlove.substack.com/

I toured the Rhododendron Garden for the first time and reveled in its immediate soothing effect on the various American disturbances unsettling my mind. After the tour, I bought an annual pass and knew I would return on a regular basis and sit on a bench under a 30-foot rhododendron and write or do nothing at all except gaze upon a lake and waterfowl.

What a fine morning and different walk, meaning not through my local homeless encampment, to begin it. Sometimes, I force myself to take a break from observing the New American Diaspora. You have to make a conscious effort to to avoid it and I was doing exactly that.

Out in the parking lot, I decided to keep walking down the boulevard and meet up with a creek that I suspected was laden with beaverwood.

The boulevard ran along a socialist golf course and I passed a kid teeing off on the 14th hole, a par four, dogleg left. He smacked it down the middle. I saw a concrete path to my left that paralleled the 14th hole and took it, while watching the kid hit his second shot. It faded to the right and hit some branches of an oak tree. He had 50 yards to the green to get up and down for par. Something down the path arrested my attention: a lone tent pitched off to the side near the creek. If I kept on my present course I would walk within inches of it. I wasn’t really in the mood to observe, let alone interact with something related to the New American Diaspora, but this is how it always unfolds.

I stopped for a moment to watch the kid hit a wedge to within eight feet of the hole. I could watch him putt and then turn around. Or I could keep going to down the path. I kept going and soon found myself standing in front of the tent. I peered inside. How could I not? I had never seen the inside of a tent of a member of the New American Diaspora.

It was an expensive three-person model. The flap was wide open. No one was inside. There was water pooled on the floor. I saw a cot with an expensive sleeping bag strewn across it. I saw ear buds, a flashlight, a tiny propane stove, various toiletries, empty bottles of booze, cans of beans and other items I associated with someone living on the streets. The contents inside the tent exuded a definite male occupant and the condition of the interior and surrounding disarray of other items, including a bong, barbecue and bicycle parts, suggested strongly to me the tent had been abandoned. That’s certainly nothing new. Tents, shanties, RVs and other makeshift domiciles are abandoned all the time.

I made a second visual inspection. I saw something else resting on the cot: two journals, a hard back Dickens-like red and black ledger and a pink softcover composition book with silver glitter encrusted into stars adoring the front.

Journals! A writer resided in this tent and kept a journal, possibly two! They were abandoned like the rest of gear. I had to read them. I had to know what was going on inside the mind of the writer. This was like finding gold and you weren’t even looking for it. And these were nuggets gleaming in the crystalline stream, not flakes in the black sand.

There they were, five feet away. I could grab them and only put one foot inside. I was saving something important human from human ruination.

It all added up to an excellent rationalization for a writer who always remembers Joan Didion’s priceless and true line: “Writers are always selling somebody out.”

I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t step inside. It felt like an obvious violation. I resumed walking down the path, and my rationalizations resumed as well.

The kid walked off the green. I didn’t know if he saved par or not.

My mind raced:

The tent had been obviously been abandoned. How long is something abandoned before it can be claimed? I once taught a one-period high school writing workshop on such an ethical dilemma It was about a bike chained to a power pole that no one came back to unlock.

Okay, I would come back the next day and see if the journals were still there. That would make it more ethical?

What is my duty here as a caring person? If that tent and the journals end up in a landfill,what good does that serve?

I kept walking down the path. It ended just past the 14th green onto a dead end street. I wheeled right and beheld the remains of a homeless encampment of seven or so dilapidated vehicles, including a milk delivery truck that appeared as if it had taken a direct hit from a bazooka. In fact, the whole encampment looked bombed out or fought through, like Stalingrad. No one appeared to be still living there. I thought about exploring it and then decided otherwise.

The unsettling of my mind began again. I simply can’t escape it, even when I purposely try to find refuge in nature. There I encounter members of the New American Diaspora, on a logging road in the Coast Range, along a river outside Drain, in the willows along a lake near Klamath Falls, in a national forest surrounding Sisters. Everywhere in Oregon. Yes, even on a holiday egg nog and cider stroll at the port in Bandon where a homeless joins carolers and sings “Hark the Herald Angels Sing.”

I turned around and headed back to the tent. I was taking the journals. If I had established one rule in my ongoing mission or adventure or observation or documentation or whatever I am doing with this story it was this: when an opportunity help or learn more arises, and they always do, you must ACT RIGHT THEN. You cannot wait for tomorrow when you’ve mustered courage or better reflected or developed a strategy. ACT RIGHT NOW. I’d blown so many incredible opportunities the past year by not sensing the moment to care or learn and I was done with that feckless approach.

Move! Got to move! I walked up to the tent. I looked around. No one was in sight. I found an oak branch on the ground, one with a kind of claw at the end. I extend the claw into into the tent. I grabbed the edge of both journals. I yanked the claw toward me with all my might and the journals flew into my hands in almost balletic fashion. (I’m not making this up.) I cradled them under my arm like a football and headed back toward the Rhododendron Garden. I had never stepped inside the tent.

Was I a thief? I’d wrestle it with that question later. Perhaps I’d saved a masterpiece of a memoir, illustrations, comics, a fantasy novel, a collection of Bukowski-like tales of depravity or something totally new to American literature because what was going in was totally new in American history.

As I walked, I noticed the journals were damp. I wanted to read them right along the golf course but I forced myself to wait.

Just a peek. I stopped. I thumbed the Dickens ledger. Nothing! Nothing except a first name and a phone number on the inside front cover.

I opened the pink journal. I scanned its pages and found mostly blank pages, but also stray words, a list and doodles in different colored ink written/drawn in a scratchy script that to me felt like a female’s. One the very last page was a page of prose written in orange and pink ink. At first glance, I couldn’t read it.

Why write on the last page of a journal before filling the rest of it? Over my long career as an English teacher who required students to keep journals, I had come across a few writers who inexplicably skipped pages and jumped around, but the one I now held was the most extreme in this oddity.

I hustled to the car and drove to my favorite dive bar to better scrutinize the journals. Since there was only one page of prose, I doubted any chance for discovering a major literary revelation, but then again the Gettysburg Address is only 272 words and Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 18” is a mere 14 lines.

The bartender poured me an ale and took I took it to a table near a window for extra light to decipher the handwriting, which on first inspection, was nothing like I had ever seen and I’d seen thousands of samples.

The last page of the journal read:

Don’t fuck with

I just got my phone last night. I miss you too and also want to let you know I’ve been holding the spot I cleaned up a lot. I think things look and feel more comfortable.

Your homie Rich came to see you but you weren’t here obviously.

(unintelligible words) …you get this note. I also got a phone for you. You need one. I gotcha.

I am going to get some (unintelligible words). Just call you and make sure you’re good. Like you’ve been gone for days. I love you.

It wasn’t what I had initially hoped for, but as I read the passage over and over and constructed an interpretation, it occurred to me that I had discovered something much richer and encouraging than a literary diamond in the squalor: a message of caring, of helping, of nuts and bolts survival, and at the end, of love.

My New Literary Endeavor: The New American Diaspora

NSP Meditations, Writing , , , , , , , , ,

Friends of the Meditations Blog:

I invite you to subscribe to my latest literary endeavor, a newsletter called the New American Diaspora. In this newsletter, I write about observing and interacting with the homeless people in Oregon and also those people who have checked out on conventional American life.

Should you subscribe, the newsletter is emailed to your in-box two or three times a week via Substack, a newsletter platform that is helping writers find a wider audience and generate revenue from their writing.

It works like this: you click on this web site (or cut and paste into your browser)

https://mattlove.substack.com/

and it will direct you to the newsletter, where there are several options to subscribe. If you subscribe, each one of the pieces would be emailed to you when I post it. You can also access the archives of previous writings by subscribing. There is no blog or web site or social media outlet to visit. The content comes directly to you. Mine are mostly short reads, but not always.

At some point, I will put up a pay wall for certain content available only to paid subscribers. For the time being, however, the content is free to read in hope that my words will engage your heart and mind and perhaps lead to great notions of understanding and solutions.

Four years ago, I started Meditations. Many of you have read it and became regular readers. I will continue to post there on subjects unrelated to the newsletter, but the blog format has grown outdated, certainly as a model to get paid for writing, and I needed to adapt to the changing market and try generating additional income for my writing on this momentous crisis in our nation.

Thank you for your consideration and I hope you can support this endeavor. Please feel free to share this communication to other potential subscribers.

Matt Love