OUR FOUNDER & EDITOR
Aloha, folks... Thanks for dropping by The DICTION AERIE ™ -- literary blogs written and edited by American essayist, poet and adventure guide, JOHN HESSBURG -- with "a little help from his friends." Founder and managing partner of the U.S. Dive Travel Network and affiliate agency Live-Aboards.com, John Hessburg has devoted more than 30 years to designing new tropical adventure vacations for preferred clients around the world, in tropical nations across Latin America, the Pacific Rim, Australia, SW Asia, the Indian Ocean and North America. He hard-launched these nine lit-blogs in March 2016, almost on the heartbeat of the agency's 25th birthday.
Before his travel career, John worked as a general assignment reporter for metro daily newspapers and as an associate editor for feature and adventure magazines in Minneapolis and Seattle, USA. John earned a BA degree in journalism, summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, from Grinnell College and the University of Minnesota and then worked 15 years as a feature writer and investigative journalist. He also moonlit as the Pacific Northwest correspondent for Reuters, the British international news agency, during his 9 years as a staff writer at a morning metro daily, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (P-I).
For 5 years in the late 1980s and early 1990s, John served as Associate Editor of America's oldest mountaineering magazine, "Summit" and was a regular contributor to two national magazines: "Climbing" and "Rock & Ice." He published cover stories in "Pacific Northwest Magazine" and "The Mountaineers Magazine" during the 1990s. Altogether, John has written more than 2,000 by-lined stories -- many of which were released over international wire services such as AP and Reuters.
In the 1980s, while a senior staff writer for the Seattle P-I, John Hessburg twice was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize -- one time solo for a feature piece about America's turbulent Vietnam years; and once as member of a news team analyzing a Mt. Hood climbing tragedy in May 1986, which claimed the lives of 7 students and 2 teacher-guides. John won a dozen state and regional reporting awards in Minnesota and Washington, including Minnesota's highest honors for investigative reporting -- the Frank Premack Award for Investigative Journalism -- and also the Minneapolis Tribune Government News Contest (1st place for investigative reporting) two times.
Aloha, folks... Thanks for dropping by The DICTION AERIE ™ -- literary blogs written and edited by American essayist, poet and adventure guide, JOHN HESSBURG -- with "a little help from his friends." Founder and managing partner of the U.S. Dive Travel Network and affiliate agency Live-Aboards.com, John Hessburg has devoted more than 30 years to designing new tropical adventure vacations for preferred clients around the world, in tropical nations across Latin America, the Pacific Rim, Australia, SW Asia, the Indian Ocean and North America. He hard-launched these nine lit-blogs in March 2016, almost on the heartbeat of the agency's 25th birthday.
Before his travel career, John worked as a general assignment reporter for metro daily newspapers and as an associate editor for feature and adventure magazines in Minneapolis and Seattle, USA. John earned a BA degree in journalism, summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, from Grinnell College and the University of Minnesota and then worked 15 years as a feature writer and investigative journalist. He also moonlit as the Pacific Northwest correspondent for Reuters, the British international news agency, during his 9 years as a staff writer at a morning metro daily, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (P-I).
For 5 years in the late 1980s and early 1990s, John served as Associate Editor of America's oldest mountaineering magazine, "Summit" and was a regular contributor to two national magazines: "Climbing" and "Rock & Ice." He published cover stories in "Pacific Northwest Magazine" and "The Mountaineers Magazine" during the 1990s. Altogether, John has written more than 2,000 by-lined stories -- many of which were released over international wire services such as AP and Reuters.
In the 1980s, while a senior staff writer for the Seattle P-I, John Hessburg twice was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize -- one time solo for a feature piece about America's turbulent Vietnam years; and once as member of a news team analyzing a Mt. Hood climbing tragedy in May 1986, which claimed the lives of 7 students and 2 teacher-guides. John won a dozen state and regional reporting awards in Minnesota and Washington, including Minnesota's highest honors for investigative reporting -- the Frank Premack Award for Investigative Journalism -- and also the Minneapolis Tribune Government News Contest (1st place for investigative reporting) two times.
One series of 25 investigative stories in the Seattle morning newspaper, published in the late 1980s, exposed rampant timber theft on U.S. Forest Service lands in Washington, Oregon and Alaska, which for decades had cost American taxpayers millions of dollars a year. Prodded by those stories, and public outcry over Forest Service malfeasance, Congress passed strict new laws regulating timber sale accountability. Now logging in America's national forests falls under tighter law enforcement scrutiny, to protect vulnerable public resources from a corrupt network of timber pirates that used to prey on Pacific NW forests, as a matter of covert routine during the 1970s and '80s. The thieves were stopped; some were jailed.
A composer of jazz, rock and blues tunes, who plays acoustic guitar and folk harmonica, John gigged as a hobby sideline at small clubs and coffee houses during the '70s, '80s and '90s. For one year, while a Rotary International Scholar in Argentina, he fronted a classic-rock band that toured the Sierras de Cordoba and once opened for a group, which at that time was among the most popular rock bands in South America.
A certified PADI divemaster and alpine mountaineering guide, John Hessburg is trained in mountain and ocean rescue. He is fluent in Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese, conversant in classical German. A native of St. Paul, Minnesota, John moved to Seattle in '82, then back to St. Paul in June '99. After visiting the Cook Islands in spring of 1990, he fell in love with the South Pacific and founded Wild Island Expeditions in late summer that same year. That guide service grew into the present-day U.S. Dive Travel Network by the early 1990s. He founded Live-Aboards.com -- the Internet's largest resource for chartered scuba diving yachts -- several years later.
John Hessburg has led many land-based alpine expeditions and tropical island tours in about 30 countries for more than 35 years. These include climbing and trekking trips to the Andes Mountains of Bolivia and Argentina, plus countless climbs and hikes in the U.S. Rockies, North Cascades and Mexico; as well as reef-exploration expeditions -- diving in Tonga, New Caledonia, the Fiji Islands, Cook Islands and other South Pacific atoll groups.
In May and June of 1989, John led the U.S. Expedition to La Cordillera Real' (the Royal Range) in the Bolivian Andes, exploring 3 virgin valley systems on the eastern flanks of the Royal Range. There his team photographed, charted and gave formal geographic names to most of the glaciers, rock faces, buttresses, ridges and summits in two remote alpine valleys of the Andes where no non-indigenous explorers ever had set foot before. His Real' Time Expedition was featured at the 1990 national convention of the American Alpine Club (AAC) in Boulder, Colorado, the world's congress for mountaineering and alpine exploration, where he addressed the assembly with slides of the climbing team's geographic discoveries. John published new geo-charts in archives with the AAC and the Bolivian government.
On the move several months each year, John Hessburg divides his time among the islands of Hawaii, the South Pacific, the Caribbean, the mountains of Washington and Colorado states, and his home in Minnesota USA. Main websites for the tropical adventure business he runs are www.usdivetravel.com and www.live-aboards.com .
A composer of jazz, rock and blues tunes, who plays acoustic guitar and folk harmonica, John gigged as a hobby sideline at small clubs and coffee houses during the '70s, '80s and '90s. For one year, while a Rotary International Scholar in Argentina, he fronted a classic-rock band that toured the Sierras de Cordoba and once opened for a group, which at that time was among the most popular rock bands in South America.
A certified PADI divemaster and alpine mountaineering guide, John Hessburg is trained in mountain and ocean rescue. He is fluent in Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese, conversant in classical German. A native of St. Paul, Minnesota, John moved to Seattle in '82, then back to St. Paul in June '99. After visiting the Cook Islands in spring of 1990, he fell in love with the South Pacific and founded Wild Island Expeditions in late summer that same year. That guide service grew into the present-day U.S. Dive Travel Network by the early 1990s. He founded Live-Aboards.com -- the Internet's largest resource for chartered scuba diving yachts -- several years later.
John Hessburg has led many land-based alpine expeditions and tropical island tours in about 30 countries for more than 35 years. These include climbing and trekking trips to the Andes Mountains of Bolivia and Argentina, plus countless climbs and hikes in the U.S. Rockies, North Cascades and Mexico; as well as reef-exploration expeditions -- diving in Tonga, New Caledonia, the Fiji Islands, Cook Islands and other South Pacific atoll groups.
In May and June of 1989, John led the U.S. Expedition to La Cordillera Real' (the Royal Range) in the Bolivian Andes, exploring 3 virgin valley systems on the eastern flanks of the Royal Range. There his team photographed, charted and gave formal geographic names to most of the glaciers, rock faces, buttresses, ridges and summits in two remote alpine valleys of the Andes where no non-indigenous explorers ever had set foot before. His Real' Time Expedition was featured at the 1990 national convention of the American Alpine Club (AAC) in Boulder, Colorado, the world's congress for mountaineering and alpine exploration, where he addressed the assembly with slides of the climbing team's geographic discoveries. John published new geo-charts in archives with the AAC and the Bolivian government.
On the move several months each year, John Hessburg divides his time among the islands of Hawaii, the South Pacific, the Caribbean, the mountains of Washington and Colorado states, and his home in Minnesota USA. Main websites for the tropical adventure business he runs are www.usdivetravel.com and www.live-aboards.com .
OUR CONTRIBUTORS
EVELYN JANE BECHTEL --
A moment of deep trauma, especially losing a child, will forever change the landscape of any human heart. But in parents blessed with an artist’s soul, this loss will empower and inform nearly all creative energy for the rest of their lives. And in a few, their pain not only can't defeat them; it fuels their art with a fine and furious light.
In those few mothers, the gifted ones like Evelyn Jane, their loss flares into word streams suddenly, randomly, like coronal bursts from a faroff alien star. This is a place so hard for their friends to visit it makes their art seem like chants by some aboriginal priestess who's pouring groans down a horn of hollow wood, a didgeridoo that’s tapped right into the heart of darkness, always just before a dawn that never comes, but keeps on promising it will. The power of creative tension in that gap is vast, restive, riveting. In the case of E.J. Bechtel it has forced some remarkable poems into being.
In 2004 when Evelyn Jane Bechtel, a mother of three in rural Oklahoma, lost her only daughter at age 15, she began to pour dark fire into her poetry, just so she could keep on breathing, she says. That made her poems gaunt yet noble, impossible to ignore and gently disturbing like that sub-sonic priestess humming away. Evelyn Jane struggled through the endless weeks and months -- which gathered into years -- like a stubborn half-exhausted explorer who’s ripping away vines at face level, tearing at them by the hundreds, hourly, hurling vine scraps aside as she slogs up a steepening trail that never arrives but keeps on leading her ahead.
And so it goes with this sweet-spirited little lady, a small-town office worker who lost her only daughter, Kendra, in a tragic mishap when the girl was just a freshman in high school. That’s the why and when, and how this working mom has written flurries of essays and poems, some of them breath-taking cries from places deeper than marrow, cries that remind us readers how utterly blessed we are to have our own children, on loan from Eternity for a little while, at least.
Still fresh of features, life-positive and a healthy 50-something, this 5-foot-2-inch mother of two sons who are young men now, has feral cat eyes that are brilliant and penetrating. They can change by the hour, she says – veering from blue to green to gray and back to blue, depending on the ambient sunlight -- or soul light. She has long dark hair as fine as gossamer, likely from the good Cherokee blood on her mother’s side. Her parents met when her mom was a waitress, then a factory worker and her Dad a long-haul truck driver. So she’s had to work hard all her life; and she knows how. “Both of my parents came from farmers,” E.J. says, “and they had such dignity and integrity. My Mom is still the classiest lady I’ve ever known.”
While this Oklahoma poet works hard she plays soft, and often will spend hours in the evening just sitting alone at home, writing or creating mixed-media art posters that look like psychedelic LP covers from the early 1970s, listening to drifty pulsating alt-indie records by fresh new artists like Radical Face, Gregory Alan Isakov, Paper Kites or Bon Iver. She loves to sit on the front porch listening to wind in the trees, thinking how she can shape new words -- to tether then tame them, then ride the rushes of emotion that can flare as fiercely as a mad elk with a saddle on its back.
E.J. Bechtel uses a cool quirky nom de plume on one social medium that she found one day on a mysterious scrap of paper pinned to her daughter’s bulletin board, shortly after the girl's death. It is simply this -- “Paradox Kismet.” When I asked for a translation, her answer only deepened the mystery. “I’ve never felt I’ve had to do what other people do,” she said. “I may never know what this really means…”
In recent years, Evelyn Jane wrote several meandering essays to grapple with her grief and in one she told her daughter, who loved things colored bright purple, “You were in the dining room so that’s where I went. Kendra, I know sometimes you would like to have a friend come with us shopping and we will do that someday. Just let me know when you want to invite someone. I never really bring it up or offer because honestly I just like to spend time with you. I don’t want to share you. The tears welled up in my eyes and you stepped up and put your arms around me and we hugged and you said, ‘I like to spend time with you, too, Mom.’ I was crying at this point and then we kind of laughed about it. Now, years later, I’m so glad I said those words… The words I could have let evaporate. But I said them and we had a good day. And I love you.”
Her daughter Kendra’s favorite poem was Edgar Allen Poe’s “Alone,” which begins like this…
From childhood’s hour I have not been
As others were -- I have not seen
As others saw -- I could not bring
My passions from a common spring
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow, I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone
And all I lov’d, I lov’d alone…
In spring of 2016 I discovered E.J. Bechtel’s poems in an online community for writers and what clutched my attention within minutes of reading her first poem was her raw maternal energy, that gnawing grief with no relief, yet marked by a gently dignified restraint. Like the priestess chants, these poems will insinuate themselves deeply into your mid-brain; I've got to warn you.
A short time ago, while editing her newest cluster of poems, I asked E.J. to share more about her daughter's passing and how she's doing today. “I still feel lucky to be her mother,” she said, though 12 years had flown past. “I had over 15 amazing years and if this pain is the price, then so be it. I know so many parents are just as awed by their children as I have been. Our children don't realize it. We cannot miss the opportunity to let them know.”
And all the parents out there, the ones who never give up, who radiate their love incessantly, seeing it so often taken for granted like summer sunlight or like breathing, simply smile and sigh then say, “Amen." - JH
A moment of deep trauma, especially losing a child, will forever change the landscape of any human heart. But in parents blessed with an artist’s soul, this loss will empower and inform nearly all creative energy for the rest of their lives. And in a few, their pain not only can't defeat them; it fuels their art with a fine and furious light.
In those few mothers, the gifted ones like Evelyn Jane, their loss flares into word streams suddenly, randomly, like coronal bursts from a faroff alien star. This is a place so hard for their friends to visit it makes their art seem like chants by some aboriginal priestess who's pouring groans down a horn of hollow wood, a didgeridoo that’s tapped right into the heart of darkness, always just before a dawn that never comes, but keeps on promising it will. The power of creative tension in that gap is vast, restive, riveting. In the case of E.J. Bechtel it has forced some remarkable poems into being.
In 2004 when Evelyn Jane Bechtel, a mother of three in rural Oklahoma, lost her only daughter at age 15, she began to pour dark fire into her poetry, just so she could keep on breathing, she says. That made her poems gaunt yet noble, impossible to ignore and gently disturbing like that sub-sonic priestess humming away. Evelyn Jane struggled through the endless weeks and months -- which gathered into years -- like a stubborn half-exhausted explorer who’s ripping away vines at face level, tearing at them by the hundreds, hourly, hurling vine scraps aside as she slogs up a steepening trail that never arrives but keeps on leading her ahead.
And so it goes with this sweet-spirited little lady, a small-town office worker who lost her only daughter, Kendra, in a tragic mishap when the girl was just a freshman in high school. That’s the why and when, and how this working mom has written flurries of essays and poems, some of them breath-taking cries from places deeper than marrow, cries that remind us readers how utterly blessed we are to have our own children, on loan from Eternity for a little while, at least.
Still fresh of features, life-positive and a healthy 50-something, this 5-foot-2-inch mother of two sons who are young men now, has feral cat eyes that are brilliant and penetrating. They can change by the hour, she says – veering from blue to green to gray and back to blue, depending on the ambient sunlight -- or soul light. She has long dark hair as fine as gossamer, likely from the good Cherokee blood on her mother’s side. Her parents met when her mom was a waitress, then a factory worker and her Dad a long-haul truck driver. So she’s had to work hard all her life; and she knows how. “Both of my parents came from farmers,” E.J. says, “and they had such dignity and integrity. My Mom is still the classiest lady I’ve ever known.”
While this Oklahoma poet works hard she plays soft, and often will spend hours in the evening just sitting alone at home, writing or creating mixed-media art posters that look like psychedelic LP covers from the early 1970s, listening to drifty pulsating alt-indie records by fresh new artists like Radical Face, Gregory Alan Isakov, Paper Kites or Bon Iver. She loves to sit on the front porch listening to wind in the trees, thinking how she can shape new words -- to tether then tame them, then ride the rushes of emotion that can flare as fiercely as a mad elk with a saddle on its back.
E.J. Bechtel uses a cool quirky nom de plume on one social medium that she found one day on a mysterious scrap of paper pinned to her daughter’s bulletin board, shortly after the girl's death. It is simply this -- “Paradox Kismet.” When I asked for a translation, her answer only deepened the mystery. “I’ve never felt I’ve had to do what other people do,” she said. “I may never know what this really means…”
In recent years, Evelyn Jane wrote several meandering essays to grapple with her grief and in one she told her daughter, who loved things colored bright purple, “You were in the dining room so that’s where I went. Kendra, I know sometimes you would like to have a friend come with us shopping and we will do that someday. Just let me know when you want to invite someone. I never really bring it up or offer because honestly I just like to spend time with you. I don’t want to share you. The tears welled up in my eyes and you stepped up and put your arms around me and we hugged and you said, ‘I like to spend time with you, too, Mom.’ I was crying at this point and then we kind of laughed about it. Now, years later, I’m so glad I said those words… The words I could have let evaporate. But I said them and we had a good day. And I love you.”
Her daughter Kendra’s favorite poem was Edgar Allen Poe’s “Alone,” which begins like this…
From childhood’s hour I have not been
As others were -- I have not seen
As others saw -- I could not bring
My passions from a common spring
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow, I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone
And all I lov’d, I lov’d alone…
In spring of 2016 I discovered E.J. Bechtel’s poems in an online community for writers and what clutched my attention within minutes of reading her first poem was her raw maternal energy, that gnawing grief with no relief, yet marked by a gently dignified restraint. Like the priestess chants, these poems will insinuate themselves deeply into your mid-brain; I've got to warn you.
A short time ago, while editing her newest cluster of poems, I asked E.J. to share more about her daughter's passing and how she's doing today. “I still feel lucky to be her mother,” she said, though 12 years had flown past. “I had over 15 amazing years and if this pain is the price, then so be it. I know so many parents are just as awed by their children as I have been. Our children don't realize it. We cannot miss the opportunity to let them know.”
And all the parents out there, the ones who never give up, who radiate their love incessantly, seeing it so often taken for granted like summer sunlight or like breathing, simply smile and sigh then say, “Amen." - JH
CHARLI MILLS --
From riding horses to crafting stellar stories, Charli is a natural-born buckaroo who’s wrangling language with an assertively sensitive hand in a setting far from typical -- at a peaceful ranch in Elmira, Idaho. She hosts the weekly Carrot Ranch Flash Fiction Challenge online at CarrotRanch.com and the monthly writer’s program called Wrangling Words at The Library in Sandpoint. We love this gal; she's like an engine of effervescent good will.
For Charli Mills, flash fiction (ultra-short stories with power packed into every word choice) is a tool to quickly explore characters, motives, tone, scenes, research and settings for her novel-length works of fiction. She’s currently revising a historical western novel that, she promises, “will rock the West” with her revelations of Wild Bill Hickok. Why? Because Charli digs for long-buried treasures. She carries a keen passion for writing about the forgotten women of history and much of her new work explores their perceptions and insights. For example, she’s now delving into the lives of three Idaho women who have new secrets to reveal about Wild Bill’s “Incident at Rock Creek” in 1861. When Charli Mills discovers an historical anomaly or forgotten female’s yarn, she likes to say “the imagination churns and the research burns” deeply into local history tomes.
Charli’s writing career got its kick-start while she pursued her degree in Writing at Carroll College in Helena, MT. She graduated Magna cum Laude in 1998 and presented an honors thesis titled: “A Thread of Incest: Analyzing the Text and Character Roles in Troilus and Criseyde.” She’s freelanced for regional publications, business clients and has been editor of a Minnesota food cooperative newsletter, “Living Naturally,” for 15 years. As a marketing communications manager she’s earned numerous national awards for writing, editing and presentations – including a Master Cooperative Communicators Designation. She’s published more than 500 articles in print and online. Previously, Charli served as a contributing author to the website for Go Idaho.
In 2012, Charli Mills left a marketing manager's post to pursue her life-long literary dream -- writing historical and women’s fiction. She’s drafted three unpublished novels during that time. Her third has piqued considerable interest among western states’ writers, as a lot of folks want to know what really happened with Hickok in Rock Creek, Nebraska. (Stay tuned...) Since hosting the flash fiction collective, Charli also created a spirited literary group called the Rough Writers. Comprising authors from around the globe, including the UK, Australia, Canada, Poland and Spain, she declared she’s “feeling chuffed” to be publishing the group’s first anthology. That's Brit slang for "really pleased," and Charli just likes the way that sounds. ( We do too. Slick diction. ) She’s also chiefly chuffed to live in a beautiful corner of Idaho, while experimenting with a new literary form that melds essay, history and imagination into snapshots to tell the story of a place: mainly the Pack River in northern Idaho. Much of the work is based on her Elmira Ponds Spotter blog posts, her ear for local stories and over-active imagination.
Charli is married to a retired Army Ranger with an amazing 1890s handlebar mustache, who's now a master airline mechanic. She’s a multi-tasking Mom to their three grown children: Radio Geek (a 27-year old daughter who’s a science journalist for Michigan Tech); Rock Climber (a 25-year old daughter living the Montana life of adventure); and Master Runner (a 24-year old son finishing his Masters in Psychology IO at UW Stout in Wisconsin). She and her children live in four different time zones and relish the rare but rockin’ times they get together. Charli says he is "determined and blessed to keep earning her living from writing" and she generously shares her abundant literary insights and experience with many emerging rural writers.
You can also find her cavorting and disporting – with wisdom and TLC – on Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn.
From riding horses to crafting stellar stories, Charli is a natural-born buckaroo who’s wrangling language with an assertively sensitive hand in a setting far from typical -- at a peaceful ranch in Elmira, Idaho. She hosts the weekly Carrot Ranch Flash Fiction Challenge online at CarrotRanch.com and the monthly writer’s program called Wrangling Words at The Library in Sandpoint. We love this gal; she's like an engine of effervescent good will.
For Charli Mills, flash fiction (ultra-short stories with power packed into every word choice) is a tool to quickly explore characters, motives, tone, scenes, research and settings for her novel-length works of fiction. She’s currently revising a historical western novel that, she promises, “will rock the West” with her revelations of Wild Bill Hickok. Why? Because Charli digs for long-buried treasures. She carries a keen passion for writing about the forgotten women of history and much of her new work explores their perceptions and insights. For example, she’s now delving into the lives of three Idaho women who have new secrets to reveal about Wild Bill’s “Incident at Rock Creek” in 1861. When Charli Mills discovers an historical anomaly or forgotten female’s yarn, she likes to say “the imagination churns and the research burns” deeply into local history tomes.
Charli’s writing career got its kick-start while she pursued her degree in Writing at Carroll College in Helena, MT. She graduated Magna cum Laude in 1998 and presented an honors thesis titled: “A Thread of Incest: Analyzing the Text and Character Roles in Troilus and Criseyde.” She’s freelanced for regional publications, business clients and has been editor of a Minnesota food cooperative newsletter, “Living Naturally,” for 15 years. As a marketing communications manager she’s earned numerous national awards for writing, editing and presentations – including a Master Cooperative Communicators Designation. She’s published more than 500 articles in print and online. Previously, Charli served as a contributing author to the website for Go Idaho.
In 2012, Charli Mills left a marketing manager's post to pursue her life-long literary dream -- writing historical and women’s fiction. She’s drafted three unpublished novels during that time. Her third has piqued considerable interest among western states’ writers, as a lot of folks want to know what really happened with Hickok in Rock Creek, Nebraska. (Stay tuned...) Since hosting the flash fiction collective, Charli also created a spirited literary group called the Rough Writers. Comprising authors from around the globe, including the UK, Australia, Canada, Poland and Spain, she declared she’s “feeling chuffed” to be publishing the group’s first anthology. That's Brit slang for "really pleased," and Charli just likes the way that sounds. ( We do too. Slick diction. ) She’s also chiefly chuffed to live in a beautiful corner of Idaho, while experimenting with a new literary form that melds essay, history and imagination into snapshots to tell the story of a place: mainly the Pack River in northern Idaho. Much of the work is based on her Elmira Ponds Spotter blog posts, her ear for local stories and over-active imagination.
Charli is married to a retired Army Ranger with an amazing 1890s handlebar mustache, who's now a master airline mechanic. She’s a multi-tasking Mom to their three grown children: Radio Geek (a 27-year old daughter who’s a science journalist for Michigan Tech); Rock Climber (a 25-year old daughter living the Montana life of adventure); and Master Runner (a 24-year old son finishing his Masters in Psychology IO at UW Stout in Wisconsin). She and her children live in four different time zones and relish the rare but rockin’ times they get together. Charli says he is "determined and blessed to keep earning her living from writing" and she generously shares her abundant literary insights and experience with many emerging rural writers.
You can also find her cavorting and disporting – with wisdom and TLC – on Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn.
GEOFFREY BYRON GARWICK --
Trying to keep Geoff’s hand on the tiller of a task like writing his own bio notes, was not unlike struggling to pin a ball of quicksilver to a mirror. It's not that the lad is mercurial; he's just not easily pin-down-able. Always inventing "Why-Nots" in arenas that favor Ho-Hums, his mind’s eye and Zen-ish humor dart about in perpetual motion -- both perplexing and invigorating -- so we just gave up and said, “Let ‘er rip, amigo.”
Blessed with a blazing mane of wizard white like some prairie-romping Gandolph, Geoff earned his undergrad wings at Yale with a double major in Intensive English and Psychology. He was in the same graduating class as former President George "Dubya" Bush. “But you know,” Geoff admits, “I don’t think I ever saw George in all my four years there.” But neither did most of Dubya’s profs; or so it’s been reported. However, Geoff was named Class Poet at Yale, where renowned American poet and novelist Robert Penn Warren, a co-founder of the celebrated New Criticism, was his advisor on the senior thesis. At Yale University, the diligent Mr. Garwick also was a Merit Scholar, and he graduated magna cum laude.
Geoff now lives near Minneapolis, Minne-snow-tah – the Flyover Land of Wayward Vikings, 70-lb icy roof stalagtites and wheel-well phlegm that would clog a Hoover Dam turbine -- where he works as a clinical psychologist when he’s not bashing out amazing poems – gems that are tart, cheeky and delightful to read out loud. Geoff is a raconteur and conversationalist of no small talent, who can bench-press more iron than 90% of the guys his age. Probably an understatement. With true Garwicked glee, he tells how he named his daughter Tachyon, after the theoretical subatomic particle that moves faster than light speed. Proved to be a prescient move, as later in her adult years Tachyon got a tattoo on one ankle -- the biochem model of an adrenaline molecule. Here in Geoff's own words are a few more folds of the ham-on-wry mind that fashioned this kick-off issue’s lead poem….
“Favorite language: English. Favorite humor genre: punishing epigram. Favorite sports: backstroke and debate (in high school), second place in Minnesota debate for two years. Captain of Yale tournament debate team and in Yale-Princeton Humorous Debate. Favorite accomplishment: invented my very own obscene word at age eleven (No, it’s not ‘conservative’… it’s 'pilck')." [Ladies and gents, we’ve since learned that pilck can mean just about whatever you need at the moment, like a few other spicy terms of Anglo-Saxon origin.]
"Second favorite accomplishment: after mom took me, at age eight, to a lecture on Chaucer at the University of Minnesota, changed pronunciation of first name so it rhymes with ‘quaff’, not ‘ref’. Third favorite accomplishment: as a teen, while raising rabbits for fur, manure and meat, I learned to skin one in under two minutes. (So ... you jealous much, Davy C ?)
"Okay, I’ll cooperate now: born in Minnesota; raised in the Ozarks of Missouri; high school graduation speaker, as was one of two sisters; MA from Hartford Seminary in psychology and religion; Ph.D. from University of Minnesota where I completed coursework in clinical psychology and educational psychology. I’m now on staff at an inner city community mental health center in St. Paul for 30+ years. Married to another Ph.D. clinical psychologist with whom I taught psych courses at Metropolitan University. First published play was in high school (“The Jeer Leaders”) and led to threats of violence by, guess who, the real cheerleaders. Edited small literary mag for my college (note: it’s like Oxford, with twelve undergrad ‘colleges’ within Yale). OK I admit it, I arrived at Yale wearing a beret, Bermuda shorts, and a cello under one arm, my first time further East than Wisconsin. ( Editor’s note: yet the seniors apparently liked him, and never forced Geoff to wear a T-shirt stating, “Effetes don’t fail me now.” )
"Favorite instrument: the oboe, which my daughter played until she ditched it and her music scholarship, but which I made the instrument of the female protagonist in current project -- an SF novel about music, pseudo-pregnancy, and parasitism. (In that order.) Favorite PC issue: whatever happened to the redoubtable “Ms?” Why are all my grandkids’ teachers now being hailed as “Miss” or “Mrs.”?
Favorite animal: the naked mole rat. Favorite author for little kids; Mo Willems….” (Geoff delights in his toddler granddaughter.)
Favorite political party? The one that never speaks, like the sound of one hand clapping. And so, dear ones… Geoffrey Byron Garwick, a man for all seasons yet slave to none, threatens to slap a flurry of hot new poems and essays down on our editing desk in future months, so please stay tuned. It promises to be a fun 'n dandy adventure -- down a Road Not Taken – yet. -- JH
Trying to keep Geoff’s hand on the tiller of a task like writing his own bio notes, was not unlike struggling to pin a ball of quicksilver to a mirror. It's not that the lad is mercurial; he's just not easily pin-down-able. Always inventing "Why-Nots" in arenas that favor Ho-Hums, his mind’s eye and Zen-ish humor dart about in perpetual motion -- both perplexing and invigorating -- so we just gave up and said, “Let ‘er rip, amigo.”
Blessed with a blazing mane of wizard white like some prairie-romping Gandolph, Geoff earned his undergrad wings at Yale with a double major in Intensive English and Psychology. He was in the same graduating class as former President George "Dubya" Bush. “But you know,” Geoff admits, “I don’t think I ever saw George in all my four years there.” But neither did most of Dubya’s profs; or so it’s been reported. However, Geoff was named Class Poet at Yale, where renowned American poet and novelist Robert Penn Warren, a co-founder of the celebrated New Criticism, was his advisor on the senior thesis. At Yale University, the diligent Mr. Garwick also was a Merit Scholar, and he graduated magna cum laude.
Geoff now lives near Minneapolis, Minne-snow-tah – the Flyover Land of Wayward Vikings, 70-lb icy roof stalagtites and wheel-well phlegm that would clog a Hoover Dam turbine -- where he works as a clinical psychologist when he’s not bashing out amazing poems – gems that are tart, cheeky and delightful to read out loud. Geoff is a raconteur and conversationalist of no small talent, who can bench-press more iron than 90% of the guys his age. Probably an understatement. With true Garwicked glee, he tells how he named his daughter Tachyon, after the theoretical subatomic particle that moves faster than light speed. Proved to be a prescient move, as later in her adult years Tachyon got a tattoo on one ankle -- the biochem model of an adrenaline molecule. Here in Geoff's own words are a few more folds of the ham-on-wry mind that fashioned this kick-off issue’s lead poem….
“Favorite language: English. Favorite humor genre: punishing epigram. Favorite sports: backstroke and debate (in high school), second place in Minnesota debate for two years. Captain of Yale tournament debate team and in Yale-Princeton Humorous Debate. Favorite accomplishment: invented my very own obscene word at age eleven (No, it’s not ‘conservative’… it’s 'pilck')." [Ladies and gents, we’ve since learned that pilck can mean just about whatever you need at the moment, like a few other spicy terms of Anglo-Saxon origin.]
"Second favorite accomplishment: after mom took me, at age eight, to a lecture on Chaucer at the University of Minnesota, changed pronunciation of first name so it rhymes with ‘quaff’, not ‘ref’. Third favorite accomplishment: as a teen, while raising rabbits for fur, manure and meat, I learned to skin one in under two minutes. (So ... you jealous much, Davy C ?)
"Okay, I’ll cooperate now: born in Minnesota; raised in the Ozarks of Missouri; high school graduation speaker, as was one of two sisters; MA from Hartford Seminary in psychology and religion; Ph.D. from University of Minnesota where I completed coursework in clinical psychology and educational psychology. I’m now on staff at an inner city community mental health center in St. Paul for 30+ years. Married to another Ph.D. clinical psychologist with whom I taught psych courses at Metropolitan University. First published play was in high school (“The Jeer Leaders”) and led to threats of violence by, guess who, the real cheerleaders. Edited small literary mag for my college (note: it’s like Oxford, with twelve undergrad ‘colleges’ within Yale). OK I admit it, I arrived at Yale wearing a beret, Bermuda shorts, and a cello under one arm, my first time further East than Wisconsin. ( Editor’s note: yet the seniors apparently liked him, and never forced Geoff to wear a T-shirt stating, “Effetes don’t fail me now.” )
"Favorite instrument: the oboe, which my daughter played until she ditched it and her music scholarship, but which I made the instrument of the female protagonist in current project -- an SF novel about music, pseudo-pregnancy, and parasitism. (In that order.) Favorite PC issue: whatever happened to the redoubtable “Ms?” Why are all my grandkids’ teachers now being hailed as “Miss” or “Mrs.”?
Favorite animal: the naked mole rat. Favorite author for little kids; Mo Willems….” (Geoff delights in his toddler granddaughter.)
Favorite political party? The one that never speaks, like the sound of one hand clapping. And so, dear ones… Geoffrey Byron Garwick, a man for all seasons yet slave to none, threatens to slap a flurry of hot new poems and essays down on our editing desk in future months, so please stay tuned. It promises to be a fun 'n dandy adventure -- down a Road Not Taken – yet. -- JH
MARTIN BRETT (aka) SQUID McFINNIGAN --
Good ol' Squid. There's nobody like him in the world of UK letters. He's a force of Nature, a loyal friend, as straight-forward and sincere as a pint of fresh Irish stout, just now slid down the bar to your elbow on its own dew cushion. When the spirit moves, this guy can churn magnificent prose into being with a fine fury, and incredibly prolific energy to boot. He seems to release his honest language into the ether as easily as breathing out.
We first learned of Squid's viscerally arresting talent when we stumbled across another friend’s post on Google+ last year – after Ireland's Mr. Brett commented on a few of our G+ pics of undersea critters. We were intrigued by his nom de plume, checked his blog, and were astonished at the knuckle-knocking energy that we saw arise, in a surprise Irish geyser, from some of his irresistible yarns. So I sent him an e-mail greeting, after reading a couple new short stories that blew my mind with their unvarnished raw immediacy and emotional integrity. His best stories seem to tap into some unsettling crevices of the human Id, yet with a curiously innocent touch that leaves the reader wondering, "How does a guy who senses this much grit of the spirit, still remain as unscarred by the world?" And that dichotomy is why Squid has a loyal following in Europe, now growing in the States.
First things first with this remarkable young writer from the verdant heart of New Eire. Where in heaven’s name did you get that seaside moniker, he often is asked. And his reply is straight off-the-cuff, as usual: “My real name is Martin Brett, but when it comes to the world of writing most people know me as Squid McFinnigan. I’ve spent many years standing behind bar counters all over Ireland, hearing amazing stories, and telling more than a few myself. I currently can be found in the Gleneagle Hotel in Killarney. But I call Tralee, County Kerry, my home town. When I first started my blog I was worried that some of my friends and customers would not take kindly to a blogger having access to their lives; so I took on a pen name."
"The name ‘Squid McFinnigan’ was born behind the bar," he recalls. "Literally, when one day a pregnant co-worker felt her baby kick. I was worried I might be delivering more than beer pints that day, but she assured me that ‘It was only little Squid messing around.’ She did not want to know if the baby was a boy or a girl, so they’d taken to calling it The Squid. The rest, as they say, is history.”
Martin’s lit-blog is not yet three years old, and already has been read 70,000 times, he reports. He’s had several of his strongest stories published online and in hardback books. The Woven Tale Press, edited by gifted New York novelist and lit professor Sandra Tyler, also has featured his stories, “Cliff Dive” (Nov. 2013) and “Murder of Crows” (Aug. 2014). Creative Quarterly awarded “Buddy App” the short story of the year award for 2015 (Dec. 2015) and also featured “Father Tom and Marylin” in its February 2016 edition. “The Bunny Derby” was his first story to appear in a book called Visions. It was created and produced by The Arts Council of Ireland, and launched by Billy Kean, son of the renowned John B. Kean, in October 2014.
“Then came my first full novel,” says the rough ‘n ready Mr. Squid McFinnigan – whose raw relentless diction and authentic street dialogue call to mind a younger Charles Bukowski, as well as several American noir detective authors in their heydays. Martin’s first novel is called “Honeysuckle Lane” and was published by Kindle Press (August 2015). It has raised discerning eyebrows across the world, as his name gathers some well-deserved steam among the cognoscenti.
And, Squid McFinnigan adds, “Just recently I’ve added a collection of short stories called “The Misadventures of Father Tom’ (January 2016). “Since the launch of these books I have done half a dozen radio and newspaper interviews in Ireland, the UK and the USA,” Martin says. “I hope you enjoy my stories, and if you feel like some more you can always pay a visit to my blog.” http://squidmcfinnigan.blogspot.ie/ -- JH
Good ol' Squid. There's nobody like him in the world of UK letters. He's a force of Nature, a loyal friend, as straight-forward and sincere as a pint of fresh Irish stout, just now slid down the bar to your elbow on its own dew cushion. When the spirit moves, this guy can churn magnificent prose into being with a fine fury, and incredibly prolific energy to boot. He seems to release his honest language into the ether as easily as breathing out.
We first learned of Squid's viscerally arresting talent when we stumbled across another friend’s post on Google+ last year – after Ireland's Mr. Brett commented on a few of our G+ pics of undersea critters. We were intrigued by his nom de plume, checked his blog, and were astonished at the knuckle-knocking energy that we saw arise, in a surprise Irish geyser, from some of his irresistible yarns. So I sent him an e-mail greeting, after reading a couple new short stories that blew my mind with their unvarnished raw immediacy and emotional integrity. His best stories seem to tap into some unsettling crevices of the human Id, yet with a curiously innocent touch that leaves the reader wondering, "How does a guy who senses this much grit of the spirit, still remain as unscarred by the world?" And that dichotomy is why Squid has a loyal following in Europe, now growing in the States.
First things first with this remarkable young writer from the verdant heart of New Eire. Where in heaven’s name did you get that seaside moniker, he often is asked. And his reply is straight off-the-cuff, as usual: “My real name is Martin Brett, but when it comes to the world of writing most people know me as Squid McFinnigan. I’ve spent many years standing behind bar counters all over Ireland, hearing amazing stories, and telling more than a few myself. I currently can be found in the Gleneagle Hotel in Killarney. But I call Tralee, County Kerry, my home town. When I first started my blog I was worried that some of my friends and customers would not take kindly to a blogger having access to their lives; so I took on a pen name."
"The name ‘Squid McFinnigan’ was born behind the bar," he recalls. "Literally, when one day a pregnant co-worker felt her baby kick. I was worried I might be delivering more than beer pints that day, but she assured me that ‘It was only little Squid messing around.’ She did not want to know if the baby was a boy or a girl, so they’d taken to calling it The Squid. The rest, as they say, is history.”
Martin’s lit-blog is not yet three years old, and already has been read 70,000 times, he reports. He’s had several of his strongest stories published online and in hardback books. The Woven Tale Press, edited by gifted New York novelist and lit professor Sandra Tyler, also has featured his stories, “Cliff Dive” (Nov. 2013) and “Murder of Crows” (Aug. 2014). Creative Quarterly awarded “Buddy App” the short story of the year award for 2015 (Dec. 2015) and also featured “Father Tom and Marylin” in its February 2016 edition. “The Bunny Derby” was his first story to appear in a book called Visions. It was created and produced by The Arts Council of Ireland, and launched by Billy Kean, son of the renowned John B. Kean, in October 2014.
“Then came my first full novel,” says the rough ‘n ready Mr. Squid McFinnigan – whose raw relentless diction and authentic street dialogue call to mind a younger Charles Bukowski, as well as several American noir detective authors in their heydays. Martin’s first novel is called “Honeysuckle Lane” and was published by Kindle Press (August 2015). It has raised discerning eyebrows across the world, as his name gathers some well-deserved steam among the cognoscenti.
And, Squid McFinnigan adds, “Just recently I’ve added a collection of short stories called “The Misadventures of Father Tom’ (January 2016). “Since the launch of these books I have done half a dozen radio and newspaper interviews in Ireland, the UK and the USA,” Martin says. “I hope you enjoy my stories, and if you feel like some more you can always pay a visit to my blog.” http://squidmcfinnigan.blogspot.ie/ -- JH
MELANIE G. MILLS --
A mother, artist, poet and musician who plied the noble world of nursing as a way to pay the bills, Melanie lives in Greeneville, Tennessee. She’s been writing poetry since age eight, when she was first encouraged by a teacher she now calls “brilliant” -- Mrs. Brenda Thompson Smith -- who discerned she was bored by spelling and vocabulary worksheets. So she recommended Melanie write her own stories and poems – “using all the words correctly now.”
No relation to Charli Mills, another of our DICTION AERIE contributors, Melanie's been published in several anthologies and e-zines in recent years, the latest being three poems in Brine Books Publishing's “Stanza and Clauses for the Causes, Vol. One” -- which is available on Amazon. Friends and family nourish most of Melanie's richest themes. But modern poetry is like pure sweet oxygen, a life-conferring force to Melanie Mills...
“I've always read poetry obsessively,” she confides, “and my favorite writers, my biggest influences all seem to start with “P” -- Pound, Plath, Poe, and Parker. Plath is the all-time most powerful of them all. Her words drop on me as if they have the weight of stones.” Melanie shares that, for a short while, she flirted with thoughts of her own death during her teens, “so I empathize with much of Sylvia Plath’s later work.” But through writing, friends and family she has slogged through those swamps, fueled by grit and grins, and come through far wiser, so that life and family are her joys. And Light's defeating the Darkness, we're fully chuffed to report.
Melanie also delights in the poetry of Louis Gluck and the many friends she’s made in the years since the Internet poetry scene grew to be a nourishing fountain in her life. She has two sons, ages 17 and 22, “who are the best musicians I know, and I know quite a few from my old touring days,” she says. “I've given up the reins on the basement studio to them (mostly) since they are so fantastic.”
She shares that she’s been battling significant health problems but refuses “to give in to Anubis (Egyptian dog-deity of mummification.) He just looks silly to me now,” she says. “So much of my whining poetically usually ends in a dark and humorous flare, if I can muster it. And a lot of my poetry is personal, with fictional elements thrown in. The trick is to decipher the difference.”
A wordplay conjurer in chiaroscuro, who's edging steadily back towards the Light, Melanie Mills allows with a hint of a smile, “it may seem odd that someone who once begged for death now does her best to outrun it. But that is the gist, the prime arc of my story.”
A mother, artist, poet and musician who plied the noble world of nursing as a way to pay the bills, Melanie lives in Greeneville, Tennessee. She’s been writing poetry since age eight, when she was first encouraged by a teacher she now calls “brilliant” -- Mrs. Brenda Thompson Smith -- who discerned she was bored by spelling and vocabulary worksheets. So she recommended Melanie write her own stories and poems – “using all the words correctly now.”
No relation to Charli Mills, another of our DICTION AERIE contributors, Melanie's been published in several anthologies and e-zines in recent years, the latest being three poems in Brine Books Publishing's “Stanza and Clauses for the Causes, Vol. One” -- which is available on Amazon. Friends and family nourish most of Melanie's richest themes. But modern poetry is like pure sweet oxygen, a life-conferring force to Melanie Mills...
“I've always read poetry obsessively,” she confides, “and my favorite writers, my biggest influences all seem to start with “P” -- Pound, Plath, Poe, and Parker. Plath is the all-time most powerful of them all. Her words drop on me as if they have the weight of stones.” Melanie shares that, for a short while, she flirted with thoughts of her own death during her teens, “so I empathize with much of Sylvia Plath’s later work.” But through writing, friends and family she has slogged through those swamps, fueled by grit and grins, and come through far wiser, so that life and family are her joys. And Light's defeating the Darkness, we're fully chuffed to report.
Melanie also delights in the poetry of Louis Gluck and the many friends she’s made in the years since the Internet poetry scene grew to be a nourishing fountain in her life. She has two sons, ages 17 and 22, “who are the best musicians I know, and I know quite a few from my old touring days,” she says. “I've given up the reins on the basement studio to them (mostly) since they are so fantastic.”
She shares that she’s been battling significant health problems but refuses “to give in to Anubis (Egyptian dog-deity of mummification.) He just looks silly to me now,” she says. “So much of my whining poetically usually ends in a dark and humorous flare, if I can muster it. And a lot of my poetry is personal, with fictional elements thrown in. The trick is to decipher the difference.”
A wordplay conjurer in chiaroscuro, who's edging steadily back towards the Light, Melanie Mills allows with a hint of a smile, “it may seem odd that someone who once begged for death now does her best to outrun it. But that is the gist, the prime arc of my story.”
JACK LARRISON (aka) JackL --
He’s an urban guerrilla poet, a performance artist who's nearly free of fear, who massages word choices, sentence rhythm and dialects until they moan with barely chaste abandon. Straight up, this guy is one of the cruelest, most refreshing satirists I’ve ever known. His best work is wonderfully addicting, like spicy kettle corn, or bossa nova jazz with marzipan. Powered by guilty pleasure.
The one thing Ol' Jack's few close friends most appreciate about him is his heart for the little guy, the voiceless and the beaten-down working folks of a vanishing middle class. He's a self-made man and never forgets what salad days felt like, when a guy had to live 5 days a week on a fast-food salad bar down the street, because they let you go back for seconds; then you slept in a one-room studio walk-up with a Murphy bed, where your left knee nearly touched the stove -- when you sat on the commode. When Mr. Larrison's luck changed a thousand-thousand-fold, he joined the One Percent only on his CPA's spreadsheets, never in his mindset. Today, he relishes the chance to skewer the pompous and the powerful, folks in gated communities whose greed and hubris forced so many families during the Great Recession into dismal apartments just like his was, way back when.
Preferring to deliver his gadfly "gifts" in galloping verse, or dry Brit-like satire that slowly gathers wicked momentum from a warm innocuous beginning, Jack Larrison is a master of Schadenfreude. But he only relishes stirring discomfort in the urban aristocracy, to which he should belong, but he simply refuses to cooperate. His lampoons seem to nourish him with new vigor and sharper sensitivity to the hype, the social hypnotists and hypocrites who prod the G7's consumerist frenzy. (G8 if we're counting Russia...)
Jack once told me, "It feels like winning a prize to see so many One Percenters are now too scared to invite me to their black-tie galas anymore. Must be doin' something right..."
OK, so the man has a social conscience and fancies his role as an Urban Robin Hood (maybe that's why he wears those annoying thuggish hoodies, which almost have become self-parody.) His heart for the disenfranchised aside, Mr. Larrison can be a pain in the asterisk to reach by phone or e-mail, a vexing process that always takes two or three days. Now that's for the folks he cares about. And that's why many of his best essays, poems and diatribes have surfaced under pseudonyms more jealously protected than Fort Knox. It was like pulling teeth to get even one photo of him for these bio-notes. And he just had to have an airborne beer bottle in it. Like its handler, it's impossible to tell whether that bottle is arriving or departing -- via sunrise or sunset ...
Ol' Jack is charming when he wants to be, but moody as a Pacific Northwest winter. And you know what they say in Seattle and Vancouver -- "If you don't like the weather, just wait 15 minutes." Jack Larrison is blessed / burdened with a mind so keen to capture every gem he sees or hears, there’s only one speed – and it’s all-out pulsing on -- always on. He works like a manic magpie, perpetually wheeling in the airways looking down, then landing in a flash to gather scraps of sass and wit or confessional grit from convos all around the world -- then hauling them home to build his nest of literary sanity in an office more private than the Vatican’s situation room.
This dude is a reliable “Jack-o'-Diamonds” to his contract partners during work hours, “Jack-o'-Spades” to his competitors when he’s wheeling and wheedling a deal, shoveling blarney like a locomotive coal stoker. And he is “Jack-o'-Clubs” to the night-spot lovelies, the lonely ladies he might flirt with for a bit after work. But no time for “Jack-o'-Hearts.” Not yet.
BTW: Mr. Larrison tightly guards dozens of hardback notebooks brimming with “found poems,” stray bits of dialogue overheard in diners or subway cars or airport lounges, plus ideas he awoke at 4 am in a happy lather to write by flashlight, all stacked tenderly like communion wafers in a red Rubbermaid bin beside his computer desk. If it’s good for the gander – this plundering of chat -- then it’s good for me too and shamelessly (though under the table) I’ve been scratching notes on this guy since Seattle days, wondering if ever there might be a movie script to be wrung like mountain dew from T shirts left on one of our base camp tent lines overnight.
Years before the Mexican beer commercial even appeared, his best friends used to muse of Jack Larrison, “It’s like he’s gunning for male lead in some neo-slapstick Woody Allen movie, “Most Driven Man in the World.” (Yep... he skis Black Diamond runs, skydives, scuba dives and has paid ace Sherpas to guide him up some serious ice faces on 7,000 meter peaks in Nepal, Bhutan and the Pakistani Himalaya.) He once chugged an entire half liter of Jaeger then swiped a luge in Zermatt, Switzerland and rocketed down a run from midway up – hitting speeds of 120 km/hr after only 20 minutes of lessons. (At 11:30 pm on a Friday!) And he lived. Never lost the line nor shot the rim. But never once bragged about that lunacy to anyone.
Heads of state need trade envoys more like Jack Larrison and less like Mayberry Deputy Barney Fife. Jack would stand tall for the American Homeland, most definitely... This man takes no guff from any oligarchs -- not Russians, not Chinese -- especially not the Beijing Bullies, with their state-sponsored sleight-of-hand, duplicitous double-talk and 11th-hour contract gamesmanship. He knows just enough Mandarin to punch in a piquant phrase -- calling BS on the trade lords in front of their own lackeys -- which in a shame-based Commie culture ensures they sign off by fair means. Now Jack hopes to gradually disengage from the wild bare-knuckle world of trans-Pacific trade so he can jump-start a new dream deferred too long -- writing screenplays, producing docu-dramas for indie cinema, and refining his satirical essays and poems until “they make you wince at 20 paces,” he declares.
When on the North American mainland, Jack Larrison lives in a towering red cedar A-frame on a cliff over-looking the Pacific – at an altitude he triple-checked would be more than 40 meters higher than any tsunami ever recorded in the Pac Northwest since the early 1800s. He still sweats the small stuff. Big time.
He never touches weed nor any stiffer drugs at all except his ulcer meds. His primary vices are fine wines, whining at fines (for driving like an Autobahn commando on Canadian back roads) and an inability to relax. He’s a finely-tuned creation machine who can work like a whirligig on high-test lattes for 14-hour days, then drive downtown, park in a private alley spot, his own 4-wheel Stammtisch -- one from which no cops or landlords will ever tow him -- then he’ll order a collection-quality cognac that would set me back two week’s commissions; & he’ll hunker down in the corner of an elegant all-night indie jazz club on the West Coast until dawn, maybe with a buddy or a caj girlfriend. All of them tell a few jokes, sip & munch a little, then drill into reading a book, or jotting notes in their journals. They don’t say much as Jack cranks out some of the most astringent satire I have ever read, most of which he’s never tried to publish. His first 2 or 3 drafts are always on yellow legal pads, not a laptop or. Like many in our tribe, he seldom carries a smart phone at home nor in his home town; only on the road.
"Please explain, what is so 'smart' about a damn phone?" Jack likes to say. "Especially when it grips you in addictive trances like some imbecilic rave drug."
A newly liberated bachelor, sincerely delighted about it too, the guy’s still “49 and holding” he claims with a smirk, designed to assure it’s all charade -- but a fun one -- since he’s fit and finely-tuned as a 35-year-old triathlete. He’s a textbook slave to OCD who still spaces his suitcoat hangers precisely 2 cm apart in a walk-in closet you could park a Mini-Cooper in. Imelda Marcos would laud his multi-wall shoe and boot array. The man shaves once every couple weeks (whether needed or not) with one of those terrifying Sweeney Todd straight-razors that could fell bamboo. "Hey, those plastic 4-tier disposables cost almost a buck a shave," he grimaces. "Can you believe the ripoff? It's like snake oil in some 1880s cow town."
He’s been to nearly every country or island group on the Pacific Rim and all the G8 many times, leaving “an embarrassing carbon footprint,” he concedes, which he’s now erasing with guilt-driven tithes to carbon-offset watchdog firms in Europe and the USA. For a guy who may be the most brilliant businessman, investor and database innovator I’ve ever known; who is well-read (novels and current events) in five languages; who’s visited 4 dozen countries before he turned 35 and can order lunch in the local dialect in nearly all; who built his first fortune in a decade, lost nearly all of it, then redoubled it again within a second decade; who can quote you the specific vintage years, vineyards and grapes for many of the world’s finest wines (he favors reds); who goes fly fishing, hiking and incognito club-hopping with some of North America’s most fascinating minds – Jack Larrison can dismay you some days with his utterly backwoods cravings at lunchtime, and music choices that seem ripped from jukebox lists in grimy roadside bars in Alabama. In a custom walk-in fridge in his gourmet kitchen, he keeps kilos of imported truffles, organic capers, fresh organic herbs flown in from the Skagit Valley, gourmet cheeses from English Stilton to French camembert, and premium Russian caviar -- always on hand to serve with herb-flecked artisan bread he has his chef bake hot 'n fresh, just as guests arrive. Yet he also unabashedly craves White Castles, fish burgers, Cheap Trick, the Georgia Satellites and Lynyrd Skynyrd… Go figure.
But Jack Larrison is so transparent and so kind a soul in person, he's almost emotionally naive. And he’s never lied to me or any of our friends about even one detail – of anything – in 30 years. He donates more to local and global charities each year than all of us earn together. He was foster dad to two orphan lads for nearly four years after the tsunami off Sumatra in Dec. 2004. And he still teaches Sunday school to tweens when he's in town. Seriously. Junior high kids. And he never needs Xanax.
These virtues aside, one thing still makes me cringe after all these years -- Jack's incongruous tastes will veer from haute couture to faux couture, from highbrow to hillbilly in half an hour – always keeping us on the edge of gut-bomb dismay when we’re craving a hot organic seafood feast, or some fine rich curry, or kim chee and chap chai. At least something edible with genuine umami flavors, for Pete's sake...
On a recent trip to visit Jack Larrison at his new home in the Pacific NW – an avidly undisclosed location as he insists for all 4 homes he owns (in the Vancouver BC area, in Hawaii, in exurban NYC and Western Europe) we decided to head to town for supper. He brown-bagged a bottle of the best cognac I’d ever tasted, the price of which would have covered two months mortgage for me. However, Jack brought no crystal snifters in his gym duffel bag -- only biodegradable plastic cups because they fit the holders in his Land Rover. He also toted a huge nuked-hot paper bag of White Castle cheese 'n turkey sliders, with onion chips and extra pickles, which we smuggled into a franchise pie joint that served pre-fab banana creams and choco-velvet pie (yikes). "Go on, go on man, take a few," he prodded us repeatedly; so we grabbed those pirate burgers from underneath the table like sophomores after a Sadie Hawkins Dance. Only Jack and one other guy ate the chemo-syntho-pies.
So bro, um, are you sure there aren't corkage fees at "House of Pie" for Remy Martin by the bottle? And what about "brown baggage fees" for under-the-table sliders? Some day you will get busted by a fussy waitress, a Melissa McCarthy type, and I hope the whole campy brouhaha is captured on YouTube for all time, dude. Maybe this tongue-in-cheek nutritional dementia is how the tireless juggernaut of joy and jangling keys that is Jack Larrison gets informed inspiration for tearing "new ones" into all that is unholy and unhealthy about American Big Agri, Big Pharma, Big Lobbies, Big Media and Big Lies inside the Beltway. Or all up and down that ante-room to Dante's deepest pit in hell... Wall Street.
Seems like a reasonable guess for this ramblin’ Jack of All Trades, Master of Many.
P.S. Once I get Jack Larrison to fork over the manuscripts he’s promised, then sweet Lawd ‘o Mercy head for hills, boys and girls. You’ll be in for one rockin’ ride. Believe me. -- JH
He’s an urban guerrilla poet, a performance artist who's nearly free of fear, who massages word choices, sentence rhythm and dialects until they moan with barely chaste abandon. Straight up, this guy is one of the cruelest, most refreshing satirists I’ve ever known. His best work is wonderfully addicting, like spicy kettle corn, or bossa nova jazz with marzipan. Powered by guilty pleasure.
The one thing Ol' Jack's few close friends most appreciate about him is his heart for the little guy, the voiceless and the beaten-down working folks of a vanishing middle class. He's a self-made man and never forgets what salad days felt like, when a guy had to live 5 days a week on a fast-food salad bar down the street, because they let you go back for seconds; then you slept in a one-room studio walk-up with a Murphy bed, where your left knee nearly touched the stove -- when you sat on the commode. When Mr. Larrison's luck changed a thousand-thousand-fold, he joined the One Percent only on his CPA's spreadsheets, never in his mindset. Today, he relishes the chance to skewer the pompous and the powerful, folks in gated communities whose greed and hubris forced so many families during the Great Recession into dismal apartments just like his was, way back when.
Preferring to deliver his gadfly "gifts" in galloping verse, or dry Brit-like satire that slowly gathers wicked momentum from a warm innocuous beginning, Jack Larrison is a master of Schadenfreude. But he only relishes stirring discomfort in the urban aristocracy, to which he should belong, but he simply refuses to cooperate. His lampoons seem to nourish him with new vigor and sharper sensitivity to the hype, the social hypnotists and hypocrites who prod the G7's consumerist frenzy. (G8 if we're counting Russia...)
Jack once told me, "It feels like winning a prize to see so many One Percenters are now too scared to invite me to their black-tie galas anymore. Must be doin' something right..."
OK, so the man has a social conscience and fancies his role as an Urban Robin Hood (maybe that's why he wears those annoying thuggish hoodies, which almost have become self-parody.) His heart for the disenfranchised aside, Mr. Larrison can be a pain in the asterisk to reach by phone or e-mail, a vexing process that always takes two or three days. Now that's for the folks he cares about. And that's why many of his best essays, poems and diatribes have surfaced under pseudonyms more jealously protected than Fort Knox. It was like pulling teeth to get even one photo of him for these bio-notes. And he just had to have an airborne beer bottle in it. Like its handler, it's impossible to tell whether that bottle is arriving or departing -- via sunrise or sunset ...
Ol' Jack is charming when he wants to be, but moody as a Pacific Northwest winter. And you know what they say in Seattle and Vancouver -- "If you don't like the weather, just wait 15 minutes." Jack Larrison is blessed / burdened with a mind so keen to capture every gem he sees or hears, there’s only one speed – and it’s all-out pulsing on -- always on. He works like a manic magpie, perpetually wheeling in the airways looking down, then landing in a flash to gather scraps of sass and wit or confessional grit from convos all around the world -- then hauling them home to build his nest of literary sanity in an office more private than the Vatican’s situation room.
This dude is a reliable “Jack-o'-Diamonds” to his contract partners during work hours, “Jack-o'-Spades” to his competitors when he’s wheeling and wheedling a deal, shoveling blarney like a locomotive coal stoker. And he is “Jack-o'-Clubs” to the night-spot lovelies, the lonely ladies he might flirt with for a bit after work. But no time for “Jack-o'-Hearts.” Not yet.
BTW: Mr. Larrison tightly guards dozens of hardback notebooks brimming with “found poems,” stray bits of dialogue overheard in diners or subway cars or airport lounges, plus ideas he awoke at 4 am in a happy lather to write by flashlight, all stacked tenderly like communion wafers in a red Rubbermaid bin beside his computer desk. If it’s good for the gander – this plundering of chat -- then it’s good for me too and shamelessly (though under the table) I’ve been scratching notes on this guy since Seattle days, wondering if ever there might be a movie script to be wrung like mountain dew from T shirts left on one of our base camp tent lines overnight.
Years before the Mexican beer commercial even appeared, his best friends used to muse of Jack Larrison, “It’s like he’s gunning for male lead in some neo-slapstick Woody Allen movie, “Most Driven Man in the World.” (Yep... he skis Black Diamond runs, skydives, scuba dives and has paid ace Sherpas to guide him up some serious ice faces on 7,000 meter peaks in Nepal, Bhutan and the Pakistani Himalaya.) He once chugged an entire half liter of Jaeger then swiped a luge in Zermatt, Switzerland and rocketed down a run from midway up – hitting speeds of 120 km/hr after only 20 minutes of lessons. (At 11:30 pm on a Friday!) And he lived. Never lost the line nor shot the rim. But never once bragged about that lunacy to anyone.
Heads of state need trade envoys more like Jack Larrison and less like Mayberry Deputy Barney Fife. Jack would stand tall for the American Homeland, most definitely... This man takes no guff from any oligarchs -- not Russians, not Chinese -- especially not the Beijing Bullies, with their state-sponsored sleight-of-hand, duplicitous double-talk and 11th-hour contract gamesmanship. He knows just enough Mandarin to punch in a piquant phrase -- calling BS on the trade lords in front of their own lackeys -- which in a shame-based Commie culture ensures they sign off by fair means. Now Jack hopes to gradually disengage from the wild bare-knuckle world of trans-Pacific trade so he can jump-start a new dream deferred too long -- writing screenplays, producing docu-dramas for indie cinema, and refining his satirical essays and poems until “they make you wince at 20 paces,” he declares.
When on the North American mainland, Jack Larrison lives in a towering red cedar A-frame on a cliff over-looking the Pacific – at an altitude he triple-checked would be more than 40 meters higher than any tsunami ever recorded in the Pac Northwest since the early 1800s. He still sweats the small stuff. Big time.
He never touches weed nor any stiffer drugs at all except his ulcer meds. His primary vices are fine wines, whining at fines (for driving like an Autobahn commando on Canadian back roads) and an inability to relax. He’s a finely-tuned creation machine who can work like a whirligig on high-test lattes for 14-hour days, then drive downtown, park in a private alley spot, his own 4-wheel Stammtisch -- one from which no cops or landlords will ever tow him -- then he’ll order a collection-quality cognac that would set me back two week’s commissions; & he’ll hunker down in the corner of an elegant all-night indie jazz club on the West Coast until dawn, maybe with a buddy or a caj girlfriend. All of them tell a few jokes, sip & munch a little, then drill into reading a book, or jotting notes in their journals. They don’t say much as Jack cranks out some of the most astringent satire I have ever read, most of which he’s never tried to publish. His first 2 or 3 drafts are always on yellow legal pads, not a laptop or. Like many in our tribe, he seldom carries a smart phone at home nor in his home town; only on the road.
"Please explain, what is so 'smart' about a damn phone?" Jack likes to say. "Especially when it grips you in addictive trances like some imbecilic rave drug."
A newly liberated bachelor, sincerely delighted about it too, the guy’s still “49 and holding” he claims with a smirk, designed to assure it’s all charade -- but a fun one -- since he’s fit and finely-tuned as a 35-year-old triathlete. He’s a textbook slave to OCD who still spaces his suitcoat hangers precisely 2 cm apart in a walk-in closet you could park a Mini-Cooper in. Imelda Marcos would laud his multi-wall shoe and boot array. The man shaves once every couple weeks (whether needed or not) with one of those terrifying Sweeney Todd straight-razors that could fell bamboo. "Hey, those plastic 4-tier disposables cost almost a buck a shave," he grimaces. "Can you believe the ripoff? It's like snake oil in some 1880s cow town."
He’s been to nearly every country or island group on the Pacific Rim and all the G8 many times, leaving “an embarrassing carbon footprint,” he concedes, which he’s now erasing with guilt-driven tithes to carbon-offset watchdog firms in Europe and the USA. For a guy who may be the most brilliant businessman, investor and database innovator I’ve ever known; who is well-read (novels and current events) in five languages; who’s visited 4 dozen countries before he turned 35 and can order lunch in the local dialect in nearly all; who built his first fortune in a decade, lost nearly all of it, then redoubled it again within a second decade; who can quote you the specific vintage years, vineyards and grapes for many of the world’s finest wines (he favors reds); who goes fly fishing, hiking and incognito club-hopping with some of North America’s most fascinating minds – Jack Larrison can dismay you some days with his utterly backwoods cravings at lunchtime, and music choices that seem ripped from jukebox lists in grimy roadside bars in Alabama. In a custom walk-in fridge in his gourmet kitchen, he keeps kilos of imported truffles, organic capers, fresh organic herbs flown in from the Skagit Valley, gourmet cheeses from English Stilton to French camembert, and premium Russian caviar -- always on hand to serve with herb-flecked artisan bread he has his chef bake hot 'n fresh, just as guests arrive. Yet he also unabashedly craves White Castles, fish burgers, Cheap Trick, the Georgia Satellites and Lynyrd Skynyrd… Go figure.
But Jack Larrison is so transparent and so kind a soul in person, he's almost emotionally naive. And he’s never lied to me or any of our friends about even one detail – of anything – in 30 years. He donates more to local and global charities each year than all of us earn together. He was foster dad to two orphan lads for nearly four years after the tsunami off Sumatra in Dec. 2004. And he still teaches Sunday school to tweens when he's in town. Seriously. Junior high kids. And he never needs Xanax.
These virtues aside, one thing still makes me cringe after all these years -- Jack's incongruous tastes will veer from haute couture to faux couture, from highbrow to hillbilly in half an hour – always keeping us on the edge of gut-bomb dismay when we’re craving a hot organic seafood feast, or some fine rich curry, or kim chee and chap chai. At least something edible with genuine umami flavors, for Pete's sake...
On a recent trip to visit Jack Larrison at his new home in the Pacific NW – an avidly undisclosed location as he insists for all 4 homes he owns (in the Vancouver BC area, in Hawaii, in exurban NYC and Western Europe) we decided to head to town for supper. He brown-bagged a bottle of the best cognac I’d ever tasted, the price of which would have covered two months mortgage for me. However, Jack brought no crystal snifters in his gym duffel bag -- only biodegradable plastic cups because they fit the holders in his Land Rover. He also toted a huge nuked-hot paper bag of White Castle cheese 'n turkey sliders, with onion chips and extra pickles, which we smuggled into a franchise pie joint that served pre-fab banana creams and choco-velvet pie (yikes). "Go on, go on man, take a few," he prodded us repeatedly; so we grabbed those pirate burgers from underneath the table like sophomores after a Sadie Hawkins Dance. Only Jack and one other guy ate the chemo-syntho-pies.
So bro, um, are you sure there aren't corkage fees at "House of Pie" for Remy Martin by the bottle? And what about "brown baggage fees" for under-the-table sliders? Some day you will get busted by a fussy waitress, a Melissa McCarthy type, and I hope the whole campy brouhaha is captured on YouTube for all time, dude. Maybe this tongue-in-cheek nutritional dementia is how the tireless juggernaut of joy and jangling keys that is Jack Larrison gets informed inspiration for tearing "new ones" into all that is unholy and unhealthy about American Big Agri, Big Pharma, Big Lobbies, Big Media and Big Lies inside the Beltway. Or all up and down that ante-room to Dante's deepest pit in hell... Wall Street.
Seems like a reasonable guess for this ramblin’ Jack of All Trades, Master of Many.
P.S. Once I get Jack Larrison to fork over the manuscripts he’s promised, then sweet Lawd ‘o Mercy head for hills, boys and girls. You’ll be in for one rockin’ ride. Believe me. -- JH