Category Archives: Uncategorized

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Erich Fromm on the Art of Listening

Listening, Fromm argues, is “is an art like the understanding of poetry” and, like any art, has its own rules and norms. Drawing on his half-century practice as a therapist, Fromm offers six such guidelines for mastering the art of unselfish understanding:

  1. The basic rule for practicing this art is the complete concentration of the listener.
  2. Nothing of importance must be on his mind, he must be optimally free from anxiety as well as from greed.
  3. He must possess a freely-working imagination which is sufficiently concrete to be expressed in words.
  4. He must be endowed with a capacity for empathy with another person and strong enough to feel the experience of the other as if it were his own.
  5. The condition for such empathy is a crucial facet of the capacity for love. To understand another means to love him — not in the erotic sense but in the sense of reaching out to him and of overcoming the fear of losing oneself.
  6. Understanding and loving are inseparable. If they are separate, it is a cerebral process and the door to essential understanding remains closed.

I have admired and loved Erich Fromm ever since I read his The Art of Loving, the most sane and humane treatise on love I have ever encountered. The parallels he draws in The Art of Listening make perfect sense to me. And I reflect that an author must be capable of listening to and loving his characters. Otherwise, they will never seem real.

Photo by SSH
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Another Poem in Sky Island Journal

January is turning into a busy month. Today my poem “Tropical Rain” appeared in Sky Island Journal. The editors of this relatively new on-line journal have been wonderfully supportive of my writing, so I’m grateful to be able to highlight their existence.

You can read my poem here: https://www.skyislandjournal.com/issues#/issue-11-winter-2020/ . Please remember to scroll down to my photo/bio and click on the poem there. And thanks.

Photo by Marten Jager
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First Podcast Interview

Thanks to the Internet, I don’t have to move out of my chair to have a publicity tour for Evelio’s Garden: Memoir of a Naturalist in Costa Rica. In fact, this one was conducted from my sister’s house in Washington State, where I visited for the holidays.

Sherri was a good interviewer and we had an interesting conversation about what makes a writer. I encourage you to tune in on January 16 at 3:00 p.m. Pacific Standard Time. That would be 4:00 in Costa
Rica, so simply count backwards to get to, Toronto, say (where the hell is that, anyway? I am spatially challenged). Once it’s live, of course, you can tune in on line anytime you feel like it, so I hope you enjoy.

All best wishes for the New Year.

Photo of Mt. Baker by SSH
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Evelio’s Garden is Launched!

After so many years, and so much waiting and dithering around, putting the manuscript in the hands of professionals made it happen — whoosh! December 1st it was on Amazon (and as a Kindle Book), Barnes & Noble (also as a Nook Book) and Powells.com. With increasing demand on line, it will also make it into bricks and mortar stores.

Photo by Roger Eichholz

Enter the enchanting world of the northern highlands of Costa Rica, where the author begins a memoir, tracing the seasons and closely observing the natural riches around her. But Evelio, who helped build their house, interrupts with an idea to plant an organic garden on their property. Although her husband has already agreed, she is wary, suspecting Evelio will pull her into the daily ups and downs of his project. This is exactly what he does, creating an often funny, always frustrating, and ultimately rewarding counterpoint to her own work, such that the two inevitably intertwine on the page.

   Over the course of a challenging year of unpredictable weather and the depredations of wild animals and toxic chemicals, their friendship grows as Evelio teaches her about the rural sustainability of Costa Rica in decades past. But stresses over the garden and a serious health detour churn up the author’s long-buried memories, forcing her to try to make sense of her past and opening her up to profound personal change.

  Evelio’s Garden is a lyrical meditation on cultural values, friendship, aging, loss, and, ultimately, the healing power of the natural world.

“The conversational prose is rich in detail about the wide variety of trees, flowers, fruits, and vegetables that blanket the area, and there are some wonderful stories about various wildlife that Homer has encountered. A vignette in which she creates a makeshift bridge for a band of monkeys is particularly delightful . . . . A remembrance that effectively captures one woman’s connection with nature in Central America”    — Kirkus Reviews

Evelio’s Garden: Memoir of a Naturalist in Costa Rica

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More Thoughts on Listening from the Heart

“To see takes time, like to have a friend takes time,” Georgia O’Keeffe wrote as she contemplated the art of seeing. To listen takes time, too — to learn to hear and befriend the world within and the world without, to attend to the quiet voice of life and heart alike. “If we were not so single-minded about keeping our lives moving, and for once could do nothing,” Pablo Neruda wrote in his gorgeous ode to quietude, “perhaps a huge silence might interrupt this sadness of never understanding ourselves.”

This inspiriting, sanctifying power of listening is what writer Holly M. McGhee and illustrator Pascal Lemaître explore in the simply titled, sweetly unfolding Listen — a serenade to the heart-expanding, life-enriching, world-ennobling art of attentiveness as a wellspring of self-understanding, of empathy for others, of reverence for the loveliness of life, evocative of philosopher Simone Weil’s memorable assertion that “attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.”

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“Forthcoming memoir” is Coming Forth!

Evelio’s Garden: Memoir of a Naturalist in Costa Rica is coming in September (as soon as I have a few reviews to put on the back cover). Published by Atmosphere Press, a small collaborative publishing house, it looks almost too good to be true.

I had let it slide for a while (ten years???) after contacting a zillion agents who were not thrilled — although some said it was beautifully written — because in the hurly-burly world of major publishing, a small, even beautiful, book needs a lot of extra work to become its own little profit center.

Even after all the work editor Allyson Latta had put into it, I still lacked confidence after so many rejections, but something stirred me when I saw a call for submissions by Atmosphere Press in a publishing newsletter. After I had jumped through so many hoops with the agents (send first and third chapters; send first five pages and a marketing summary; send synopsis of no more than 300 words, etc.) all this press wanted to see was the manuscript!

Well, that was just too easy, so I sent it — what the hell? — and a few days later I had a note from the publisher, Nick Courtright, a well-known poet in his own right, saying they would like to take it. I was flabbergasted: this was really too easy. So I hemmed and hawed for a few days (was that weeks, Nick?) until agreeing to go forward.

Nick put me in touch with one of their editors, with whom I had an excellent few weeks of working together — he liked it! — and I was beginning to feel a little jazzed. So, here it comes:

  • Photography by Roger Eichholz

More later!


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Great Thoughts for Creative People


“A writer — and, I believe, generally all persons — must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.”

Jorge Luis Borges


“I find my position as a poet today a curious one… For a long time I have maintained that the poet’s affair was the individual human soul, the story of it in one man, in my case the transforming of personal emotions into written events. Now it has become impossible to guard one’s soul — death to do it — we are forced to read the papers, and yet I still believe that our job is somehow or other to be above the mêlée, or so deeply in it that one comes through to something else, something universal and timeless.”


May Sarton
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Similes and Metaphors

Every Sunday Creative Nonfiction releases a “Sunday Short Read.”  These are always worth reading, and I found this one especially good in its use of similes and metaphors.  One can identify with virtually all of them in this piece, and they add a richness that makes the simple ending ever more powerful.

Sin

by Max Garland
It hovered in the glowing tips of my unmarried uncles’ cigarettes. And in the red, rounded tops of lipstick tubes. It smelled, not sweet like lilies of the valley or hyacinths, but more like the insides of purple irises or, stranger, like azaleas or hawthorn blossoms—not bad, but definitely not all that good. It sounded like the sliding of nylon hose when high school girls crossed their legs in church and swung their high-heeled shoes not quite professionally, but in a sort of practiced way. How did it feel? It didn’t feel like the florid waving of Pentecostal preachers on Sunday, nor like the chemical jolt when a copperhead slid under a pile of warped boards near the smoke shed where hams hung. Nor did it resemble the cackling of hens, nor the barn roof peaked like a witch’s hat on Halloween. It wasn’t the way bats swerved over the catalpa branches in the evening, though once when I found one clinging to a rafter in the barn loft, I felt something human, a kind of leathery kinship born of shame and exile. But it was more than that.

It was more like the feeling of barometric pressure on the rise—how the air got crowded when a storm was coming. How it felt when you tried not to think about what you shouldn’t. It was the vast but tightly compressed distance between who you appeared to be and who you suspected you were.

Once, for instance, I lit a field on fire. It started with a haystack, and I don’t remember from where I stole the matches. I do remember the smell of striking several and watching the straw catch and then putting it out, and then again and again, and although I thought I’d doused the thing, somehow the whole stack went up, and my grandfather was jerking the garden hose toward the field, and I was watching the flames from some shadow somewhere, and simultaneously constructing an alibi, and still watching it burn, beautiful as the lie I was crafting. It was like that. For no reason at all, I’d started a series of small fires and failed to put one out, and then briefly loved the look of calamity and the force of the hay turned to fire and the race of flames through the field. Nothing terrible happened, just an acre of burned fescue and one less haystack in the world. And it wasn’t so much the lie, but sticking to the lie, as if I owed my denial some allegiance, and then discovering I could even muster indignation at my grandfather for not believing a fire could start of its own free will. It was knowing my own will was anything but free.

It was knowing who started the fire in me that struck the match. Smelling the devil’s sulfur breath, that was how it felt—like not ratting on yourself. A pure, bright, alien allegiance you’d go down for if you had to.

It was the strangeness of thinking—after years of reading the Bible, sitting in pews from which my feet couldn’t reach the floor, learning the wages and consequences—that I would never really die, not ever. Whatever dead folk I had actually encountered, fluffed up and peachy in their caskets, I promoted directly on up to heaven. Heaven was the joker in the deck. If only a second were left in an evil life, you could say you were sorry and up you would fly. So claimed Jesus on the cross to the thief.

It was knowing I was that thief. I stole some matches, and burned down most of a field, and lowered my head and lied for the sake of some strange honor that was logically bound to lead toward other varieties of burning. It was the distance between the logic and the lie, the distance between knowing and coming clean. And finally, it was the terrible forgiveness of my grandfather, who said, Well, I guess the field needed burning anyway, and then plowed the stubs and ashes under. Then came fall, and winter was sodden and brown with a few bouts of snow that raced at the windows. Then it was spring, and I remember the green of that field.

No one ever mentioned the fire. It was the green that got to me.
Max Garland is a former rural letter carrier from Kentucky and the author of The Postal Confessions and Hunger Wide as Heaven. His poetry and prose have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Best American Short Stories. He lives and teaches in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and is the former poet laureate of that state.

* This essay originally appeared in Creative Nonfiction #48 (2013