I occasionally write for Squidoo, Seth Godin’s ” … platform that gives people a simple way to organize their interests online ….” Squidoo recently began publishing a series of online magazines that cover a range of pursuits, such as crafts, eating healthily, holidays, and business. I had an article recently published in Upmarket, the business publication, called How Pedaling Your Bike Is Actually Pedaling Your Mind. Perhaps that sounds like it should be in the Dubious Metaphors magazine, but they haven’t put that one together yet.

But I’m not here today to argue whether pedaling your mind is self-abuse or psychic stimulation; I’m here to talk about the power of connection, and to try and not get all gooey about it, because when I go gooey, it’s paper-towel-in-triplicate time. The reason I wrote anything for Squidoo in the first place is because I’m a member of Seth Godin’s Triiibes network, a online playpen of successful solopreneurs, new-media mavens, generous gurus of ethical marketing, and outlier lunatics who stumbled in from the pool hall, where they play Bach harmonica fugues for tips. (Note: I am an agent for the outlier harmonica fugue-ists, if you want to talk licensing.)

You can read a lot of circulating cynical comments about the questionable quality of online relationships, and how much of online congress is people trying to sell their self-printed posters of baby harp seals being threatened by real estate agents, but there’s a counterpoint to that: I know that some of the connections are real—and warm. For instance, though I’ve never met Megan Elizabeth Morris, I’ve gotten to know her through her posts on Triiibes as smart, soulful, and witty, and as an indefatigable idea-powerhouse. As Head Solicitor and Sifter of Submissions for the new Squidoo magazines, she invited folks on Triiibes to submit pieces for consideration.

Online Exchange of the Not-Dry-Business Variety
But because she is Megan, and because any exchanges with her have much more than dry business in them, she has been particularly encouraging to me about submitting a series of pieces, and getting my stuff up and read. I cannot refuse a person who can sing operatically in Welsh, so I’m trying. Another Groove Child of Cyberspheric Connection is Jodi Kaplan, who has been working a bit with Megan in herding the cats of Triiibes Squidoo-ing. Jodi is another Triiibes marvel, a person who has consistently offered her broad and pointed knowledge of marketing and copywriting done rightly (and by rightly, I mean effectively and with integrity) to the people on Triiibes, and to her clients and blog readers.

Just out of the blue, Jodi recently profiled me on Squidoo in this Are Professional Writers Worth It? post. What’s she getting out of that? Nuttin. Other than the sweet glow you get when you do a pal a good turn. My point—and though my hair is covering it up, I’m getting to it—is that I can list a whole bushel of connections I’ve made like this on Triiibes and other networks, where just hanging out and golfing ideas around can crack the walls between people. Even though I’ve only known some of these folks in the ether (though some have even come to my house, where I’ve collected their DNA and am making a golem who will help with the vacuuming), I know that they are real. And real good. So, yeah, online connections can be trivial tripe, but they can also be genuine gold.

By the way Jodi, you ended that profile by wondering about the full story of what happened in Micronesia. Well, the full story will come (I have to carefully align all my lies), but Traveler’s Tales just published another part of the story: Read about the 5-dollar bell pepper, and weep, weep for the children. (Or the cereal eaters—good God, the infamy!)

A couple of weeks ago, my girlfriend and I were invited to spend the night at a house on the Big Sur coast, a house that my girlfriend’s sister was considering buying a shared ownership in. It’s a modest home, bringing to mind a style of California hippie houses of the 70s, with funky, unpretentious charm. That comfortable worn-in feeling is both inside and outside the grounds of the home. And then there’s the view.

The view, of which the photo above only provides a rather shabby sense of its actual grandeur, is sublime. That’s the view you see if you step out the door of the house and move just a bit up the driveway. So, every time I stepped out of that house, my mind shot down that cliff in a delirious riot of color, light, sound and scent. From the cliff, you can hear the ocean whump though the blowholes below, you can hear the trill and squawk of birdsong, you can smell pine and sun-warmed grasses.

Though Big Sur is less than 90 minutes from my house and I too live in a coastal California community, Big Sur is vastly different. It is visually dazzling, with great, craggy cliffs that plunge to a sea crashing on foaming rocks. Even with somewhat recent fires, there are thick forests with trails that lead to rolling waterfalls. There are places like the Henry Miller library, with its eccentric art work in the tree-splashed front yard, the eclectic and thoughtful book collection, the free coffee and ping-pong, the absolute “hang out and read a while” feeling of the place. And, while being cautious of stereotyping the locals, Big Sur folks seem friendly in a way that doesn’t seem affected.

Place Is a State in Your Reader’s Mind
When you are writing about a specific place, you need to open a big window—or step down a short driveway—to the view of that place. But that view must let your reader crunch the gravel underfoot, let them remark on the unusual number of  people who have crew cuts, let them peruse a menu that has hush puppies rather than french fries. I’m working on a novel right now whose setting is mainly the San Francisco of the late 80s, and mostly Market Street downtown. The bike messengers, women in fashionable outfits, ragged homeless and lost tourists of Market Street look, sound and smell different from the people I saw roaming Key West a couple of months ago.

Today I went hiking in the redwoods near my house. The redwoods smell different from the pines of Big Sur, they throw the light in a different way from their branches. If you pay real attention to small details that can capture the essence of a place, or distinguish it enough so the reader says, “Ah, so that’s what Big Sur is like,” you’ve gained ground on capturing their imagination too. Or if you can lie skillfully enough to describe the taste of place so that there aren’t false notes in the rendering, even if you’ve never been to that place before, the writing, and the world of imagination it creates, can still hold together.

Oh, about that share in the house: the other partial owners came back, after an absence of some time, to consider whether they really wanted to sell. They came on a beautiful weekend; they decided they couldn’t give it up. Damn.

Trying to place an article about a man who drives nails into his scrotum is a challenge. You have to find a publication that is appropriately (or inappropriately) edgy, but as a writer with an interest in circulating ideas, not so obscure as to not have an audience. And also as a writer interested in circulating cash, you would want compensation, even for a piece that might need to have dark curtains pulled over its stage.

These concerns came to mind the other day when I received a rejection notice for my memoir-style article about a night in San Francisco long ago. I’d attended what I thought was going to be a tattooing display and discussion, but its main event was an S&M demo, where aside from the scrotal crucifixion mentioned above, the artist in question sewed up his testicles over his penis with dental floss, much like a woeful pig in a blanket. Live, naked, onstage, much to my appalled eyes.

The Taste of Rejection
Where I’m going with this is not into any discussion of better choices among an evening’s entertainment (my article does that), but rather the various flavors of writer’s rejections, and how those taste on a writer’s tongue. The image for this post is a shot of my rejection folder, in all its glory. It is two inches high, and weighs almost two pounds. You might think that by my keeping that folder, I have a different—but just as pointed—sense of masochism as my pal with the pliant scrotum. By no means. That pile of “nos” is just a thing writers can step on to be a bit higher on their way to “yes.”

Looking over my hummock of rejections, you can see traces of their evolution over time. Sure, most of them are form letters of the “Dear Author, because of the number of submissions we receive, we regret that we are unable to respond personally ….” variety. But for those publications from twenty years ago where the editorial assistants or (victory!) the editors themselves spent some effort to tell the writer just why something didn’t fit the publication, the “no, buts” are longer and more developed extenuations. In the main, the handwritten rejections from the last few years are brief and pointed. They reflect more of today’s hurried and “next!” pace.

In fact, the letters themselves these days are so much more often little strips of paper, a slight ribbon that perhaps rejects a little more softly, because the “we regret” isn’t followed by the full page’s damning white space of emptiness. And as the evolution of electronic publishing is pushing paper aside, physical rejection letters are fewer seen. The ease of an electronic “no” is hastening their demise. Speaking of demise, I hadn’t gone through my reject slips for years, but in doing so, saw that many of the magazines I’d tried so fervidly to enter have shut their doors for good. Little solace, that.

Aiming High Keeps Your Head Up
But it was fun to flip through my collection, and note my ambition. There’s a partially handwritten, partially printed (from a dot-matrix printer, oh my!) sheet from 1988 on what I pushed that year: Articles to Atlantic, Esquire, Paris Review, Harper’s, Playboy and a host of smaller publications. None of those titans bit into what I was serving, but there was consolation in getting “an intriguing idea” from a Harper’s editorial assistant, and a “It’s a good one” from Esquire. A long handwritten response from a Travel and Leisure managing editor in 1992 detailing alternate publications that might accept my piece that he graciously declined. Even the form salutation from the Utne Reader: “Dear intrepid writer:”

So many of the letters are undated and don’t specifically mention the rejected article or story, so I have no idea what these limbo letters refer to, just a vagabond “no” telling me at some point I mailed, I waited, I hoped, and it was for naught. But clasping hands with those closed hands in my “no” pile are a number of yesses—the extended correspondence I had with Peter Sussman, a San Francisco Chronicle editor, much of it handwritten, about an article of mine he published about my much more extended correspondence with the Jack Daniel’s Distillery. A series of letters from Lynn Ferrin, the late editor of Motorland magazine (precursor to Via) who had been trying to locate me—pre-email address—in the midst of a couple of moves. Regarding my piece on driving cross-country trying to locate a good cup of coffee, she told me, “Out of the piles of unreadable pap that come over the transom every day, by dump truck, suddenly there’s something that stirs my coffee….”

Onward!
Here’s my message: keep sending your stuff out. I’ve had articles accepted for publication that were years old, that were sent out 10 times. My rejection folder weighs two pounds, but that’s considerably less than the weight of the 200+ magazines, newspapers or books that accepted and published pieces of mine. The reject folder is just a reminder that you have to do the work, and keep doing it. I’ll pass on the advice of Howard Junker, the longtime, former editor of ZYZZYVA magazine, whose typed signature in his rejection letter is preceded by, “Keep the faith.” And whose handwritten note reads: “Onward!”

Onward indeed. Now, what editor is likely to go for that scrotum piece?

One of the intrigues about being an enthusiast about a subject or person is that once you start poking about, there seems to be a bottomless rabbit hole of information. And that hole can be well off the main road of what’s normally shared among the broad population. Now I’m not talking about true obsession, where perhaps you know more about the Morpho butterfly than its mother did, where you skip lunch then dinner sitting on the floor of a bookstore a continent away from your home because you’d heard they had a dusty tome by the premiere 18-century entomologist who also skipped most meals in favor of studying the Morphos. Not that kind of obsession, my pretties.

No, I’m referring to something more than the mere fan, but less than the stalker. As an aside, there are the rare polyglots who are able to tiptoe close to obsession’s stage while still staying out of its brightest footlights, and yet own another stage all their own. For example, going back to our fluttery friends, when Vladimir Nabokov wasn’t writing one of his remarkably layered, seriocomic novels, he spent serious time researching butterflies, publishing many monographs that professional lepidopterists recognized as authoritative. He once commented, “The pleasures and rewards of literary inspiration are nothing beside the rapture of discovering a new organ under the microscope or an undescribed species on a mountainside in Iran or Peru. It is not improbable that had there been no revolution in Russia, I would have devoted myself entirely to lepidopterology and never written any novels at all.”

Looking at Layers Leads to More Layers
This is a hide-and-seek way of getting to my main topic: how people and things are multilayered, and once you start pulling at the onionskin of a topic or character, there’s always another skin underneath. Case in point: one of the books I’m reading is titled, Twain’s Feast: Searching for America’s Lost Foods in the Footsteps of Samuel Clemens. Now, were this work “… in the footsteps of Mamie Eisenhower,” I probably—and no insult to Mamie—would have picked it up with mild amusement and then let it flit from memory forever.

But because it’s Mark Twain, and I am more than a simple fan (though not obsessed, no, that’s not the beating of my hideous heart!), I’m reading it with great pleasure, for the author Andrew Beahrs combines his careful and light-hearted research into Twain’s writings on American food with Bearhs’ travels around the country trying to locate and eat that very food, which in the case of the prairie hens of Illinois proves ecologically difficult, and that of stomaching the ideal stewed raccoon a mite unpalatable.

From the Grubby to the Gracious
But it’s the flavor of Twain’s voice that comes through with spice, particularly when he lavishes angel-winged admiration on an American dish and contemptuous skewering on an insipid counterpart found elsewhere. His hilarious railings against spineless European coffee and expoundings on the glories of a stout cup of good American coffee do make one wonder what happened between Twain’s time and our parent’s days with the Folgers. Twain was uniquely suited to comment on the breadth of American food, for he palavered with the powerful in the boardrooms of the Eastern Seaboard, grubbed among the grubs in the grubbiest makeshift mining towns in dead-dry Nevada, and of course moved through the shoals and the high waters of foodstuffs up and down the mighty Mississippi, both in his boyhood and as a steamboat pilot.

I want to return to my original spiraling rabbit hole, for it’s in the reading of the table tastes of a famous person that you consider how layered a life is, how layered all our lives are. Twain could be, in turn, a kitten-loving sentimentalist, a flinger of flaming arrows against the establishment, a provocateur who spoke truth to power, and yet one who cultivated the company of barons of industry. A man of spectacular fame, yet of multiple spectacular failures and deeply public sorrows. His onion had many skins, and reading this off-center book tells me there are skins I’ll never know, on him and so many other subjects.

Yeah, Well, I Invented the Crossbow
Today I heard my girlfriend Alice tell one of my old friends on the phone that she had spent time a long while back to learn how to play the harmonica. Really! Who knew? Good instruction that, a reminder that thinking we know all that a person is about is a kind of blindness, because there are always layers unseen.

One thing though: Twain sang the praises of the 19-century oysters and mussels of the San Francisco Bay. That’s going much too far: I vigorously object. Oysters and mussels, gut-tugging expressions of some bronchial character, a kind of simpering slime. Though on the subject of maple syrup, I share his every sentiment.

I’ve been spending time on the Bahamian island of Eleuthera for the past 7 weeks or so. “Spending time”—such a peculiar expression, as though time could be counted like pennies or pomegranates. Time is much more like taffy, in that in some instances it can seem to stretch and stretch, and in others, break off or shatter. My time here has had many shattered moments, some where the blindingly sharp sun and brilliant blues of the ocean have been more like make-believe metaphors than the cloth that clothes my days.

Let’s skip past wrestling with the quirks and questions of time and move more toward its standard December measure: Christmas. Alice and I will not be on Eleuthera at Christmas, instead stealing away from here just a few days before the date. At some level, I regret that, because Christmas in a foreign country, especially on an island, is just that: foreign. And that foreignness is a good reminder that customs and traditions are just arbitrary, where cultures that might share a holiday like Christmas, don’t share it in quite the same way.

In that spirit, I recently wrote a piece on an island Christmas I did experience some years ago, when we lived on a little stretch of land in Micronesia. Courtesy of Squidoo; look for the Santa wearing flip-flops.