A Spillworthy, by John Ross and Johanna...

Imagine you just found some neatly folded pages, stuck conspicuously between the pole and the chain-link fence you often walk by. Scrawled on them you find a conversation of sorts...between people you do not know - yet...

Johanna:  Anyone want to have me stop by their blog during the Spillworthy release week?

John: Oh Hella-Yeah! Did I mention I really love this book?  It's got a good beat and you can dance to it. Wait, that didn't sound right...  

Please let me know what I can do to help spread some Spillworthy around.

Johanna:  An interview would be fun--or really more of a conversation. We could do that.

John: That's certainly something we could do. Except you may have to prompt me. I just realized that I had never actually interviewed anyone when I was on the radio. I'm not sure I was ever actually on the air with anyone for longer than it took to pass off or take up a segment or a shift.

Johanna:  We could do a spillworthy then--just back and forth like Gem and Ulysses do in the book. When we're done, we'll release it on your blog.

John:  That sounds good. There is an aspect of this book I'd like to explore at some point, and that's how this book addresses some very real things that happen in people's heads and then leak out and get all over who or whatever is around them. The book kind of makes a point of that, doesn't it? To me, that would seem to be a major theme running through pretty much everyone who's anyone in the cast of characters. And those weirdnesses of thought or belief then inform the whole settings of the scenes, the movement of the plot, the correlation and causation that happen in the story. And of course there is that pattern of looking at what doesn't want to be seen throughout a number of your stories from Belle to Claire. What up wi dat?

Johanna: I'm just going to sit here and grin for a second. I'm so happy you see that in my stories.

John:  Yes, I think I know, but you have to say it. It's an interview. *winks*

Johanna: Well, we all have our own realities, don't we?  We interpret the world through whatever lens we've established for ourselves and generally we ignore the fact that there are other ways of seeing things. We look away from things that don't fit into our way of understanding the world. I don't think people do this because they're trying to be cruel to others.  We hold on to our existing paradigms, and when we feel them crumbling or slipping away, we hold on even more tightly--even if doing so takes us into weird thought patterns. We justify what we do based on tradition or upbringing because it's less personally catastrophic than rethinking how we've lived our lives up to that point.

There is a longing for connection that runs through most of what I write. And yes, a lot of tension in scenes and plots originates from characters not understanding each other on some really fundamental levels--and yet they need each other.

John:  This reminds me of a time in Salt Lake--at a little Arts Council building in the park across the street from my brother's house--when I got to go to a poetry reading with Chip Rawlins, who wrote the science/climatological book Sky’s Witness, and had a great elk hide jacket. A young poet was there who related her life as single woman in terms of the world of Barbie. Yes, the doll Barbie. She kinda looked like a fashion doll herself, and had this high little barbie voice, and - she was utterly brilliant. I wish I still had her chapbook, or could at least remember her name. 

That stay in Salt Lake, I also got to hear some great Latino, mostly Chilean, poets who would read their poems in English and then Spanish.  Even though I don't really speak Spanish, I often thought the Spanish (original) versions sounded better, and conveyed more emotion. Pink amazon porpoises, choking on the ashes of the burning rainforest surrounding the river, rushing into the shallows, trying in vain to push through to deeper, wider water. Of course I can't remember any of their names either. It was twenty years ago, now. This was at my brother's Lutheran church and while we were listening to these wonderful poets, half the time in Spanish, a black gospel choir who borrowed the loft was practising, just barely audibly, two floors above us. It was a major diversity blast for me at the time.

Johanna: I love that image and, even more so, that potential for connection. I think you show that in your work more than I do. I have characters who really struggle to relate to each other. With your characters, that inter-connectedness is a fact of life. They can acknowledge it or not, but it's always there. Everything is connected.

John: Yes. I think "Everything is Connected to Everything Else," (which is one of the "Givens" of most Native American spirituality), will wind up proving to be one of those organically grown and derived-over-time threads, in the William Stafford - life-long-thread sense, that will run through the body of my writing. It's kind of a big deal to me. That, and "Balance is the Key." I was pretty proud of myself when I thought I had figured that one out all on my own, at about age fifteen or so, as if anyone ever really figures anything out "all on their own."

Johanna: I love your reference to William Stafford here. During the last two summers, I've attended Summer Fishtrap in Oregon. It's a gathering of writers, held in this beautiful place up in the The Wallowas, not far from where Chief Joseph is buried. This year our theme, "What The River Says," is a celebration of William Stafford's themes and ideals. So many writing conferences leave me overwhelmed with the business of writing--or feeling pressure because I started too late to ever achieve what others have accomplished.  Fishtrap centers me and puts me in the right headspace to keep writing for another year. Publishing is its own thing, but writing what matters--that has to come ahead of everything else.

John: So I'm reading kind of slow, this time through Spillworthy, because I want to be able to taste some things differently, or more, than I would if I read faster. Page 48, "They feel ashamed about being where they are, and their shame makes them easy targets." Yes, shame does make people easy targets because it makes them more vulnerable.

Being vulnerable draws predators, both from within and without the self. From within, in the form of all those negative feelings, self-destructive voices, fears, anxieties, and deadly depressions. The kind of depressions that sink below the rest of the green-grass lawn to become gaping maws of hell, inescapable tiger-traps, complete with poison tipped impaling spikes at the bottom.

And being vulnerable draws predators from without in the form of anyone who recognizes and knows how to use that vulnerability to their own advantage and is inclined to do so. One example just mentioned in Spillworthy, bad shepherds, charlatan preachers, intent on bending others to their own paranoid visions. Grief, and pain, on the profound end of the scale, will do it too of course, any major trauma that we can't let go of...

Johanna: Right. When we internalize the negative outside judgements, we continue being victimized, even when the predator is gone. It's like a poison that continues spreading through us for the rest of our lives.  I think about that with kids a lot and it worries me.

A few readers of Spillworthy have been surprised that I question authority figures more than most middle grade authors do. I don't produce an Officer Friendly to guide the kids through their problems. No teacher comes to the rescue. The characters have to make their own judgements and sometimes their help comes from unlikely places.

I grew up in a time when we implicitly trusted authority figures, and distrusted people who didn't look and act exactly like us. In my case, growing up in a lower middle class home, that meant I developed a great distrust for the wealthy people in our community. Others developed a distrust along racial or religious boundaries. Today we continue to see distrust of families or couples who look different than the families of our childhoods.

Again, I'm not convinced people do this to be cruel to others outside their group. They're looking for a sense of security. Somehow if they play by the rules and stay where they belong, they believe they will be safe. They believe their children will be safe.

That paradigm isn't working out so well. Not only does it spawn hatred of others who are not like us (no matter what that "us" is), it also gives people inside our circles too much power over our children. We keep seeing news stories about children abused by authority figures--abuse that ends up lasting for years. 

John: Yes. There is that thing. We still tell kids that if they see cops, they're there to help. Still, with appalling stories of shooting, tazing, or other harm coming to people with mental illness or social/learning disabilities, I worry that telling our kids this might somehow lead them to harm.  I hope that Autism Awareness Days might help the constabulary become more able to recognize different types of disabilities and then react in some way less harmful than they have done in the past. I still tell my child that the police are there to help, and I have always experienced that be true, but I then add - "Don't make any sudden movements and do whatever they tell you." It goes back to seeing Individuals and individual situations as individual, in the context of the moment.

Johanna: Right, so we have to ask: how does this shape our teaching and our parenting? We want our kids to be safe, but we're not going to be able to follow them around their whole lives and shield them from harm. Plus? We can't keep putting up all these barriers for our kids. It goes back to that need for connection between people--our need for balance. We don't want our kids to be victims, but we don't want them to isolate themselves either. That means we have to talk to our children as soon as they're able to start processing the world on a more complex level. We must encourage them to move beyond profiling (for good or bad), and help them to consider individual actions, thoughts, words, context. It's a heavy responsibility. My hope is that a book like Spillworthy will open up some of those conversations in a hopeful, optimistic way.

What do you think?  Is this spillworthy done?  Is it ready to be released?

John: I think it is...Oh, other than perhaps to say, "This has been an impromptu,  no, let's face it, random Spillworthy with author Johanna Harness"  Basically, as you might find between the main characters of her newly released middle grade novel Spillworthy.

Reviews of Spillworthy on Goodreads

You can buy Spillworthy here: Spillworthy

Find Johanna here: Homepage

"And now for something completely different"... well no, actually, kind of the same - "For your viewing and listening pleasure", here's the best video I think I've seen for Pink Floyd, On The Turning Away, Live, with finely timed fades on great song/story imagery on Youtube.

Perceptions On a Summer's Day (may vary)

He watched the path down where the it came out from under the buckbrush. Something just out of sight was coming towards him. It was much louder than he would have thought anything that would fit under there could be. True, the sound of it's passage, more ambling than charging, seemed louder because of the many seasons' worth of fallen oak leaves there.

Little Head-Bob the owl sat on the black oak branch some thirty feet up from the ground. He listened with unease, even though he knew the odds of anything down there being a threat to him up here were pretty slim. He was learning gradually to not make rash moves over hasty conclusions about what were often, really, non-threats. 

More than once he had leapt from the safe comfortable nest into the roaring campfire, so to speak, just to get away from nothing. When he told this observation to his mate she responded that he had gotten awfully wordy, no doubt from spending too much time around humans. 




The old turtle paid attention to everything as he moved through the woods. He felt the brittle crackling of the dry leaves under his feet and the small sticks scraping along the sides of his shell. He heard the wind in the trees. He smelled the prickly pear fruit, just ripe, up there next to the sandstone place. 

He might enjoy that if he got up there, perhaps even this afternoon if he kept a steady pace. He couldn't see that far with his near sighted turtle-vision, but he could certainly almost taste the cactus fruit. Were prickly pears worth traipsing around out in the open up on the sandstone? He knew sometimes hungry coyotes howled there in the night.

He stopped and thought about that and about the great horned owl sitting in the tree on the edge of the little clearing just ahead. He drew into his shell then, closing the door in front of his eyes. 

It had been many seasons since he had, as a tiny shelled hatch-ling, crossed paths with a great horned owl. He had survived that then and he was pretty sure it was no real threat to him now. Still, it made him anxious. 

Turtles' long memories gave them plenty of things to think about, plenty of things to stay in about. At least Bobby's memories did. There in his cozy shell, insulated from outside concerns, he fell into a half dosing kind of sleep as the morning turned to noon.



Bob dreamt of walking the path through the woods on the hill, up towards the old sandstone. His perspective seemed curiously skewed. He was seeing the woods from a bit above what he thought of as his normal perspective. Still he was not up as high as say, a bird gliding through the trees searching for poor slow little things to pounce upon. He saw himself wondering why he had thought of it that way. Walking along in his dream he hummed an old tune about a broken arrow and a bottle of rain to make himself feel calmer, but then he couldn't remember why.

He bolted upright in his bed wide-eyed at the sound of one word, one syllable spoken loudly, somewhere in the room right there next to him. He looked over at his wife. Sound asleep, she had her head buried under the pillow. She had surely not made that sound. The room was silent now. All he could hear was the ringing in his ears. The Ring said nearly nothing. Just *

He got out of bed and walked into his son's room. Nothing. He walked down the stairway, through the living room, the dining room, the kitchen. Nothing. He blinked once, slowly, there in the kitchen, in the dark.



Bobby shook himself awake inside his shell and opened his eyes. It felt as though something had been reset in his mind, in his... feelings. Never mind, he saw himself think. He could feel it was warming up out there now and he opened his shell and started off through the underbrush.

He vaguely recalled being anxious about something that had startled him. Some sound, some sharp intake of information, unsought and unprepared for.  He stepped out of the concealing brush.

Owls didn't need to concern him now he thought, though every now and then one might come down to rasp stark warnings about the nature of crows and clack it's sharp beak at him. They tended to vocalize their opinions too much he thought. Most things did. The old turtle walked resolutely past the big owl's perch as it watched him now, in stony silence.

Bobby liked the mourning doves though. Their soft murmurings as they tucked each other in, to keep safe through the night, comforted him greatly sometimes. The sound meant something tender, and hopeful, and brave.

It reminded him of the promise of spring, heard and tasted even in the chill fall air as he would be going into some dark den to hibernate, perhaps never to come out again.

He smelled the sweet prickly pears again as he stepped out of the trees, up onto the warm sandstone, and into the full open sunlight. 
He heard the mourning doves cooing softly, somewhere, just behind him.







For your listening pleasure:
"Broken Arrow" Robbie Robertson, Acoustic cover by Mr. Brad Cole

 

Two Shots, Extra Sugar - Portland

He handed me crumpled page, hand written, both sides - "just a memory of mine. Was just so, I tell you three times".

I'm sitting inside Powell’s Books, in World Cup Coffee, and I think it must be summer, and some year not yet long past. A young woman in a Pokemon t-shirt sits poring through an overstuffed binder of game cards next to two guys who are discussing Stephen Hawking as to quantum graphics.  

The two men speak of "Project Xanadu", and what a fiasco that was. Another guy is talking to a kid who has a Canadian flag sticking out of his tartan plaid day-pack. The man is telling him about selling his BMW and buying the cargo bicycle of his dreams. It will have laser-filigreed meteorite-alloy disk brakes. The Xanadu-Hawking guys shake hands and leave, each drawing a phone as he goes. 


I'm watching Bob watching out the window, as a sidewalk river-current of humans, mostly, moves steadily by. Across from me, out of the blue, Pokemon girl says the cards go in a story she's writing. “Writing is good,” I say. She doesn’t say anything in response but her eyes look up towards me without looking at me. I worry that I’ve intruded or perhaps just said something stupid. I feel the otherness wafting off her, coming in waves, and I feel my own place in this realm shift again, just a bit. 

Outside, a girl with magenta hair and bright green cat-eye glasses stops on the sidewalk. Her bracelet matches her glasses as she reaches in a pocket of her orange dress to give a couple of folded bills to a guy in a wheelchair. He is wearing a POW/MIA ball cap. He smiles at her and they exchange a couple of sentences before moving on. As she starts off her stride catches, just a half-beat, as she’s thinking she’s just heard an owl, right here downtown of all places. Looking around I see eight laptops and six pads being used along the counter that sits against the big windows. There are way too many books being read in here to count. It is Powell's Books after all. No one else in here has seen her, or heard her wondering that.


"Today is a good day to wear green" Pokemon girl says to the young guy with the flag as he’s passing by. She asks him where the flag is from so he explains it's from Quebec, and worn in support of school loan debt protesters there. She blinks at him, that slow hardworking blink that signals shifting gears, jumping tracks, or coming to an abrupt halt and says “Something is coming.”

He quick, looks around behind him, thinking someone wants to pass. There’s no one there. “Excuse me?” he asks her - “Something is coming, something slow and huuuge” she says drawing it out making it huge-er, and then goes back to flipping the album's pages. Flag-kid glances around, catches my eye, gives me a questioning look. I try to give him one back that says “Hey, I’d listen to her”.


He looks back down at her. She's now inspecting a card with a magnifying glass, and he tells her to have a nice day. She just looks up, smiles and nods, as people sometimes do when they’re immersed in something on headphones. She is not wearing headphones.  All this time, Bob, he hasn't said a thing, made a motion, maybe breathed. He gets up now from his book, stretches a leg down and out behind him, then the other, like some big old bird of prey, then pats me on the shoulder, heading off to Mysteries. 

I wonder if all that just happened. Then I realize nothing unusual has just occurred, because this is Powell's, this is Portland. I take that impression out and roll it around to look at it. I wonder if part of that feeling comes from my Native American genes, or if it just means I truly belong here now. Either way “Something Big is coming”, said as one might speak of major geologic events or whole cultures disappearing, and yet said absolutely casually? It's really not much more of a surprise to us than “Tomorrow is another day”.

I pick up my coffee, pressed Sumatran, two shots, extra sugar, and go. Something large flies by overhead, on silent wings.

Heres a video from Portland:  Thomas Dolby, live at the Kink.FM Bing lounge - She Blinded Me With Science

Things Found While Cleaning Out the Garage

Bob hadn't intended this to be the day he cleaned the garage, but looking at the heavy rain falling outside the open overhead door, he supposed it was as good as any. Uncommonly heavy rain for here, for this season, it reminded him of the fall downpours back home.

Gradually he passed through the stacks of boxes and upon shifting the layers of flat materials leaning up against the wall he was surprised to find the deer skull hanging there. It seemed undamaged by all that stuff he had just moved, but he felt guilty, for not having been more careful.

He reached out and took it from the wall and…

Little Head-Bob watched in awe as the rain came down in nearly solid sheets, the trees lit up by the lightning that flashed over and over. He had never seen a storm like this in his young life and he instinctively backed up to the far wall of the nest hole, against the warm living part of the old tree. It had shielded his family from the weather all his life, perhaps it would still do.

Over the rain and the roaring of the creek, now a surging smashing thing he did not recognize, his keen owl ears picked up the sound of something running down the hill. It crashed through the brush toward him as though in flight or panic.  He could hear it coming, leaping and darting, changing direction every time the lightning flashed or the thunder struck.

Terrified, the doe came so fast it never had a chance to stop before it got to the raging creek. Now twenty feet wide and over twelve feet deep, the once tiny creek was carrying everything in its path downstream with it. 

Watching from his nest, Little Head-Bob's eyes flashed wide, shocked, as the deer's reflexive leap carried it high up, out over the creek and almost to the bank on his side. Then plunging into the roaring water the deer tumbled out of sight and was just - gone.

Lightning flashed and across the creek he saw a shadowy thing standing as though looking his way. He shivered and blinked but then the shadow was gone, obscured by darkness, as the lightning faded.

Another flash of lightning and Bob looked up from the skull in his hands and there out through the rain across the street, where the water ran swift through the ditch, he thought he saw a shadow. Something with four legs, something there… and then gone.

Little Head-Bob blinked in the sun, drying his feathers as he dozed, dreaming of a man who walked along the creek bank. The man stopped, looked at the pile of dead brush stuck under the tree fallen across the creek, and caught the glint of light off something there.

Bob waded into the knee-deep creek, careful of the slick moss that covered rock bottom, trying to watch where he was going while still keeping an eye on that spot in the brush.  Hedge thorns raked the back of his hand as he tunneled it into the pile, back almost to his full arm's-length, before finally catching hold of the thing. Carefully bringing it out he was surprised to be holding a perfectly intact deer skull, too small for a buck, staring back at him.

Little Head-Bob watched as the man climbed backed up out of the creek, the skull of the storm-killed doe in his hand.

Standing in his garage Bob jumped, startled out of his reverie, when his wife poked her head in to call him to dinner. He looked down absently at the skull in his hand.

"Are you still hanging on to that thing?" she asked.

"Uh-huh. Be there in just a minute, Hon" he replied.

She cocked her head and looked at him kind of side-ways like she did sometimes. Then half grinning, she turned back to the kitchen, closing the door behind her.

Bob found a push pin there in the tray and reaching up high on the wall stuck it in.  He hung the skull and his memories far up this time, out of everyday life's range, not quite so easily covered.

It just seemed to matter somehow.