except there's more below
faithful audience in training
summer 2020
J. K. divides his time between sunny summers in the Umbrian woods and cloudy winters north of the Alps--in review of times past and too many places of residence. Both inspire descriptions of what it is like to live as an imagined self and the characters that populate his reveries. They, self and characters, show essential goodness as well as flaws they must work through. J. K. believes that recording bits from life’s journeys, reverie or real, and nurtured by work, leisure, observation, study, and reflection is reward aplenty. If you sample some of his notes and queries to himself, he would be pleased; and some of his cherished characters might be also.
I wanted to become a professional basketball player. I wanted to become a college teacher of literatures in English. Most of all, and throughout my life, I wanted to be a writer. All three aspirations were not to be, and still won't, this in spite of the apparent evidence here.
I had to make a living to support a young family beginning my first year in college, and on the years marched. I worked and I wrote, not well--for others--employers and clients and customers, technical writing mostly. I got better and better, particularly because I was able to explain calmly and well enough, without color and irrelevant rhetoric. I was able to present complex subjects by translating them into simpler ways of understanding. These were mostly practical things that required stating what and how for purposes of application, sometimes a bit of why to suggest action accordingly.
Forced into retirement because of age and health, ten plus years ago I started writing for me. If there happened along a lone reader or possibly two, they would be safe from dark realities and all other possibly offensive stuff. I chose not to write which might offend, although I sometimes did through mistakes I made by telling the truth--ranting actually--and sometimes by how I wrote. (For example, what I said to a generalized other was taken to be you personally.) Writing not to offend, I believe, limits one from full qualification as a writer, and therefore any recognition as one.
I have had these years of grace to practice and learn, knowing the while that I am not good enough to write for an audience or publish conventionally. Would that ten years had been at the start of my careers, I might have been further along by this point. No matter.
I write because I enjoy--relish--the experience of doing it, and when I let a piece go I start afresh to work on the next or next several. There is no end to subjects that invite me to consider and take up a pen, or address myself to a keyboard. In truth I haven't the time to become a real writer, do I.
Because I claim what I do and love and feel blessed that I have another day to play while being, today I am J. K. Mactavish, so-called writer, more accurately a student of writing. John Kevin Mactavish or John K., or just kevin, well he went the way of all the energies he plowed into producing for others.
J.K. Mactavish
Petrovice I
11.20