John Yearwood
Former stringer for the New York Times, John Yearwood taught in high schools and universities for 30 years, and was an award-winning journalist for 15 years. He has published hundreds of editorials and columns and thousands of news stories, as well as academic works on the First Amendment and the extra-Constitutional powers of the Presidency during times of crisis. After retiring in 2012, he now volunteers helping elementary students improve their reading skills, and assisting refugee immigrants when he is not writing.
He is the author of The Icarus Series: The Icarus Jump, The City and the Gate and The Gender of Fire; as well as The Lie Detector App, which is set in modern California and follows the unfolding life of a genius kid who creates apps for the smartphone, and discovers there is truth everywhere if you know how to look; and Jar of Pennies, a historical and cultural crime fiction novel set in a small town in East Texas. John lives in Austin with his wife and two small dogs.
Twitter: @jcyearwood
Instagram: jcyearwood/
Is there a genre of music that influences your writing/thinking? Do you listen to music while you write?
My mother, in her failed quest to raise a gentleman, sent me to cotillion to learn to dance and began me on piano lessons when I was eight years old. It is phenomenal what a young boy will endure for the sake of his mother. After ten years of dreaded piano recitals, I managed to convince myself that I was a musician and destined for the big time. This, despite the fact that I couldn’t remember a melody without reading the printed music. So it is also phenomenal how the confidence of youth will blossom out in ridiculous ways. In Texas, we often see this kind of behavior in the famous phrase, “Here, hold my beer.”
I am not now nor have I ever been a musician. I am a writer. But now that I have met real musicians, I stand in awe and know I am not one of them. When the Grateful Dead played Austin in 1972, they opened the stage up to anyone who wanted to come up and play along while various band members went backstage to smoke joints and drink the free beer. Only by the grace of God did I not go up and try to join with them. I’ve been foolish many times, but at least I wasn’t that night.
Nevertheless, I was by 1972 still pounding away on the little spinet piano I got when I was eight, and I had graduated from “Mary had a little Lamb” (not a reference, as it turns out, to the nineteenth-century essayist). Now I was trying Beethoven, Mozart, and Bach. The original greats. And though I was never very good, I got in the habit of analyzing the musical structure of the pieces as I practiced playing them. With Bach, in particular, I learned how the structure of his fugues created the perfect model for creative writing. He begins with a musical phrase—sometimes just ten or so notes. Then he repeats the phrase with harmony. Then he inverts the phrase to play in the base line while the harmony moves to the treble line. Then he reverses the phrase. Then he plays the original phrase in the harmonic against the reversed phrase in the original key. He creates additional variations, playing off the original phrase. And then he concludes by re-stating the original phrase. His genius was not in the original phrase but in the variations he could organize around it, and by beginning and ending with the same set of notes he created a sense of unity and conclusion.
For more than fifty years I have been trying to do the same thing with my writing. T.S. Eliot, the world-renown poet, observed “We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.” That’s what I think Bach was doing—and also other composers, of course, but for me, Bach. We start, we explore, we return with insight that makes the beginning new and deep.
So for me, the musical genre I like the most is classical music from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. I find in it models for creative expression I might otherwise miss. And no, I cannot listen to music and write at the same time. My brain sings my words, and alternative music merely confuses the muse.
Favorite non-reading activity?
Yeah, you got me on this one. My favorite non-reading activity is writing. Of course. In both, you convert words into pictures and actions, so there’s almost no difference—mentally speaking—between the two. But that’s not the answer you want, and I know it. That’s a cheap shot kind of answer. You’re asking what I do when I’m not being an author. So here’s a list of things I do every day:
a. Exercise my muscles. I do either an hour of Pilates or an hour of strength training every day, and I walk a minimum of two miles. At my age—when buying a banana is a leap of faith—I figure I need all the physical exercise I can get to keep functioning. So that’s that.
b. I practice memory games with myself. For example, I have memorized the license plates of all 63 automobiles in my neighborhood. I also know the names of all my neighbors, their kids, their pets, their parents, and their in-laws, most of their brothers and sisters, and their other relatives. I know the square footage of every house in the neighborhood. I know the appraised value—which is always, laughably, total fiction. Like muscles, memory gets better when you use it, and I am deliberate about using it. This behavior also makes me a tedious relative to other members of my family, but hey.
c. I love to eat. Since I have been married to a sensible woman for more than fifty years, I have learned to cook, an activity I love. In cooking you eat your mistakes, but you also eat your triumphs, a zero-sum kind of behavior. I read cooking columns, but then I follow up by trying to cook some of the stuff I find. Southern Living and the New York Times Cookbook are my favorite go-to recipe sources. Sometimes I will just browse through, thinking about things I might cook on the rare occasion when my wife relinquishes the kitchen. As a sensible woman, she knows that neither of us need to snack on a new chocolate cake. Making espresso is also part of this pleasure.
d. I truly enjoy playing darts and enjoying adult beverages with my neighborhood friends. All males. Women are welcome, but for some reason always decide they have better things to do than sit around a fire sipping bourbon, lying, and tossing sharp objects at the wall. Women are mysterious creatures.
e. Playing with my dogs. I have two small white dogs. They are extremely cute, feisty, and distinct in their personalities. One is a true clown. He gets such a kick out of playing with me by ignoring me or making me do things. What a trickster. And I mean “trickster” in the sense that the Iroquois mean “trickster”: sort of a primal force of nature. The other, a female, has learned that she can get anything out of life that she wants just by being cute. She’s a lover, but she has her boundaries. First, she has to talk—which might sound like barking to uninitiated—and then she makes love. One of ladies in the neighborhood describes her as the most feminine creature she’s ever met.
f. Playing the piano. My mother may have failed in her original quest, but she created a Frankenstein of the keyboard. I only play when other humans are gone, to spare them. The dogs, meanwhile, just whine and keep checking on me to make sure I’m okay. Well, duh. I’m the entity who opens the canned food, so they should check on me. Unfortunately, I play the piano exactly the way you think a humanoid constructed of dead body parts would play.
What’s the difference (at least for you!) between being a writer and an author? How do you shift gears between the two?
Being an author is a commercial venture. Authors sell their writing or hope to. Writers often hope to be authors but are driven to be writers even if their work isn’t commercially viable. Imagine a young Leonardo DaVinci. He saw the possibility for three-dimensional art on the two-dimensional plane of the canvas before almost everyone. In the only eighteen works generally attributed to him, he created a vision that influenced every artist who came after him. Was he a painter, or was he an artist? Well, he was both. Painting is a skill; being an artist is doing it well enough to make money at it. Likewise, writing is a skill. Doing it well enough to make money at it makes you also an author. If people don’t buy your work, you’re a writer.
Do you have another artistic outlet in addition to your writing? Do you sew? Paint? Draw? Knit? Dance? As mentioned previously, I play classical music on the piano. I find the expression and depth of emotion in the music of Mozart and Beethoven very rewarding. In recent years, however, as my eyesight has aged, I play less piano than I do other things. These days I enjoy doing pottery, which is more about feel than about eyesight. To throw clay on a wheel, you must first center it. This is not always easy, but I enjoy the ways in which it serves as a metaphor for the writing process. Then you create a form by “opening” the clay, or a metaphor for creating character and a situation. Then you continue working at the spinning clay to form a shape, to complete the shape, to fire it and then to glaze it. The artistic possibilities at each of these stages are immense, so you study how others have done it. Some people form cup handles one way, others a different way; others forget about the lip of the cup, but some remember to shape it to the human mouth; some glazing techniques work, some don’t. Overall, I enjoy the various challenges in the art, which is so similar to writing. Basically, everything I do that is not writing is, in some way, about writing. I don’t sew, though I can. I don’t dance, though I can jerk around in a way that some stoned or drunk persons might consider dance. I don’t draw, although I’ve enjoyed it. I don’t knit. I don’t paint. I might take up welding, which is a useful skill, like horseshoeing. But I am drawn to pottery because, simply, nothing works if you don’t start by centering your clay on the wheel. I can’t think of a more apt description of the artistic process.
Is there another profession you would like to try?
Whoo boy! Oh yeah! I want to be a fighter jet pilot in Ukraine. I want to be an astronaut. I daydream about being President. I would love to be an engineer and build small jet engines to power electric generators. When I was in the seventh grade, General Motors sent a speaker to my school to discuss automotive design, and I’ve wanted to design automobiles ever since. I built a shortwave radio when I was in the fifth grade. I built a gasoline engine when I was in the sixth grade. I mounted that engine on my bicycle and rode it to school every day when I was in the seventh grade. (After that, I discovered girls, and my “thrust” in life changed) My brother is a medical doctor, and I’d love to work side by side with him. My favorite place in the universe is the British Museum. I’d love to be an archaeologist. On alternate days, I’d love to be an anthropologist. I wish I had the genius for music, and art, and pottery.
But I’m a writer. Writing is what I do. Others may find themselves slammed into other professions, but not me. I’ve known my whole life I would be a writer. My dad was an Air Force pilot and when I was five we moved to Munich, Germany. I learned German but forgot it. What I did not forget was reading the folklore—the original, unexpurgated, fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, and stories about Charlemagne. I have never forgotten stories about the ghost of Charlemagne walking among the vineyards along the Rhine in the moonlight, and I never will. Or the tales of the Rhine maidens, the dwarfish power of gold, the allure of an unseen world. And thus, from the age of six, I have been a writer trying to recapture the mystery and magic in the long symphony of humanity. Alternatives? You bet. Dream on, sucker. Possibility? No. I am the creature I am, and words are my medium and my end.
