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Editor,
Oregon Literary Review

MFA, Playwriting, University of Oregon

Writing faculty, Portland State University (part-time)

Retired playwright and screenwriter.
Active novelist, librettist and teacher.

Email: cdeemer(at)yahoo(dot)com

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Highlights:

Finalist, Oregon Book Award

Practical Screenwriting

Love At Ground Zero

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More books.

Suggest a writer's blog

• My short story The First Stoplight in Wallowa County began this way. A number of years ago I was invited to teach a workshop at Fishtrap, a writer's conference at Wallowa Lake in Eastern Oregon. I fell in love with the place, later renting a cabin on the lake to escape for dedicated writing sessions. I learned that there was not a single stoplight in the entire county! I began to think of unusual things that might happen to require one ... and came up with the idea of one just appearing, like magic. A small town comedy is the result.
  
• My screenplay "Don't shoot! I'm white!" began with the plot premise of a white man turning somehow into a black man, experiencing great changes in his life. I gave him something important to say: he's a whistle-blower. And a rationale for turning black, he's slipped an overdose of a new "suntan pill." He wants to warn the country of the dangerous side-effects of this new "genetic manipulation" technology. So we have a thriller that began with ideas of plot.
  

• In my short story The Man Who Shot Elvis I wondered what it would feel like to be a black rhythm-n-blues artist in the early years of rock-n-roll, watching white "cover" groups record your original material and sell more copies than you did. And I extended this feeling into a fantasy of assassinating Elvis, the symbol of this phenomenon, the man who filled Sam Philips' search for "a white singer who could sound black."
  
• In my stage play The Pardon I wondered about all those guys who fled to Canada during the Vietnam War. When Pres. Carter pardoned them, what if one returned home to try and make peace with his father? And to up the ante, let's make his father a World War II hero. Here we have a natural character conflict.
  

• What would an eastern guru and an unemployed logger have to say to one another? Christmas at the Juniper Tavern, a stage play.
  
• What would the historic Casanova think about all the sexual license in the culture today? Casanova Does California, a screenplay.
  

• I was married for a long time to a woman who realized or decided she was a lesbian. End of marriage. After many years of stirring around in my gut, this experience became the basis for what remains my favorite stage play, The Half-life Conspiracy.
  
• After his death, I learned that an old and dear friend of mine had sexually abused his daughter. He was doing this during the time when we hung out together. It blew my mind. I decided to try and write a story that put the audience through the same emotional upheaval that I felt upon learning the truth. This became my screenplay, A Woman Scorned, which many in the film industry have admired for its craft (particularly as a page-turner) but which has a resolution too risky to be "commercial."
  
• I was eight years old when my father retired from the Navy. It was strange to have him at home all the time, particularly since it took him a while to adjust to civilian life. This is the basis of my short story, The Sextant.
  
• Here is a surrealistic and strange story that came out of a moment of anger and frustration. One afternoon early in my writing career I walked to the mailbox to find six rejected short stories. Six rejections in one day! Two of these came from the same magazine, The Literary Review, which I was trying hard to get into. I remember throwing things around in a temper tantrum, then sitting down at my Remington manual and pounding out this story in a quick, feverish writing session, and racing off to the post office to mail it the same day -- to The Literary Review naturally. And they accepted it! There's karma for you. It appears to be a convoluted statement about poetics. I still like the closing image, suggesting what it means to be a writer. The story is called Fragments Before the Fall.