The Writing Life: reflections by a working writer.

The Writing Life: reflections by a working writer. The Writing Life

Reflections of a working writer, a university screenwriting professor, and the editor of Oregon Literary Review.

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Charles Deemer

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

The eagle flies!

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References

Bookstore
Highlights:

Finalist, Oregon Book Award

Practical Screenwriting

Love At Ground Zero

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Blogs by (mostly) creative writers:

"Can We Talk About Me For A Change?"
Playwright Debra Neff Nathans

Inkygirl
Debbie Ridpath Ohi, a weblog for writers (resources)

Silliman's Blog
Ron Silliman, contemporary poetry and poetics

Maud Newton
literary links, amusements, politics, rants

Darren Barefoot
Technical and creative writing, theatre, Dublin

Rob's Writing Pains
Journey of a struggling writer.

Mad, Mad World
Cara Swann, fiction writer, journalist, "reflections on humanity, random news & my life."

Writeright
Random musings on a writer's life and times.

Flaskaland
Barbara Flaska's compilation of the best online articles about music and culture.

Write Of Way
Samantha Blackmon's written musings on writing (composition and rhetoric).

Alexander b. Craghead: blog
Writing, photography, and watercolors.

Rodney's Painted Pen
Rodney Bohen's daily commentary "on the wondrous two legged beast we fondly refer to as mankind." His pen runneth over.

Frustrated Writer
This one named Nicole.

scribble, scribble, scribble
Journalist Dale Keiger teaches nonfiction scribbling to undergraduate and graduate students at Johns Hopkins University.

The Unofficial Dave Barry Blog
The very one.

The Hive
The official blog of science fiction / horror author Terence West.

William Gibson Blog
Famed author of Neuromancer and Johnny Mnemonic: The Screenplay.

The Word Foundry
Joe Clifford Faust's "blog of a working writer: tracking writing projects, musings on the creative process, occasional side trips into music, media, politics, religion, etc."

A Writer's Diary
By Cynthia Harrison, who has the good sense to quote Virginia Woolf: "The truth is that writing is the profound pleasure and being read the superficial."

Bow. James Bow.
The journal of James Bow and his writing.

Ravenlike
Michael Montoure's weblog about writing, primarily horror and speculative fiction.

Globemix
By David Henry, "a poet's weblog from Aberdeen, Scotland."

Modem Noise
By Adrian Bedford, a "fledgling Pro SF Writer, living in Perth, Australia."

boynton
"A wry writerly blog named in honour of a minor character in a minor Shirley Temple film."

Real Writers Bounce
Holly Lisle's blog, "a novelist's roadmap through the art and ordeal of finding the damned words."

2020 Hindsight
By Susan.

downWrite creative
Phil Houtz's notes on the writing life.

Vivid: pieces from a writer's notebook
Blog of Canadian poet Erin Noteboom.

The Literary Saloon
The literary weblog at the complete review.

Rabbit Blog
The rabbit writes on popular culture.

This Girl's Calendar
Momoka writes short stories.

Twists & Turns
Musings by writer Michael Gates.

Plays and Musicals -- A Writer's Introspective
A blog by John D. Nugent - Composer, Playwright, and Artistic Director of the Johnson City Independent Theatre Company

The American Sentimentalist
"Never has any people endured its own tragedy with so little sense of the tragic." Essays by Mark W. Anderson.

Screenwriting By Blog
David C. Daniel writes a screenplay online. "I've decided to publish the process as a way to push myself through it. From concept to completion, it'll be here."

SeanAlonzo.com
Official site of occult fiction author Sean-Alonzo, exploring symbolism, alternative history, philosophy, secret societies and other areas of the esoteric tradition.

Crafty Screenwriting
Maunderings of Alex Epstein, tv scribe, about life, politics, and the tv show I'm co-creating.

Letters From The Home Front
The life of a writer, 21, home schooled, rural living.

Venal Scene
The blog of bite-sized plays inspired by the news (by Dan Trujillo).

'Plaint of the Playwright
Rob Matsushita, a playwright from Wisconsin, "whines a lot."

I Pity Da Fool!
Glenn's adventures in screenwriting.

Time In Tel-Aviv
Hebrew modern literature at its best, by Corinna Hasofferett.

Big Window
Robin Reagler's poetry blog.

John Baker's Blog
Author of the Sam Turner and Stone Lewis novels.

The Writing Life With Dorothy Thompson
What goes on during a writer's busy day?

The Rebel Housewife
Not just a housewife!

Barry's Personal Blog
A running commentary on writing and the writing life.

Bonnie Blog
Maintained by Bonnie Burton of grrl.com.

Writer's Blog.
By easywriter. "From the walls of caves to cyberspace."

Flogging the Quill
Pursuing the art and craft of compelling storytelling, by an editor, Ray Rhamey.

Man Bytes Hollywood
Sharing tools, strategies and resources for the screenwriter's journey.

Mad for the smell of paper
A writing journal.

The Writing Life
A blog by Katey Schultz.

It Beats Working 9-5
A screenwriting blog by a young Canadian screenwriter.

Stealing Heaven From The Lips Of God
Writer & Artist, Dee Rimbaud reflects upon politics, religion, art, poetry, the meaning of life, the nature of God and why toast always lands butter side down on carpets.

Robert Peake
Heart and Mind, Fully Engage ... a poet's website.

Sidestepping Real
By Ren Powell, poet, children’s writer, essayist and editor.

Suggest a writer's blog

The Writing Life...

"An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's."
J.D. Salinger

"All my best friends are writers and are dead."
A friend over beer, Berkeley, winter, 1959

"And it came to pass that all the stars in the firmament had ceased to shine. But how was anyone to know?"
The Half-Life Conspiracy

After October 31, 2006,
new posts are published at

The Writing Life II

(Posts archived here are from 01/10/03 - 10/31/06)

Friday, April 25, 2003

Girls & Guys
[from a memoir in progress]
Biology rules. For all my interest in astronomy and mathematics, for all my preference in spending a late night with my telescope than with a girl, I still started having wet dreams. I still became more curious with each birthday about the opposite sex, especially when it was naked.

I want to begin with something I’ve remembered vividly for fifty years. This took place when I was in 9th or 10th grade, I believe, putting me in what now would be called the freshman or sophomore year of high school. All the students were standing outside on the school grounds. It may have been a fire drill. I was standing near a group of Hispanic kids. Though I had only a rare black classmate, Hispanic classmates were common. Two guys older than I were admiring an Hispanic girl down the way, and one observed, “Look at all the hair on her arms.” To this the other said, “Think of all the hair on her pussy.”

I can hear that line as if it were spoken only a moment ago. Think of all the hair on her pussy. There was something at once mysterious and forbidden about such a thought, a promise of secrets offering pleasure beyond measure, perhaps made more mysterious, more foreign, by the accent of the speaker. But try as I might, I couldn’t imagine such a thing. I became obsessed with finding out what was so special about a girl’s pubic hair. What was I missing?

The first place to look, of course, was in magazines, but no magazine I was aware of – Playboy, Adam – showed female genitalia or pubic hair. I managed to get hold of some nudist magazines but every crotch had been smudged out, regardless of sex. This, of course, only whetted my desire to see female pubic hair even more. It must be something spectacular to justify hiring someone to smudge out all those crotches!

I became so desperate in my quest to see female pubic hair that I did something incredibly stupid. Lust is irrational. I could solve number theory problems in my journal but I couldn’t figure out that I was about to do something so reckless that it guaranteed I would get caught. Getting caught never even occurred to me.

What I did is come up with a plan so I could see my mother’s pubic hair. The bathroom had a window that faced the driveway. The window was covered by curtains. I went to Mom’s sewing basket and took out a dozen straight pins. I used them to pin the curtains back in what I thought was a very subtle way, creating a narrow slit through which I could see into the bathroom from the driveway. And it worked! The trouble was, Mom grabbed a towel before stepping out of the shower, covering the magic area. When she dropped the towel, her back was to the window.

I saw her breasts, of course, but breasts were nothing. I’d been seeing naked female breasts since Dallas when Dad mailed home movies from Guam full of women of all ages and shapes, naked to the waist in their grass skirts. Boobs were nothing. My quest was for pubic hair.

The next day I went into the bathroom to remove the straight pins of my failed experiment. They were gone from the curtains. Clearly I’d been found out! But mother never mentioned a thing about it to me. My quest continued.

I found an advertisement in a magazine for a European nudist magazine with unretouched photographs. I sent off for it, inserting American money into the envelope, an order on the honor system. I don’t think I actually expected to get the order filled because soon I had totally forgotten about placing it. Several months later I came home from school one day to have mother tell me, “You got something from Denmark in the mail today. I put it on your bed. It looks like a magazine.”

I believe my mother actually thought I had ordered a Danish astronomy magazine. It would be just like me. I closed my bedroom door and opened the magazine-sized envelope with considerable trepidation.

Astounding! Absolutely amazing! Female pubic hair did not disappoint. Think of all the hair on her pussy. How could you not, after seeing such a thing? It was well worth waiting for.

In the Danish nudist magazine, there were no provocative poses. Most of the photographs were of families doing outdoor family things together, such as playing croquet or swimming. But not all of them. My favorite photograph was an action shot of four teenage girls playing volleyball – because the girls could have been my classmates, and they were naked. They also were beautiful, they made me feel hot and bothered, and they all had pubic hair.

I never looked at my female classmates in quite the same way after that. Not that I suddenly became a stud. I seldom dated. I rarely had time, for all the hours I spent keeping track of my variable stars for Harvard Observatory. But I looked at girls differently all the same.

I especially looked differently at a cheerleader named Kathy. She was my first crush. She was almost failing in some subject or other, I don’t remember which, but I do remember that when she asked if I’d help her with her homework – which turned out to mean actually doing it for her – I had no hesitation in complying. And what else can I do for you, Kathy? Think of all …

A few girls, amazingly enough, took an interest in me, but these were the female brains in school, the small minority who took math. and science classes right along with the nerds. A girl named Janet kept asking me to the Sadie Hawkins Dance until one year I said yes. I remember feeling her breasts against my chest when we danced, an extraordinary surprise that seeing movies of half-naked girls in Guam somehow had not prepared me for. Janet kissed me on the lips after I walked her to her door, but I never asked her out again. Too bad, because she grew up into a stunning young woman – and her family owned the biggest jewelry store in Pasadena.

I never had a real girlfriend in high school. I rarely dated. But I was very tight with four guys – Doug, Ed, Matt and John. We were the smartest five guys in school, and if you didn’t believe it, all you had to do was ask us. We were the future scientists of America.

In fact, we actually were the smartest guys in school, or at least had the highest IQs. One day I found a memo in a faculty waste basket that listed the IQs of everyone in the senior class! There we were, the top five, though of course I really didn’t need to know that Matt’s IQ was higher than mine. As I recall, Matt came in highest at 154, which made him an official genius, the only one among us. The lowest I.Q. among us was 135. Mine was 140.

We all got accepted at top colleges. Matt and I went to Cal. Tech., Doug and Ed went to Stanford, and John went to M.I.T. Only Doug and Ed went straight through to graduate. I transferred to Berkeley in the middle of my sophomore year. John joined the Army even before I did. Matt committed suicide.

The circumstances of Matt’s suicide remain puzzling to me. At Cal. Tech. we drifted apart, interestingly enough, because I suddenly discovered that I was a latent jock. Moreover, Matt’s primary interest was chemistry, not mathematics, so we ran in different intellectual circles.

I have a theory about why Matt committed suicide, though I can’t prove it. I think he was gay and couldn’t deal with it in the climate of the 1950s. Additionally, I think his mother put extraordinary pressure on him to succeed – and at Cal. Tech. he learned, before anything else, exactly the same thing that I learned: we weren’t as bright as we had been led to believe we were in high school.

At any rate, the tragedy happened in the summer after our freshman year. One afternoon Matt’s mother phoned the house to ask if I could come over and talk to Matt, who was very upset about something. We lived close to one another, so I hustled over to his house. Matt had a private apartment above the garage. When I went in, I remember he had a wild look in his eyes, unlike anything I’d seen in him before. He talked a lot but wasn’t really making any sense. He obviously was upset but I couldn’t understand, or get him to explain clearly, who or what was disturbing him. But I saw in his room the clue that later became the basis of my theory: he had some gay pornographic magazines. He’d never made any overtures to me in this direction, or to anyone else as far as I knew. But the magazines were like a statement.

I never succeeded in settling him down and finally gave up. I went on home. The next day I heard he had killed himself that night. For a while I felt guilty, wondering if there was something I could have done to help him, but we’d drifted so far apart by then that I knew there wasn’t. He was a genius, he was probably gay, and he had reached one of those moments of personal crisis through which he couldn’t find his way to the other side.

I returned to Cal. Tech. for my sophomore year, now the only representative from PHS’s Class of ’57. I don’t think I knew in October (Cal. Tech. started late) that I’d be gone by January.

4/25/2003 03:52:00 AM | 0 comments

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__The Writing Life

After October 31, 2006, new posts are published at

The Writing Life II

After October 31, 2006,
new posts are published at