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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Literary archive

The Sextant Press

Personal home page

Electronic screenwriting tutorial

References

Bookstore
Highlights:

Finalist, Oregon Book Award

Practical Screenwriting

Love At Ground Zero

More books.

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 18, 2003

Pasadena
[from a memoir in progress]
Personal adjustments aside, in many ways Pasadena must have looked like Eden to my family in 1948. Our house at 2862 Estado Street faced north to a spectacular view of the brown San Gabriel mountains. Our front yard was lined with sycamore trees. In the back yard were apricot, lemon, avacado and peach trees. The house had two bedrooms, one for my parents and one for Bill and me. We had a dining room and a den. The back yard was large enough that later my dad, with the help of his dad, would build a considerable patio, shaped like a navigator’s compass. Through much of his Navy career, my dad had been a navigator.

Our neighborhood in east Pasadena was middle-class and lily white, bordered on the west by a large avenue that marked the end of the route of the famous Rose Parade on New Year’s Day and on the east by a large gully, called “the wash,” across which was a poorer neighborhood of Hispanics.

I started school in Pasadena in the third grade, at an elementary school across from the park where the Rose Parade floats lined up for viewing. Today Pasadena High School is located there. I have a strong memory of my first day in school because the experience was very unpleasant.

The teacher began to call the roll. When she got to my name, I quickly stood up, stood at attention, and said in my southern drawl, “Yes, ma’am!” Immediately I was surrounded by laughter as all my classmates thought this was the most hilarious thing they had seen in their lives. I burst into tears.

Welcome to Southern California. Shortly after this trauma, my parents informed me that I would be taking a speech therapy class after school several days a week. Apparently the school administration had called them in to suggest this, arguing that my future would be bleak indeed unless I learned how to talk like a human being, which is to say, like a Californian.

So a dozen kids with southern accents began meeting after school to learn how to speak human. We played games, one being fish, and if you didn’t ask for a card with a proper accent, your request was denied. I don’t remember how long I took speech therapy in the Pasadena School System but the brainwashing mostly took. Now and again I would say something as an adult to someone that would lead him to ask if I’d ever been in the south, but this hasn’t happened to me in decades, although my wife still accuses me of saying "beautiful" like a southerner.

But more than my accent was changed. Speech therapy also gave me the notion that “southern” was stupid. I say this because I remember how put off I was years later, sitting in a calculus classroom at the California Institute of Technology, listening to a teacher with a southern accent explain a point of mathematical theory. I couldn’t get past his accent, couldn’t get myself to accept that this joker with the accent actually knew what he was talking about. This bias, I’m happy to say, was temporary. Today I find southern accents perfectly charming and, when spoken by a woman, very sexy.

Despite the handicap of my accent, I did well in school in Pasadena. In fact, halfway through the third grade I was moved up to the fourth grade, doing both grades in my first year at George Hale Elementary School. Part of the reason for my promotion was my age. With a birthday in October, after the school year began, I was older than many kids since in Dallas I started school 11 months later than if I had been born in September. I was moved up to be with more kids my own age. I think they must have studied geography in the last half of third grade because I missed it and have been ignorant of the subject ever since.

My memories of Pasadena include my first memory of having lots of friends, of being a social being. According to family stories, I was something of a ringleader, always organizing kids into activities like track meets or baseball board game tournaments or star-gazing parties. The shy kid on the pony in Dallas was growing into, if not an extrovert, at least into a young person with social skills.

I have only fond memories of Pasadena, whether those memories were filmed or not. I lived at home until 1959 when I transferred from Cal. Tech. to the University of California at Berkeley, and many of these years will be related in later sections of this memoir. Today I consider myself lucky to have had such an idyllic childhood.

In November, 2002, I returned to my old neighborhood for the first time in decades. I was in Los Angeles to teach at a screenwriting conference and took the side trip to Pasadena. My neighborhood had been changed forever when much of it was taken out for a new freeway, called the Foothills Freeway today, one of the reasons my parents moved to Medford, Oregon, shortly after I left home. I expected to find little that was pleasant in my old neighborhood but still was driven to check it out and see if I could remember anything.

I was astounded at how familiar the neighborhood looked. Our house and block on Estado Street had been taken out for the freeway but the houses across the street were still standing, Estado Street being the last street before bare land that stretched to the gigantic pillars holding up the Foothills Freeway. You still could drive north into the neighborhood from location of my old house at 2862. And when you did this, almost everything looked exactly as I remembered it. The cars were new but the homes, the streets lined with sycamore trees, everything looked just as I remembered it when I rode my bike through the neighborhood on my paper route. In the distance was the drone freeway traffic, but here in my old neighborhood I felt a tranquility straight out of the 1950s. I felt as if I were a character in Pleasantville, thrust back through time into a less stressful and anxious era.

I learned something else about Pasadena. It felt like home. Much of the city had changed hugely, of course. But the San Gabriels to the north looked just as I remembered them, the same brown mountains I had grown up with. What had been the seedier side of town when I grew up, full of bars and bums, where after the Army I would “slum” to drink with “winos” who somehow seemed romantic to a budding writer, now was called Old Pasadena and was a trendy, gentrified area full of sidewalk cafes and art galleries.

After graduating from UCLA I had fled Southern California for graduate school in Oregon with a promise never to return. The Pasadena I had grown up in, the Southern California I knew as a kid, had been ruined by growth and expansion. I never expected to return. Yet in 2002, almost forty years after I had fled, I felt nostalgic as I roamed through Pasadena, like a long lost traveler returning home.

I could live in Pasadena again. I doubt if circumstances will lead to this but there is something pleasant in the knowledge that this town in which I grew from a kid into a young adult still feels like home. There’s a sense in which you can go home again after all.

4/18/2003 04:53:00 AM | 0 comments

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Sketch says, "Happiness is sunshine and a bone."

__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