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

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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.

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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, June 27, 2003

Dad's death
[from a memoir in progress, which began on 4/13/03]
Dad’s death – like my UFO sighting while observing sunspots as a teenager and like sitting next to Robert Kennedy’s future assassin when learning of President Kennedy’s assassination – was filled with a sense of the mystical. I tell the full story in my essay “The Weight of My Father’s Soul,” which appeared in Oregon Magazine.

After mother’s death, Dad was beside himself. He moved back to New Jersey to be near his relatives. He never got interested in another woman.

Somewhat selfishly, Bill and I convinced him to move back west in order to be closer to his two sons. We found him a nice room in an assisted living building near Eugene, which also was near Bill, whose life was far more stable than mine. I flew to New Jersey to help Dad settle his affairs and to accompany him west.

I’m convinced that Dad decided to die on the east coast. Here is how I pick up the story in my essay:

What I remember most about that trip are the final minutes of my father's life. We were invited to Gubby's for a farewell dinner, and the drive to his country home was spectacular along country roads lined with the bright oranges and reds of a New Jersey fall. I pulled into the parking area near the secluded house and turned off the engine. Reaching for the door, I felt Dad's hand on my knee.

"I'm sure glad I got to see the leaves change before I go," he said.

This remark haunted me for years. At the time, of course, it made perfect sense in its literal meaning: he was happy to see one final New Jersey fall before moving to Oregon. In retrospect, however, I wondered if he were referring to a different kind of "going," if he were speaking of his own death. After all, in only several minutes after the remark, he would be gone from this world.

Gubby and especially his wife Betty were loving caregivers to my father. They phoned him daily and saw him as often as possible. They'd been concerned, I'd learned, because Chick had been losing a little weight lately, and when we walked up to the house, the first thing Gubby said was, "Chick, I think you've gained back some of that weight."

We entered the kitchen, and Gubby immediately came in behind us with a portable scale.

"Step on this," he said, setting the scale on the floor.

I didn't see what the weight read but Gubby said, "Look, you've gained three pounds!"

They had a weight chart for Dad on the wall, and Betty wrote down the new figure.

Then the scale went to zero. Then my Dad stepped off the scale and without a word headed for the bathroom. Then he fell dead

Apparently the battery on the scale had gone dead just before my father died. But the story doesn’t stop here.

It was late when I returned to Gubby's. I'd been invited to spend the night and accepted, rather than returning alone to my father's apartment several hamlets away.

I was sitting in the kitchen, drinking a beer, when I noticed the scale on the floor. I got up and slowly walked to it. Then I stepped up onto it.

The scale registered my weight.

I stepped down and up again. My weight appeared again.

"The battery isn't dead," I said.

Gubby and Betty came forward, and each stepped on the scale. It was working perfectly.

"Why did it register zero?" I wondered aloud.

Somewhere I'd read that, according to some ancient superstition or wisdom, the soul left the body at the moment of death. Had the scale registered the departure of my Dad's soul from his body, only moments before he came crashing down onto the bathroom floor?

It's a ridiculous possibility, of course, and one that still haunts me.

One thing Dad did after Mom’s death is often tell me he loved me. I told him I loved him, too. Don’t wait, he said, because one day it might be too late. Apparently he hadn’t told this to Mom as often as he felt he should. Indeed, from my perspective, their marriage was not a particularly happy one after he became a civilian but particularly after his stroke when, according to mother, he became less social and less active. She once told me that Dad was “a great date and a lousy husband.” Still, she stayed with him long after her two sons had left the house, long after she’d completed her obligations as a mother.

I remember them happy in Pasadena. They went out a lot, and they had a lot of friends. Friends often filled the house for canasta parties. In Medford I only knew them on visits and increasingly (especially after Dad’s stroke in the early 1970s) they bickered or, more commonly, stopped listening to one another. Sometimes visiting them would be almost surrealistic, as each would converse with you without paying any attention to the thread of the other conversation.

Yet Dad had a hard time living without her. After she was gone, perhaps he realized how much he loved her. Dad and I did not talk as intimately as mother and I did, but once he told me that he had never been in love with another woman or ever cheated on Mom. I suspect he must have had sex with prostitutes or someone else during shore leaves in the Navy. I suspect he must have known about oral sex to ask mother to perform it. But in his mind this was not cheating, and he loved her more than he was able to tell her while she was alive.

I like to remember my parents as they appear in the home movies, laughing together during a block party in Dallas, or embraced in front of a Christmas tree in Pasadena. They were married when it was fashionable to endure marital problems for the sake of the children, and I have no doubts that my childhood was happier than it would have been in our modern age when parents think of themselves first and their children second. There is something to be said for parental sacrifice. Of course, this is not a theory I practiced. Far from it. But I admire and thank my parents for providing a stable home full of family activities and joy.

Dad, like Mom, was cremated. I put a part of his ashes in the creek in the park in Milford. Part I gave to Bill, who scattered them in the Willamette River near Eugene, and I scattered the rest in the Shakespeare Garden in Washington Park, which overlooks the Portland skyline. I wanted to scatter part with Mom’s ashes but by this time her fishing hole was nowhere to be found.

I miss not having a parental gravesite to visit. Even visiting the Shakespeare Garden is not quite the same thing as standing at a gravestone and reading a name carved in stone. Cemeteries exist for the survivors.

Dick’s mother knew this. When she learned that Dick wanted to be cremated, she made sure he got the best of both worlds.

6/27/2003 06:05:00 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