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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The Sextant Press

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Electronic screenwriting tutorial

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Finalist, Oregon Book Award

Practical Screenwriting

Love At Ground Zero

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

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

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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.

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Real Writers Bounce
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Blog of Canadian poet Erin Noteboom.

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The literary weblog at the complete review.

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The rabbit writes on popular culture.

This Girl's Calendar
Momoka writes short stories.

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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)

 
Tuesday, June 03, 2003  
"Linda"
[from a memoir in progress, which began on 4/13/03]
I arrived a few days early. Tom had a hot tub, and I was alone in it one afternoon while everyone was at work when a young woman suddenly entered, stripped naked, and slipped into the water across from me. “Hi, wolf man,” she said. It was “Linda,” Tom’s daughter, who was around ten when I’d first met the Andersons and Crawfords, a homely, gangling girl with braces, one of many kids I’d chased across the lawn while doing my wolf man impersonation. Now Linda was a gorgeous young woman, and she was naked in the hot tub with me.

We didn’t exactly cause a scandal but we raised a lot of eyebrows. Linda was recently divorced, I was lonely, and we hit it off fabulously despite our considerable age difference. As the house filled with guests for Thanksgiving, we escaped to walk around the city for hours as Linda gave me the grand tour of San Francisco. There was no hanky-panky going on, just a lot of good company and even more laughter. We laughed very well together.

We started corresponding after I returned to Portland, then talking on the phone for hours at a time. Eventually I invited her to visit me “in God’s country.”

Linda was a talented folk musician by this time, with a wide range of musical interests. She could sing jazz, pop, gospel, and everything else. She often accompanied her folk songs on a dulcimer that her father had built for her. She also proved to be a talented song writer.

The relationship turned romantic, and Linda moved in with me in Portland. Somehow Tom Anderson didn’t disown me for shacking up with his daughter.

I was working on Country Northwestern, a story about two country singers who used to be married and unexpectedly meet in the final days before their home town gets flooded by a dam project. The play required several original country songs, and I put Linda to work on them. One song became the title song for the play:

GAYLE: (singing) I was born in a place where the sky was always clear
Where you took the trees for granted in a forest live with deer
Where every face was friendly and every voice was kind
And that country northwestern soothed your mind

(Chorus) I've been through Kentucky, Oklahoma, Tennessee
But my home in the west won't let me be
Where the clean sparklin' river comes flowin' through the pines
Got that country northwestern on my mind

Another was a beautiful love song. I had to change the play to find a place for it:

BUCK: (singing) I've always been a rambler
I never settled down
I took the road to be my own best friend
But lately I've been finding
All my roads lead back to you
I've found my home
You are my journey's end
BUCK AND GAYLE: (singing) Thank heaven for you
You've always seen me through
You know the ways to ease my troubled mind
Thank heaven for you
For the love that's been so true
You are the one I never thought I'd find

Her songs were perfect, far better than anything I expected.

I liked one of her songs so much that I decided to end the play with it:

BUCK: (singing) Well, I once met an agent
He said he liked my song
Said he'd make me famous
But my image was all wrong
He was talking about a sequined suit
As I headed for the door
I guess you just can't make a star
From a ramblin' dinosaur

(Chorus) Hangin' in
Hangin' on
Another drink, my friend, and another song
Hangin' on
Hangin' in
If life is just a game, my friend, then few folks are playin' to win

( FADE TO BLACKOUT. The play is over.)

Not since Carol’s partnership as my editor was I working so closely with the same woman I was sleeping with. I was beginning to feel the possibility of having a soul mate again. The period surrounding the development of Country Northwestern remains one of the happiest memories of my life.

This play, more than any of mine, reflects the influence of Dick Crooks. The story is set in the “God’s country” of loggers and backwoods culture introduced to me by Dick. The humor in the play especially owes a debt to him. A practical joke I use in the play was first pulled by Dick on Dee, in a backwoods tavern in northern Idaho:

BUCK: I know some tricks. I can turn a glass into a peach.
DOTTY: Lord, that trick's older than I am.
MRS. AMES: Lester can have you pick a card from a deck and put it back and then when he shuffles, the card just flies up into the air!

(Buck moves to the bar for a glass and a bar towel.)

BUCK: What we have here is an ordinary glass, am I right? And here you see one ordinary bar towel.
DOTTY: There can't be anybody who ever knew a logger who doesn't know that trick.
BUCK: You ever seen a glass turned into a peach, lady?
MRS. AMES: Oh no, but it sounds wonderful!
BUCK: Great. I'm going to turn this here glass into a peach. But I need your help. We drape the towel over the glass like this ... and say a few magic words, abra-cadabra ... and now I want you to hold onto the glass through the towel while I take the other end. There you go.

(Mrs. Ames holds the glass through the towel and Buck will begin to twist the other end of the towel.)

BUCK: A few more magic words ... abra ... cadabra ... shazam!

(The towel is twisted and Buck suddenly moves his end to his crotch: a huge phallus is suggested, with Mrs. Ames holding its head.)

BUCK: Now ain't that a peach!
MRS. AMES: Oh my!

The Pardon and Country Northwestern established me as a playwright to keep an eye on. Watching my growing reputation was the artistic director of a new group of theater artists in town, who had become known as the Minnesota Mafia because they’d moved en masse to Portland to start a theater company. They’d selected Portland after doing some research, deciding here was the best prospect for getting on the ground floor of a significant growth in regional theater. The artistic director was Gary O’Brien, and his new company was called the New Rose Theatre. He invited me to be the company’s playwright-in-residence.
6/03/2003 06:49:00 AM | 0 comments

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