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Charles Deemer MFA, Playwriting, University of Oregon Writing faculty,
Portland State University (part-time) Retired playwright and screenwriter.
Active novelist, librettist and teacher.
cdeemer@yahoo.com.
Links:
Literary archive
Personal home page
Photo
Electronic screenwriting tutorial
Online writing classes
References
Bookstore
Highlights:
Dress Rehearsals
A memoir
Love At Ground Zero
Seven Plays
Oregon Book Award finalist
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.
Suggest a writer's blog
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The Writing Life...
"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
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Sunday, November 30, 2003
Real Audio Screenwriting Tips
One of the more popular features of my original screenwriting/playwriting website (1994-2001) were my Real Audio screenwriting tips. I've added them to my literary archive at the University of North Carolina. Go to index.
I've also added my old screenwriting columns from the Hollywood Network (1995 on), called "The Screenwriter in Cyberspace." Go to index.
Some of this material is now dated, some not, but these additions contributed to early screenwriting activity on the Internet.
11/30/2003 03:52:34 PM |
Thursday, November 27, 2003
Being thankful
Anyone who has survived a sordid past has much to be thankful for. Perhaps no one has expressed this with as much passion as Raymond Carver in his short poem "Gravy" (my own modest contributions to the genre include an essay, Liquor and Lit and a screenplay, Recovery).
Here is Carver's poem:
Gravy
No other word will do. For that's what it was. Gravy.
Gravy, these past ten years.
Alive, sober, working, loving and
being loved by a good woman. Eleven years
ago he was told he had six months to live
at the rate he was going. And he was going
nowhere but down. So he changed his ways
Somehow. He quit drinking! And the rest?
After that it was all gravy, every minute
of it, up to and including when he was told about,
well, some things that were breaking down and
building up inside his head. "Don't weep for me,"
he said to his friends. "I'm a lucky man.
I've had ten years longer than I or anyone
expected. Pure gravy. And don't forget it."
11/27/2003 05:23:19 AM |
Wednesday, November 26, 2003
Happy Thanksgiving!
Hope you have a good Thanksgiving with friends and family. Here is a Thanksgiving ecard I received that may be the classiest ecard I ever received. Worth the few minutes wait it takes to load (at least on my system).
11/26/2003 08:03:03 AM |
Monday, November 24, 2003
New project
I'm going to work with L.A. jazz singer/songwriter Lynne Fuqua, who wrote songs for several of my plays in the 1980s, to convert Bedrooms & Bars (the short NY version) into a jazz musical. This dark story will not be Oklahoma but I think it may work even better with music than without. And I look forward to working with the very talented Lynne after so many years. Onward.
11/24/2003 02:35:27 PM |
Saturday, November 22, 2003
40 years ago today
All of us have experiences that defy rational explanation and are somehow wrapped in mystical or other-worldly possibilities. I've had three, all of which are explored in detail in my memoir which began here last spring: my flying saucer citing while looking at sunspots with my telescrope as a teenager; the circumstances surrounding the death of my father; and the cirumstances surrounding my learning of the JFK assassination.
40 years ago today I was sitting in a classroom in Southern California, returning to college after the Army. The back door of the small room burst open and a teacher shouted, "Kennedy's been shot!" I turned to my right to look back, and in so doing faced the student sitting beside me, a foreign student whom I sometimes tutored. His name was Sirhan Sirhan. I learned of JFK's assassination while seated next to the future assassin of his brother, Bobby.
When RFK was shot, and I saw the photograph of Sirhan in the newspaper, I tracked down my old teacher from Nov. 22nd and asked him if this really was the same guy who had been in our class. It was. What do I remember about him? Mostly that he belonged to a small, unpopular group of foreign students who celebrated JFK's death (and who stopped coming to class thereafter).
This is the sort of accident that really doesn't mean anything -- except that it's weird, and it feels weird.
Another memory from that day is that in an English class we were studying the W.H. Auden poem that begins, "About suffering they were never wrong, the old Masters..." and, of course, they weren't wrong at all. (Later Auden came to campus and as president of the English Club, I was his host. At a reception he drank over a dozen martinis.)
11/22/2003 07:26:46 AM |
Friday, November 21, 2003
Movie news
I don't get excited about movies often any more. The last films to take my breath away were The Pledge and The Hours. Yesterday I saw another, The Human Stain. Nicole Kidman is extraordinary in two of these films. She is a rare actor, who becomes the character movie to movie (movie stars bring the material to themselves; actors take themselves to the material). Interestingly, all three of these films are based on novels and all have dark, or relatively dark, endings. Tells you something about my tastes!
And the Nicholl Screenwriting Fellowships have been announced. Here are the winners. It's a crap shoot. Mike Rich, who won a few years back with Finding Forrester, also entered the script in the Austin Heart of Film competition, almost as prestigious, and didn't even make the first cut. Before entering Nicholl, he tried to sell the script and everyone rejected it, including Sony. Six weeks after he won, Sony bought the same script they had rejected less than three months earlier. Such is life in LaLaLand.
But publishing has gotten just as crazy. A few days ago the National Book Awards were announced. Stephen King got a special award and in his speech scolded the judges for their traditional bias against "popular literature." Then the winner of the best novel award got up and argued that popular culture was irrelevant, pointing out that she not only has never read King (she is too busy reading Conrad and the classics) but has never owned a television set. This is one literary lady! The culture wars continue.
In the almost forty years I've been writing, I've seen a great rise in commercialism and, worse, in outright hype. Advertising controls the fate of books and movies today. One of the reasons I am disappointed in most movies I see and can't finish most "best selling" novels I begin, perhaps, is that my expectations are too high from the hype that gets attached to them.
After the first of the year, I too am returning to the classics -- a large reading project, George Chapman's translation of Homer, followed by Kazantzakis' sequel to the Odyssey. Can't wait! Onward.
11/21/2003 11:52:10 AM |
Wednesday, November 19, 2003
(Let it snow)^3
Almost never snows in Pdx -- 1997 last time any stuck -- but a surprise snow storm today, though it only stuck in isolated neighborhoods ... and we are one, with almost two inches on the ground. Kinda exciting and different for Puddle City.
11/19/2003 01:38:18 PM |
Marriage, family, and other controversies
The Massachusetts Supreme Court, by permitting same-sex marriages, may have added fuel to next year's election by raising the questions, what is marriage? what is a family?
These same questions were raised dramatically in my play Famililly, which won the 1997 Crossing Borders International New Play Competition and was a finalist for the 1998 Oregon Book Award. This is the story of a dying patriarch who tries to come to terms with the reality that his only grandson will be raised by his gay son and partner.
The play is set on the day of the Bicentennial, just before a costume party. The characters look like our Founding Fathers -- and they end up discussing and debating issues with the same urgency. In a moment of the play I especially like, I juxtapose and layer action in a way that only can be done in live theater. In my recent memoiir, I explain it this way:
In another play, Famililly, I create a counterpoint between a tense realistic scene (family members confronting the patriarch, who is dying of cancer) and a fanciful rewriting of the “Declaration of Independence” as a declaration of the rights of children against the tyranny of traditional family values:
EMILY: Do it [commit suicide] bravely, not cruelly.
GEORGE: Who's being cruel here? Is it too much to ask for the support of my family?
(Vincent steps out to address the audience, continuing his one-man show. [note: Vincent wears 18th C. costume])
VINCENT (to audience): "The history of the present Family in the United States is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of absolute Disregard for the well-being and security of children. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world."
GEORGE: I wanted family support and didn't get it. You turned on me yourself.
EMILY: I apologize for that. Seeing what was in the bag made it seem more real to me than before. I panicked for a minute.
VINCENT (to audience): "Over half the marriages in the United States end in divorce; almost one in three divorced adults cite abuse as the reason for termination;"
EMILY: This isn't easy for any of us, Dad.
VINCENT (to audience): "one-quarter of the violent crimes in the U.S. is wife assault;"
GEORGE: Please don't cry, mother. I need you to be strong now.
MARTHA: I don't think I have any strength left.
(George moves to Martha.)
VINCENT (to audience): "A woman is physically abused in this country every nine seconds;"
GEORGE: Give me your hand.
(Martha does. George helps her to her feet.)
VINCENT (to audience): "Two-thirds of the attacks are by someone she knows, often a husband or boyfriend;"
GEORGE: I'm asking you to come upstairs with me.
MARTHA: Are you sure this is the only way?
GEORGE: Positive.
VINCENT (to audience): "Sixty percent of battered women are beaten while they are pregnant;"
MARTHA: Don't you want to wait and see if June changes her mind?
GEORGE: I wish I could wait for a lot of things. But I can't.
VINCENT (to audience): "Forty-two percent of murdered women are killed by their intimate male partners;"
This is a layered moment, one actor playing against the others, that cannot be duplicated on the flat, two-dimensional movie screen. Scenes like this lose all their power when put to film. But these are the very scenes that make live theater a unique form of narrative, as it should be, rather than a dress rehearsal for a future movie, as “realistic” theater so often is.
A theater company in Massachusetts should do this play. Perfect timing.
11/19/2003 07:48:25 AM |
Tuesday, November 18, 2003
Update
Must be out of my funk -- or at least I got a ton of work done today. Wrote a chapter on the novel and finished script of my next project at the Unitarian church, an appreciation of Paul Robeson. Onward.
11/18/2003 04:54:00 PM |
Monday, November 17, 2003
Time marches on
Pass out my take-home final to my university screenwriting students today ... light at the end of the tunnel and all that. Been a harder term than usual, the one night a week more exhausting than two shorter nights a week (which I go back to for winter and spring terms). All the same, managing to crawl forward on the current project, Patriots. Love At Ground Zero is at the publishers finally. Onward.
11/17/2003 09:57:11 AM |
Friday, November 14, 2003
MY GET UP AND GO HAS GOT UP AND WENT
(as sung by Pete Seeger)
How do I know my youth is all spent?
My get up and go has got up and went
In spite of it all, I'm able to grin
When I think of the places my get up has been
Old age is golden, I think I've heard said
But sometimes I wonder as I crawl into bed
My ears in a drawer, my teeth in a cup
My eyes on the table until I wake up
As sleep dims my vision, I say to myself
Is there anything else I should lay on the shelf?
But nations are warring and business is vexed
So I'll stick around to see what happens next
cho.
When I was younger, my slippers were red
I could kick up my heels right over my head
When I was older my slippers were blue
But still I could dance the whole night thru
Now I am old, my slippers are black
I huff to the store and I puff my way back
But never you laugh, I don't mind at all
I'd rather be huffing than not puff at all
cho
I get up each morning and dust off my wits
Open the paper and read the obits
If I'm not there, I know I'm not dead
So I eat a good breakfast and go back to bed
11/14/2003 02:42:59 PM |
What goes around, comes around
Interesting story on NPR this morning. In India, boy babies are so much more wanted than girl babies that an illegal, underground sex-determination industry has risen so mothers of girl babies can abort. Boy babies, after all, grow to adults who will support their parents. Girl babies grow into brides requiring expensive dowries. So many girl fetuses are being aborted that the population is shifting to male dominance. Indeed, in twenty years, predicts one doctor, there will be so few females of marrying age that males will have to compete for them -- by offering dowries.
If you were an alien watching this planet, wouldn't you take one look and turn around and speed back to your own galaxy? Or would you use us as the basis of a galactic sitcom? A destination resort of primitive life forms?
11/14/2003 07:23:30 AM |
Wednesday, November 12, 2003
Transitions
Took a big step this morning: phoned Social Security and officially applied for my retirement benefits. After the first of the year, I should be a ward of the state.
The Funk has become a funk but by the end of the week, with the wife back home, I should be able to return to my wonderful normal routine. In the meantime, what sanity I have comes from our dog. He keeps me laughing. Onward.
11/12/2003 01:05:03 PM |
Saturday, November 08, 2003
Funk
In a real funk this weekend. Part of it is that my wife is out of town, and I miss her. I feel like I'm coming down with the flu. I have to think of something to fill four hours in my godawful long Monday night class (hope I never get one night a week again!). LOVE is delayed because the small publisher ran out of ISBN numbers and is waiting for a new batch. Etc etc whine whine. Thank the gods for the dog -- he stays the same! The older I get, the more I like routine.
11/8/2003 01:16:50 PM |
TV execs
Except for sports and news, I don't watch much network TV. One reason is that every time I get interested in a series, they cut it. I loved the Richard Dreyfus as a college prof series, for example, which quickly got the ax. Now the only 2 new shows I like, Skin and Brotherhood, both got canned.
Thank the gods for public TV! Masterpiece Theatre is doing a fine new Dr. Zhivago at the moment, concludes Sunday I believe.
Columnist today pointed out how TV execs used to give shows time to build an audience. Seinfeld and Hill Street Blues both took time to do this. Today they would be quickly canned because they weren't immediate hits. So the bottom line continues to spread like a destructive virus through the popular arts.
11/8/2003 09:52:44 AM |
Wednesday, November 05, 2003
Coming soon
Before the end of the year, I hope.
11/5/2003 04:15:22 PM |
Update
Just approved the cover for the novel, and I'm jazzed. I really like it. Onward.
11/5/2003 01:58:52 PM |
Tuesday, November 04, 2003
Letter to a dead soul brother
Hey Dick,
It's been a while since I've written so I thought I'd bring you up to date.
Your number two son graduates this week from the DePaul Treatment Center, having completed ninety days of intensive in-patience care. I've visited him most weekends and am optimistic he will keep off the booze this time around. For one, his liver is bad and the doctor scared the bejesus out of him, telling him drinking from here out would be like pouring gasoline on fire. I think the doc got his attention. Fear of death is not the worst motivation for sobriety. It was ours, although the gods were kinder to me in that regard. I am well aware I am living on borrowed time and try daily to make the most of it. Anyway I'm driving him to Newport on Thursday, where he still has some lose ends on his various legal problems. After tying those up, he plans to move to northern Idaho to be near his brother. His mother also is retiring up there in February. So he'll be around lots of family support.
On my end, things have changed a tad. I've returned to fiction, just had a novel out with another short novel soon behind it, and am working on a new one. I'm in a funny place in that I've never written better and never been more invisible. On the brighter side, I've found a small publisher in Texas to call home -- I like that it's in Texas since today I would talk like a Texan were it not for the brainwashing services of Speech Therapy in the southern California school system after we moved there. I've always had a soft spot in my heart for Texas, and I like remembering going to school barefoot. The point is, my work does have a home, and my books do get into the libraries around here (and I usually put a free ebook version on the Internet). They exist, which is the point. I am not writing for a marketplace any more (well, if I ever did) but for myself, trying to write things I can look at a year later and be proud of. I feel like I'm doing that although it is yet too soon to tell. As you know, my taste is so eccentric that it's no wonder in writing to please myself I please so few others. Two years ago, looking back at my body of work, I found myself most admiring my short fiction of the 1960s and 1970s and wondered if I'd ever write with balls like that again. I'm happy to say I am.
I visited your mother last summer, as I do every summer, and she is still sharp as a tack and bitching about outliving you. I think she'll probably outlive me, too.
That's about it, brother. Miss you and think of you often. So do your sons, big time. Till next time, Deemer
11/4/2003 10:30:41 AM |
Story strategy
Have started the prose (from the screenplay draft) of the novel-in-progress, and a story strategy has emerged. The screenplay follows the wife of my central couple. In the novel, I'm alternating chapters between points of view of the wife and husband, formalizing this in the title of each chapter. This means inventing a lot more new material for the husband than for the wife.
Meanwhile, disapproved of the cover for Love At Ground Zero but it doesn't take much to tweak it to my satisfaction. Hoping to see the corrections today or soon.
It occurred to me I can combine these last two short novels within one cover, calling it After 9/11: Two Short Novels. May do exactly this.
First things first. Going to have great fun with Patriots, a harder novel than the last one. Good shot of finishing the prose draft this year, then rewrite through winter, have it ready by spring or early summer. Onward.
11/4/2003 06:07:04 AM |
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__The Writing Life
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