Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.
Writing
-- G.K. Chesterton
A sample from the archives:
- Two poems I read at the Vermont Studio Center, by request:
- an occasional poem, "Paean: E-Mail" (multiple versions)
- a sermonette, "Whaddya, STOOPIT?"
- a Lenten meditation, "Peopling Heaven"
- Haiku Ameriku (selection)
- A Boomer's Brief Bio
- a satyr play, "Euripides in N-Town"
- a harmless little essay, "The Playwright Directs"
- a short rant, "'Beyond Carrots & Sticks'? I Don't Think So"
News and Non'ts
The September 2000 issue of Yahoo! Internet Life contains my poem, "Paean: E-Mail", commissioned for the launch of a new feature, The E-Mail Chronicles, which also proffers prose pieces by Ben Stein, Esther Dyson, Susan Cheever, Jennifer Eno, Jonathan Rosen, Cliff Stoll, and George Plimpton. I've posted a copy of it here, both as published and as submitted -- the latter being somewhat more full-bodied, but I wasn't about to get any more than the full page spread accorded to George Plimpton!Following the Ploughshares Seminar (see below), the three Metro New Yorkers in the group -- Aaron Alexander, Jackie Steiner, and Bill Bly -- got together on a more or less monthly basis to have dinner and talk about the writing life. Although we all hated it, we couldn't think of anything else to call it but the Well Writers Group. In between noshing sessions, we traded manuscripts, then got on the telephone and gave each other detailed critiques. The result was that every one of my fiction drafts (except for the hypertexts) has now had a thorough going-over -- and boy do I have a lot of work to do! We ran out of manuscripts to show each other in May, and so are on deep standby for the moment, but as soon as something worth looking at comes out of the word-processor (or, in Jackie's case, the manual typewriter!), we'll be back!
In August 1997, I took part in the Ploughshares International Fiction Writing Seminar (info: dgriffin@emerson.edu), which was held in a Renaissance castle (with two moats!), Kasteel Well, on the river Maas (Meuse in France) in southeast Holland, about 20 miles north of Venlo. 36 "students," 6 "faculty," a full complement of ducks, geese, a crane, a hawk, and some brilliantly colored game birds (I never found out their name) ran the castle staff ragged for eleven days, caroused the nights away at a riverside potation establishment, and picked nits out of each other's fiction by day.
And, of course, hypertext is writing too...
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Last updated: 21 September 2000