The INTERNET WRITING WORKSHOP

Notes For November 10th, 2009

noreply@blogger.com (Eric) — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 21:56:00 +0000

This Day In Writing History

On November 10th, 1973, copies of Slaughterhouse-Five, (1969) the classic novel by legendary writer Kurt Vonnegut, were burned by administrators of a high school in Drake, North Dakota, as per the orders of the Drake School Board.

An English teacher at the high school had assigned Slaughterhouse-Five to his students for classroom study. One student complained to her mother about the profane language in the novel, and the disgruntled parent contacted the principal, who then brought the issue to the attention of the board of education.

The Drake School Board decided not only to ban Slaughterhouse-Five from the classroom and the school library, but also to confiscate students' personal copies of the novel and burn them. Most of the students refused to turn over their books, so school officials searched their lockers and took them. All the seized copies of Slaughterhouse-Five (and other books banned by the Board, including James Dickey's classic suspense thriller Deliverance) were tossed into the school's furnace and burned.

When Kurt Vonnegut learned that copies of his novel had been burned, he wrote the following to a member of the Drake School Board:

Dear Mr. McCarthy:

I am writing to you in your capacity as chairman of the Drake School Board. I am among those American writers whose books have been destroyed in the now famous furnace of your school.

If you were to bother to read my books, to behave as educated persons would, you would learn that they are not sexy, and do not argue in favor of wildness of any kind. They beg that people be kinder and more responsible than they often are. It is true that some of the characters speak coarsely. That is because people speak coarsely in real life.

If you and your board are now determined to show that you in fact have wisdom and maturity when you exercise your powers over the education of your young, then you should acknowledge that it was a rotten lesson you taught young people in a free society when you denounced and then burned books — books you hadn't even read. You should also resolve to expose your children to all sorts of opinions and information, in order that they will be better equipped to make decisions and to survive.

Again: you have insulted me, and I am a good citizen, and I am very real.

Nine years later, in the case of Island Trees School District v. Pico (1982), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment limits the authority of school boards to remove books from middle and high school libraries. Students had sued the Island Trees School Board over their decision to ban Slaughterhouse-Five and other books, which the Board had declared "anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-[Semitic], and just plain filthy."

Public burnings of books still take place in the United States. Most recently, church groups have conducted public burnings of J.K. Rowling's series of Harry Potter fantasy novels, which they accuse of encouraging children to practice real witchcraft and dabble in devil worship.

Quote Of The Day

"Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae." - Kurt Vonnegut

Vanguard Video

Today's video features Kurt Vonnegut in a 2005 interview on the PBS program NOW, talking about Slaughterhouse-Five. Enjoy!

IWW Members' Publishing Successes

noreply@blogger.com (Jody Ewing) — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 21:30:00 +0000

Internet Writing Workshop members continue to find publishing success in all venues, including works appearing on both stage and screen.

It's been a productive week with some exceptional announcements, and a hearty congratulations goes out to all for these well deserved successes.

Jody
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Barry Basden

WWII IN HD, a 10-part color series will be shown on the History Channel on 15-19 November 2009. The series will tell how the war unfolded around twelve people, including Captain Charles Scheffel, the subject of CRACK! AND THUMP, a book I wrote based on my interviews with him.

View the trailer and learn more about the series.

Thanks to all, especially Diane Diekman, whose frank and expert critique of an early draft helped make this such a gratifying project.

Charlie, who turned 90 in June, was recently honored at the WWII museum in New Orleans. He is one of the many citizen-soldiers who helped save the world from tyranny. But he would be the first to tell you he is no hero, that he was just trying to do his job and survive in the difficult circumstances thrust upon his generation.

We owe them all so much. I'm glad I could tell at least one of their stories.

Also, Long Story Short has published "Patrolling Afghanistan," a microfiction piece.

Though I'm only one degree of separation from a loved one serving there, this is fiction, but just barely....

We're a long way from WWII.

Jeannette Cezanne

My new short play, "Mama's Boy," will be part of the Fall Playwrights' Festival at the Provincetown Theater in Provincetown, MA, starting this weekend.

Mama's Boy is a timely story about a middle-aged gay couple dealing with the sudden responsibility of caring for aging and ill parents.

Dawn Goldsmith

Editor of 50 to 1, Glenn Binger wrote a guest blog that is now up at Observations. I know it's a popular market with IWW fiction writers, so maybe you'll find it interesting. I was pleased to have him.

Thanks to everyone who suggested online jobs. They are out there, and I actually got one! Here's the announcement:

Wooden Horse Publishing is very proud to introduce our four new news editors:

Shelagh McNally of Pincourt, QC, Canada
Dawn Goldsmith of Oviedo, FL
Jamie Engle of Richardson, TX
Linda McMaken of Waynesville, OH

We are delighted to have these very talented and experienced writers in our stable and are looking forward to provide an even better coverage of the publishing industry for all of you.

Plus: I finally earned enough from Suite 101 to receive my first paycheck. They pay in $10 increments. Six weeks for $10. Maybe a little better than what I earn on my investment CDs. :)

And, my Subversive Stitchers blog continues to grow, attracting more followers and getting more guest blogs from experts and legends in the field. I'm proud of this endeavor. It earns about the same as my investment CDs. :)

Ann Hite

Sullivan Maxx, the literary agency that represents my first two novels, Beautiful Wreck and Ghost on Black Mountain, has a new look. Check out my page. They sure do make me sound and look good.

Also check out Jeanie's page. She has been my agent since May of this year. We are a perfect fit. She believes in my work and is very accessible. She is continually bringing opportunities my way.

I know they are accepting new clients in women's and literary fiction. Check out their guidelines.

Kathleen Jordan

The Shine Journal just accepted another one of my flash memoir pieces, "No Way Home," for their February issue.

Thanks to those on the Nfiction list for their help with this--assuming they're still around! I subbed it there a long time ago now. It's been traveling around looking for a home for some time.

Joanna M. Weston

My short story, "Every witch way," is published in On Spec, Fall 2009, print edition.

Many thanks indeed to the Fiction critters for their help a year or so ago. I'm truly so pleased about this!

I also have four poems, all celebrating my mother, in Qwerty, the print journal published by the Dept. of English at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton.

This Week's Practice Exercise!

celticwynds@gmail.com (Norman Thomas Cooper) — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 15:43:00 +0000

Imaginings Version 2

Prepared by: Don Mackenzie
Reposted on: Sun, 8 November 2009

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Exercise: In 400 words or less, show us a character whose imagination has a particularly significant effect, either within the story or on the reader.

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Dreaming or imagining is a natural function of ordinary and creative life. You may be trying to take yourself out of an uncomfortable situation, or imagining the steps you need to take to achieve a personal victory.

Dreaming/imagining can also be an activity that sneaks up on you. It may undermine your intentions, or if you are more fortunate, point the way to new successes.

Dreaming/imagining is a powerful force that writers should be encouraged to explore, but caution is needed. The revelation "it was all a dream" is one of the most offensive devices in fiction. Readers object when they feel they have been tricked and the contract between writer and reader has been broken. Surprises are wonderful, but the reader must feel properly prepared and the surprise must be appropriate.

"All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible."--T. E. Lawrence, "Seven Pillars of Wisdom"

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Exercise: In 400 words or less, show us a character whose imagination has a particularly significant effect, either within the story or on the reader.

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When critiquing, explain whether you found it easy or difficult to draw the line between what was real and what was imagined. Did you find the writing believable or insightful? Are the characters and the setting well drawn?

These exercises were written by IWW members and administrators to provide structured practice opportunities for its members. You are welcome to use them for practice as well. Please mention that you found them at the Internet Writing Workshop.

Notes For November 6th, 2009

noreply@blogger.com (Eric) — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 00:43:00 +0000

This Day In Writing History

On November 6th, 1921, the famous writer James Jones was born. He was born in Robinson, Illinois. In 1939, at the age of eighteen, Jones enlisted in the U.S. Army and was stationed in Oahu, Hawaii, at Schofield Barracks. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (which he witnessed) that led his country into World War 2, Jones was stationed on Guadalcanal island, where he was wounded in action.

After the war, Jones wrote an autobiographical novel called They Shall Inherit The Laughter, but getting it published proved unsuccessful. It was rejected several times as being too shrill and lacking perspective. So, Jones abandoned it and began writing would what would become his first published novel, an 850+ page epic novel based on his experiences in the Army before and during the war.

From Here To Eternity (1951) was considered a landmark novel for its expose of the dark side of life as a soldier in the U.S. military. The book chronicles the Army's violent subculture of company boxing, its hazing rituals, and the profane language and sexual exploits of its soldiers. It was quite a shocker, offending both the Army and conservative readers. Nevertheless, it became a best seller. Critics savaged the novel over its frequently misspelled words and numerous punctuation errors, not realizing that the mistakes were deliberate and part of a writing style conceived by the author for this particular book, which won the 1952 National Book Award and has been named one of the 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century by the Modern Library.

The novel opens in the summer of 1941, at Schofield Barracks, Oahu, months before the Pearl Harbor attack. It follows several soldiers in G Company. First Sergeant Milt Warden begins a passionate affair with Karen Holmes, the neglected wife of Captain Dana "Dynamite" Holmes. Meanwhile, in the conflict at the heart of the novel, Private Robert E. Lee "Prew" Prewitt, an infantryman from Kentucky, refuses to fight on the G Company team, although he's the best boxer. That's because in his last fight, he ended up blinding his opponent.

Prew's refusal to fight angers his superiors, (Warden and Holmes) who put him through the "Treatment" in order to break his will. The Treatment is a daily hazing ritual of brutal physical and psychological torture. Ironically, Prew grew up dirt poor and joined the military not out of patriotism, but because it was the only way out of poverty. He had planned to become a career soldier. He understands well the motive behind the "Treatment" and won't allow it to break his will. Prew has a love interest - Lorene, a prostitute who helps him when he gets into trouble.

Trouble comes in the form of Old Ike, a sergeant with whom Prew gets into a scuffle. He's sentenced to the stockade, where he must break rocks with a sledgehammer. He must also endure solitary confinement in the "hole" and physical abuse at the hands of the sadistic guards. When one of the guards beats another inmate to death, Prew vows revenge, which leads to his downfall. The man who once lived for the Army is destroyed by it.

In 1953, From Here To Eternity was adapted as a highly acclaimed feature film, directed by Fred Zinnemann. Due to the novel's length and wealth of objectionable elements (Hollywood's stifling Production Code was still in effect) many wondered if it could be adapted for the screen. It took over a year to write a suitable screenplay that remained (mostly) faithful to the novel, while at the same time, taming the objectionable elements. Finally, screenwriter Daniel Taradash completed the task.

Taradash decided that most of the novel's brutality would be better communicated through suggestion. Instead of sending Prewitt (Montgomery Clift) to the military stockade, run by the sadistic Sgt. "Fatso" Judson, (Ernest Borgnine) the screenplay sends his friend, Maggio (Frank Sinatra) instead. This left Prewitt alive for a heroic and happy ending, where he kills Judson to avenge Maggio's death. Since producer Buddy Adler needed the permission of the Army to do location shooting at the actual Schofield Barracks, he and Taradash agreed to make two major changes: instead of being promoted as he was in the novel, Captain Holmes, (Philip Ober) who ordered Prewitt to get the Treatment, is cashiered and condemned by his outraged superiors. A long standing animosity is used to explain Judson's torture of Maggio; in the novel, torture is standard procedure.

Taradash's screenplay had already cleaned up the soldiers' language, so only one more element needed to be changed for PCA (Production Code Administration) head censor Joe Breen to pass the film: the New Congress Club brothel was changed into a social club for soldiers, a sort of primitive USO instead of a house of prostitution. In the movie, when one of the girls explains to Prewitt that the "privileges" of Club members are "dancing, snack bar, soft drink bar, and gentlemanly relaxation with the opposite gender so long as they are gentlemen, and no liquor is permitted. Get it?" Prewitt slyly replies "I get it," making it appear that a lot more is going on.

As for the adulterous affair between Warden (Burt Lancaster) and Karen Holmes, (Deborah Kerr) Breen's only victory in censoring it was getting Taradash to push back the start of their sexual relationship so that they appear to have become involved out of love for each other rather than lust. Breen still demanded that they be punished for their affair, but punishment only comes in the form of a single line of condemnation spoken by Karen when she and Warden end their affair, which seems to have been justified by the buildup of Captain Holmes' negative characteristics, including his own unfaithfulness. Ironically, the famous love scene featuring Karen and Warden wrapped in each other's arms and kissing passionately on the beach amidst the pounding surf, (which was seen in the film's trailer and print advertising) caused the most moral outrage.

James Jones followed From Here To Eternity with Some Came Running (1957), the story of an Army veteran with literary aspirations and personal problems. Former soldier Dave Hirsh is a cynical alcoholic who finds himself back in his hometown of Parkman, Illinois, after being put on a bus in Chicago while in a drunken state. Also on the bus is Ginny Moorehead, a woman of seemingly loose morals and poor education who is being stalked by her hoodlum ex-boyfriend. Dave doesn't think much of Ginny at first, but eventually, he will see past her flaws and fall in love with her. He will also be reunited with his embittered older brother, Frank. Frank married well and inherited a successful jewelry business from his wife's father. To Frank, social status is his and his wife's highest priority. He sees his brother as a threat to that, so he tries to make him respectable. Instead, Dave strikes up a friendship with Bama Dillert, a gambler.

In 1958, Some Came Running was adapted as a feature film by director Vincente Minnelli. Featuring Frank Sinatra as Dave Hirsh, Shirley MacLaine as Ginny Moorehead, and Dean Martin as Bama Dillert, the film is rightfully considered a masterpiece. It received five Academy Award nominations.

In 1962, James Jones published The Thin Red Line, the second book in a trilogy of military novels that began with From Here To Eternity. Praised by critics who compared it to Stephen Crane's classic novel The Red Badge Of Courage, The Thin Red Line is a fictional account of the Battle of Mount Austen on Guadalcanal during World War 2. The story focuses on a number of characters and their different, individual reactions to combat, effectively capturing the horrors of the Pacific campaign.

The author presents a chillingly realistic, non-judgmental depiction of battle, where ordinary people experience murder, terror, dread, helplessness, frustration, cruelty, emptiness, and other such elements of war, including war crimes committed by American soldiers against Japanese soldiers. For example, Japanese corpses are disinterred for fun or to have their gold teeth removed, and Japanese prisoners of war are summarily executed. The author places no moral judgment on these acts. They are shown as the natural reactions of American soldiers to their environment. The novel was adapted as a film first in 1964, then remade in 1998.

With money earned from the success of From Here To Eternity, James Jones helped fund and form the Handy Writers' Colony in Marshall Illinois, which was conceived as a Utopian commune where aspiring writers could concentrate on their writing. Organized by Jones' then girlfriend Lowney Handy (who was still married at the time), the colony dissolved after a few years due to Handy's erratic behavior and Jones' focus on his own novels. He married his wife, Gloria Mosolino, and relocated to Paris.

James Jones continued to write novels. His last book, Whistle, was the third novel in his military trilogy. He was dying of a heart condition while he wrote it. Jones died of congestive heart failure on May 9th, 1977, at the age of 55. He had died before completing the last three chapters of Whistle, but left extensive notes and recorded conversations, enabling his friend, writer Willie Morris (best known for his autobiography My Dog Skip) to complete the novel.

Whistle is about four wounded American soldiers in the South Pacific who are taken by hospital ship to a veteran's hospital in the fictional town of Luxor, Tennessee. Before he began writing it, Jones said that he expected that the novel would say "Just about everything I have ever had to say, or will ever have to say, on the human condition of war and what it means to us, as against what we claim it means to us."

Quote Of The Day

"There are so many young guys, you know - young Americans, and yes, young men everywhere - a whole generation of people younger than me who have grown up feeling inadequate as men because they haven't been able to fight in a war and find out whether they are brave or not. Because it is in an effort to prove this bravery that we fight - in wars or in bars - whereas if a man were truly brave, he wouldn't have to be always proving it to himself. So therefore, I am forced to consider bravery suspect, ridiculous, and dangerous. Because if there are enough young men like that who feel strongly enough about it, they can almost bring on a war, even when none of them want it, and are in fact struggling against having one. And as far as modern war is concerned, I am a pacifist. Hell, it isn't even war anymore, as far as that goes. It's an industry, a big business complex." - James Jones

Vanguard Video

Today's video features the original theatrical trailer for the acclaimed 1953 feature film adaptation of From Here To Eternity. Enjoy!

Notes For November 5th, 2009

noreply@blogger.com (Eric) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 03:04:00 +0000

This Day In Writing History

On November 5th, 1943, the famous playwright, screenwriter, director, and actor Sam Shepard was born. He was born Samuel Shepard Rogers III in Fort Sheridan, Illinois. His parents were teachers. After graduating from high school, Sam briefly attended college, then dropped out to join a traveling theater group.

In 1963, Sam Shepard was working as a busboy in Manhattan's Greenwich Village. He delved into illicit drugs and for a time became a drummer for the eccentric folk-rock group The Holy Modal Rounders, which were featured in the classic movie, Easy Rider (1969). He avoided the draft for Vietnam by claiming to be a heroin addict.

Shepard returned to the theater, becoming involved with New York's off-Broadway theater scene. Although he acted occasionally, he was primarily interested in writing. His plays were staged at several different off-Broadway venues, mostly at the Theatre Genesis in the East Village. Richard O'Brien, author of the musical The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which would be adapted in 1975 as one of the greatest cult classic films of all time, cited Shepard's 1969 science fiction play The Unseen Hand as an influence. Though Shepard wrote for the stage, he also earned some impressive early screenwriting credits, contributing to the screenplays for Robert Frank's indie classic Me And My Brother (1968) and Michelangelo Antonioni's Zabriskie Point (1970).

In the early 1970s, Sam Shepard lived in England for three years, then moved back to the United States, where he settled in the San Francisco Bay Area and became playwright-in-residence at the Magic Theatre, which produced his works. Some of his notable plays from this period include Geography Of A Horse Dreamer (1974), Suicide In B Flat (1976), and Angel City (1976). Shepard's 1978 play, Buried Child, won him a Pulitzer Prize for drama the following year and brought him international fame. It was the first time that an off-Broadway play won a Pulitzer Prize.

Buried Child debunks the mythology of the American Dream in its tale of Dodge, the aged, failed patriarch of a dysfunctional Midwestern farm family. A weak, sardonic alcoholic who is bullied by his wife and children, Dodge represents the archetypical American father's failure to create the environment of "family values" idealized by the American Dream. Dodge's sons, Tilden and Bradley, are also failures. One is handicapped physically, the other emotionally. They are unable to take over the family farm or care for their parents in their old age.

Never able to make a success of his farm, the now elderly Dodge sits in his living room and decays, his immobility a metaphor for his disappointment and disillusionment. Dodge's wife Halie, now in her mid-60s, still worships her third son Ansel, whom she idolized as an All-American hero. Ansel was a star basketball player who was found dead in his motel room under suspicious circumstances.

Other characters in the play include Father Dewis, the family minister - a married man who drinks and carouses with women and once had an affair with Halie. A subplot finds Shelly, the girlfriend of Tilden's son Vince, (who hates being at his grandparents' house) uncovering the shocking family secret - Vince is the child of an incestuous union between his father and grandmother.

Although Sam Shepard's film career began as a contributing screenwriter, he would turn to acting, debuting as the wealthy farm owner in Terrence Malick's 1978 epic film, Days Of Heaven. Shepard would follow his debut with a memorable role in the 1980 movie, Resurrection. It was about a woman, Edna (Ellen Burstyn) who miraculously survives the horrific car accident that kills her husband. Paralyzed from the waist down, Edna soon discovers that she has gained the power to heal herself and others. Her new boyfriend Cal (Shepard), a young hellraiser, begins to believe that Edna represents the second coming of Christ. He becomes a born again Christian. Edna fails to see what her survival and healing powers have to do with religion, and this disturbs Cal to the point that he becomes dangerously unbalanced.

In 1983, Sam Shepard co-starred as astronaut Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff, a performance that earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor. Although he had a fear of flying, he allowed the real Chuck Yeager to take him up in a plane in preparation for the role. Shepard appeared in memorable supporting roles in numerous films. Most recently, he was the voice of the narrator in the 2006 live action feature film adaptation of E.B. White's classic children's novel, Charlotte's Web, and co-starred in the 2008 prison drama, Felon, which starred Stephen Dorff as a loving family man who finds himself sent to prison for killing a burglar.

Shepard would return to screenwriting in 1984, co-writing the Wim Wenders film, Paris, Texas. The following year, he wrote and starred in an adaptation of his play, Fool For Love, directed by the great Robert Altman. In 2005, Shepard co-wrote and starred in another Wim Wenders movie, Don't Come Knocking. Shepard played an aging Western movie star, who, disgusted with his decadent, meaningless life, flees the set of his latest movie on horseback. He hits the road in search of his past and the woman (Jessica Lange) he left behind twenty years ago.

Sam Shepard has proven himself to be one of America's best modernist playwrights. He has written over 45 plays, eleven of which won Obie Awards, and one the Pulitzer Prize. He also earned Tony Award nominations. In 1986, Shepard was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which in 1992 awarded him the Gold Medal for Drama. In 1994, he was elected to the Theatre Hall of Fame. He has done a lot of teaching over the years, and his classes in play writing and theater arts have been held at various theater workshops, festivals, and universities. During the 1970s, he served as a professor at the University of California, Davis.

He lives with his girlfriend, actress Jessica Lange. They have two children.

Quote Of The Day

"The sides are being divided now. It’s very obvious. So if you’re on the other side of the fence, you’re suddenly anti-American. Its breeding fear of being on the wrong side. Democracy’s a very fragile thing. You have to take care of democracy. As soon as you stop being responsible to it and allow it to turn into scare tactics, it’s no longer democracy, is it? It’s something else. It may be an inch away from totalitarianism." - Sam Shepard

Vanguard Video

Today's video features Sam Shepard reading from his 1983 collection of short prose and poetry, Motel Chronicles. Enjoy!

Notes For November 4th, 2009

noreply@blogger.com (Eric) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 00:38:00 +0000

This Day In Writing History

On November 4th, 1948, the famous poet and playwright T.S. Eliot won the Nobel Prize in literature. Eliot was born in America, but emigrated to England in 1914 at the age of 25. He would later become a naturalized British subject.

Though Eliot is probably most famous today for his whimsical poetry collection Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, (1939) which was adapted as the hit Broadway musical Cats, by the time he had written that book, Eliot had already established himself as one of the most profound poets of his time. His classic poems The Waste Land (1922), Ariel Poems (1927-31), and Ash Wednesday (1930) were steeped deep in spirituality and philosophy.

Eliot's first major work, The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock, (1917) introduced his poetic style, which combined blank verse with long, fragmented images, a style that still influences poetical voice to this day. Although some scholars consider The Waste Lands to be Eliot's masterpiece, most believe that Four Quartets (1945) was his greatest work and what led him to win the Nobel Prize. It was a collection of four long poems (Burn Norton, East Coker, The Dry Salvages, and Little Gidding) inspired by Eliot's considerable knowledge of mysticism and philosophy.

T.S. Eliot's Nobel Prize award came as a surprise to some, as he was a controversial figure. A devout Anglican and staunch conservative, Eliot had voiced support for fascism (and praised Italian dictator Benito Mussolini) before the outbreak of World War 2, and had been accused of anti-Semitism. The idea that Eliot was anti-Semitic is still hotly debated to this day.

In a series of lectures he gave at the University of Virginia in 1933, which were published a year later as After Strange Gods, Eliot had said "What is still more important is unity of religious background, and reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable." He would later disavow After Strange Gods and prevent any part of it from being reprinted.

Eliot would later be defended by his friends, poet Stephen Spender and writer Leonard Woolf, (the husband of Virginia Woolf) who were both Jewish. Woolf said that Eliot was probably "slightly anti-Semitic in the sort of vague way which is not uncommon. He would have denied it quite genuinely."

In 2003, Professor Ronald Schuchard of Emory University published the details of a previously unknown series of letters written by T.S. Eliot to Horace Kallen, a Jewish American philosopher. The letters revealed that during World War 2, Eliot helped German and Austrian Jewish refugees settle in England and the United States. In letters he wrote after the war, Eliot voiced support for Israel as a Jewish state.

Despite the controversy surrounding his personal and political beliefs, T.S. Eliot still remains a strong influence on modern poetical voice.

Quote Of The Day

"Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood." - T.S. Eliot

Vanguard Video

Today's video features a rare recording of T.S. Eliot reading his classic poem, The Waste Land. Enjoy!

Notes For November 3rd, 2009

noreply@blogger.com (Eric) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 21:32:00 +0000

This Day In Writing History

On November 3rd, 1939, the legendary playwright Terrence McNally was born. He was born in St. Petersburg, Florida, but grew up in Corpus Christi, Texas. In 1956, McNally moved to New York City in order to attend Columbia University, from which he graduated in 1960, earning a degree in English. During his last year at university, McNally became a member of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, an academic honor society for outstanding students of the liberal arts and sciences.

After he graduated university, Terrence McNally went to Mexico and began his career as a playwright. He wrote a one-act play which he submitted to the Actors Studio in New York City for production. The Studio turned down McNally's play, but was impressed with his script. McNally was offered a position as the Studio's stage manager so he could gain experience in the theater. He moved back to New York and took the job.

While learning the ropes both working and writing for the theater, McNally became the protege and lover of legendary playwright Edward Albee. In 1968, McNally's first produced project made its debut. He had co-written the book for a musical called Here's Where I Belong. Unfortunately, McNally was so disappointed in the final product that he asked for his name to be removed from the credits. It was a wise decision. The musical bombed and closed after one performance.

That same year, Terrence McNally wrote what would prove to be one of his early breakthrough plays. Sweet Eros opened off-Broadway at the Gramercy Arts Theatre in New York City on November 21st, 1968, as part of a double bill with Witness, another early McNally play. Sweet Eros was a 45-minute, one-act, two-character play about a disturbed young man with a history of failed relationships who kidnaps a young woman and brings her to his home in the country.

The play opens with the girl sitting in a chair, bound and gagged, while the young man sits opposite her. He explains his motive for the kidnapping, then methodically strips her naked, both body and soul. After removing her clothing, he presumably rapes his victim, then subjects her to a series of rants and monologues about life and love. He wants to make the girl understand him, and ultimately, submit to him. Sweet Eros caused a sensation when it opened, because the girl, played by Sally Kirkland, was nude on stage for almost the entire length of the play.

In 1969, McNally once again won critical praise with his timely comedy, Next. Also a one-act, two-character play, Next told the story of Marion Cheever, an overweight, middle-aged sad sack who is mistakenly drafted. He reports to Sgt. Thech, a tough female examining officer. The two engage in a battle of wits, as Cheever is just as determined to avoid military service as Thech is to sign him up. The play opened off-Broadway, on February 10th, 1969, at the Greenwich Mews Theatre, as part of a double bill with Adaptation, a play written by Elaine May, who directed both productions. James Coco and Elaine Shore co-starred in Next. Both plays ran for over 700 performances.

In the 1970s, McNally continued to win critical praise with two more comedies, Bad Habits (1974) and The Ritz (1975), which is my favorite McNally play. Bad Habits takes place during one day in a rehab center that caters to various "bad habits." The play is focused on three particular patients: an alcoholic, a drag queen, and a perverted, sadistic deluded man. Dr. Toynbee is the head doctor at the center. Described as a saint and revered by everyone, the doctor has developed a "serum" that can supposedly cure his patients' bad habits, but it only lasts momentarily and doesn't really cure anything... or does it?

The Ritz was a landmark gay-themed play that managed to be both poignant and screamingly funny. Gaetano Proclo is a meek, straight businessman from Cleveland on the run from his brother-in-law, murderous mob boss Carmine Vespucci. Proclo flees to New York City, where he hides out at a Manhattan bathhouse, (The Ritz) not realizing that it's a gay bathhouse. Proclo suspects something is not quite right as he meets the oddball characters at the bathhouse, which include a fat fetishist, go-go boys, and a squeaky-voiced detective. Performing at the establishment is Googie Gomez, a third-rate Puerto Rican lounge singer with Broadway aspirations and a fiery Latin temper. When Proclo realizes that he's staying at a gay bathhouse, he's horrified at first, but soon comes to accept his gay housemates. Then, Proclo's wife tracks him down and jumps to the wrong conclusion about his sexual preference!

The Ritz opened on Broadway on January 20th, 1975, at the Longacre Theatre, and ran for 398 performances. Original cast mates Jack Weston, Rita Moreno, Jerry Stiller, F. Murray Abraham, Stephen Collins, and George Dzundza would reprise their roles a year later in an acclaimed feature film adaptation of the play, which was directed by Richard Lester.

In the 1980s, Terrence McNally would establish himself as one of America's greatest contemporary playwrights with his famous play, Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune. The two-character play was about two lonely people - a middle-aged man (Johnny) and woman (Frankie) - who end up in bed after their first date. Johnny believes that he's found a soul mate in Frankie, but she's not so sure about him. As the night progresses, Frankie and Johnny slowly reveal themselves to each other, baring their souls as they take tentative steps toward the beginning of a relationship.

Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune opened off-Broadway on June 2nd, 1987, at the Manhattan Theatre Club, directed by Paul Benedict (best known as Mr. Bentley, the daffy British neighbor of the Jeffersons) and featuring Kathy Bates and Kenneth Welsh in the starring roles. In 1991, the play was adapted as an acclaimed feature film called Frankie and Johnny, starring Al Pacino and Michelle Pfeiffer, who beat out Kathy Bates for the role of Frankie. Although McNally himself wrote the screenplay, the movie differs greatly from the play on which it was based.

McNally would return to musical theater in 1984, writing the book for a musical called The Rink. He would also write the books for hit musicals such as Kiss Of The Spider Woman (1992), Ragtime (1996), and The Full Monty (2000). In 1990, McNally ventured to a new medium - television, writing the teleplay for a TV movie called Andre's Mother. The acclaimed telefilm was written as an episode of PBS' American Playhouse series. The gay-themed drama is about a woman, Katherine, who is unable to come to terms with the death of her son Andre from AIDS. So, she directs her rage at his lover, Cal, (she never accepted her son's homosexuality) her own mother, (who did accept her grandson as gay) and even Andre himself. Andre's Mother earned McNally an Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Miniseries, Movie, or a Dramatic Special.

Andre's Mother would not be McNally's last gay-themed drama. In 1994, he wrote the hit off-Broadway play, Love! Valour! Compassion! The comedy-drama was about eight gay friends who meet at a lakeside summer vacation home in upstate New York to celebrate the Memorial Day, Independence Day, and Labor Day holidays. The house is owned by Gregory, a middle-aged choreographer who fears that his creative talent is drying up, and his younger lover Bobby, a legal assistant who is blind. During their holidays. Gregory, Bobby, and their friends deal with flirtations, infidelity, AIDS, truth telling, and soul searching. The play also includes a dress rehearsal for a wacky production of Swan Lake - performed in drag! Love! Valour! Compassion! would be adapted as an acclaimed feature film in 1997, with McNally adapting his own play for the screen.

In 1998, McNally wrote his most controversial gay-themed play. Corpus Christi is a brilliant and scathing satire of the Passion play, with Jesus and his disciples depicted as gay men living in Texas. Mixing elements of the ancient past (a Roman occupation) and modern times (television), the play satirizes religious persecution of homosexuals. When Corpus Christi was scheduled to open off-Broadway at the Manhattan Theatre Club, the play was canceled due to death threats made by Christian extremist groups against the Club's board members. The decision angered other playwrights, including Tony Kushner, who threatened to withdraw their own plays from the Club if Corpus Christi was banned. The board members relented, and the play was produced.

The play contained scenes that raised the ire of right wing Christians and other conservative religious groups; in one scene, Jesus performs a gay wedding between two of his disciples, and in another, he is betrayed by Judas - in an act of sexual jealousy. On opening night, the Theatre Club was besieged by two thousand protesters. When Corpus Christi opened in London, a British Muslim extremist group called Defenders of the Messenger Jesus issued a fatwa sentencing McNally to death.

With his brilliant, challenging plays, Terrence McNally has proven himself to be one of America's greatest contemporary playwrights. He lives with his husband, Thomas Kirdahy.

Quote Of The Day

“I don't think I've ever written anything even remotely naturalistic. The closest probably would be seen as Frankie and Johnny, and that's only 'cause they eat a sandwich and make an omelet in act two. But it's a romantic fairy tale, and I'm very aware of that. I don't think it helps the actors in my plays to lose themselves in the reality of talking to another person. A good McNally actor always knows he's in a play with an audience.” - Terrence McNally

Vanguard Video

Today's video features a short interview with Terrence McNally. Enjoy!

IWW Members' Publishing Successes

noreply@blogger.com (Jody Ewing) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 19:23:00 +0000

It's been another terrific week for Internet Writing Workshop members, who continue to find publishing success in many genres and venues.

Congratulations to this week's crew!

Jody

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Barry Basden

After a wait of six months from acceptance to appearance, I have three poems now at Pemmican, a site that caters to social and political commentary.

Thanks to those who helped with the two short poems when they were 55-worders. The longer one, "Old Scores," began life as a rant--based, I like to think, on truth--and morphed into a fantasy based only on partial truth at best. But it sure felt good at the time...

Norman Cooper

I have joined other esteemed IWW members such as Wayne Sheer by seeing my work published on Fiction At Work.

As usual, thanks to all at the Practice-W, Fiction and Prose-P groups for their help fine tuning this story.

Stacey Dye

My poem "A Fine Line" is up at Dew on the Kudzu.

It was a challenge winner some time ago on another site where I workshop. The challenge was to write a poem in your own vernacular that describes an instance where you may have acted a bit out of line at a family gathering...I unfortunately had a story from many moons ago!

Thanks to everyone for their continued support.

Alice Folkart

Bob Sanchez and I appear as guest writers in the current edition of In Focus, the Newsletter of the West Valley Branch of the California Writers Club, edited by Kathy Highcove. My essay (originally written for Practice a year ago) "Thanksgiving with Grandma Pearl," appears right next to Bob's charming memoir on page 11 (you'll have to scroll down to that page). I'm honored to be in such good company.

Mel Jacob

My latest book reviews at SFRevu:

A Young Man Without Magic by Lawrence Watt-Evans

Acclaimed and prolific author Lawrence Watt-Evans begins a new fantasy series with A Young Man Without Magic, a coming of age fantasy or at least growth into political activism novel.

Ascendant Sun (The Saga of the Skolian Empire) by Catherine Asaro

The tale of a hero facing overwhelming odds to survive and free his disintegrating empire.

Burn Me Deadly: An Eddie LaCrosse Novel by Alex Bledsoe

A detective noir set in a fantasy quasi-Middle Ages setting, continues the saga of sword jockey Eddie LaCrosse.

Diving into the Wreck by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Science fiction novel, focuses on a business of locating and mapping derelict space ships.

Wings of Creation (The Silver Ship) by Brenda Cooper

A war threatens the Five Planets, and Chelo Lee and her brother Joseph try to stop it on a planet where modified humans fly.

Book reviews at Gumshoe Review:

All the Wrong Moves (A Samantha Spade Mystery) by Merline Lovelace Berkley

An Air Force lieutenant investigates a murder in the Nevada desert during testing of advanced technology applications. Humor abounds.

G.I. Bones: A Sergeants Sueño & Bascom Mystery by Martin Limón

In Korea during the Seventies, Sergeants George Sueño and Ernie Bascom, members of the Criminal Investigation Division of the 8th Army, investigate a twenty-year-old mystery over the disappearance of a young sergeant and find the oversexed, underage daughter of a colonel.

Tom Mahony

My short story, "Castles," is up at Bartleby-Snopes.

Gary Presley

It's always good to have a little ditty appreciated by a good writer who is also a good editor. A flash piece I wrote based on ... well, I don't know: the glimpse of an actress in a movie, a conversation overhead, a dream ... is up at Camroc Press Review.

Randy Radic

My commentary on Where The Wild Things Are is up at Basil and Spice. Thanks to Kelly.

My review of Life After 187 is up at Alvah's Books. Thanks to Wade for the book and to Rebeca for the opportunity.

Bob Sanchez

A short Thanksgiving essay of mine has just appeared in the newsletter of The California Writers's Club (West Valley Branch), thanks to their editor, Kathy Highcove. You'll need to scroll down to page 11 of the PDF, where I am honored to have space next to Alice Folkart's essay.

Please check it out -- you get two for the price of one!

Wayne Scheer

I have a story up at Apollo's Lyre, "Overcoming Debbie Gilroy."

Everyday Fiction is planning a print edition and wants to include two of my stories, "Growing Up" and "Starting Over."

Sniplits is back. They bought my holiday story, "Christmas at the Post Office."

Rebeca Schiller

My article on stained glass artist Joseph Cavalieri appeared today online in HAND/EYE Magazine.

I have another article slated for the pub and hope to have more in the near future.

This Week's Practice Exercise

celticwynds@gmail.com (Norman Thomas Cooper) — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 16:52:00 +0000

Words words words Version 2

Prepared by: Rebecca Marshall-Courtois
Revised and Reposted on: November 1, 2009
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Exercise: In 400 words or less, write a scene that is inspired by and includes four words chosen at random.

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This is a basic writing exercise, useful to spark inspiration.

Pick four words at random - open a dictionary, look through a newspaper, whatever. There are no restrictions on the words you may use, but if you have trouble choosing, you might pick a color, a place name, a physical object, a sound - pick the first word that comes to mind when you think of each category. So for example, you might start with the words "brown, Paris, creamer, bells." Once you have picked the words, think about what those words mean to you, or what they might mean to a character. Then write a scene that uses those words as creatively as possible.

Let your imagination run wild!

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Exercise: In 400 words or less, write a scene that is inspired by and includes four words chosen at random.

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In your critique: Does the scene work? Could the writing be better? How? Give details. Are the chosen words used effectively?

These exercises were written by IWW members and administrators to provide structured practice opportunities for its members. You are welcome to use them for practice as well. Please mention that you found them at the Internet Writing Workshop.

Notes For October 30th, 2009

noreply@blogger.com (Eric) — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 00:36:00 +0000

Happy Halloween

I'd like to wish all of you who celebrate it a happy and safe Halloween. As part of the celebration, I recommend reading the classic horror stories of Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, Washington Irving, and Guy de Maupassant!

This Day In Writing History

On October 30th, 1938, the Mercury Theater radio program, well known for its radio play adaptations of classic literature, presented a production of H.G. Wells' classic science fiction / horror novel, War Of The Worlds, adapted by and starring legendary actor-producer-writer Orson Welles, who co-founded the Mercury Theater company with John Houseman. At the time of the broadcast, Welles was only 23 years old, yet he had already established himself as a renowned stage and radio actor, having starred as the voice of the Shadow on that popular mystery program.

The Mercury Theater program aired on Sunday nights at 8PM. It was common for people to tune in around 8:12PM after the comedy sketch on the Edgar Bergen & Charlie McCarthy show ended and a singer filled out the remaining time. Had these late comers tuned in at the beginning of this particular episode of Mercury Theater, they would have known that what they were listening to was Orson Welles' adaptation of War Of The Worlds. Instead, they thought they were listening to a real newscast describing a Martian invasion of Earth!

The radio play was presented as a mock broadcast. It began with an announcer reading a weather report, then taking listeners to "the Meridian Room in the Hotel Park Plaza in downtown New York, where you will be entertained by the music of Ramon Raquello and his orchestra." After a few minutes of dreadful dance music, an announcer broke in with a news bulletin: a scientist, Professor Farrell of the Mount Jenning Observatory, had detected explosions on Mars. The lame dance music returned, then an announcer broke in again to report that a large meteor had crashed into a farm in Grovers Mills, New Jersey.

Soon, an on-the-spot reporter at the crash site begins describing a monstrous space alien emerging from a large metallic cylinder. "Good heavens!" he cries, "Something's wriggling out of the shadow like a gray snake. Now here's another and another one and another one. They look like tentacles to me ... I can see the thing's body now. It's large, large as a bear. It glistens like wet leather. But that face, it ...it ... ladies and gentlemen, it's indescribable. I can hardly force myself to keep looking at it, it's so awful. The eyes are black and gleam like a serpent. The mouth is kind of V-shaped with saliva dripping from its rimless lips that seem to quiver and pulsate."

The Martians initiate a massive attack, wiping out 7,000 National Guardsmen and lobbing canisters of poison gas across America. The incredibly realistic radio play featured sophisticated sound effects and a first rate cast of actors portraying announcers and other terrified characters. When one announcer character reported that widespread panic had broken out at the crash sites, with thousands of people trying to flee, it wasn't far from the truth. Panic had actually broken out across the country, as perhaps a million people believed that Martians had really attacked the Earth!

In New Jersey, people fleeing in terror caused huge traffic jams on the highways. Others begged police for gas masks to protect them from the Martians' poison gas and pleaded with electric companies to shut off the power so the Martians couldn't see their lights. In Indianapolis, a terrified woman ran into a church during evening services, screaming that New York had been destroyed and warning the congregation that the end of the world had come. After news of the panic reached CBS studio bosses, Orson Welles broke character and went on the air as himself to remind people that they were listening to a radio play.

After the broadcast, the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) investigated the Mercury Theater program and concluded that no laws had been broken. Radio networks promised to be more cautious with their programming in the future. Nevertheless, people were furious that the War Of The Worlds broadcast caused such unnecessary duress. They believed that the broadcast was a Halloween prank played on listeners by Welles and his cast mates. It wasn't, but Welles gave them the impression that it was in his humorous on-air apology:

"This is Orson Welles, ladies and gentlemen, out of character to assure you that The War of the Worlds has no further significance than as the holiday offering it was intended to be. The Mercury Theater's own radio version of dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush and saying boo. Starting now, we couldn't soap all your windows and steal all your garden gates by tomorrow night...so we did the next best thing. We annihilated the world before your very ears, and utterly destroyed the Columbia Broadcasting System. You will be relieved, I hope, to learn that we didn't mean it, and that both institutions are still open for business. So, goodbye everybody, and remember, please, for the next day or so, the terrible lesson you learned tonight. That grinning, glowing, globular invader of your living room is an inhabitant of the pumpkin patch, and if your doorbell rings and nobody's there, that was no Martian. It's Halloween."

Orson Welles feared that his career had been ruined by the controversy, but just the opposite happened. The publicity helped him land a movie contract with RKO Pictures, for whom he would write, direct, and star in what many consider to be the greatest movie ever made - Citizen Kane (1941).

To this day, the 1938 War Of The Worlds broadcast is rightfully considered an old time radio (OTR) classic and is a treasured favorite of OTR enthusiasts like myself.

Quote Of The Day

"Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what's for lunch." - Orson Welles

Vanguard Video

Today's video is a six-part presentation featuring the complete 1938 Mercury Theater broadcast of War Of The Worlds. Enjoy!

Notes For October 29th, 2009

noreply@blogger.com (Eric) — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 01:06:00 +0000

This Day In Writing History

On October 29th, 1740, the famous writer James Boswell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. His father, Alexander Boswell, was a judge and the 8th Laird of Auchinleck. His mother, Euphemia, was a strict Calvinist.

As a child, James Boswell was delicate and sickly. He suffered from an inherent nervous ailment. At the age of five, Boswell was sent to the James Mundell Academy, which was an advanced school for its time; students were taught English, Latin, writing, and mathematics. Boswell was unhappy living at the school, and his nervous ailment manifested itself in forms such as extreme shyness and night terrors.

Finally, three years later, at the age of eight, Boswell was removed from the Academy and taught by private tutors who awakened in him a love of literature and an interest in religion. When he was thirteen, Boswell enrolled in the arts program at the University of Edinburgh. He studied there for five years, then suffered a bout of severe depression and nervous illness. When he recovered, he had lost his childhood delicacy and found good, robust health.

Boswell continued his studies at the University of Glasgow, where he was taught by Adam Smith, who would become famous for his treatise on economics, The Wealth Of Nations (1776). While at Glasgow, Boswell decided to convert to Catholicism and become a monk, which prompted his irate father to demand that he return home. Instead, Boswell ran away to London, where for three months, he lived the unrestrained life of a libertine until his father came to bring him back to Scotland.

When he returned to Edinburgh, Boswell re-enrolled at university to finish his education. On July 30th, 1762, he took his oral law exam, which he passed easily. The following year, he met Samuel Johnson for the first time, and they became close friends. Johnson was a British poet, novelist, essayist, literary critic, and lexicographer who has been described as "arguably the most distinguished man of letters in English history." He called Boswell "Bozzy."

Three months after he met Johnson, Boswell left for the Netherlands, where he planned to continue his law studies at Utrecht University. Although deeply unhappy at first, Boswell eventually came to enjoy his time in Utrecht greatly. He met and fell in love with an eccentric, vivacious young Dutchwoman named Belle van Zuiylen, who proved to be his social and intellectual superior.

Belle refused to marry him, so Boswell left Utrecht and traveled around Europe for two years, where he would meet the legendary writers and philosophers Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He also met one of his heroes, the Italian independence leader Pasquale Paoli. The diaries that Boswell kept during his time in Utrecht and his travels through Europe would later be published as Boswell In Holland (1763-64) and Boswell On The Grand Tour (1764-66).

In 1766, Boswell returned to Scotland, where he took his final law exam, passed it, and became a practicing advocate for over a decade. Once a year, he would go to London to see his friend Samuel Johnson and hobnob with London's literati. Boswell's journals and letters from this time described his libertine exploits. In a 1767 letter to W.J. Temple, Boswell wrote "I got myself quite intoxicated, went to a Bawdy-house and past a whole night in the arms of a whore. She indeed was a fine strong spirited girl, a whore worthy of Boswell if Boswell must have a whore." Earlier, Boswell had written of a one night stand he had with an actress named Louisa. Though he occasionally used a condom for protection, Boswell would contract venereal disease at least seventeen times.

In November of 1769, Boswell married his cousin, Margaret Montgomerie. She bore him seven children, two of whom died in infancy. He also had at least two illegitimate children who died in infancy. Despite Boswell's frequent visits to brothels, Margaret remained with him for twenty years, until her death from tuberculosis in 1789. Despite achieving moderate literary success with the publication of his travel journals, Boswell was unsuccessful as an advocate. By the late 1770s, he had plunged into the depths of alcoholism and gambling addiction, and also suffered from severe mood swings, most likely the result of bipolar disorder.

After his old friend Samuel Johnson died in 1784, Boswell moved to London to try his hand at the English Bar, but was even less successful than he was as an advocate in Scotland. So, he spent most of his last years writing a biography of Samuel Johnson, which was published in 1791. It was a masterpiece, considered to be the greatest biography ever written. Unlike most biographies of the time, which just provided the dry details of an individual's public life, Boswell's biography of Johnson was revolutionary. It included far more personal information than readers of the time were accustomed to, providing them with not only a record of Johnson's public life and works, but also a vivid account of Johnson the complete man. Boswell even included transcripts of conversations he'd had with Johnson. The longevity of Samuel Johnson's fame owes itself mostly to James Boswell's biography.

With the publication of The Life Of Samuel Johnson, James Boswell finally received the literary recognition he'd sought for so long, and his fame endures to this day. After the book was published, Boswell's health began to deteriorate from the ravages of alcoholism and venereal disease. He died on May 19th, 1795, at the age of 54. Over 120 years after his death, a large collection of his papers, including intimate journals he'd kept throughout his life, were discovered at Malahide Castle, North of Dublin. They were sold to an American collector and later passed on to Yale University, which published them.

Quote Of The Day

"I hate mankind, for I think myself one of the best of them, and I know how bad I am." - James Boswell

Vanguard Video

Today's video features a short presentation on the life of James Boswell. Enjoy!

Notes For October 28th, 2009

noreply@blogger.com (Eric) — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 22:22:00 +0000

This Day In Writing History

On October 28th, 1905, Mrs. Warren's Profession, the famous play by legendary Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, opened at the Garrick Theater in New York. The play, Shaw's second, was written in 1893. It had been banned in Britain by the Lord Chamberlain (England's theater censor) because of its frank depiction of prostitution. It would finally open in London on January 5th, 1902, behind closed doors at the New Lyric Club - a private, members-only organization. It wouldn't be legally performed in public in Britain until 1926.

Mrs. Warren's Profession centers on the relationship between Mrs. Warren, a middle-aged ex-prostitute turned brothel madam, and her prudish, Cambridge-educated daughter, Vivie. Mrs. Warren has always hidden the truth about her profession from her daughter. When Vivie discovers that her mother's fortune was really made in the brothel business, she's horrified. Eventually, the two strong willed women reconcile when Mrs. Warren explains that her childhood, spent in grinding poverty and despair, led her to become a prostitute because it was the only way to support herself. Vivie forgives her - until she finds out that Mom is still running brothels.

George Bernard Shaw, a staunch socialist, said that he wrote Mrs. Warren's Profession "to draw attention to the truth that prostitution is caused not by female depravity and male licentiousness but simply by underpaying, undervaluing, and overworking women so shamefully that the poorest of them are forced to resort to prostitution to keep body and soul together." The play was also inspired by Yvette, a novel by the great French writer, Guy de Maupassant.

After opening in New York, Mrs. Warren's Profession would close after only one performance, as the play was promptly shut down by puritanical authorities. A few days later, on October 31st, the producer and the entire cast of actors were arrested for obscenity. Fortunately, they were all acquitted of the charge in court - including George Bernard Shaw, who was tried in absentia.

Shaw would go on to write many more classic plays, including Candida (1894), Caesar And Cleopatra (1898), Major Barbara (1905), The Doctor's Dilemma (1906), Fanny's First Play (1911), and Pygmalion (1912), upon which the famous, award-winning musical My Fair Lady was based. In all of his works, Shaw supported socialism and denounced capitalist exploitation and the degradation of women. He also drew attention to the effects of poverty, violence, and war on both society and the individual.

Quote Of The Day

"The secret of success is to offend the greatest number of people." - George Bernard Shaw

Vanguard Video

Today's video features a scene from a production of Mrs. Warren's Profession. Enjoy!

Notes For October 27th, 2009

noreply@blogger.com (Eric) — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 01:39:00 +0000

This Day In Writing History

On October 27th, 1932, the legendary American poet and novelist Sylvia Plath was born. She was born in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts. Her father, Otto Plath, was a German immigrant and professor of biology and German at Boston University. Her mother, Aurelia, was the daughter of Austrian immigrants. She was 21 years younger than Sylvia's father when she married him.

When Sylvia Plath was four years old, the family moved to Winthrop, Massachusetts, where she spent most of her childhood. Otto Plath died of complications from diabetes when she was eight years old. The loss devastated his daughter and would affect Sylvia the rest of her life. Her most famous poem, Daddy, reflects her grief over her father's death and her anger at him for leaving her. Plath's readers still visit her father's gravestone at Winthrop Cemetery.

The same year that she lost her father, the eight-year-old Sylvia Plath had her first poem published in the children's section of the Boston Herald. In addition to her writing talent, she also displayed artistic talent; when she was 15 years old, her paintings won an award from the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. She began keeping a diary at the age of eleven and kept journaling up until her death.

Sylvia Plath attended Smith College in Massachusetts. During her junior year, she was awarded a position as guest editor at Mademoiselle magazine. She spent a month in New York City working for the magazine. She hoped it would be a great experience, but instead, it marked the beginning of a downward spiral in her life and resulted in her first documented suicide attempt. She crawled under her house and took an overdose of sleeping pills. She was briefly committed to a mental institution where she received electroshock therapy. All of these experiences would be used as the basis for her only novel, The Bell Jar.

After recovering from her first bout with mental illness, Sylvia graduated with honors from Smith College. She won a Fulbright scholarship to Newnham College, Cambridge. There, she continued writing poetry, and her work was occasionally published in the student newspaper, Varsity. At a party at Cambridge, Sylvia met British poet and children's book writer Ted Hughes. After a brief courtship, they were married on June 16th, 1956. They spent the next couple of years living and working in the U.S., where Sylvia taught at her alma mater, Smith College.

When Sylvia found herself pregnant with their first child, Frieda, she and Ted returned to London. There, in 1960, her first poetry collection, The Colossus and Other Poems, was published. Some of the poems contained in it had been previously submitted to magazines and rejected because the editors found them to be too strange and disturbing. The year after her first poetry book was published, Sylvia, then pregnant with her second child, suffered a miscarriage. In 1962, she became pregnant again and gave birth to a son, Nicholas.

The birth of their second child did nothing to help Sylvia and Ted's already troubled marriage. News of her husband's affair devastated Sylvia, and Plath scholars believe that Ted was also physically abusive to her throughout their marriage. (Ted Hughes' admirers dispute that.) The couple separated in late 1962. In 1963, Sylvia's first and only novel, The Bell Jar, was published under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. The semi-autobiographical novel, based in part on Sylvia Plath's first struggle with mental illness, is considered a masterpiece. I read it when I was a teenager and loved it. The novel was adapted as a feature film in 1979. A new adaptation is currently in development.

A month after The Bell Jar was published, Sylvia Plath committed suicide by sealing herself in her kitchen, plunging her head into the oven, and turning on the gas. Family, friends, and scholars believe that Sylvia's suicide was the result of a combination of factors. She suffered from mental illness (most likely bipolar disorder), she was devastated by her father's death and her own miscarriage, and she suffered at the hands of an unfaithful and physically abusive husband whom she still loved. Six years after Sylvia's death, her husband's mistress, Assia Wevill, committed suicide herself - the same way that Sylvia did - after murdering her daughter. Sylvia's son Nicholas Hughes, a biologist, would commit suicide later at the age of 47 after suffering from depression. Her daughter Frieda Hughes would go on to become a poet, painter, and children's book writer.

As the result of Sylvia Plath's untimely suicide in 1963, her second poetry collection, Ariel, which featured her most famous poems, (Daddy, Lady Lazarus, and Tulips) was published posthumously in 1965. More poetry collections, prose works, and four children's books would also be published posthumously. In 1981, a complete collection of Sylvia Plath's poetry, The Collected Poems, would be published. It won her a Pulitzer Prize the following year. Sylvia became the first poet to win a Pulitzer Prize posthumously.

Sylvia's husband, Ted Hughes, spent the last years of his life preparing an unabridged version of her journals for publication. They were first published in an abridged version in 1980. Hughes faced criticism for the way he handled Sylvia's journals. He claimed to have destroyed her last journal "because I did not want her children to have read it." He was also accused of trying to cash in on his wife's death, though the proceeds from all of her posthumous publications were placed in a trust fund for her children.

In 2000, Anchor Books published The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, which writer Joyce Carol Oates called a "genuine literary event." To this day, Sylvia Plath remains a major influence on American poetical voice.

Quote Of The Day

"Everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt." - Sylvia Plath

Vanguard Video

Today's video is a two-part presentation featuring an interview with Sylvia Plath from October, 1962, conducted by Peter Orr of the British Council. Enjoy!

IWW Members' Publishing Successes

noreply@blogger.com (Jody Ewing) — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 20:51:00 +0000

Internet Writing Workshop members continue to find publishing success in all venues.

Congratulations to this week's crew!

Jody

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Barry Basden

My poem, "The Last Time I Saw My Father," is in the Fall Issue of Dogzplot.

Thanks to those who helped when it was a 55-worder.

Amanda Borenstadt

Yay! 50 to 1 used my "1st line."

Sue Ellis

Wild Violet just accepted a lighthearted essay I wrote for practice, "Faces in Odd Places," for a future issue.

If you haven't checked out their site lately, take a peek. They're using some amazing artwork with the stories now. Thanks Practice, for all the comments.

Rebecca Gaffron

I have two pieces up at Ink Sweat and Tears, "In Unison" and "Proxy."

Many thanks for all of you at IWW for your help and support.

Deanna Hershiser

Long Story Short has accepted my flash essay, "Living On Love," for their February issue. It's a bit from the memoir I'm attempting, though I hadn't yet submitted it for critique. Only posted a version of it on my blog last year, and people told me they liked it. Blogs can be good for something.

Randy Radic

My review of Musical Chairs is up at Alvah's Books. Thanks to Jen for the book and Rebeca for the opportunity.

Catherine Robinson

Earlier this month, I got a request to appear on Studio 10, a local morning talk show in Tampa, hosted by Holley Sinn and Jerome Ritchey. They wanted to discuss my review of Capitalism: A Love Story and maybe even my blogging adventures at Out in Left Field.

I agreed to go on the show. Video from the interview and my piece about the experience, "How to survive being on television when you’re a neurotic mess like me. Or not," are now up at Out in Left Field.

Wayne Scheer

Long Story Short has accepted two stories for a future issue. One is an old nonfiction piece, "The Adventures of Bluey Swanson," and the other, "They Can't All Be Gems," recently written for Practice, will be published in their 'About Writing' section.

A humorous flash I wrote recently for Practice, "Summertime Ain't No Time to Sing About," is up at Dew on the Kudzu.

I'm the Featured Author this week at Sniplits, complete with smiling photo. That means this week you can hear my story, "Blind Date," read for only forty-eight cents. Usually, it would cost two cents less than half a dollar.

Also, I was just notified that Flash Me Magazine nominated two of my stories for a Pushcart Prize--"Unspoken Words" and "Morning Routine." Both of these pieces began as Practice exercises, so I have IWW to thank.

Jack Shakely

My memoir "An Oz Memory," is up at Red Room. I know, I know, I should get a day job, but my latest novel is in editor limbo and I itch something awful, but I can't scratch it.

Dan Smith

I have a story, "Hole 18A," posted at Powder Burn Flash, a flash fiction site.

Joanna M. Weston

I have two poems, "Leisure" and "Bedding," in Candelabrum, a small print magazine from Southsea, U.K.

A poem, "Prairie Fall," and a photo of mine are on the latest 'Barrio Poetry Poster.' These posters go to libraries across Canada, an exciting project run by a poet in Ontario. (No website)

This Week's Practice Exercise

celticwynds@gmail.com (Norman Thomas Cooper) — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 14:54:00 +0000

Characterization Version 4

Prepared by: Florence Cardinal
Reposted, revised, on: Sun, 25 Oct 2009

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Exercise: In 400 words or less, describe someone so that we feel we know him or her. Don't rely on descriptors such as "he had red hair," "she was about 70," or "he was a tall man." Avoid general terms like "beautiful" or "ugly, fat or thin." Show us that "red, tall, 70, beautiful, ugly, fat or thin."

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What can you show us about this character's place in the world, his/her goals, achievements, dreams or fears that will let us see the individual? Use the whole bag of writer's tricks--description, satire, exaggeration, dialogue, or other characters as foils to help us to see this individual. You don't have to tell a whole story; but if you do find a story taking shape, that's fine.

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Exercise: In 400 words or less, describe someone so that we feel we know him or her. Don't rely on descriptors such as "he had red hair," "she was about 70," or "he was a tall man." Avoid general terms like "beautiful" or "ugly, fat or thin." Show us that "red, tall, 70,beautiful, ugly, fat or thin."

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When critiquing this work, consider how much you know about the character and how the author achieved the portrait. What specific tools were used to create the character you see? And, how much do you know about how this person thinks? Would you like to know about this person? Keep an eye open for any "telling."

These exercises were written by IWW members and administrators to provide structured practice opportunities for its members. You are welcome to use them for practice as well. Please mention that you found them at the Internet Writing Workshop.

Notes For October 23rd, 2009

noreply@blogger.com (Eric) — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 22:51:00 +0000

This Day In Writing History

On October 23rd, 1942, the legendary novelist, screenwriter, and film director Michael Crichton was born. He was born John Michael Crichton in Chicago, Illinois, but grew up on Long Island, New York. His father was a journalist. He had a brother and two sisters.

Michael Crichton had an interest in writing from an early age. By the time he was 14, he had a travel-related column published in the New York Times. Crichton had always planned to become a writer, so in 1960, he entered Harvard College as an undergraduate student in literature. When he came to believe that one of his professors was unfairly giving him low grades and harsh criticisms of his writing, Crichton conducted an experiment to prove it.

After telling another professor of his plan, Crichton deliberately plagiarized a story by George Orwell and submitted it as his own to the suspect professor. It was returned with a B- grade. Despite this, Crichton was unable to resolve his issues with the English Department, so he switched his major to biological anthropology. He graduated summa cum laude in 1964.

Michael Crichton then enrolled in Harvard Medical School. While studying medicine, he continued to write and published several early novels under the pseudonyms John Lange, Jeffery Hudson, and Michael Douglas. The first of these, Odds On (1966), introduced his trademark style of techno thriller. It told the story of an attempted robbery of an isolated hotel on Costa Brava. Unlike most robberies, this one has been planned scientifically through the use of critical path analysis computer software.

Crichton graduated from Harvard Medical School and obtained his M.D. in 1969. That same year he published his first novel under his own name - a novel that would establish him as a bestselling writer. It was called The Andromeda Strain. In it, a military satellite returns to Earth with a stowaway on board - a deadly alien microbe that infects humans and either kills them quickly or causes them to go insane and commit violent acts of suicide and / or murder. A team of scientists races to stop the microbe before all mankind is wiped out. The novel would be adapted as an acclaimed feature film in 1971, directed by Robert Wise. It would also be adapted as a TV miniseries in 2008.

Crichton's next novel published under his own name was The Terminal Man (1972). It told the story of Harry Benson, a man in his 30s who suffers from a rare form of epilepsy. During his seizures, he blacks out and wakes up hours later with no memory of what he has done - even though during some of the seizure blackouts, he has attacked people and beaten them savagely. Benson volunteers to undergo an unprecedented surgical procedure where forty electrodes and a minicomputer will be implanted in his brain to control his seizures. The surgeons are warned that Benson is psychotic, but they decide to go ahead with the procedure anyway. As man and machine become one, Benson grows more psychotic. He escapes from the hospital and goes on a murderous rampage.

The Terminal Man was adapted as a feature film in 1974, starring George Segal as Harry Benson. It was critically and commercially unsuccessful, but has since become a cult classic and was finally released on DVD this year.

In addition to his own works being adapted to the screen, in the 1970s and 80s, Michael Crichton wrote and directed original techno thriller films. Westworld (1973), rightfully considered one of the great classic science fiction films of all time, is set in the near future where tourists pay big money to visit an Old West theme park called Westworld. The park's feature attraction is a large cast of incredibly lifelike robots that the guests can interact with. They can shoot it out with gunslinger robots in a ghost town or engage in sexual encounters with the robot ladies at an Old Western brothel.

All the robots are monitored by a staff of scientists and engineers in an elaborate underground control room. The staff begins to notice that the robots are experiencing malfunctions. They want to close the park, but the company executives won't let them. Soon, the robots go completely out of control and start hunting and killing the guests. Yul Brynner gives a chilling performance as a relentless, murderous gunslinger robot. Westworld became a huge hit. It was followed by a sequel, Futureworld (1976), that proved to be a critical and commercial flop, and a short lived TV series, Beyond Westworld, than ran for five episodes in 1980.

In 1981, Michael Crichton wrote and directed Looker, a techno thriller that satirized the media, advertising, and their unreasonable standards of beauty. Albert Finney stars as Dr. Larry Roberts, a plastic surgeon who is baffled when four women, all of them models who work in TV commercials, request cosmetic procedures so minor that they would be unseen by the naked eye. When the models later start dying mysteriously, Roberts investigates and discovers that they were involved with Digital Matrix, a company that has developed the technology to scan models' bodies and create lifelike 3D computer animations of them for use in TV commercials. As Roberts digs deeper into the mystery, he learns that Digital Matrix has also developed the technology to hypnotize people into buying the products that they see advertised in TV commercials.

The 1990s would be Michael Crichton's greatest decade of success. In 1990, he published his most popular novel, Jurassic Park. Expanding on themes first addressed in Westworld, Jurassic Park was about an island where scientists have created a theme park populated by real live dinosaurs cloned from DNA found in fossils. When the technology employed to control the dinosaurs fails due to an attempt at industrial espionage that backfires, the mighty reptiles escape confinement and go on a rampage. In 1993, an acclaimed movie adaptation, directed by film legend Steven Spielberg and co-written by Crichton, was released. With its landmark use of computer-generated animation special effects to create lifelike dinosaurs, the movie became a monster hit (no pun intended) that grossed nearly a billion dollars. It would be followed by two sequels, The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997, based on Crichton's 1995 novel, The Lost World) and Jurassic Park III (2001).

In 1992, Crichton published Rising Sun, a departure from his usual techno thriller novels. Rising Sun is a murder mystery suspense thriller with a unique angle. It addresses the anti-Japanese prejudice of Americans that resulted from Japanese companies buying up American businesses - a prejudice that was common at the time. The novel opens with the murder of a high priced escort, which occurs at the Los Angeles headquarters of a fictional Japanese company, the Nakamoto corporation. The girl appears to have been killed following a violent sexual encounter. Police detective Peter J. Smith is assigned to the case. Assisting him as a consultant is retired former police captain John Connor, who has lived in Japan and is an expert on Japanese culture. Rising Sun would be adapted as acclaimed feature film in 1993.

Crichton followed Rising Sun with another suspense thriller that looks at corporate culture. Disclosure (1994) tells the story of Tom Sanders, an executive for high-tech company DigiCom, whose ex-girlfriend, fellow DigiCom executive Meredith Johnson, receives a promotion that Tom thought would be his. When Meredith tries to win him back, Tom spurns her sexual advances. She takes revenge by transferring him to another department and preventing him from getting stock options which would have made him rich. She also files false sexual harassment charges against him. Tom decides to countersue Meredith for sexual harassment, putting the company's pending merger and his own job in jeopardy. Tom builds his case against Meredith using virtual reality technology and the assistance of a mysterious ally known only as "A. Friend." Tom learns an unforgettable lesson about sexual politics in the workplace and discovers that he has become a pawn in a much larger game of corporate intrigue. Disclosure was adapted as a feature film in the same year that it was published.

Also in 1994, Michael Crichton returned to television. His first attempt at creating a TV series (Beyond Westworld) was a flop. This time, however, he created one of the most acclaimed and popular TV series of all time - a medical drama called ER. Taking place primarily in the emergency room of a fictional hospital - County General Hospital in Chicago - the series ran for 15 years, and Crichton served as creator, producer, and head writer.

Crichton continued to write techno thriller novels, including Airframe (1996), Timeline (1999), Prey (2002), State Of Fear (2004), and Next (2006), which would be his last. In the spring of 2008, Crichton was diagnosed with lymphoma. While undergoing chemotherapy, he died unexpectedly of throat cancer on November 4th, 2008, at the age of 66. After his death, his assistant discovered a complete and unpublished manuscript on one of his computers. Pirate Latitudes was a detail-rich adventure story about pirates in 17th century Jamaica who plan to commandeer a Spanish galleon and make off with a fortune in Spanish gold. The novel will be released on November 24th, 2009. An unfinished techno thriller is due for release in 2010.

Quote Of The Day

"The notion that the natural world obeys its own rules and doesn't give a damn about your expectations comes as a massive shock... it will demand that you adapt to it - and if you don't, you die. It is a harsh, powerful, unforgiving world that most Westerners have never experienced." - Michael Crichton

Vanguard Video

Today's video is an episode of the Charlie Rose show featuring an interview with Michael Crichton. Whether you agree or disagree with his views on scientific issues, he's always interesting to listen to. Enjoy!

Notes For October 22nd, 2009

noreply@blogger.com (Eric) — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 02:25:00 +0000

This Day In Writing History

On October 22nd, 1964, the legendary French writer Jean-Paul Sartre won a Nobel Prize for literature, which he declined. He was the first person to ever decline the award. When Sartre learned that he was in contention to receive a Nobel Prize, he wrote to the Nobel Institute and asked that his name be removed from the list of candidates. The Swedish Academy had already made its decision to give him the prize.

Sartre didn't want to cause a scandal by refusing the Nobel Prize, nor did he want to offend the Swedish Academy, so he prepared a statement explaining that he always turned down "official distinctions" because he believed that "a writer must refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an institution, even if it takes place in an honorable form." He believed that if a writer carried the authority of an institution along with his name, it wasn't fair to the reader, saying that "It is not the same thing if I sign Jean-Paul Sartre or if I sign Jean-Paul Sartre, Nobel Prize winner."

Sartre had previously turned down both the French Legion of Honor (the highest award given by his country) and a tenured teaching position at the prestigious College de France.

Jean-Paul Sartre was not only a novelist, he was also a playwright, a screenwriter, and most famously, an existentialist philosopher. He was a founding father of the existentialist movement in 20th century literature, of which his 1945 novel, The Age of Reason, became a classic. It was the first in a trilogy of existentialist novels called The Roads to Freedom. The other two novels in the trilogy were The Reprieve (1947) and Troubled Sleep (1949).

Quote Of The Day

"Words are more treacherous and powerful than we think." - Jean-Paul Sartre

Vanguard Video

Today's video features a clip of Jean-Paul Sartre discussing classic intellectualism. Enjoy!

Notes For October 21st, 2009

noreply@blogger.com (Eric) — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 01:20:00 +0000

This Day In Writing History

On October 21st, 1977, Bridge To Terabithia, the beloved, award-winning, and controversial children's novel by Katherine Paterson, was published. The heart wrenching tale of two lonely, outcast children - a young boy and girl from very different backgrounds - who create an imaginary world for themselves and become soul mates, only to be separated forever when tragedy strikes, was inspired by a real life tragedy that affected the author and her son.

Katherine Paterson had already established herself as an acclaimed and popular children's author with her first two books, The Sign Of The Chrysanthemum (1973) and Of Nightingales That Weep (1974), when her eight-year-old son David lost his best (and only) friend, a vivacious and imaginative little girl named Lisa Hill. While at the beach with her family, Lisa was struck by lightning and killed. David Paterson was devastated and traumatized by his sudden loss, and his mother was deeply affected by it as well.

After publishing her third novel, The Master Puppeteer (1975), Katherine Paterson and her son were still struggling to cope with Lisa Hill's death. So, for her next book, she decided to write a story about a close friendship between a young boy and girl that ends in tragedy, the boy struggling to cope with his loss. She would later say that writing the book was a therapeutic exercise that helped her and her son make some sense out of a senseless tragedy.

Bridge To Terabithia is set in Lark Creek, a small town in rural Virginia. The novel opens with 10-year-old Jess Aarons, a poor farm boy, going out for a morning run before breakfast. The introverted, artistically gifted Jess has no friends, but hopes to win his peers' admiration and respect when school starts by becoming the fastest boy in the fifth grade and winning the races held during recess.

When Jess returns from his practice run, we get a look at his bleak home life. The Aarons family is large and poor. His two older sisters, Brenda and Ellie, are cruel to him. His younger sisters, May Belle and Joyce Ann, adore him, but also annoy him, as he must share a bedroom with them. His mother favors her daughters over her son and is always yelling at him. His father lavishes affection on Jess' younger sisters but is emotionally distant from his son and shows him no affection. He's often gruff and foul tempered, especially to Jess. With money so tight that he has to commute over an hour each way to Washington, D.C. to work as a day laborer because farming doesn't pay enough to support the family, Mr. Aarons is rarely in a good mood.

At school, Jess' teacher is a nasty, foul-tempered, obese older woman named Mrs. Myers, nicknamed "Monster Mouth" by her students for obvious reasons. The music teacher, Miss Edmunds, is young and pretty, and the only human being who seems to care about Jess. She admires his artistic talent and encourages him to keep drawing. She's a non-conformist like Jess - she wears jeans to class and no makeup. She's also a hippie and plays folk songs on her guitar for the kids. Jess sees Miss Edmunds as a "diamond in the rough," and has a huge crush on her.

Jess' artistic talent is a source of consternation for his ignorant father, who worries that Jess' passion for drawing poses a threat to his only son's masculinity:

He would like to show his drawings to his dad, but he didn't dare. When he was in first grade, he had told his dad that he wanted to be an artist when he grew up. He'd thought his dad would be pleased. He wasn't. "What are they teaching in that damn school?" he had asked. "Bunch of old ladies turning my only son into some kind of a..." He had stopped on the word, but Jess had gotten the message. It was one you didn't forget, even after four years.

Into Jess' bleak world comes a ray of sunshine in the form of a new girl who moves in next door. Leslie Burke is Jess' age. She's an intelligent, vivacious tomboy from the city whose parents are both writers. The Burkes are wealthy, but don't own a TV set. They prefer that their daughter call them by their first names (Bill and Judy) instead of Mom and Dad. They're liberal and non-religious, whereas the Aaronses are like most people in Lark Creek - Christian fundamentalists - though they only attend church once a year, on Easter Sunday, because Mrs. Aarons "got mad at the preacher."

Jess and Leslie don't become friends when they first meet. Leslie joins Mrs. Myers' class and then runs against the boys in the races at recess. Unfortunately, she beats Jess in the heat, eliminating him from the races and crushing his dream of being the fastest kid in the fifth grade. Nevertheless, when Gary Fulcher, a bully, refuses to let Leslie run in the final race, Jess stands up for her. Fulcher lets her run, and she beats him. She outruns the other boys as well, humiliating them.

That's no way to start a friendship, but soon, Jess and Leslie become inseparable. Deciding that she and Jess need a place of their own, Leslie chooses a forest clearing on the other side of a creek bed near their homes. In order to reach their secret land, they swing across the creek bed on an old rope tied to a tree. Leslie names their magic kingdom Terabithia. There, they rule as king and queen, though Jess, who is in awe of Leslie, feels unworthy of being her king.

In Terabithia, Jess and Leslie grow closer as she draws him into her world of imagination. There, no enemies - not the imaginary giants from Leslie's stories or their real-life foes can defeat them. Leslie builds up Jess' low self-esteem and makes him feel good about himself for the first time. Although nervous around them at first, Jess grows close to Leslie's parents as well, as they too introduce him to a world he never knew existed.

Together, there's nothing that Jess and Leslie can't do. When another bully, Janice Avery, steals food from Jess' little sister May Belle, he and Leslie get even by playing a brilliantly conceived and executed practical joke to humiliate Janice in front of the other kids. Later, when Jess hears Janice crying in the girls' bathroom, he gets Leslie to reach out to her. They learn that she is being abused - brutally beaten - by her father, which is why she became a bully.

Although Jess likes Leslie's parents, he's uncomfortable having her over at his house. His sisters tease him about his "girlfriend," his mother hates Leslie's boyish looks and clothes, and his father is "fretting that his only son did nothing but play with girls," and is "worried about what would become of it." When Leslie asks if she can go to church with Jess and his family for Easter services, (she's never been to a church before) his mother grudgingly says yes. Afterward, on the way home, Leslie wonders why Jess, who is a Christian, hates church so much while she, a nonbeliever, thinks that the story of Jesus is beautiful. May Belle warns Leslie that she has to believe in the Bible, or else God will damn her to Hell when she dies. Leslie disagrees.

The closer Jess grows to Leslie, the less he thinks about his crush on Miss Edmunds, the music teacher. But one morning, Jess is stunned when she invites him out to see an art gallery in Washington. Thrilled to be able to spend time with Miss Edmunds outside of music class, he goes off with her, asking his sleeping mother for permission. He forgets to call Leslie and tell her that he won't be meeting her in Terabithia that day. Jess loves the art gallery, and immediately chastises himself for not inviting Leslie along. It's just not the same without her. He promises himself that he will invite her next time.

There won't be a next time. When Jess returns home, he finds his family worried, his mother in tears. His older sister Brenda breaks the news: Leslie is dead. She had been swinging on the rope to Terabithia when it broke. She fell, struck her head, and drowned in the creek. The family thought that Jess had been killed, too. Disbelieving them at first, the terrible realization hits Jess and he takes off running, as if by running, he could keep Leslie alive. His father brings him home.

Jess goes through all the stages of the bereaved: denial, anger, fear, guilt, and sorrow. He and his parents go to the Burkes' house to pay respects. The experience is unreal to him. Afterward, Jess struggles to deal with his grief. The only way he can cope with his loss is to use all the inner strength that Leslie had given him. He decides to repay her for her kindness by passing it along. He builds a bridge to Terabithia and brings his neglected little sister May Belle into the magical kingdom, making her the new queen.

Katherine Paterson's powerful, emotional story won the Newbery Award the year it was published. Over 30 years later, it continues to touch the hearts and minds of new generations of readers. Surprisingly, Bridge To Terabithia holds the distinction of being the most banned and challenged children's book of all time. It often appears on teachers' assigned reading lists for classroom study and discussion, raising the ire of disgruntled parents and conservative groups who complain about the novel's dialectic use of profane language, (casual use of the words damn and hell in conversation) ridiculing of authority figures, and negative depictions of Christians and Christianity.

These criticisms are surprising, considering that the author is the wife of a Presbyterian minister. Religious themes are handled in an honest, realistic way. Due to the effect of the religious dogma he was raised to believe in, Jess' faith is no comfort to him at all in his greatest time of need. On the contrary, he is terrified that God will send Leslie Burke to Hell for being a non-believer. His father assures him otherwise, telling him that "God don't send no little girls to Hell."

Bridge To Terabithia was first adapted in 1985 as an episode of the PBS TV series, Wonderworks - a zero-budget, horribly written, poorly acted episode of a series that usually produced quality adaptations of children's literature. Fans of the book, including me, believed that it would never be made into a movie because of its controversial nature. However, in 2007, Disney's Walden Media division produced a feature film version of Bridge To Terabithia.

With David Paterson (who grew up to become a playwright) serving as producer and co-writer, the movie turned out to be a faithful adaptation that beautifully captured all the emotion of the story. Lovingly directed by animator Gabor Csupo in his first live-action film, the movie features stunning performances by young leads Josh Hutcherson and AnnaSophia Robb as Jess Aarons and Leslie Burke. They're backed by a stellar supporting cast, including Robert Patrick as Mr. Aarons and Zooey Deschanel as Miss Edmunds.

Although the "Disneyfied" screenplay tones down the story (the book is much darker) and omits or waters down the most objectionable elements of the novel, the movie still ignited a firestorm of controversy due to deceitful marketing practices over which the filmmakers had no control. The movie was falsely marketed by Disney as a lighthearted fantasy similar to The Chronicles Of Narnia. Parents and children unfamiliar with the book went to the movie expecting to see what was advertised. Instead, they saw a deep and very sad story that really had little to do with fantasy. The marketing also drove away fans of the book (like me) who believed that the story they loved so much had been totally butchered and ruined.

The Bridge To Terabithia movie is currently available on standard and Blu-Ray DVD. I wholeheartedly recommend that you see it - after you read the book, which is a masterpiece of contemporary children's literature.

Quote Of The Day

"When people ask me what qualifies me to be a writer for children, I say I was once a child. But I was not only a child, I was better still, a weird little kid." - Katherine Paterson

Vanguard Video

Today's video features an interview with Katherine and David Paterson on the Bridge To Terabithia movie. Enjoy!

Notes For October 20th, 2009

noreply@blogger.com (Eric) — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 02:15:00 +0000

This Day In Writing History

On October 20th, 1854, the famous French poet Arthur Rimbaud was born. He was born Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud in Charleville, France. When Arthur was six years old, his father, Captain Frederic Rimbaud, a Legion D'Honneur award winning soldier, left to join his regiment and never returned, having become tired of domestic life. This left Arthur and his siblings to be raised alone by their mother, a domineering, controlling, fanatically devout Catholic.

In 1862, believing that her children were spending too much time with the local poor kids and being influenced by them, Madame Rimbaud moved the family to the Cours D'Orleans, where the living conditions were better. Instead of being taught at home by their mother, Arthur Rimbaud and his brother attended school for the first time at the Pension Rossatr. To push her children to get good grades, Madame Rimbaud would punish them by forcing them to learn a hundred lines of Latin verse, then withholding their meals if they recited the verse incorrectly.

As a boy, Arthur Rimbaud hated school and his mother's constant control and supervision - he and his brother were not allowed to leave her sight until their late teens. At the age of nine, Arthur wrote a 700-word essay voicing his objections to having to learn Latin in school. When he was eleven years old, he had his first communion. Despite his intellect and his individualistic nature, he became as fanatically devout a Catholic as his mother, which led his schoolmates to call him un sale petit cagot - a dirty little hypocrite.

Though most of his reading as a child was confined to the Bible, the young Arthur Rimbaud also enjoyed fairy tales and adventure stories. While he disliked school, he became an outstanding student and was at the head of the class in all of his subjects except science and mathematics. His schoolmasters noted with awe Arthur's ability to absorb large quantities of material. In 1869, at the age of fifteen, he won eight prizes in school. The following year, he won seven.

Around the same time, while studying at the College de Charleville, Arthur's mother hired a private tutor for him, Father Ariste Lheritier, who was the first person to encourage Arthur to write. The teenage Rimbaud's first published poem, Les Etrennes des Orphelines, (The Orphans' New Year's Gift) appeared in the January 2nd, 1870 issue of the Revue pour Tous magazine. Two weeks later, a new teacher, Georges Izambard, arrived at Rimbaud's school and became his literary mentor.

When the Franco-Prussian War broke out, Izambard left, and Rimbaud was devastated. He ran away to Paris and was arrested and imprisoned for a week. After returning home, he ran away again to escape his mother. He became a different person; he drank, wrote vulgar poems, and stole books from bookshops. He abandoned his penchant for neatness and wore his hair long. Later, he wrote to his old teacher Izambard about his method of achieving poetic enlightenment through "a long, intimidating, immense, and rational derangement of the senses," reporting that "the sufferings are enormous, but one must be strong, be born a poet, and I have recognized myself as a poet."

A friend encouraged Arthur Rimbaud to write to Paul Verlaine, a prominent Symbolist poet, after Arthur's letters to other poets went unanswered. So, Rimbaud sent Verlaine two letters, which contained several of his poems, including the dazzling, hypnotic, and shocking Le Dormeur du Val - The Sleeper of the Vale. The impressed Verlaine wrote back, sending Rimbaud a one-way ticket to Paris, telling him to "Come, dear great soul. We await you; we desire you." Rimbaud arrived in September of 1871 and stayed briefly at Verlaine's home.

Although Paul Verlaine had a pregnant wife, he and Arthur Rimbaud engaged in a short, but torrid gay affair. While Verlaine had previously engaged in homosexual relationships, there is no evidence that Rimbaud had gay affairs before he met Verlaine. He would later become involved with women. While he and Verlaine were together, they led a wild, vagabond life that was enhanced by their frequent use of absinthe and hashish. Rimbaud's outrageous behavior brought scandal to the Parisian literati. He became the archetypical enfant terrible, yet at the same time, he wrote striking, visionary works of verse.

In September of 1872, Rimbaud and Verlaine arrived in London. They lived in poverty in Bloomsbury and Camden Town, scraping together a meager living, mostly through teaching. Their relationship grew increasingly bitter. By June of 1873, a frustrated Verlaine returned to Paris. The following month, he wrote to Rimbaud, telling him to meet him at the Hotel Liege in Brussels. The reunion was a disaster. They argued incessantly and Verlaine drank heavily. He bought a revolver and ammunition, and shot at Rimbaud twice in a drunken rage. The first shot missed him, but the second grazed his wrist.

Rimbaud dismissed his injury as superficial and declined to press charges. But after the shooting, when Verlaine accompanied Rimbaud to the train station in Brussels, his bizarre behavior made Rimbaud fear that he was going insane. Rimbaud begged a policeman to arrest Verlaine for his own good - and for Rimbaud's safety. Verlaine was charged with attempted murder. In the resulting investigation, Verlaine's intimate correspondences with Rimbaud were uncovered and used against him. Rimbaud withdrew his criminal complaint, but the judge sentenced Verlaine to two years imprisonment anyway, because of his wife's accusations of homosexuality.

After the trial, Rimbaud returned home to Charleville and completed his famous epic work Une Saison en Enfer (A Season In Hell), a masterpiece of Symbolist prose poetry. In 1874, he returned to London with his friend, poet Germain Noveau. There, Rimbaud wrote and assembled his groundbreaking prose poetry collection, Les Illuminations (Illuminations). The following year, after Paul Verlaine was released from prison, Rimbaud met him for the last time.

Arthur Rimbaud later gave up writing and settled into a quiet, steady working life. Some say that he had become fed up with the wild life; others speculate that he intended to save up enough money so he could afford to live independently as a carefree poet. He continued to travel extensively throughout Europe, mostly on foot. In May of 1876, he became a soldier for the Dutch Colonial Army in order to travel to Indonesia for free, after which, he promptly deserted and sailed back to France. In December of 1878, Rimbaud went to Cyprus, where he worked for a construction company as the foreman of a stone quarry. Five months later, he had to leave after contracting typhoid fever.

In 1880, Rimbaud settled in Aden, Yemen as an employee for the Bardey agency. Four years later, he left Bardey's and became an independent merchant in Harar, Ethiopia, dealing mostly in coffee and weapons. He took native women as lovers and lived with an Ethiopian mistress for a time. He became close friends with Ras Makkonen, the governor of Harar and father of future Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie.

The following year, in February 1881, Rimbaud developed a pain in his right knee that he thought was arthritis. A British doctor in Aden mistakenly diagnosed Rimbaud's knee pain as tubercular synovitis. When the pain grew agonizing, he returned to France for treatment. He was admitted to a hospital in Marseilles, where his right leg was amputated. The diagnosis was cancer. After a brief stay at the family home in Charleville, Rimbaud tried to return to Africa, but on the way, his health deteriorated and he found himself back at the same hospital in Marseilles in great pain.

He was attended by his younger sister, Isabelle, until he died in Marseilles on November 10th, 1891, at the age of 37.

Quote Of The Day

"Genius is the recovery of childhood at will." - Arthur Rimbaud

Vanguard Video

Today's video features a reading of Arthur Rimbaud's poem Le Chercheuses de Poux (The Seekers of Lice) in English. Enjoy!

IWW Members' Publishing Successes

noreply@blogger.com (Jody Ewing) — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 22:38:00 +0000

Internet Writing Workshop members continue to find publishing success in all venues.

Congratulations to this week's crew!

Jody

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Barry Basden

"Cousin Jake," a short remembrance, is in Poor Mojo's Almanac(k). I think they now owe me a T-shirt.

Thanks to those who helped with this one some time ago.

Dew on the Kudzu, a Southern ezine, has put up my short piece, "Days of the V8 Chevy" with a nice photo.

Thanks to those who helped when the piece was even shorter.

Florence Cardinal

My article, "Coffee for Babies," has been posted on Health Central where I have numerous articles on sleep and sleep disorders.

Mira Desai

I’m glad to inform you that my short story has been accepted for a local festival souvenir, the Celebrate Bandra souvenir, that Caferati is putting together. My story, "115 Carter Road," is among two stories selected for print.

Thank you, Internet Writing Workshop, and especially Alice. And thank you, Mister God.

Ruth Douillette

I'm going to follow Sue [Ellis] with a yahoo of my own for a book review by author Michael Greenberg about the trials of making a living from writing: Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writer's Life. If you're the sort who keeps a pen and pad handy to jot down thoughts and bits of overheard dialogue, let's hope you don't carry this habit quite as far as Greenberg did and recounts in his essay "The Importance of Pronouns."

Sue's review of Patience with God is a good one!

If you check this month's issue of Internet Review of Books, you'll recognize at least five more reviewers among the many.

Sue Ellis

My review of Patience with God, a refreshing perspective on religion written by Frank Schaeffer, is in the birthday issue of this month's Internet Review of Books.

I haven't read all the reviews yet, but I plan to and hope you'll take a look, too. As always, thanks to the editors for being so easy to work with and turning out a great publication.

Also, I'm up at Callussed Hands in the new Issue #9 with a single poem.

Alan Girling

My prose poem thing "By the Road to the Emerald City" is now up at Six Sentences. I'm very happy to be there.

Also, I had a poem, "Marijuana Girl, by N.R. DeMexico" accepted for the upcoming print issue of Gutter Eloquence.

Nicole Green writing as Elizabeth Jerrold

I am an author on Fried Fiction! They post serialized fiction and they're very new and actively looking for authors, so you should consider submitting to them if you're interested in writing serialized fiction. The great thing about it is you don't have to have a finished work. You just need about 1,000 words to get started and after you submit your initial story, if you're accepted as an author you just go in and post new episodes as you're ready.

They're looking for nearly all genres. I think this will be a fun little adventure.

I'm writing YA fantasy for them under the pseudonym Elizabeth Jerrold if you want to check out my Cage Donnovan stories (only one posted so far).

Karyn Hall

My review of The Day the Falls Stood Still is up at Internet Review of Books.

Thanks Julie and Ruth for the opportunity.

Ann Hite

My book review of Whisper To The Black Candle has been published in the Internet Review of Books in the Lasting Impressions portion of the magazine. Give it a read and you'll understand why this book made a lasting impression on me.

Tom Mahony

My short story, "Hippie Market" is being reprinted at ReadShortFiction.

Jeannette Monahan

I just found out I received an Honorable Mention in the 78th Annual Writer's Digest Writing Competition for my story, "A Blender in Parrothead-Land." Thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone on the Nonfiction List who critiqued my story for me back in May and helped me improve it. I so appreciate it!

Gary Presley

My memoir is no longer news since it was "hot of the press" a year ago, but this month it received a relatively favorable review up in the Great White North.

It can be read as a PDF file in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

Randy Radic

My review of T.J. Constable's book on UFOs and etheric energy is up at Alvah's Books. Thanks to the Book Tree for the book and Rebeca for the opportunity.

Wayne Scheer

My fantasy flash, "Stripped of Innocence," is up at Everyday Fiction. It's a departure from my usual "realistic" fare.

Jack Shakely

Taking my cue from Barry and Stacy, I submitted my first 50-word short story to 50 to One, which they are posting today. Go check out 50 to One; it's addictive, and lots of fun.

Virginia Winters

My story, "Freddie's Athabaska," previously critiqued on Fiction, has been accepted for a 2010 issue of The Other Herald.

Thanks to everyone who took a look at it and commented.

Ruth Zavitz

I was one of 12 semi-finalists in the John Kenneth Galbraith Literary Awards short story contest.

This Week's Practice Exercise

celticwynds@gmail.com (Norman Thomas Cooper) — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 15:07:00 +0000

Picture It! Version 2

Prepared by: Florence Cardinal
Reposted, revised, on: Sun., 18 Oct. 2009
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Exercise: In less than 400 words, choose a picture--any picture--and write a scene that takes place in the space portrayed.
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When you set a scene, you're painting a picture for your readers. Sometimes it's easy--if an airplane's taking off your characters are probably on an airfield or in the plane, and they act appropriately. Sometimes you have many more options.

For this exercise, choose the scene first, and then find some characters and let them do whatever they want to do. Use a picture--any picture you choose--for your scene. It can be a photo in a magazine, a painting, somebody's drawing, even a calendar picture. Tell your readers what it is in only a few words--if you get it off the Web, give us the URL. You might say: "A barn in winter, six cows waiting to be milked." Or, "In the Oval office; the President's not there." Doesn't matter what or where. But make sure your readers can "see" the scene.
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Exercise: In less than 400 words, choose a picture--any picture--and write a scene that takes place in the space portrayed.
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In your critiques, let the author know whether you can "see" the picture in which the scene takes place, and whether the actions of the characters make sense. Also, critique the writing, and let the author know what could have been done better.

These exercises were written by IWW members and administrators to provide structured practice opportunities for its members. You are welcome to use them for practice as well. Please mention that you found them at the Internet Writing Workshop.

Notes For October 16th, 2009

noreply@blogger.com (Eric) — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 23:14:00 +0000

This Day In Writing History

On October 16th, 1854, the legendary playwright, poet, and novelist Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin, Ireland. His father, Sir William Wilde, was a prominent ear and eye surgeon who wrote books on medicine, archaeology, and Irish folklore. His mother Jane wrote poetry for the Young Irelanders revolutionary movement and was a lifelong Irish nationalist.

As a boy, Oscar Wilde was home schooled until the age of nine, when he attended Portora Royal School in County Fermanagh. After graduating from Portora, Wilde enrolled at Trinity College, Dublin, where he roomed with his brother Willie and became an outstanding student, winning the Berkley Gold Medal - the highest award a classics student could win at Trinity. He also won a scholarship to Magdalen College, Oxford.

While studying at Magdalen, Wilde won the 1878 Newdigate Prize for his poem Ravenna, but he failed to win the Chancellor's English Essay Prize. However, the essay he entered, The Rise Of Historical Criticism, would be published posthumously in 1909. Wilde graduated from Trinity with a double first (the UK equivalent of two 4.0 grade point averages) in classical moderations and literae humaniores.

During his years at Magdalen, Oscar Wilde was known for his involvement with the aesthetic and decadent movements in art and literature of the time. He wore his hair long, openly expressed his disdain for "manly" sports, and decorated his rooms with objets d'art such as peacock feathers, sunflowers, and blue china. As a result, Wilde was greatly disliked by his fellow students, who would throw their china at him and trash his rooms. Also during this time, Wilde joined a Masonic Lodge and rose to the rank of Master Mason, which he retained until his death.

After he graduated from Magdalen, Wilde returned to Dublin. He met a woman, Florence Balcombe, and courted her, but she ended up marrying writer Bram Stoker. After hearing of their engagement, Wilde wrote to Florence and told her that he was going to leave Ireland permanently. He would return just twice, for brief visits. After he left Ireland, he spent the next six years in London, Paris, and the U.S.

In London, Wilde met Constance Lloyd, whose father, Horace, was Queen's Counsel. Wilde married Constance in May of 1884. They would have two sons. Although a married father of two, Wilde was a bisexual who preferred men. Wilde biographer Neil McKenna theorized that Oscar was aware of his homosexuality as a teenager, when at the age of 16, he experienced his first kiss with another boy. McKenna also speculated that for a time, Wilde became unhappy with his sexual orientation and sought out female companionship, marrying his wife with the hope that marriage could "cure" him. It didn't.

Wilde subsequently developed an interest in homosexual philosophy and law reform. Homosexuality was not only held in great contempt during the Victorian era, it was also illegal under British law and punishable by imprisonment. So, Wilde and some like-minded individuals formed a secret society called the Order of Chaeronea, which was dedicated to gay activism. In the summer of 1891, Wilde met Lord Alfred Douglas, a young undergraduate student and poet known as Bosie to his friends. Douglas' father was John Sholto Douglas, the 9th Marquess of Queensberry. He was a brutal man who abhorred his son, claiming that Lord Alfred had been corrupted by older homosexuals.

Bosie, who would become famous for his poem Two Loves, wherein he described homosexuality as "the love that dare not speak its name," was first Wilde's close friend, then lover. For a few years, they lived together openly in various places. But their relationship would soon lead to Wilde's downfall.

As a writer, Wilde was best known for his plays, which he infused with his famous, rapacious wit. His only novel was a masterpiece of Gothic horror called The Picture Of Dorian Gray (1890). Dorian Gray, a handsome young man, is the subject of a painting by artist Basil Hallward. Hallward becomes smitten with him and believes that Dorian's beauty is responsible for a new phase in his art. He introduces Dorian to his friend, Lord Henry Watton, an aristocrat whose hedonistic philosophy enthralls Dorian.

Fearing that his beauty will fade with age, Dorian sells his soul to Satan in exchange for eternal youth. While Dorian stays young and beautiful, his portrait ages. Over the next eighteen years, he embarks on a path of indulgence and debauchery, experimenting with every vice and sin. When Basil Hallward arrives to question him about the rumors of his debauchery, Dorian shows him the portrait, which has become as hideous as Dorian's sins. Blaming the artist for his fate, Dorian stabs him to death.

Later, Dorian decides to give up his sinful ways. He starts by not breaking the heart of a vicar's daughter whom he has come to love. Back at home, Dorian wonders if his portrait has changed, now that he has chosen to be good. Instead, it has become more hideous than ever. Realizing that only a full confession will absolve him, but lacking the courage to confess to the killing of Hallward and fearing the consequences of doing so, Dorian is left with only one option. He plunges a knife into his portrait. Hearing a scream, his servants summon the police. They find Dorian's body, suddenly aged, withered and monstrous, and stabbed in the heart.

The Picture Of Dorian Gray was decried as immoral upon its publication because of its homoerotic overtones and depictions of debauchery. It would become a classic of Gothic horror. Although it was Oscar Wilde's only novel, a famous, anonymously published gay erotic novel Teleny, or The Reverse Of The Medal (1893) would be attributed to him. Scholars believe that the book was in fact a collaborative effort written by Wilde's friends, with Wilde serving as editor.

Oscar Wilde's most famous play was The Importance Of Being Earnest (1895), a comedy that satirized the hypocrisy and foibles of Victorian society. The play, which is packed with witty dialogue, tells the story of aristocrats who use the same alias (Ernest) in order to lead double lives. Considered his best play, it would also be his last. It closed after 83 performances because of a scandal that had ensnared Wilde.

The Marquess of Queensberry, father of Wilde's lover Bosie, (Lord Alfred Douglas) publicly accused Wilde of being a "posing sodomite," so Wilde made a complaint of criminal libel against him. He was arrested and released on bail. A team of detectives led Queensberry's lawyers to London's gay underground and details of Wilde's associations with male prostitutes, transvestites, and gay brothels were soon revealed and leaked to the press, which assailed him nonstop. Queensberry's lawyers claimed that the alleged libel was done for the public good. He was acquitted and Wilde found himself arrested for "gross indecency" - a term for homosexual acts that were illegal under British law.

The jury in Wilde's first trial failed to reach a verdict. At his final trial, presided by Justice Sir Alfred Wills, Wilde was convicted of gross indecency and sentenced to the maximum of two years imprisonment - a sentence that the judge believed was too lenient for the crime of homosexuality. Wilde served his time at three different prisons. By the time of his release, prison life had left him in poor health. He spent his last years abroad in self-imposed exile, living under the alias Sebastian Melmoth, a name based on Saint Sebastian and the main character of Melmoth The Wanderer, a Gothic novel written by Wilde's great uncle, Charles Robert Maturin.

Wilde was broke, so his wife, who refused to meet with him or let him see his children, sent him money when she could. He took up with his first lover, Robert Ross, and they spent the summer of 1897 together in Northern France, where Wilde wrote his famous poem, The Battle Of Reading Gaol. Despite the objections of their families and friends, Wilde was later reunited with Bosie Douglas, and they lived together in Italy in late 1897, but soon separated.

Wilde settled at the Hotel d'Alsace in Paris, where, it has been said, he lived the uninhibited gay lifestyle that he had been denied in England. He died of cerebral meningitis on November 30th, 1900, at the age of 46. Some have speculated that the meningitis was a complication of syphilis, but Wilde's grandson, Merlin Holland, has said that it was a complication of a surgical procedure, most likely a mastoidectomy. Wilde's own doctors blamed the meningitis on an old suppuration of the right ear.

Oscar Wilde remains to this day one of the world's great literary icons.

Quote Of The Day

"It is through art, and through art only, that we can realize our perfection." - Oscar Wilde

Vanguard Video

Today's video features a reading from Oscar Wilde's De Profundis, a long letter he wrote to Bosie Douglas while in prison. Enjoy!

Notes For October 15th, 2009

noreply@blogger.com (Eric) — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 22:45:00 +0000

This Day In Writing History

On October 15th, 1844, the legendary German philosopher and writer Friedrich Nietzsche was born. He was born in Rocken bei Lutzen, Prussia, the son of a Lutheran pastor and teacher. The oldest of three children, Nietzsche's brother Ludwig died at the age of two, a year after their father died of a brain ailment at the age of 33. Nietzsche's sister Elisabeth would later figure in the controversy that still surrounds his philosophy and writings.

As a boy, Friedrich Nietzsche attended a boys' school, then a private school. In 1858, the 14-year-old Nietzsche displayed particular talent for both music and language, so the world famous school at Schulpforta accepted him as a student. While studying there, he received his first important introduction to literature, especially ancient Greek and Roman literature.

After graduating in 1864, Nietzsche entered the University of Bonn, where he studied theology and classical philology. After the first semester, he lost his faith and ended his theological studies. Around this time, he had read David Strauss' famous book, The Life Of Jesus, a debunking of the bible as mythology. However, two years earlier, in an essay titled Fate And History, Nietzsche had already argued that the central beliefs of Christianity had been discredited by historical research.

Deciding to become a classical philologist, Nietzsche followed his favorite professor to the University of Leipzig. At this time, he began delving into philosophy, studying the works of the thinkers of the day, such as Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Albert Lange. In 1869, although he was only 24 years old and had neither a doctorate nor a teaching certificate, Nietzsche was offered a professorship in classical philology by the University of Basel in Switzerland. He accepted the offer and served for ten years. Today, he is still one of their youngest tenured Classics professors on record.

During this time, Nietzsche struck up a close friendship with legendary composer Richard Wagner and his wife, Cosima. He had met Richard first in 1868. Nietzsche admired the Wagners greatly, and they introduced him to their inner circle of friends. His friendship with the Wagners would sour after Richard began to champion "German culture," which Nietzsche considered to be a contradiction in terms. He would later blast Wagner in his 1888 book, The Case Of Wagner.

In 1872, Nietzsche published his first book, The Birth Of Tragedy, where he argued that ancient Greek tragedy was the highest form of art. This was because its blending of Apollonian and Dionysian elements into a whole allowed the viewer to experience the full spectrum of the human condition. The Apollonian impulse is detached, rational, sober, and emphasizes superficial appearance, whereas the Dionysian impulse is immersion in the whole of nature, intoxication, irrationality, and inhumanity. Nietzsche argues that it's not healthy for the individual or society to be ruled by either impulse. Instead, they should be combined to create a healthy whole.

Nietzsche's 1878 book, Human, All Too Human, was a reaction to the pessimism of Wagner and Schopenhauer. It was a book of aphorisms on subjects including metaphysics, religion, the sexes, and morality. It was the first of Nietzsche's writings that would be taken out of context by the Nazis to build the foundation of their own philosophy - despite the fact that Nietzsche was the same man who had said, "Germany is a great nation only because its people have so much Polish blood in their veins."

In 1879, Nietzsche resigned his professorship due to a severe decline in his health. While serving as a medical orderly in the Franco-Prussian War, he contracted several diseases, including diphtheria, dysentery, and some believe, syphilis, which would eventually cause his mental illness and death. After leaving the university, he continued to write, and in 1881, he began using a typewriter, as his eyesight started to fail.

In his 1881 book, Daybreak, Nietzsche began his "campaign against morality," criticizing the moral schemes of such institutions as Christianity and utilitarianism. His aim was not to destroy morality, but to replace the moral schemes of the aforementioned institutions with a new moral code. There is no such thing as one-size-fits-all morality, and exceptional people should no longer be ashamed of their uniqueness. The old style of morality is best suited to unexceptional people who are satisfied with their mediocrity. Thus, Nietzsche's motto is "become what you are."

The Gay Science (1882) was a mixture of philosophy and poetry. It contained Nietzsche's famous axiom "God is dead" and its explanation, "Whither is God? he cried; I will tell you. We have killed him - you and I. We are his murderers."

Nietzsche's most famous book, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, published in four parts between 1883 and 1885, was a philosophical novel. It incorporated all of Nietzsche's ideas into a prose narrative. It told the story of Zarathustra, a wandering prophet who seeks to teach people how to live a fulfilling life in a world without meaning. Although Zarathustra was based on the Persian prophet Zoroaster, he seems more like Jesus Christ - or rather, an anti-Christ. Ironically, Nietzsche's prose mimics that of the Bible, in a clever parody.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra is not a traditional novel by any means. It's a very deep and dense treatise on philosophy and morality. It explores Nietzsche's concept of the ubermensch, or overman, better known in English as the superman. It would be another concept bastardized by the Nazis after Nietzsche's death to suit their own philosophy. Whereas Hitler's idea of a superman was a physically strong Aryan warrior, Nietzsche's ubermensch was mentally as well as physically strong - a well-rounded superman.

On January 3rd, 1889, Nietzsche collapsed after witnessing the whipping of a horse and throwing his arms around the animal's neck to protect it. This event triggered in Nietzsche a severe psychotic episode from which he would not recover, as it was believed that he was in the final stages of syphilis. He started sending incoherent letters to friends. Claiming to have been crucified by German doctors, he called for the abolishment of anti-Semitism, the execution of the German emperor, and for all European powers to declare war on Germany.

Nietzsche's mother had him committed to a psychiatric hospital. Later, his sister Elisabeth returned from Paraguay following the suicide of her husband, a notorious anti-Semite. While she cared for her brother, Elisabeth studied his works and read through all of his unpublished manuscripts. She hired philosopher and writer Rudolf Steiner to tutor her so she could understand her brother's writings. After a few months, Steiner gave up, declaring that it was impossible to teach her anything about philosophy.

Following a series of strokes and a bout with pneumonia, Friedrich Nietzsche died on August 25th, 1900 at the age of 55. His sister Elisabeth took control of his literary legacy. The following year, she had his last book published posthumously. The Will To Power (1901) was actually a patchwork quilt of bits and pieces of previously unpublished manuscripts edited together by Elisabeth Nietzsche, who took great liberties with the material, and most of it out of context. The final product was a hodgepodge of Nietzschean philosophy distorted and slanted to suit Elisabeth's anti-Semitic, nationalistic beliefs.

When Hitler rose to power in the early 1930s, the eightysomething year old Elisabeth Nietzsche became enamored with the Nazi dictator, who was equally enamored with Elisabeth's bastardization of her brother's work. Hitler made Friedrich Nietzsche the official philosopher of the Reich. In life, Nietzsche was no anti-Semite; he broke ties with his editor, Ernst Schmeitzner, because he was disgusted by Schmeitzner's anti-Semitism. His relationship with his sister was on again-off again, a seemingly never ending pattern of conflict and reconciliation, as Nietzsche was also disgusted by her anti-Semitism and that of her husband. And, as previously mentioned, Neitzche had a low opinion of German culture. He also despised the concept of nationalism.

Today, over a hundred years after his death, Friedrich Nietzsche still remains one of the world's most influential and most controversial philosophers.

Quote Of The Day

"Good prose is written only face to face with poetry." - Friedrich Nietzsche

Vanguard Video

Today's video features a reading from Friedrich Nietzsche's book, Twlight Of The Idols. Enjoy!

Notes For October 14th, 2009

noreply@blogger.com (Eric) — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 03:05:00 +0000

This Day In Writing History

On October 14th, 1888, the famous writer Katherine Mansfield was born in Wellington, New Zealand. She was born Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp. The third of four children, she had two older sisters and a younger brother. Her father was a banker who would become the chairman of the Bank of New Zealand and be knighted as well. The Australian-born British novelist Elizabeth von Arnim was her cousin.

Although her first published short stories would appear in the High School Reporter and Wellington Girls' High School magazines, the teenage Katherine Mansfield was an accomplished cellist who initially planned to become a professional musician. She developed a crush on fellow cellist Arnold Trowell, whose father was her music teacher, but her feelings were mostly unreciprocated.

Mansfield began keeping journals from a young age. She wrote of her growing alienation from provincial white New Zealand society and her disillusionment with and disdain for her fellow whites over the repression of the Maori (New Zealand aboriginal) people. In her fiction, Mansfield often depicted the Maoris in a positive or sympathetic light.

In 1903, Mansfield moved to London, where she attended Queen's College with her sisters. While she continued with her cello studies, she also contributed to the school newspaper, doing so with such dedication that she eventually became editor of the paper, bringing to it her interest in the French Symbolists and Oscar Wilde. Her peers regarded her as vivacious and charismatic.

From 1903 to 1906, Mansfield traveled through Europe, living mostly in Belgium and Germany. After completing her schooling in England, she returned to her home in New Zealand, where she began her writing career. She quickly tired of the provincial life and returned to London, falling into the bohemian life.

Katherine Mansfield was known for her restless and rebellious nature, so the bohemian life suited her. She was bisexual and had many lovers, mostly male, though she had some lesbian relationships. One was with Ida Baker, a South African fellow writer who would become a lifelong friend. In 1908, when she returned to London, Katherine sought out her old friends, the Trowell family. Her teenage crush Arnold Trowell was involved with another woman. She soon found herself involved in a passionate affair with his brother, Garnet.

By 1909, Mansfield found herself pregnant with Garnet's child, but his parents disapproved of their relationship, so they broke up. She hastily married George Bowden, a singing teacher eleven years her senior, but left him the same night after failing to consummate the marriage. Her mother came to see her and blamed the breakup of the marriage on Ida Baker. She sent Katherine to Bad Worishofen, a spa town in Bavaria, where she miscarried after trying to lift up a heavy suitcase and place it on top of a cupboard.

Mansfield's life in Bavaria had a major effect on her writing. She was introduced to the works of Anton Chekhov, who would prove to be a bigger influence on her than Oscar Wilde. In January 1910, she returned to London, where she had over a dozen works published in The New Age. A socialist magazine edited by A.R. Orage, it was a highly regarded intellectual publication. In 1911, her first short story collection, In A German Pension, was published. A hit with critics, the book would be greatly enjoyed by readers during World War 1, due to its negative portrayal of Germans.

The Great War had a major effect on Katherine Mansfield's life and writing. In 1915, when she learned that her younger brother, to whom she was very close, was killed in action, she was shocked and traumatized. To cope with her loss, she took refuge in her memories of him, basing her fiction on nostalgic reminisces of their childhood. In one of her poems, she writes of a dream she had shortly after her brother's death:

By the remembered stream my brother stands
Waiting for me with berries in his hands...
"These are my body. Sister, take and eat."

Mansfield's best collection of short stories, The Garden Party and Other Stories, published in 1922, was also inspired by her childhood in New Zealand.

In 1911, Mansfield submitted a short story to a new avant-garde literary magazine called Rhythm. The editor, John Middleton Murry, rejected it as too lightweight. So, Mansfield submitted another story, The Woman At The Store, a dark tale of murder and insanity. Not only did Murry publish it, he and Mansfield began a seven-year relationship that resulted in their marriage in 1918. Their life, however, was not a happy one.

Stephen Swift, the publisher of Rhythm, fled and left John responsible for all the magazine's debts. Katherine's health began to deteriorate from, among other things, an undiagnosed case of gonorrhea. She left John twice, but returned to him each time. In 1915, she had an affair with French writer Francis Carco after visiting him in Paris. She retold the story of this relationship in her short story, An Indiscreet Journey. That same year, she learned of her brother's death in the war.

In 1916, Katherine Mansfield entered her most prolific period as a writer, and her relationship with John Murry improved. She broadened her literary acquaintances, meeting writers such as D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Lytton Strachey, and Bertrand Russell through social gatherings and mutual friends. Unfortunately, in December of 1917, Mansfield fell ill and was diagnosed with tuberculosis.

In April of 1918, Mansfield's divorce from her husband George Bowden was at last finalized, so she married John Murry. The following year, he became the editor of a prestigious weekly journal called Athenaeum. Mansfield wrote over a hundred reviews for the magazine. During the winter of 1918-19, because of her poor health, she stayed in a villa in San Remo, Italy, with her friend and ex-lover, Ida Baker. Their relationship became strained, and Katherine wrote to John of her depression, so he came to stay over the Christmas season. But their relationship too became strained and they often lived apart.

Katherine Mansfield spent her last years seeking unorthodox treatments for her tuberculosis, but none of them worked. She died on January 9th, 1923, at the age of 34. She was a master of the short story, a modernist, an early feminist, and a progressive thinker ahead of her time.

Quote Of The Day

"The pleasure of all reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books." - Katherine Mansfield

Vanguard Video

Today's video features a short documentary on Katherine Mansfield. Enjoy!

Notes For October 13th, 2009

noreply@blogger.com (Eric) — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 23:39:00 +0000

This Day In Writing History

On October 13th, 1943, the famous poet Robert Lowell was sentenced to a year in prison for evading the draft. Lowell, a conscientious objector, refused to be drafted because he opposed saturation bombings and other tactics used by the Allies that targeted civilians in enemy countries. He served his time at New York's West Street jail.

Robert Lowell was born into a prominent Boston family whose ancestors included William Samuel Johnson, a signer of the United States Constitution, the famous Calvinist theologian Anne Hutchinson, the second governor of Massachusetts, and two passengers on the Mayflower. Lowell sought to separate himself from his family's history and rejected their Episcopalian religious tradition, converting to Catholicism. Although his new faith would influence the writing of his first two books, Lowell left the Catholic Church not long after his second book was published in 1946.

Lord Weary's Castle (1946), a poetry collection, won Robert Lowell a Pulitzer Prize at the age of 30. It featured one of his classic poems, The Quaker Graveyard In Nantucket. Like the other poems in the book, it featured Lowell's trademarks: rigorous formality, violent imagery, and powerful use of meter and rhyme. A good example can be found in these lines:

       The bones cry for the blood of the white whale, 
       the fat flukes arch and whack about its ears, 
       the death-lance churns into the sanctuary, tears 
       the gun-blue swingle, heaving like a flail,
       and hacks the coiling life out: it works and drags
       and rips the sperm-whale's midriff into rags,
       gobbets of blubber spill to wind and weather.

Lowell returned to Boston in 1954 after living abroad for several years. He became involved with the Beat Generation of writers and artists. After he heard Beat poets such as Allen Ginsberg perform at readings, he incorporated their open, confessional narrative voice into his own more formal style of poetry. In his 1959 poetry collection Life Studies, Lowell wrote of his breakdown, his struggle with mental illness, and the breakup of his marriages.

In the 1960s, Robert Lowell became a champion of the civil rights movement and a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War. He was among a group of writers who led a march to the Pentagon in 1967. Lowell published many books and divided his time between Boston and London. He died of a heart attack in 1977 at the age of 60.

Quote Of The Day

"If youth is a defect, it is one we outgrow too soon." - Robert Lowell

Vanguard Video

Today's video features a recording of Robert Lowell reading his poem, Old Flame. Enjoy!