A few memorable moments in a long career

The film Way Off Broadway reminded me of my own writing career early on. Some memorable moments from same:

• When I decided to take myself seriously as a writer, it was hard to find anyone else who took it, and me, seriously. My parents thought it was a strange, passing phase since I'd been a math/science nerd all my life. My first wife thought it was a moment of temporary insanity. "Sally," whom I met in grad school, was the first who took me seriously and she became my excellent first editor. I suppose that's why I still think of her in high regard despite what came to pass.
• I "became a writer" in 1967-8, after dropping out of grad school (out of a Ph.D. program--in a year I'd return as an MFA candidate) and moving to Portland with "Sally," getting an editorial job and writing literary short stories on the side. One day I received four rejections on the same day. I recall throwing a tantrum, then sitting down and writing Fragments Before the Fall, in which a writer assaults his readers, writing this in white heat quickly, mailing it off unrevised to The Literary Review -- where it got accepted and appeared several years later. It's the closest thing I've written to a statement of poetics. I love its closing image still. Same period: getting my first paycheck for selling a feature to Northwest Magazine (recently I edited an anthology of stories from there) -- I could call myself a pro!
• Seeing my first short story in print in a literary magazine. What a thrill! Then soon thereafter a bigger thrill, seeing my name in Best American Short Stories' "Roll of Honor," on a list that included Russell Banks, William Eastlake, Joyce Carol Oates, Tillie Olsen, Philip Roth, L. Woiwode. You can't be in better company than this! (I made the list in 1971, 1972 and 1974). Why I abandoned fiction for theater at this same time remains one of the great career blunders of all time, I suppose -- or so I thought for years.
• Seeing my first play produced. Winning a competition, flown to K.C. for it, put up in the Daniel Boone Hotel, treated like a bigshot, partying with the actors. Here was a different rush than seeing a story published because it was a communal experience, sitting in an audience, seeing folks respond in real time. At the same time, I was introduced to the frustrations and wonder of collaboration, watching actors create characters not quite my own.
• Becoming a resident playwright at a theater company. What security! Yes, you write, we'll produce. Here are your actors. It's the way it was meant to be.
• My first hyperdrama. Going to opening night in a white tux. Making the pages of TV Guide -- and the local society page! Extraordinary publicity, endless flattering reviews. I'm called "one of Oregon's most precious natural resources" (but couldn't get the time of day a decade later).
• The sting of bad reviews. Being called names in print in public. No defense.
• Learning how to live on grants. Avoiding full-time work, "a job," for so much of my life. Managing to exist as a writer.
• Writing my hypertext screenwriting book, which still sells. A new way of presenting educational material.
• Producing and directing my first hyperdrama, the rush, the power and control, the success of the economic model -- the boredom of the repetition, finally.
• The honor of a retrospective, a season dedicated to my work -- not realizing it was actually a death sentence.
• Coming to understand the writer's ace in the hole: "it's all material." No matter what happens, you write about it.
• Hearing John Nugent's music for our first opera. What a rush! A very talented guy. He seems to have disappeared. John, where are you?
• Being invited by the University of North Carolina to store my literary archive at Ibiblio. Later Special Collections at the University of Oregon giving me a shelf. The possibility of keeping the work alive.
• Emails from strangers about my work. It's nice to know they're out there.
• Doing a reading with poet Ralph Salisbury late in my career. He was the editor of Northwest Review and accepted my first published short story. I reminded him of this and, in fact, still had his initial rejection slip on which he suggested revisions.
• Starting Oregon Literary Review. Right place, right time, right focus.
• Feeling at the top of my game, finally -- and somehow all the twists and turns of a career begin to make sense. If I hadn't made this mistake, well, this good thing wouldn't have followed. Or is this rationalization or hallucination? Who cares? At this point in time, I'm where I want to be.
• Hoping the gods continue to grace me with good health so I can continue writing for whatever time I have left. Yet I expect to leave this world in the middle of the best writing I've ever done. It's the nature of the beast.

Well, more long-winded than I intended ... but there it is, a few highlights of a long career.