The year in review

It was a year of changes, including some profound ones, on both the personal and professional fronts.

• Personal front
  
  • Getting rid of the "Sally" monkey. All writers draw from personal experiences. We know where our best material comes from. I've been aware that the "soul mate" who decided she was a lesbian would influence my work in many ways, as indeed she did. "Sally" influenced my play "The Half-Life Conspiracy" and my novel "Kerouac's Scroll." But she, the experience, still bugged me. I hadn't resolved it in the work. Something was missing. Then a strange request came: to attend a reunion of graduate students from the University of Oregon, 1965-1975, the very years of the experience. Would "Sally" be there? The question led to a video, a fictional memoir, called Deconstructing Sally. This was the work that got the money off my back. Bob Hicks even gave it a generous review, the only video I've ever had reviewed.
  • Getting rid of the Cold War monkey. My experience as a Russian Linguist during the Cold War, 1959-1962, was extraordinary but I'd only used it in my work in a few short stories. Surely an epic novel was there, the kind of thing young Mailer or Jones wrote about their wars. I made many false starts at it over the past forty years. Then, of a sudden, it occurred to me that I was aiming too high. This experience didn't have to lead to an epic novel. Let it take you where it went. Think smaller. The result was a novella, Baumholder 1961, and in 75 pages I got the Cold War monkey off my back.
  • Ridding myself of these two monkeys has been liberating because each bugged me, affecting how I felt, the subtext of my life. The Big C scare and the wake up call. When a substantial, growing lump appeared under my jaw, my doctor felt certain it was cancer. A specialist, however, disagreed and tests proved her right. It was "probably" a stone in a saliva gland. However, for a time, thinking I had cancer, I remembered how quickly the end can, and probably will, come. I lost my closest two friends to cancer. Each was fine one day, diagnosed the next, and dead several months later. Fine one day, diagnosed the next, and dead several months later. So one might get only a few months notice to the end. Not much time to accomplish anything you've been putting off. I was driven to think hard about my priorities. Finally I made a profound personal decision: to retire as a writer. Not as a creative person. As a writer. No more plays, no more novels, no more short stories. Well, maybe I'd still dabble in screenwriting because it was fun and less demanding of rhetorical hard work. Retire as a writer. What a concept! And to formalize the decision, I'd collect the work that mattered most to me into "a reader." Yes, I decided to retire as a writer -- and since writing had been my life, this was a profound personal decision.
    
  
  
• The Professional front
  
  • Publications. 2009 saw publication of the work that got two monkeys off my back. And it saw me selecting the work that would go into A Charles Deemer Reader, to be published early in 2010.
  • A new direction. During the Big-C scare, when it hit home that one day I might be given an eviction notice with only a few months warning, when I was deciding on priorities, I realized that the great unrealized work ahead of me was to compose and write a chamber opera, or as much of it as my skill set allowed. I could write a libretto, vocal lines, a basic elementary piano score. A future composer could use this as foundation and run with it. This would take a long time, maybe more than I had, but if I didn't start now, I never would. So retiring as a writer really meant struggling for birth as the composer/librettist of a chamber opera. To make things easier, and because it's where my narrative interests were, I decided to use the very same story I had been working on as a short novel, the last day in the life of an old man. Appropriate enough, hey! This would be my project, probably my last project given its difficulty and challenge, and my barely functioning skill set with which to approach such an endeavor. I am calling the piece Life Is A Nice Place To Visit with a subtitle Musical and Dramatic Notes for a Chamber Opera. I've begun. It's going to be painstakingly slow, and I should have started several years ago. I am hoping the old cliche "better late than never" applies here.
  • So it's the end of one thing, the beginning of another, in this, the last act of my adventure. I feel satisfaction at what I accomplished as a writer. I feel lucky to be living, still, on what Raymond Carver called "gravy time." Yes, the gods have blessed me indeed. And I feel more at peace than I have in a long time, which I think is a result of retiring, of no long chasing that "last great literary work" that will catapult me out of the marginal shadows into the light. As a writer, I've already done my best work. What's there is there. This has not been an easy thing to admit. The good news is, It is available many places. Since it has a few fans, it can have more. It's good work. I feel confident about that. I have far less confidence as a composer. I'm not a good composer but I hear music in my head and I have learned how to write it down and there are moments of compelling music. I think a composer interested in my story and themes would find enough to run with it, to make it something worthwhile. So my job is to get down as much of the stuff in my head down as possible. It ain't doing anyone any good in my head ha ha.
  • Already I see that the rhythm of my life is very different now. More relaxed, less frantic. Less worrisome. I won't speculate why. Some obvious reasons. Some complicated ones.
    
  
  

What a year! How much I would have missed if I had died in 2008! I am blessed indeed. Of course it makes absolutely no sense that I outlived my closest friends, all of whom had less self-destructive lifestyles that I had for 30+ years. The only explanation is mind over matter because I've always been tough-minded and existential in my dealings with life and death. The gods, for whatever reasons and purposes, have been kind to me.