- Kerouac's Scroll. Two old men, best friends for over half a century, take a road trip across the country, each bringing a secret the sharing of which will change the end of their lives.
- Seattle Sonnets. 23 sonnets about love and lust.
- The Brazen Wing: A Screenplay. When Emil learns he has terminal cancer, he takes his grandson Billy on a trip to his small hometown in Idaho to find the old man’s first love. Tracking her to a rest home, they take her with them on a camping and fishing adventure. By the time the authorities find them, Emil has decided on his final exit and Billy has learned valuable lessons about life, death and love.
- The Man Who Shot Elvis and Other Stories.
Eleven short stories by Charles Deemer, two of which were selected to the Roll of Honor in BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES. - Famililly. A play in two acts. Winner, 1997 "Crossing Borders" International New Play Competition. Do children have inherent rights to be nurtured?
- Sad Laughter: the stage play and the screenplay. A story based on Moliere's fear that he may have married his own daughter.
- Dead Body In A Small Room. A screenwriter recoving from cancer in a small Nevada town investigates the death of a brothel prostitute.
- The Sadness of Einstein and other plays. Two bright young students go in search of Einstein at the Solvay Conference in 1927. Plus a cycle of one-act plays, The Death Cycle.
- Movies for the Mind: Volume One and Two.
Country Northwestern and other plays of the Pacific Northwest. 5 plays by Charles Deemer: Country Northwestern, Christmas at the Juniper Tavern, Varmints, Waitresses, The Half-Life Conspiracy.- Dark Mission. John Nugent's opera based on the Whitman Massacre of 1847. (Piano, vocal score. Coil binding. Libretto by Charles Deemer.)
But only four of these projects were new (and half of these were mostly written in 2005): Kerouac's Scroll, Dead Body..., The Brazen Wing, Dark Mission (this mostly done in 2004-5, but published in January, 2006). The rest are a repackaging of previous works for the archive in Special Collections at the University of Oregon. Housekeeping projects. Of the new work, the most promising (in commercial terms) initially was the mystery, Dead Body..., which landed me a top agent. However, this agent's initial great enthusiasm and confidence became decimated by initial rejection of the projected series; his staying power was poor, which actually became a blessing in disguise. Writing a mystery a year, I've come to realize, is not what I want to be doing right now. My interests, my real interests, are far less mainstream than this.
In 2007 I plan to devote more and more energy to operatic projects and fringe personal things. If I can rid myself of all commercial instincts, all the better, though they are so engrained in my upbringing and training that this is hard to do.
Change of subject. It's been suggested that I get the university to sponsor the review. I already went through and rejected this argument, even before I came out with the first issue. Such a relationship, in my view, would interfere with my vision for what the review is -- it would be restrictive. I'm not interested in editing just another literary or academic journal. I want something more reckless and more open to "reckless" work than this. I don't want to publish only what gets official academic approval. I want the review to reflect the personalities of its editors. I'm delighted with how it's shaped up, in fact. I think with official academic sponsorship, much of its contents would be rejected. In his interview in the current issue we called Fighting the Culture Police, OyamO says, "Academic theatre is dead, but it has many regular attendees who repeatedly come to view the preserved bodies." The strength of academia is to make sense of the past, not to embrace and explore the future. So as long as I am editor, Oregon Literary Review will have no formal relationship with academia.
No comments:
Post a Comment