March 21, 2005

 

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN:

 

            I am writing to nominate my friend and Internet colleague Charles Deemer for the Charles Erskine Scott Wood Retrospective Award for a distinguished career in Oregon letters.

            Many important Oregon voices already have spoken up in praise of Deemer’s career as a playwright, short story writer, and journalist in Oregon since the mid-1960s. Listen to some of them (citations taken from Deemer’s website at http://www.ibiblio.org/cdeemer/cdref.htm):

 

·       “Charles' impact on Northwest literature and theater over the past twenty-plus years is impressive. As a critic I've followed his work since the early 1980s, and no playwright has had such an important or long-lasting effect on this community's cultural life.”  – Bob Hicks, Senior Critic, The Oregonian

·       “Charles has written over 40 plays and numerous scripts, essays, short stories and web projects. Over three dozen of his stage plays have been produced. I am unaware of another Oregonian who has had such a versatile and productive career in these areas of the arts.” – Brian Booth, Founder, Oregon Book Awards

·       “During the years we've worked together, I feel Charles was the clearest and most important theatre voice in Oregon.” Steve Smith, retired Artist Director, Theatre Workshop.

·       “…the following people, during the last quarter-century, have all helped to make this a better and more entertaining place in which to live. We've haven't always agreed with them, but these folks have made Portland Portland.” Willamette Week, citing Deemer on their list of most important Portlanders over the past 25 years.

 

            Let me add to this praise a few things not widely known or appreciated about Deemer’s career in Oregon:

 

·       Deemer is the only Oregon writer to receive two Oregon Arts Commission Fellowships: in 1981 for his short fiction and in 1988 for his plays.

·       Deemer was the central figure in developing Oregon Business Magazine, now the state’s premier business publication. In 1979, Deemer was hired to transform a failing publication, Business Success News, into a respected statewide business publication. Hired as the magazine’s first Managing Editor, he accomplished this before he left in 1981.

·       Deemer edited Sweet Reason, the journal published by the Oregon Committee for the Humanities, from 1985-88, establishing it as one of the more respected publications in the state. He was Book Editor for a number of years following.

·       Through the 1960s and 1970s, Deemer was a regular contributor to Northwest, the supplement of The Sunday Oregonian, publishing many dozens of personal essays and articles. He edited the recent collection of these, Oregon Fever, one of the best anthologies of Oregon writing available.

·       From the late 1970s to mid 1980s, Deemer performed his one-man show, Ramblin’: the Songs and Stories of Woody Guthrie, over 100 times in the Pacific Northwest. Wrote Willamette Week, “Deemer's act is unusually faithful to the material, graced with the selfsame sense of commitment and trust in the common people that continues to keep Guthrie's spirit alive in this country, a spirit that's needed now more than ever.”

·       Deemer’s 1986 “hyperdrama” performed in the Pittock Mansion became not only the talk of Portland but of Seattle: “For pure media hype and upscale audience adulation, however, Baryshnikov was the only act to upstage [Charles Deemer's] Chateau de Mort. An unprecedented full page in The Oregonian was devoted to the show...,” wrote the Seattle magazine Northwest Arts.

·       In 1989, the entire season at the Firehouse Theatre was devoted to Deemer’s plays, a retrospective called “Charles Deemer’s Oregon.” No Oregon playwright has been so honored.

·       Deemer began the screenwriting program in the Masters in Professional Writing Program at Portland State University, where he continues to teach, thereby influencing a generation of younger Oregon writers.

 

It is, of course, as a playwright that Deemer is best known and that I know him best. Over three dozen of his plays have premiered in Oregon. He is probably best known for two of them:

 

·       Christmas at the Juniper Tavern, called “a Northwest classic” by then-Oregonian book critic Paul Pintarich, which went on to win an ACE award for its Oregon Public Television production.

·       The previously mentioned Chateau de Mort at the Pittock Mansion, which began Deemer’s unique career as a pioneer in the new dramatic form called hyperdrama, which has propelled Deemer into international fame on the Internet, where the “hypertext” nature of these scripts is most at home. Deemer’s hyperdrama expansion of Chekhov on the Internet, The Seagull Hyerdrama, is finally becoming recognized as one of the major expressions in the new form. Deemer’s seminal essay “What Is Hypertext?” has been translated into German, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish and Chinese and anthologized in Theatre In Cyberspace.

 

Deemer’s book Seven Plays was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. His play Famililly, although never produced in Oregon, won the 1997 Crossing Borders International New Play Competition against thousands of entrants. In 1998 he was the highest ranking playwright nationally for the New Century Writer Awards.

            I must confess it is shocking to me that Deemer has not been recognized for his career in Oregon letters before now. This frankly is why I am nominating him.

            Ground-breaking journalist and playwright, award-winning short story writer and influential writing teacher, Internet pioneer and actor, Charles Deemer is overdue for this award.

Who knows more about Oregon’s cultural life these past several decades than The Oregonian’s senior critic Bob Hicks? Who wrote, “…no playwright has had such an important or long-lasting effect on this community's cultural life.” I believe that says it all.

             Therefore, do it. Don’t wait until Deemer is dead before you appreciate him.

 

Respectfully,

 

Robert K. Charles