THE CURSE OF THE RETROSPECTIVE
By Charles Deemer
During the two decades from the late 1960s to the late 1980s, I had few complaints about my writing career. Starting as a short story writer, I soon began publishing regularly in the literary magazines, and three of my stories had been selected to the Roll of Honor in the prestigious Best American Short Stories anthology for the years 1971, 1972, and 1974. By the late 1970s I had all but abandoned short fiction for playwriting, and my plays began premiering regularly in Portland, Oregon, first at Theatre Workshop with the enthusiastic support of artistic director Steve Smith. Later I became the playwright-in-residence at The New Rose Theatre (artistic director Gary O’Brien) and in the middle of the 1980s at the Cubiculo Theatre (Sirius Productions, Peter Fornara, artistic director). Then the Cubiculo closed down, and I was a homeless playwright.
But I had one more moment of glory. Steve Smith, the original supporter of my dramatic work, decided to produce a retrospective of my work, called “Charles Deemer’s Oregon.” For this he chose to revive two plays – The Half-Life Conspiracy and Waitresses – and conclude the short season with the premier of a new play. The Oregon Arts Commission awarded me a fellowship to support the writing of this new work, which became Varmints. The retrospective of my work was in the 1988-9 theater season in Portland.
By this time in my career, I was hooked on hyperdrama. I’d been introduced to this new environmental form of theater in 1985 when Steve Smith commissioned me to write one for performance in the Pittock Mansion, in the west hills overlooking the city. (I’ve written about this experience elsewhere: especially see http://www.ibiblio.org/cdeemer/watchout.htm,“Watch Out, Mama, Hyperdrama’s Gonna Mess With Your Pittock Mansion!”). Thereafter most of my playwriting energy went to hyperdrama instead of traditional theater, culminating in the online publication in the summer of 2002 of my hyperdrama based on Chekhov’s The Seagull (see http://www.bibilio.org/cdeemer/chekindx.htm).
Through the 1990s, without my quite realizing it, my writing career was changing in a major way. I was losing my audience. My audience had never been great but it had been real – and visible to me. Although I was making money writing journalism and commissioned work, my passion was my literary work, the earlier short stories and the later plays, the work I considered my art. I had fans for this work. I was respected by those who paid attention to such things. One critic even called me “a writer’s writer.”
But this reputation had been built on short fiction first and later on plays produced on a traditional stage. By the 1990s, I had abandoned both. Hyperdrama had a small, confused audience at best – or so it seemed until I became active on the Internet. After writing a short hyperdrama in 1995 for Prisma, a theater group in Santiago headed by Andres Espejo, I learned that there was much more interest in this new kind of theatre in Europe and elsewhere than here at home. Two graduate students, one in Germany and one in Denmark, even studied my hyperdramas for their thesis work.
Early in the 21st century, I was invited to build my literary archive in the Ibiblio Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. An archivist there had chanced upon some of my online writing, particularly about hypertext and hyperdrama, and felt I deserved a larger platform. I graciously accepted. Today the archive (at http://www.ibiblio.org/cdeemer) is very large indeed with a wide variety of literary work in many forms, as well as audio and video projects. This archive receives on average over 200 visits a day, many individual writings getting a dozen or more hits a day, although it is difficult to know how much of this is browsing and how much is actually reading or downloading.
Today I appear to have my primary audience on the Internet. Yet this somehow is less satisfying than when I was finding my audience in literary magazines and regional stages. Why should this be?
A part of it may be my age. I soon turn 64, which places me firmly in the pre-computer culture. Although I consider myself very computer literate, by temperament I still belong to handwriting culture. The most satisfactory part of the writing process for me is when I reach the stage when I can print out a manuscript and rewrite it by hand, scribbling all over the pages in red ink. The image of pages filled with red ink is an icon of what writing means – it means rewriting.
Perhaps the tactile part of rewriting in this way extends to my sense of having an audience – or not. I love the fact that Geoffrey Sirc found a 1967 essay of mine in a dusty journal in the library and was inspired to write a book on the same subject in 2002. This defines exactly what community means to a writer. The library is the bank of our ideas and observations of life, of our stories and our dreams. As a writer, I want to be in the library more than on the Internet – which again may be a preference having more to do with my age than with reality today. If indeed the Internet is the new library for our culture, as indeed it seems to be (and I myself often use it in this way), then I have more readers, or possible readers, than I give myself credit for, among the 200-plus who daily enter my archive. More of them than I think may read something.
Today I devote my energy to writing books, and the experience is a curious mix of joy and frustration. When I finished my novel Emmett’s Gift last year I knew it would be difficult to sell it. The fiction market was down in general, and mine was a literary novel, the most difficult to place with traditional publishers. Nonetheless I bit the bullet and began an energetic marketing campaign, first for an agent to represent the novel. To my utter shock, almost two dozen wanted to read the opening chapters of the book. If nothing else, I knew how to pitch a story.
Only two of these agents asked for the whole manuscript, and both ended up rejecting it, although they kindly said the outcome was close (which may or may not be true). I next queried small publishers about the book. Only one wanted to read the entire novel, and after having it for months, this publisher refused to reply to my inquiries. I kissed them off. So Emmitt’s Gift was officially homeless.
I knew from the beginning that I would put the book in my archive as a free ebook if no one else wanted it, and this is what I did. But I did more than this. In recent years I’d discovered print-on-demand technology. This, of course, is what is called “vanity publishing” in the industry, a pejorative term but also a curious one. Many musical groups produce their own CDs without this stigma and many artists run their own art galleries with being called vain. Writers, however, are supposed to be above all this. Nonetheless, I came out with a print-on-demand copy of Emmett’s Gift in order to put it in the library where traditional readers could find it. If this was vain, so be it. My writing career had been active long enough by now, winning me enough awards and accolades, I’d held down enough editorial jobs, that I didn’t feel like I was pulling the wool over anyone’s eyes by publishing something myself. I was taking advantage of technology in an attempt to find a larger audience than whatever audience I had on the Internet.
And this seems to be the pattern in this, the last act of my writing career. I said earlier that this experience is a mixture of joy and frustration. The joy is that my writing has never been stronger. The frustration is that except for the Internet, I have little sense of having an audience. I believe my work is good enough to deserve a larger audience but perhaps this is self-delusion. On the other hand, maybe it isn’t. Time, I suppose, will tell.
I still knock on the door of traditional publishers before I do anything else with a new work. In fact, as I write I have an agent handling my memoir, It’s All Material: The Education of a Marginal Writer, in which I explore in greater depth the personal conflicts suggested here. Frankly, if the agent sells the book, I’ll be the most surprised writer in Oregon.
Sometimes I look back at the 60s, 70s and 80s with longing. I liked the sense I had of myself then as a writer. I don’t like many other things about my life then but the professional life was going particularly well for a time. I felt what I was doing mattered because there were people who told me it mattered. I get very little of that today. It should be enough that my work matters to me, of course, but sometimes this is not enough. It should be enough that I believe I have never written better but somehow it isn’t.
Steve Smith’s retrospective of my work hangs in memory like a dark curtain at the end of an act. Everything seemed to change after that. I lost my audience, and I remain insecure with whatever new audience I’ve found since then. Sometimes I look back at the retrospective as a curse, something that probably should be done only after a writer’s death or at the end of a long career. The mid-80s was too soon for this sort of thing. Today would be much better timing.
Still I write on. I write, therefore I am.
Charles Deemer
September 8, 2003