The INTERNET WRITING WORKSHOP: 1/1/18

Wednesday, January 31, 2018

Notes For January 31st, 2018

This Day In Literary History

On January 31st, 1923, the legendary American writer Norman Mailer was born in New York City. He enrolled at Harvard University in 1939 (at the age of 16) to study aeronautical engineering. During his freshman year, his first short story was published.

After Mailer graduated in 1943, he was drafted into the U.S. Army, where he served as a cook for the 112th Cavalry in the Philippines. Though he wouldn't see much combat during World War II, his experience in the Army would inspire him to write his classic debut novel.

The Naked and the Dead (1948), set during an Allied invasion of a fictional island in the South Pacific, was a breakthrough novel that painted an incredibly realistic, warts-and-all portrait of American soldiers at war. Not only were the horrors of war graphically depicted, so was the language of the men fighting it.

Mailer's original draft was peppered with numerous uses of the word fuck and its variants. Fearing legal repercussions, his publisher demanded that he censor the manuscript. Rather than cut out the word, Mailer famously substituted the word fug instead. It sounded exactly like the obscenity, though it wasn't an obscene word.

With his fourth novel, An American Dream (1964), Mailer paid tribute to the legendary writers of the past by publishing it first in a serialized format, over an eight month period, in Esquire magazine.

Featuring a poetic narrative rich in metaphor, the novel told the story of Stephen Rojack, a war hero and ex-congressman turned sensationalist talk show host. Estranged from his wife, a society woman, Rojack ends up murdering her in a drunken rage. He makes the crime appear to be a suicide.

From there, Rojack descends into a sleazy, surreal world of jazz clubs and bars, and gets mixed up in mafia intrigue while trying to avoid the suspicion that's closing in on him. He also begins to lose his mind. This nightmare is a metaphor for the so-called American dream.

An American Dream was famously blasted by feminist critic Kate Millett in her famous book Sexual Politics (1970), a groundbreaking study of the treatment of women in literature. Not only did she accuse Norman Mailer of misogyny, she leveled the same charge against Henry Miller and D.H. Lawrence. Millett's book received mixed reviews.

Another of Mailer's memorable novels was The Executioner's Song (1979), a novelization of the true story of Gary Gilmore, the first man executed after a conservative Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976.

Gary Gilmore was a career criminal who robbed and murdered two people in two separate incidents on the same night in July of 1976. Convicted of both murders, Gilmore, who was 35 years old, declared to the court that he wanted to be executed rather than spend the rest of his life in prison.

Gilmore was sentenced to death, but the legal process entitled him to appeal the sentence as well as his conviction. When his court-appointed attorneys began working on an appeal, Gilmore fought them for his right to be executed. The attorneys continued to defy their client.

Gilmore would get his wish. Though his attorneys had won three stays of execution for him, their appeals were ultimately denied. Gary Gilmore was executed by firing squad in January of 1977. The Executioner's Song would win Norman Mailer a Pulitzer Prize.

In 1991, after not publishing a novel in seven years, Mailer returned in style with Harlot's Ghost, a whopping 1,300+ page epic. In it, senior CIA agent Harry Hubbard learns that his mentor, agent Hugh Montague, code named Harlot, is dead. He either committed suicide or was assassinated. Hubbard's wife then tells him that she's in love with another man.

Emotionally drained, Hubbard goes to Russia, where he rereads the manuscript of his autobiography, tentatively titled The Game. It's an incredibly detailed account of Hubbard's life in the CIA, beginning at the end of World War II. The manuscript ends in 1984, with the words "To be continued."

Although Harlot's Ghost received mixed reviews, some of Mailer's famous literary colleagues, including Salman Rushdie, Anthony Burgess, and Christopher Hitchens, declared it to be the best novel he'd written so far. He planned to write a sequel called Harlot's Grave, but other projects got in the way and he never wrote it.

Mailer's last novel, The Castle in the Forest, was published in 2007 - the year he died. It was based on the life of Adolf Hitler. In this novel, Dieter, a demon from Hell, is sent to guide the young Hitler on his path of destruction. Rather than being part Jewish, as historians believed, here Hitler is the product of incest.

In addition to his literary career, Norman Mailer was a political activist. He covered the Democratic and Republican political conventions of 1960, 1964, 1968, 1972, 1992, and 1996. His account of the 1996 Democratic convention was the only one not published.

In 1969, Mailer ran for Mayor of New York City. The legendary columnist Jimmy Breslin was his biggest supporter. He lost the election. Some say it was because his platform included advocating the secession of New York City from New York State. Others believe it was because he advocated the release of Huey Newton, the founder of the Black Panther Party.

In 2003, just before the invasion of Iraq, Mailer spoke at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. He said the following:

Fascism is more of a natural state than democracy. To assume blithely that we can export democracy into any country we choose can serve paradoxically to encourage more fascism at home and abroad. Democracy is a state of grace that is attained only by those countries who have a host of individuals not only ready to enjoy freedom but to undergo the heavy labor of maintaining it.

A vocal advocate for freedom of speech, Mailer was a key witness in the famous 1965 censorship trial of William S. Burroughs' classic novel, Naked Lunch (1959), which had been banned in Boston.

The ban would be reversed by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. Mailer famously described Burroughs as “the only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius.”

Norman Mailer died of kidney failure in November of 2007. He was 84 years old.

Quote Of The Day

"Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing." - Norman Mailer

Vanguard Video

Today's video features the rare 1970s Swedish TV documentary, Norman Mailer's USA. Enjoy!

Tuesday, January 30, 2018

Notes For January 30th, 2018

This Day In Literary History

On January 30th, 1935, the legendary American writer Richard Brautigan was born in Tacoma, Washington. His father, Bernard Brautigan Jr., was a factory worker, his mother Lulu a waitress.

They separated when Lulu was pregnant, and Richard Brautigan only met his biological father twice because his mother had told him that her second husband, Robert Porterfield, was his biological father. She had never told Bernard Brautigan Jr. she was pregnant.

Richard Brautigan spent his childhood in grinding poverty thanks to his mother's history of broken relationships. She would have two more children with two other men. When Richard was six years old, he and his two-year-old sister Barbara Ann were left alone in a motel room for two days.

The family drifted around the Pacific Northwest, ultimately settling in Eugene, Oregon. They still faced grinding poverty and hunger, sometimes not eating for a few days at a time. Nevertheless, Richard Brautigan proved to be an intellectually gifted child. He began writing poetry and short stories when he was twelve.

While in high school, Richard wrote for the school newspaper, where his first published poem, The Light, appeared. After graduating with honors, he moved in with his best friend Peter Webster, whose mother became Richard's surrogate mother. He would live with the Websters on and off for a few years.

By December of 1955, unable to find steady work, the then 20-year-old Richard Brautigan faced poverty and hunger yet again. So, he came up with an unusual solution. He threw a rock through the police station window, hoping to be jailed for the offense. There, he would at least be fed.

Instead of being sent to jail, Brautigan was fined $25 and released. He kept trying to get himself sent to jail. He was arrested ten days later and committed to the Oregon State Hospital, where he was diagnosed with both schizophrenia and depression and subjected to electroshock treatments.

Released in February of 1956, he lived briefly with his family, then took off for San Francisco, where he established himself as a writer. He handed out copies of his poems on street corners and read at poetry clubs and coffeehouses.

Brautigan's first published poetry book, The Return of the Rivers, appeared in 1957. It contained just one poem. He followed it with more classic poetry collections, including The Galilee Hitch-Hiker (1958) and Lay the Marble Tea (1959).

He married his girlfriend Virginia Alder, and she bore him his only child, a daughter named Ianthe. Their relationship would end in 1962, as he had been suffering from depression and alcoholism.

A year before the breakup, Richard, Virginia, and baby Ianthe went on a camping and hiking trip together in Idaho's Stanley Basin. He had his portable typewriter with him, and while he sat near a trout stream, he began writing some sketches that would become his celebrated second novel.

Trout Fishing in America (1967) made Richard Brautigan's name as a writer. Its chapters were basically short stories with recurring characters and non-linear narratives. The title of the novel is also the name of a main character, the name of a hotel, and a reference to fishing itself.

Like all of Brautigan's novels, Trout Fishing in America is a comedy seasoned with pathos. To get an idea of the comedy, a character called Trout Fishing in America Shorty, described as "a legless, screaming middle-aged wino," gets shipped by mail to writer Nelson Algren.

In another chapter, a gang of sixth-grade boys in elementary school become "Trout Fishing in America terrorists" when they write "Trout Fishing in America" in chalk on the backs of all the first-graders.

Trout Fishing in America became an overnight sensation, a classic of the 1960s American counterculture that sold over four million copies. Many copies were sold to people who mistook the novel for a nonfiction book on trout fishing; some chapters read like nonfiction.

Although Brautigan was said to have disliked hippies, they loved his avant garde, poetic yet folksy style of writing. Soon he was reading his works at psychedelic rock concerts and serving as Poet-in-Residence at the California Institute of Technology.

He also wrote for underground newspapers and recorded a spoken word album for the Beatles' short lived Zapple Records label, which had been dedicated to spoken word and experimental recordings. The album would later be released by Harvest Records as Listening to Richard Brautigan (1970).

Brautigan followed Trout Fishing in America with another classic novel, In Watermelon Sugar (1968), which featured these memorable opening paragraphs:

In watermelon sugar the deeds were done and done again as my life is done in watermelon sugar. I'll tell you about it because I am here and you are distant.

Wherever you are, we must do the best we can. It is so far to travel, and we have nothing here to travel, except watermelon sugar. I hope this works out.

In Watermelon Sugar is an avant garde, post-apocalyptic comedy set in iDEATH, a new Eden located amidst the ruins of the old world. iDEATH is reminiscent of the American hippie communes of the 1960s. The people of iDEATH make things out of watermelon sugar at the Watermelon Works.

One member of iDEATH, a man called inBOIL, rebels and leaves the commune to live near the Forgotten Works, a huge trash heap containing the ruins of the old world. Another member of iDEATH, a woman named Margaret, likes to collect "forgotten things."

In the 1970s, as the American counterculture began to wane, Richard Brautigan found his popularity waning as well. Still, he continued to produce quality novels. Dreaming of Babylon: A Private Eye Novel 1942 (1977) told the story of C. Card, an inept private detective.

The name C. Card is a play on the words "seek hard." His investigations are complicated by an unusual condition - a form of narcolepsy where he suddenly falls asleep and dreams of ancient Babylon. The novel alternates between C. Card's adventures in the present (San Francisco, circa 1942) and in ancient Babylon.

Though Richard Brautigan would publish five quality novels and three poetry collections during the 1970s, by the end of the decade, he had been largely forgotten as a writer. Like his mother before him, his personal life would become a series of shattered relationships.

In 1982, So The Wind Won't Blow It All Away, his last novel published during his lifetime, was released - a poetic, melancholic autobiographical novel based on Brautigan's coming of age in 1948 Oregon.

Two years after the novel was published, Brautigan lost his long battle with alcoholism and depression, committing suicide at the age of 49. He had been living alone in a huge old house in Bolinas, California, that overlooked the Pacific Ocean. His body wouldn't be discovered for over a month.

Richard Brautigan's classic 1967 novel Trout Fishing in America continues to inspire new generations of readers and writers, earning the author new fans. In 1979, a folk-rock duo who performed for children named themselves Trout Fishing in America.

In 1994, a California teenager named Peter Eastman Jr. legally changed his name to Trout Fishing in America. That same year, a young couple named their newborn baby Trout Fishing in America.

Quote Of The Day

"If you get hung up on everybody else's hang-ups, then the whole world's going to be nothing more than one huge gallows." - Richard Brautigan

Vanguard Video

Today's video features Richard Brautigan's 1970 spoken word album, Listening To Richard Brautigan. Enjoy!

Monday, January 29, 2018

IWW Members' Publishing Successes

Eric Petersen

My review of Written in Blood, a novel by Layton Green, has been published by the Internet Review of Books.

Cezarija E. Abartis

I'm pleased that "Sleeping Beauty Is Not Well" has been published in Issue Four of Bennington Review. Fall / Winter 2017, pp. 146-147. It's a print magazine, and I'm astonished to be in the company of John Ashbery, Jorge Luis Borges, Rick Moody, and many other famous writers.

I just learned it's on the website! Now I really will get big-headed.

Paul Fein

I would like to thank our NFiction critiquers for helping me greatly with this political Letter to the Editor which was published on Mass Live.

Wayne Scheer

My parody of the hard-boiled detective novel, "A Defective Story," is up at Out of the Gutter. I hope you find it funny.

Friday, January 26, 2018

Notes For January 26th, 2018

This Day In Literary History

On January 26th, 1831, the famous American children's book writer Mary Mapes Dodge was born in New York City. As a young girl, Mary was well educated by private tutors, as her father, James Jay Mapes, was an affluent professor.

In 1851, at the age of twenty, Mary wed her boyfriend, a young lawyer named William Dodge. She bore him two sons, James and Harrington. Then, in 1858, facing serious financial trouble, Mary's husband abandoned the family. He was found dead in an apparent drowning a month later.

Left a poor widow at 27, Mary went to work to support herself and her children. Working with her father, she wrote for, edited, and published two magazines - The Working Farmer and The United States Journal. A few years later, in 1864, her first book was published.

The Irvington Stories was a collection of children's stories about life in colonial times. The book was so successful that Mary's publisher asked her to write another one.

This time, she wrote a novel set in the Netherlands in the early 19th century. Her colorful portrait of Dutch life, which introduced a famous Dutch folk tale to American children, became an instant bestseller and brought Mary international fame.

Hans Brinker, or The Silver Skates (1865) was inspired by historian John L. Motley's multi-volume works The Rise of the Dutch Republic and The History of the United Netherlands, which Mary Mapes Dodge had read and greatly enjoyed.

Hans Brinker is a fifteen-year-old Dutch boy who, along with his younger sister Gretel, hopes to win the big speed skating race on the canal, though all they have are handmade wooden ice skates. The grand prize for winning the race is a new pair of silver skates.

Hans and Gretel's father cannot work because he is ill and suffering from amnesia after falling from a dike. So, Mrs. Brinker and her children must work to support the family. The Brinkers are looked down on in their community because they're poor.

Hans and Gretel learn that a famous surgeon named Dr. Boekman may be able to cure their ailing father. Unfortunately, Dr. Boekman is expensive and has become gruff and hardhearted since he lost his wife and son.

When Dr. Boekman finally agrees to examine Hans Brinker's father, the diagnosis is pressure on the brain, which can be cured with a risky and expensive operation that involves trephining.

To help pay for the operation, Hans offers Dr. Boekman the money he's been saving to buy steel skates for the big race. Touched by this gesture, the doctor agrees to perform the surgery for free.

Able to buy good skates, Hans enters the big race, but then lets a friend (who needs the silver skates more than he does) win instead. Meanwhile, Mr. Brinker's operation is successful, and his health and memory are restored.

The experience changes Dr. Boekman, who loses his gruffness and hardhearted nature. Later, he helps Hans Brinker get into medical school, and Hans becomes a successful doctor.

The novel included the famous Dutch folk tale about the heroic little Dutch boy who stuck his finger in a dike to plug a leak. It was the first book to introduce this Dutch folk tale to American readers. It also introduced Americans to the sport of speed skating.

After the success of Hans Brinker, Mary Mapes Dodge would visit the Netherlands for the first time. She would write more children's books, including novels and children's poetry collections.

She would continue her career as an editor as well. She became an associate editor of Hearth and Home, the literary magazine edited by Harriet Beecher Stowe, the legendary abolitionist and author of the classic novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin.

In 1873, Scribner's asked Mary to become the editor-in-chief of their new children's magazine, St. Nicholas Magazine. Under Mary's direction, it became the most famous and highly regarded children's publication of its time - an innovative and progressive literary and art magazine for children that contained no preaching.

St. Nicholas Magazine featured the writings and illustrations of the best contemporary authors and artists. The magazine's first hit was a serialized version of Frances Hodgson Burnett's classic novel, Little Lord Fauntleroy.

Louisa May Alcott's Jo's Boys, Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book, and the works of Mark Twain and Robert Louis Stevenson would also be published in serialized form by the magazine, which would remain in publication for almost 70 years.

Mary Mapes Dodge died in 1905 at the age of 74.

Quote Of The Day

"What a dreadful thing it must be to have a dull father." - Mary Mapes Dodge

Vanguard Video

Today's video features a complete reading of Mary Mapes Dodge's classic novel, Hans Brinker, or The Silver Skates. Enjoy!

Thursday, January 25, 2018

Notes For January 25th, 2018

This Day in Literary History

On January 25th, 1759, the legendary Scottish poet and lyricist Robert Burns was born in Alloway, South Ayreshire, Scotland. He was the oldest of seven children. Robbie, as he liked to be called, was born in a house that his father built. His father, William, was a tenant farmer.

When Robbie was seven years old, his father sold the family's small house (it would later become the Burns Cottage Museum) and moved them to the 70-acre Mt. Oliphant tenant farm Southeast of Alloway.

As a young tenant farmer, Robbie Burns grew up in an atmosphere of grinding poverty and grueling labor. Young Robbie's labors would leave him with a premature stoop and frail health that would ultimately and tragically cut his life short.

He and his siblings received little formal schooling. They were taught reading, writing, arithmetic, and other subjects by their father, who also wrote a textbook for them called A Manual of Christian Belief.

Robbie Burns and his brother Gilbert attended some local schools, including a new "adventure school" founded by John Murdoch, who taught his students French and Latin in addition to English grammar and other subjects.

For the Burns siblings and other children of tenant farmers, harvest time meant leaving school and returning to full-time farming.

By the age of 15, Robbie Burns practically managed the farm himself. He was assisted by Nellie Kilpatrick, a girl his age with whom he fell in love. She inspired him to write his first poem, O, Once I Lov'd A Bonnie Lass.

Three years later, in 1777, disgusted by the poor working and living conditions at the Mt. Oliphant farm, Burns' father William moved the family to another tenant farm, this one in Lochlea near Tarbolton, where the family would stay until William died in 1784.

Robbie Burns found the conditions at the Lochlea farm better than Mt. Oliphant, though not exactly ideal. Against his father's wishes, he joined a country dancing school. He and his brother Gilbert founded the Tarbolton Bachelor's Club.

In October of 1781, Robbie was initiated into the St. David Tarbolton Masonic Lodge. When this particular lodge became inactive, Burns joined another one. He would remain an active Mason throughout his life, helping to run his lodge.

He would attain the rank of Depute Master, and in 1787 at the Lodge St. Andrew in Edinburgh, he would be toasted by the Grand Master, Francis Chateris, and named Poet Laureate - a title still honored by the Masons today.

In the summer of 1784, Robbie Burns became acquainted with a group of girls who called themselves The Belles of Mauchline. One member of the group was Jean Armour, the daughter of a fellow Mason. Robbie fell in love with her.

While they were courting, Elizabeth Paton, his mother's servant girl, gave birth to his illegitimate daughter. Within the next couple of years, Jean would become pregnant with Robbie's twin son and daughter. At this time, Robbie was also dating a girl named Mary Campbell.

Robbie wanted to marry Jean Armour, but her irate father forbade her from marrying him and sent her to stay with her uncle. Realizing that he was in no financial position to marry Jean, Robbie accepted an offer to work in Jamaica as the bookkeeper for a slave plantation.

He loathed slavery, (and later wrote a poem called The Slave's Lament) but he was desperate. Unfortunately, he couldn't afford passage on a ship to Jamaica. So, taking a friend's advice, to earn the money, he decided to publish a collection of his poems.

On April 3rd, 1786, Robert Burns submitted proposals to John Wilson, a printer in Kilmarnock, to publish his collection, Scotch Poems. The volume appeared three months later as Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect.

It was an accurate title, as Burns wrote poetry in a Gaelic dialect, in English, and in a combination of both languages. The book became an overnight sensation, and soon, Burns was famous throughout Scotland.

Robbie earned enough money to pay for his trip to Jamaica, scheduled for September 1st, but he postponed it when he learned that Jean Armour had given birth to his twin children. Two months later, he borrowed a horse and rode to Edinburgh, hoping to get his poetry collection published there.

It was accepted by publisher William Creech, who published it in a serialized format sold to subscribers. In Edinburgh, Burns found himself embraced by the city's literati and men of letters, who invited him to their gatherings. He met the then 16-year-old Sir Walter Scott, who described him this way:

His person was strong and robust; his manners rustic, not clownish, a sort of dignified plainness and simplicity which received part of its effect perhaps from knowledge of his extraordinary talents. His features are presented in Mr Nasmyth's picture but to me it conveys the idea that they are diminished, as if seen in perspective.

I think his countenance was more massive than it looks in any of the portraits ... there was a strong expression of shrewdness in all his lineaments; the eye alone, I think, indicated the poetical character and temperament. It was large, and of a dark cast, and literally glowed when he spoke with feeling or interest. I never saw such another eye in a human head, though I have seen the most distinguished men of my time.

By February of 1788, Robbie Burns, now a famous poet, was finally reunited with Jean Armour and his twin children. Her father relented and allowed them to marry. Robbie leased a farm near Dumfries and gave it a go.

He also worked for the Customs and Excise Department. Two years later, he gave up farming, wrote some of his best poetry, and embarked on a project to collect and preserve Scottish folk songs. He also wrote lyrics for Scottish folk melodies.

Unfortunately, Robert Burns' early life as a tenant farmer and its grueling labors had taken a toll on his health. It is believed that he suffered from a rheumatic heart condition that was aggravated by his drinking and possibly by an infected tooth that was extracted several months before his death.

He died in July of 1796 at the age of 37. To this day, Robert Burns remains Scotland's most famous poet, and every New Year's Eve, people around the world sing his classic song, Auld Lang Syne. In 2009, the Royal Mint issued a commemorative two pound coin featuring a quote from the lyrics.

Quote Of The Day

"My way is: I consider the poetic sentiment, correspondent to my idea of the musical expression, then chuse my theme, begin one stanza, when that is composed - which is generally the most difficult part of the business - I walk out, sit down now and then, look out for objects in nature around me that are in unison or harmony with the cogitations of my fancy and workings of my bosom, humming every now and then the air with the verses I have framed. when I feel my Muse beginning to jade, I retire to the solitary fireside of my study, and there commit my effusions to paper, swinging, at intervals, on the hind-legs of my elbow chair, by way of calling forth my own critical strictures, as my pen goes." - Robert Burns

Vanguard Video

Today's video features a full length BBC documentary on Robert Burns. Enjoy!

Wednesday, January 24, 2018

Notes For January 24th, 2018

This Day In Literary History

On January 24th, 1862, the legendary American writer Edith Wharton was born. She was born Edith Jones in New York City. The famous saying "Keeping up with the Joneses" is said to refer to her father's family.

The Joneses were indeed an upwardly mobile aristocratic family - the kind of people Edith Wharton would skewer in her writings. In 1885, the 23-year-old Edith married Edward "Teddy" Robbins Wharton, who was 12 years her senior.

Teddy also came from an aristocratic family, one of Boston's most respected, but he wasn't an intellectual like Edith - he was a sportsman. He did, however, share her love of traveling.

Teddy Wharton suffered from acute depression - recurring brief episodes of severe depression. Over time, the episodes would grow worse, ultimately manifesting as a serious mental illness. By 1908, he would be pronounced incurable and committed.

Later that year, Edith moved to Paris, France, where she met and fell in love with Morton Fullerton, an American journalist who was working as a correspondent for the London Times.

In Fullerton, Edith found a soul mate and intellectual equivalent. They were introduced by a mutual friend - the legendary writer Henry James. Edith Wharton's first novel, The Touchstone, was published in 1900.

Her fourth novel, published in 1905, would make her name as a writer and be considered a classic. Though it was called The House of Mirth, it was no comedy. Rather, it presented a stark and scathing indictment of the fate of women in the aristocracy of early 20th century New York City.

The tragic heroine, Lily Bart, realizes that like all women of her class, she was "brought up to be ornamental" - a trophy wife for a wealthy upperclassman. But what she wants is love and a relationship based on mutual respect.

Lily's naivete results in her ruin by both vicious, scheming society women and her refusal to stoop to their level to take revenge and restore her reputation, which was tarnished when the women falsely implicated her in scandalous behavior.

Lily ultimately dies from a possibly intentional overdose of chloral hydrate, a sedative which she had become addicted to. Another one of Edith Wharton's classic novels was her novella Ethan Frome (1911).

Unlike her previous writings which depicted the misery of upper class social mores, this novella dealt with working class life and its own miserable mores. The title character is a good man from rural Massachusetts whose marriage to his bitter, sickly wife Zeena has grown colder than the New England winter landscape.

Zeena's cousin Mattie has come to help keep house and take care of her. Mattie and Ethan soon develop strong feelings for each other, which they struggle to repress. Zeena suspects that the two are falling in love and seethes with anger.

When the family cat breaks Zeena's favorite pickle dish, she blames Mattie and decides to get rid of her on the pretense of needing a more competent housekeeper. Ethan plans to run away with Mattie, but guilt forces him to reconsider.

They decide to go sledding, and Mattie proposes a double suicide pact. They plan to crash their sled into a tree at full speed. At the last moment, Ethan panics and turns away.

He and Mattie survive the crash but are left crippled. The novel ends with Zeena, who recovered from her illness, forced to take care of her husband and Mattie, who is now the bitter and sickly one.

In 1920, Edith Wharton published the novel that made her the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize. The Age Of Innocence, a tale of upper class life in late 19th century New York City.

The novel opens with lawyer and respected gentleman Newland Archer happily anticipating his upcoming marriage to May Welland, a beautiful, pampered fellow aristocrat. Archer's outlook is changed completely when May's exotic cousin, Countess Ellen Olenska, arrives for a visit.

Trapped in a rotten marriage to a Polish count, Ellen left him, scandalizing herself and her family in the process. What's worse, she plans to divorce him. Archer is horrified and has second thoughts about marrying May.

When a law partner of Archer's asks him to convince Ellen to return to husband to save May's family's reputation, he comes to understand, care about, and ultimately fall in love with Ellen. Ellen reciprocates his affection, but won't consummate the relationship because she doesn't want to hurt her cousin.

Archer marries May, but it's a loveless marriage, as he can't forget Ellen, who decided to remain separated from her husband but not divorced from him. Desperate to escape his unhappy life, Archer takes Ellen as his mistress.

Later, Archer plans to leave May, but before he can tell her, she tells him that she's pregnant. Suspecting the affair, she deliberately got pregnant to trap her husband. With no way out, Archer is forced to give up his true love and remain in a loveless marriage for the rest of his life.

In addition to her novels, Edith Wharton published collections of short stories, poetry, and non-fiction. She was living in France when World War I broke out in 1914; thanks to her connections in the French government, she was allowed to travel to the front lines.

She wrote a series of articles about France's war effort that would be published as Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort. During the war, she worked tirelessly to help homeless Belgian refugees.

Edith also found work for unemployed Frenchwomen, promoted concerts to provide work for musicians, and opened tuberculosis hospitals. She edited The Book of the Homeless, a collection of manuscripts, art, musical scores, and erotica by artists left homeless by the war.

For her war efforts, Edith would be named a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor. After the war ended, she bought a villa in Provence. She would divide her time between Paris and Provence, writing and traveling. Her literary circle included her old friend Henry James and new friends Sinclair Lewis, Jean Cocteau, and Andre Gide.

Edith Wharton died of a stroke in August of 1937. She was 75 years old.

Quote Of The Day

"In spite of illness, in spite even of the arch-enemy sorrow, one can remain alive past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways." - Edith Wharton

Vanguard Video

Today's video features a complete reading of Edith Wharton's classic novella, Ethan Frome. Enjoy!

Tuesday, January 23, 2018

Notes For January 23rd, 2018

This Day In Literary History

On January 23rd, 1930, the famous Caribbean writer Derek Walcott was born in Castries, Saint Lucia. His mother was a teacher who often recited poetry around the house. His father was an artist and poet who died before Derek and his twin brother Roderick were born.

Derek Walcott first intended to become an artist like his father, training with painter Harold Simmons. But he soon fell in love with literature and writing became his main passion. He was twelve years old when his first published poem appeared in a newspaper.

The poem, inspired by both his Methodist faith and the works of John Milton, prompted a Catholic priest to write an angry letter to the editor accusing Walcott of blasphemy. The letter was published in the newspaper, but that failed to discourage the young poet.

By 1949, Walcott, then nineteen years old, had self-published his first two poetry collections, 25 Poems (1948) and Epitaph for the Young: XII Cantos (1949). He had borrowed the money from his mother, and, as he predicted, all the copies sold out.

These early poetry collections caught the eye of noted Barbadian poet Frank Collymore, who gave them rave reviews and helped promote them. Walcott then won a scholarship to the University of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica.

After graduating, Walcott moved to the Island of Trinidad, where he became a teacher, a literary critic, and a journalist. He also founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop, where he remains on the Board of Directors.

In 1962, his classic poetry collection In a Green Night: Poems 1948-1960 brought him international fame. In it, he explored the colonial and post-colonial history of the Caribbean - perfect metaphors for the turbulent social and political changes taking place around the world.

Walcott also earned international recognition for his classic play Dream on Monkey Mountain (1970), which was produced by NBC-TV the year it was written. The following year, the play was produced off-Broadway by the Negro Ensemble Company and won an Obie Award.

It told the story of Felix Hobain, a drunken hermit taken to jail to sober up after causing a ruckus at the market. Suffering from the DTs and hallucinating, he has a prophetic dream. Believing himself to be a healer, he wakes up sober and determined to heal the sick and lead his people.

In 1972, Walcott won the OBE (Order of the British Empire) Award and was hired to teach at Boston University. Nine years later, he founded the Boston Playwrights' Theatre and received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.

Walcott would teach at Boston University for over twenty years. When he wasn't in the classroom, he wrote and published new plays and poetry collections. His classic Homeric epic poem Omeros, published in 1990, is considered his masterpiece.

Most of the poem takes place in the author's native Saint Lucia. The non-linear narrative includes an imagined voyage aboard a slave ship from Africa to the Americas. In Book Five, the author relates his own experiences traveling to world cities such as London, Dublin, Rome, Lisbon, and Toronto.

In writing Omeros, Walcott employed a three-line format similar to the terza rima used by Dante in The Divine Comedy, but Omeros is largely Homeric, written mostly in hexameter, which Homer used in The Iliad, and containing character names such as Achille, Helen, and Hector.

Two years after the publication of Omeros, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature, which made him the first Caribbean writer to win a Nobel Prize. He also served as scholar-in-residence at the University of Alberta and professor of poetry at the University of Essex in the United Kingdom.

Derek Walcott wrote over twenty poetry collections and two dozen plays. His final poetry collection, The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948–2013, was published in 2014; his final play, O Starry Starry Night, came out the same year. He died in March of 2017 at the age of 87.

Quote Of The Day

"The time will come when, with elation, you will greet yourself at your own door, in your own mirror, and each will smile at the other's welcome, and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was your self. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own images from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life." - Derek Walcott

Vanguard Video

Today's video features Derek Walcott being interviewed before a live audience at a theater in Toronto. Enjoy!

Monday, January 22, 2018

IWW Members' Publishing Successes

Wayne Scheer

I have two autobiographical essays in the current edition of Clever Magazine, "Anonymous Man" and "In Search of a Life."

Lynne Hinkey

Mona Vanek has published a blog post from one of our discussions here on the list at her Montana Scribbler site.

And, in the category of better late than never, my review of Westmore and More! was published at Underground Book Reviews on 12/25.

Kristen Howe

Thanks to Paul and Jonathan with helping me with my Writers conference article. It’s been approved and accepted at Tough Nickel at Hub Pages.

Paul Pekin

This story took so long to come out, I almost forgot about it. But here it is, my story "The Lost Boy" published by Two Hawks Quarterly, a "digital literary journal brought to you by writers in the BA in Liberal Studies Creative Writing Concentration at Antioch University Los Angeles."

Friday, January 19, 2018

Notes For January 19th, 2018

This Day In Literary History

On January 19th, 1809, the legendary American writer Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts. His parents, Henry Leonard Poe and Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins Poe, were both actors.

At the time of his birth, they were in a production of Shakespeare's King Lear, and Edgar may have been named after the character in the play.

When Edgar was a year old, his father abandoned the family. A year later, his mother died of tuberculosis. He was adopted by Scottish merchant John Allan, who changed his name to Edgar Allan Poe and had him baptized in the Episcopal Church.

As a parent, John Allan proved to be a man of extremes; he was both an incredibly doting father and a ferociously strict and aggressive disciplinarian. In 1815, the Allans sailed to England.

At six, Poe briefly attended a grammar school in his adoptive father's hometown of Irvine, Scotland. By 1816, he rejoined his family in London, where he attended a boarding school in Chelsea until 1817.

By 1820, Poe and his family had moved back to the United States, settling in Richmond, Virginia. In 1824, Poe, then fifteen years old, served as a lieutenant in the Richmond youth honor guard during the celebrated visit of the Marquis de Lafayette.

Two years later, Poe enrolled at the University of Virginia, where he majored in languages. The university had been founded just a year earlier by Thomas Jefferson.

The experimental college had strict rules against such things as tobacco, alcohol, and gambling, yet it also employed an honor system of student self-government.

Poe found the system chaotic and dysfunctional, adding to the stress he was already under. His engagement to his childhood sweetheart Sarah Elmira Royster had been broken off, and he became estranged from his father after his gambling debts cut into his college finances.

A year later, still struggling to pay for his education and unhappy with the honor system, he left university. After he learned that Sarah had married another man, Poe believed there was nothing left for him in Richmond.

So, in 1827, he moved to Boston, where he worked as a clerk and a newspaper writer. He began writing poetry and fiction under the pseudonym Henri Le Rennet.

In May of 1827, unable to support himself, Poe enlisted as a private in the U.S. Army, using the alias Edgar A. Perry. He claimed he was 22 years old, though he was really 18. He was stationed at Fort Independence in Boston Harbor and earned $5 a month.

That same year, his first book was published. It was a poetry collection titled Tamerlane and Other Poems. The byline read "by a Bostonian." Only 50 copies of the book were printed, and it went practically unnoticed.

Poe's regiment was posted to Fort Moultrie in Charleston, South Carolina, where he won a promotion and his monthly pay was doubled. After serving for two years, he was promoted to Sergeant Major for Artillery.

Then he decided that he wanted to end his five-year enlistment early and enter the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He revealed his real name and age to his commanding officer, Lieutenant Howard.

Howard would only discharge him if he agreed to reconcile with his adoptive father, John Allan. He wrote to John repeatedly, but received no reply. When he visited him in February of 1829, Poe found that his father hadn't even bothered to tell him that his mother had died.

Despite this, Poe and his father did reconcile, and John Allan supported his decision to leave the Army. Before entering West Point, Poe moved to Baltimore to stay with his widowed aunt Maria, her daughter Virginia, his brother Henry, and his grandmother, Elizabeth Cairnes Poe.

His second poetry collection, Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems was published. In October of 1830, Poe's father remarried. Poe disapproved of both the marriage and the illegitimate children sired as the result of John Allan's philandering.

This led to bitter quarrels between the two men, and Poe's father disowned him. Poe left West Point by deliberately getting himself court martialed. In February of 1831, he moved to New York City.

There, he released his third poetry collection, Poems. The book was financed in part by Poe's fellow West Point cadets, who loved the satirical poems he wrote that made fun of their commanding officers.

In Poe's third book, his long poems Tamerlane and Al Aaraaf were included again. The book also featured early versions of To Helen, Israfel, and The City In The Sea.

A month after he arrived in New York, Poe returned to Baltimore to stay with his aunt, cousin, and brother. His older brother Henry died five months later from complications due to alcoholism. Afterward, Poe decided to try and make a living as a writer.

Unfortunately, copyright laws were practically nonexistent in the early 19th century, and pirated editions of literary works were common. Undaunted, Poe put his poetry on the back burner and turned to prose. He sold a few short stories and began work on his only play, Politian.

In 1833, Poe's short story MS. Found In A Bottle won him a prize from the Baltimore Saturday Visiter. It also brought him to the attention of John P. Kennedy, a novelist and prominent Baltimorian.

Kennedy helped him sell some more stories and land a job as assistant editor of the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond in August of 1835. He was fired a few weeks later for being drunk on the job.

Poe returned to Baltimore, where he secretly married his 13-year-old cousin, Virginia. After he promised to behave, Poe was reinstated at the Messenger. He and Virginia and her mother moved to Richmond. Poe and Virginia later had a second, public wedding ceremony.

By 1838, Poe's only complete novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, was published. It was widely reviewed and praised. In the summer of 1839, Poe became the assistant editor of Burton's Gentleman's Magazine.

There, he published numerous short stories, reviews, and articles, building his reputation as both a writer and a critic. That same year, his classic short story collection, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, was published in two volumes.

Regarded today as one of the all time great works of American literature, the collection received mixed reviews and he made little money from it. In 1840, Poe became assistant editor of Graham's Magazine.

He made plans to start his own literary magazine, The Stylus, but his plans fell through. Two years later, his wife Virginia was stricken with tuberculosis. As her illness worsened, he began drinking heavily.

He left Graham's and returned to New York, where he worked for the Evening Mirror, which would publish his celebrated poem, The Raven, in January of 1845.

Poe was paid only $9 for it, but the poem became a huge hit and made him a household name. Children would follow him as he walked down the street, and he would caw "Nevermore!" at them. They would scream and pretend to run away, then laugh and follow him until he cawed "Nevermore!" at them again.

Poe later become editor and then owner of The Broadway Journal. Still drinking, Poe would alienate himself from his fellow writers when he publicly accused poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow of plagiarism. Longfellow never responded to the charge.

After The Broadway Journal failed, Poe moved into a cottage in The Bronx, which is known today as Poe Cottage. Not long after he moved in, his wife Virginia died of tuberculosis. Poe was devastated and plunged into a quagmire of alcoholism and mental illness.

Later, he dated poet Sarah Helen Whitman, who lived in Providence, Rhode Island. Their engagement was called off as a result of Poe's drinking, his mental instability, and the interference of Sarah's mother, who did all she could to sabotage the relationship.

Poe returned to Richmond and resumed his relationship with his childhood sweetheart, Sarah Elmira Royster. He returned to Baltimore, then mysteriously disappeared. On October 3rd, 1849, he was found wandering the streets of Baltimore by a man named Joseph W. Walker.

Severely ill, incoherent, and wearing someone else's clothes, Edgar Allan Poe was taken to Washington College Hospital, where he died four days later at the age of 40. His death certificate and medical records were lost, so the actual cause of his death remains a mystery.

Newspapers reported that he died of "congestion of the brain" or "cerebral inflammation," which were common euphemisms used when a person died of illicit causes such as alcoholism, drug addiction, or venereal disease.

Before his disappearance, Poe had given a manuscript to a friend of his. It was something he'd written a while back, a poem he described as "a little trifle that may be worth something to you." It was the manuscript for his last great poem, Annabel Lee, which would be published two days after he died.

Rufus Griswold, an enemy of Poe's, somehow became his literary executor. He wrote a biography of Poe called Memoir of the Author, where he described Poe as a depraved madman addled by drink and drugs.

Most of Griswold's claims were lies or half-truths; for example, although Poe was an opium user and wrote about it, he was a casual user and never became addicted to the drug.

Griswold's biography was virulently denounced by those who knew Edgar Allan Poe. The letters that Griswold presented as proof of his claims were later revealed to be forgeries.

Edgar Allan Poe's writings, especially his classic horror stories such as The Tell-Tale Heart, The Black Cat, The Cask Of Amontillado, and The Fall of the House of Usher continue to inspire new generations of writers.

Quote Of The Day

"Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality." - Edgar Allan Poe

Vanguard Video

Today's video features a complete reading of Edgar Allan Poe's classic short story, The Fall of the House of Usher. Enjoy!

Thursday, January 18, 2018

Notes For January 18th, 2018

This Day In Literary History

On January 18th, 1867, the legendary Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío was born. He was born Félix Rubén García Sarmiento in Metapa, Nicaragua. Shortly after his birth, his parents' rocky marriage fell apart. His father was a hopeless alcoholic.

Rubén's mother moved to Honduras to live with her new boyfriend, leaving him to be raised by her aunt and uncle in Leon. Rubén considered his Uncle Felix and Aunt Bernarda his real parents and never had any use for his birth parents.

A child prodigy, Rubén Darío learned to read when he was three years old, and begin writing poetry not long afterward. At the age of twelve, his first published poem appeared in a local newspaper.

Within a year, his work was appearing regularly in El Ensayo, (The Test) a literary magazine in Leon, where he became famous as El Niño Poeta de Leon - The Child Poet of Leon. He would often be invited to read his poetry at public functions.

Around this time, Rubén's Uncle Felix died, and he was sent off to be formally educated by the Jesuits. By then, his private studies of the great Spanish poets and writers of the day had kindled within him strong liberal convictions.

These convictions clashed bitterly with the teachings of the Jesuits, whom he would blast in El Jesuita, an essay written in 1881 - when he was fourteen.

In December of that year, Rubén Darío moved to Managua, where some liberal politicians campaigned to have a government grant pay for him to be educated in Europe.

Unfortunately, Pedro Joaquín Chamorro Alfaro, the conservative president of congress, denied the grant, as he was offended by Rubén's anti-religious writings.

After a public outcry, a compromise was offered that would pay for Rubén to be educated in the city of Granada, Nicaragua, but he opted to stay in Managua, where he would write for the city's top newspapers.

The following year, in 1882, Rubén Darío met a girl named Rosario Murillo. It was love at first sight for both of them, but there was a problem - he was fifteen years old and she eleven. He planned to marry her when she reached the age of consent, but his friends talked him out of it. He left Managua and set sail for El Salvador.

Several years later, following the sudden death of his first wife, he would be reunited with Rosario, now in her late teens. After her brother caught them in bed together, he forced Rubén to marry her in a shotgun wedding. It would not be a happy marriage. He drank and lived mostly with his mistress.

In El Salvador, Rubén Darío was befriended by the Salvadoran poet Joaquin Mendez, who took him under his wing and introduced him to the President, Rafael Zaldivar. Darío also met poet Francisco Gavidia, a connoisseur of French poetry.

Gavidia introduced him to the works of the French symbolist poets and Victor Hugo. He would later meet his idol, French symbolist poet Paul Verlaine, in Paris. He learned the French language well enough that he began writing poetry in French and using French rhythm and meter in Spanish poems.

When the Spanish-American War broke out, Darío served as a war correspondent. In his prophetic poem, To Roosevelt (1905), published several years after the war ended and dedicated to U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt, Darío accurately predicted the plunder and exploitation of Latin America and her people by U.S. imperialists:

You are the United States
you are the future invader
of the naive America that has indigenous blood
that still prays to Jesus Christ and that still speaks Spanish

His work as a war correspondent finished, Darío served as the Nicaraguan ambassador to France. He had held other diplomatic positions before, which enabled him to travel around the world.

When he visited New York City, he met Cuban poet José Martí. While working as an ambassador, he remained a prolific poet and continued to publish collections of his work.

In 1916, after writing his autobiography, Darío went bankrupt and fell ill with pneumonia. He returned home to Nicaragua and his wife Rosario, and died peacefully in bed. He was 49 years old.

Rubén Dario remains a huge influence on Spanish poetic voice and is considered a folk hero in Latin America. If you visit Nicaragua, you'll see a huge portrait of him hanging in Managua's international airport.

In 1965, a collection of Rubén Darío's poetry would be published in an English language edition by translator Lysander Kemp. This volume includes the classic Nocturne:

NOCTURNE

Silence of the night, a sad, nocturnal
silence — Why does my soul tremble so?
I hear the humming of my blood,
and a soft storm passes through my brain.
Insomnia! Not to be able to sleep, and yet
to dream. I am the autospecimen
of spiritual dissection, the auto-Hamlet!
To dilute my sadness
in the wine of the night
in the marvelous crystal of the dark —
And I ask myself: When will the dawn come?
Someone has closed a door —
Someone has walked past —
The clock has rung three — If only it were She! —

Quote Of The Day

"I seek a form that my style cannot discover, a bud of thought that wants to be a rose." - Rubén Darío

Vanguard Video

Today's video features a complete reading of Rubén Darío's poem To Roosevelt in English. Enjoy!

Wednesday, January 17, 2018

Notes For January 17th, 2018

This Day In Literary History

On January 17th, 1904, The Cherry Orchard, the classic play by the legendary Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, premiered at the Moscow Art Theatre. It would be the playwright's most challenging work - that is, challenging for the directors who stage it.

The Cherry Orchard was a product of its time in Russian history - the years after serfdom was abolished and before the Bolshevik revolution. It was a time when the aristocracy was losing power and the bourgeoisie was gaining it, and struggled to find meaning in its new status.

In the play, Madame Lyubov Andreievna Ranevsky, a middle aged aristocrat, and her family return to their country estate, which is scheduled to go on the auction block, as the family can't afford to pay the delinquent taxes on it. They can't even afford the upkeep of the estate, which is crumbling.

Madame Ranevsky's clan is not the only aristocratic family to fall on hard times, (the abolition of serfdom deprived the aristocracy of its slave labor supply) but she cannot come to terms with her financial predicament.

Her aristocratic pride makes her spend money she doesn't have to maintain the lavish lifestyle to which a person of her class is accustomed. And, she still grieves for her husband and one of her sons, who drowned a month after his father died.

Family friend Yermolay Lopakhin, a wealthy merchant, suggests that to make the money she needs to pay off her taxes, Madame Ranevsky should parcel out the vast lands of her estate, build a cottage on each parcel, and lease them all for summer rental.

She rejects the idea because it would mean cutting down her beloved (and huge) cherry orchard; Before he leaves, Lopahkin offers to lend Madame Ranevsky fifty thousand rubles to buy her estate back at the auction if she changes her mind and agrees to his plan for parceling out her land.

Her feeble brother Leonid Gayev suggests some alternative solutions, such as a financing scheme involving some banker friends and hitting up a wealthy aunt for the money.

In the end, the stubborn, foolish Madame Ranevsky's plans to save her estate and her beloved cherry orchard fall through and Lopakhin buys the estate at the auction.

He tells Madame Ranevsky that he plans to go ahead with the destruction of the cherry orchard and parcel out the land. Before the curtain falls, as Madame Renevsky and her family weep, the sound of chopping cherry trees is heard.

The characters in The Cherry Orchard are walking, talking metaphors. Madame Ranevsky represents the stubborn pride of the waning Russian aristocracy, while her brother Gayev, with his addiction to billiards, symbolizes the aristocracy's addiction to decadent pleasures - another weakness.

Lopakhin represents the bourgeoisie, the middle class who profited most from the weakening of the aristocracy in the years before the Bolshevik revolution. He's a self-made man who rose from working class roots to become a wealthy merchant. He wears a fine, expensive white suit and gaudy yellow shoes.

Lopakhin has a kind of love-hate relationship with Madame Ranevsky. He's grateful for the kindness she's shown him over the years, but he also resents her condescending attitude.

Although he's wealthy - wealthier, in fact, than she is now - she still sees him as the lower class, because of his peasant roots. This is one of the reasons why she rejected his plan to save her estate.

Anton Chekhov was less than thrilled with the premiere of The Cherry Orchard at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1904. During rehearsals, the director of the production, Constantin Stanislavski, completely rewrote the second act, turning Chekov's comedy into a tragedy. The playwright was furious.

"In the second act there are tears in their eyes, but the tone is happy, lively. Why did you put so many tears in my play? Where are they?" Chekhov wrote to complain. He later went to the theater in person to supervise the production and work out a compromise with the director.

Although a comedy at heart, The Cherry Orchard delicately balances farce with elements of tragedy. Stanislavski insisted on doing the play strictly as a tragedy.

To this day, some directors still struggle to interpret the complex play. Audiences at the Moscow Art Theatre gave the premiere a rousing applause, but the critics' reviews were mixed.

When the play debuted in St. Petersburg at Panin's People's House theater, the audience of pre-revolutionary working class Russians, who understood Chekhov's scathing satire, reportedly cheered at the end, when the aristocrats wept over the demise of their cherry orchard, which was felled onstage.

The Cherry Orchard would be Anton Chekhov's last play. It was inspired by incidents in his own life, including the demise of a cherry orchard he'd planted on his own country estate.

The play was written over a period of several years, as the playwright began to lose his battle with tuberculosis. He died six months after its Moscow premiere, at the age of 44.

Quote Of The Day

"The role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them." - Anton Chekhov

Vanguard Video

Today's video features the 1981 British production of The Cherry Orchard, starring Dame Judi Dench. Enjoy!

Tuesday, January 16, 2018

Notes For January 16th, 2018

This Day In Literary History

On January 16th, 1933, the famous American writer, filmmaker, and activist Susan Sontag was born. She was born Susan Rosenblatt in New York City. Her childhood was unhappy; her father, a wealthy fur trader, died of tuberculosis when she was five. Her mother, cold and distant, was "always away."

When Susan was twelve, her mother married an Army captain, Nathan Sontag. Susan and her sister were given his surname, though he never officially adopted them. He moved the family around the country, finally settling in Los Angeles.

After graduating Hollywood High School at the age of 15, the intellectually gifted Susan Sontag enrolled at Berkeley University. She later transferred to the University of Chicago. There, after engaging in a brief but passionate courtship, she got married at seventeen.

Her new husband, Philip Rieff, was a writer and sociology professor at the university. They would remain together for eight years and have one child, a son named David. Susan continued her education and earned a Master's degree in philosophy.

In 1957, she was awarded a fellowship at St. Anne's College, Oxford, and traveled to England alone to take classes. She didn't care for Oxford and transferred to the University of Paris.

She considered her time in Paris the most important time in her life, both intellectually and artistically, as she struck up friendships with expatriate academics and artists, one of which, Cuban-American avant garde playwright María Irene Fornés, became her lover.

Susan and María moved to New York City and lived together for seven years. During that time, Susan had regained custody of her son and begun working on her first novel, The Benefactor (1963).

It was a novel in the form of a memoir. The protagonist, a Candide-esque bohemian named Hippolyte, takes the reader along for the ride as his dream world gradually becomes indistinguishable from reality.

Susan's second novel, Death Kit (1967), is a dark Kafka like tale that takes place on a train. One of the passengers, a thirtysomething year old businessman with the ironic nickname Diddy, becomes convinced that he might be a murderer.

Diddy, who recently attempted suicide, fears that he may have beaten a railroad worker to death while the train was stopped in a dark tunnel. Hester, the lovely yet apathetic blind girl sitting next to him, tells him that he never left his seat. Diddy examines his memories and dreams, trying to answer the question: did he do it?

Susan Sontag would publish two more novels, a short story collection, and nonfiction books. She was also known as an essayist and published six essay collections. Her second and most famous collection, Styles of Radical Will (1969), contained her most controversial essay.

Trip to Hanoi was the culmination of Susan's activism against the Vietnam War. She had first signed the Writers and Editors War Tax pledge, refusing to pay taxes to support the war. Like actress Jane Fonda, she went to Hanoi to tell the North Vietnamese side of the story.

Susan sympathized with the North Vietnamese, writing in her essay that the Vietcong could not be compared to the Soviets or the Maoist Chinese, whose communism she would later describe as "fascism with a human face." The Vietcong were fighting for their independence.

No stranger to controversy, Susan had previously published an essay in the Partisan Review where she said:

Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.

Susan would later retract that statement, but only because she believed that it was insulting to cancer patients.

She continued her activist work; in 1986, she vigorously defended the legendary Indian writer Salman Rushdie when his classic novel The Satanic Verses resulted in the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issuing a fatwa calling for his death.

A few years later, during the Bosnian War, Susan boldly declared that the Serbian Orthodox Christian forces were the real war criminals in that conflict, not the Bosnian / Albanian Muslim resistance. She went to Sarajevo and directed a production of Samuel Beckett's classic play, Waiting For Godot.

When the AIDS epidemic began to spread in the 1980s, Susan brought it to attention with her play The Way We Live Now and her non-fiction book, AIDS and Its Metaphors, where she harshly criticized the idea that AIDS was a "gay disease" and a divine judgement against homosexuals.

Susan was also a filmmaker. Between 1969 and 1983, she wrote and directed four feature films. Three were produced in Sweden, one in Italy. Her first film, Duet for Cannibals (1969), was a Swedish production.

It told the story of a professor who hires a young man to organize his papers for publication. The young man discovers that the professor's wife, tired of being abused and degraded by him, is planning to murder him. The wife and the young man become lovers. Meanwhile, the professor pursues the young man's girlfriend.

Susan followed Duet for Cannibals with Brother Carl (1971), Promised Lands (1974), and Unguided Tour (1983). Unfortunately, all of her movies are hard to find.

Never afraid to voice her often controversial opinions, on September 24th, 2001 - thirteen days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks - in the New Yorker magazine, Susan asked:

Where is the acknowledgment that this was... an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions?

That year, she won the Jerusalem Prize, which is awarded biannually at the Jerusalem International Book Fair to writers whose works have dealt with the subject of human freedom in society.

Susan Sontag died of leukemia in 2004 at the age of 71.

Quote Of The Day

"The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one - or both. Usually both." - Susan Sontag

Vanguard Video

Today's video features Susan Sontag speaking at the San Francisco Public Library in 2001. Enjoy!

Monday, January 15, 2018

IWW Members' Publishing Successes

Wayne Scheer

My humorous homage to the hard-boiled detective story, "A Defective Story," has been accepted at Out of the Gutter and will appear later this month or early February. I worked with Karen Rice on trying to turn this into a play.

That didn't work, but it helped me revise it into a better story. Thanks, Karen. This started in the Practice group and was also critiqued in Fiction a while back, so I have a lot of people to thank.

Friday, January 12, 2018

Notes For January 12th, 2018

This Day In Literary History

On January 12th, 1876, the legendary American writer Jack London was born. He was presumably born John Chaney in San Francisco, but his record of birth was destroyed in the 1906 earthquake.

London's mother, Flora Wellman, a music teacher and spiritualist, had become pregnant by her boyfriend, astrologer William Chaney. Chaney demanded that she have an abortion; when she refused, he refused to accept responsibility for the child.

In desperation, Flora Wellman attempted suicide by shooting herself. She wasn't seriously injured, but had become mentally ill, so her friend, ex-slave Virginia Prentiss, took care of the baby while she recovered.

Virginia would remain a strong maternal figure throughout Jack London's life. After his mother recovered, she met and later married John London, a disabled Civil War veteran. The baby, named John but called Jack, came to live with them.

The Londons moved around the San Francisco Bay Area before settling in Oakland. Jack London began his schooling. In 1886, at the age of 10, he discovered the Oakland Public Library and became a voracious reader, his love of literature nurtured by the librarian, poet Ina Coolbrith, later the state's first poet laureate.

In 1897, when he was 21 years old and a student at the University of California, Berkeley, London read an old newspaper account of his mother's attempted suicide. Learning the name of his biological father, William Chaney, London wrote to him.

Chaney wrote back, telling him that he wasn't his father, and that his mother was a whore who had slandered him, ruining his good name. London was devastated.

Long before he had attended Berkeley, Jack London started working at the age of 13. He toiled from 12 to 18 hours a day for slave wages. Seeking a way out of this grueling labor, London borrowed money from his black foster mother.

He bought a boat from an oyster pirate named French Frank. Jack became an oyster pirate himself for a few months, but then his boat was damaged beyond repair. So, he gave up piracy and switched sides, joining the California Fish Patrol.

From there, London signed up to work on a sealing schooner bound for Japan. When he returned to the U.S., he found his country in the grip of the Panic of '93, a precursor to the Great Depression. Labor unrest had swept through his hometown of Oakland.

After suffering through more grueling, low-paying jobs, London joined the famous Kelly's Army protest march of unemployed workers and became a tramp. These experiences would result in London becoming a lifelong socialist.

After living as a hobo for a while, Jack London decided that he would have to use his brains to escape poverty. So, he completed high school and went on to the University of Berkeley. Financial difficulties forced him to leave university in 1897, so he never graduated.

He set sail for Alaska with his brother-in-law, James Shepard, hoping to strike it rich in the Yukon Gold Rush. Instead, like most would-be prospectors, he fell ill from exposure to the harsh Alaskan climate.

Suffering from malnutrition and a bad case of scurvy, he soon found himself living in a shelter and medical facility for the poor. London would later base one of his greatest short stories, To Build A Fire, (1908) on these struggles.

When he returned to California in 1898, Jack London determined to become a writer. His first published short story, To The Man On Trial, appeared in The Overland Monthly that year. The magazine paid him $5 for the story, (about $150 today) but was slow in sending him a check.

Just as he was about to give up on being a writer, The Black Cat accepted another of his stories, A Thousand Deaths, (1899) and paid him $40 for it, or about $1200 today.

London had begun his literary career at the right time; new printing technology had just been introduced that enabled high quality magazines to be produced quickly at low cost. This resulted in a literary magazine boom.

Literary magazines catering to a wide variety of genres and tastes provided a strong market for short fiction and serialized novels. London's writings continued to sell and sell well. By 1900, he was making $2,500 a year - the equivalent of $75,000 in today's money.

That year, London married his first wife, Bess Maddern. She had been an old and close friend of his. They both knew (and publicly acknowledged) that they didn't really love each other, but they liked each other enough that they figured they could make a successful marriage. Bess bore Jack two daughters, Joan and Bessie, who was called Becky.

After the birth of their second daughter, their marriage soured. Bess wanted no more children, and she believed that sex without the express purpose of procreation was immoral, so she wouldn't let her husband touch her. Frustration led London to frequent brothels. Bess finally agreed to a divorce, and they parted amicably.

A year later, Jack London married his second wife, Charmian Kittredge. She had been his publisher's secretary. In Charmian, Jack found a soul mate. Despite her prim and dignified exterior, Charmian was a libertine who enjoyed sex. She also possessed an intellect equal to her husband's.

Charmian had been raised by an aunt who was a libertine, a feminist, and a disciple of the famous suffragist Victoria Woodhull. Jack and Charmian tried to have children together, but their first child died at birth and a second pregnancy resulted in a miscarriage.

In 1903, Jack London's most famous novel, The Call Of The Wild, was published, first in a serialization by the Saturday Evening Post. They asked London to set his price, and he received a payment of $750, or just under $21,000 today.

Later, Macmillan bought the book rights. London chose to take a lump sum payment of $2000 (about $550,000 today) instead of royalties, not realizing that his novel would become a classic, selling millions of copies. He had no regrets, because the publisher's extensive promotional campaign made his name as a writer and helped him sell more novels.

The Call Of The Wild told the story of Buck, a domesticated dog living in the rough and frigid Yukon during the Gold Rush who finds himself forced into service as a sled dog.

Buck's experiences cause him to revert to his primordial instincts. Although considered a children's novel because its main character is a dog, The Call Of The Wild is actually a dark tale with many scenes of cruelty and violence.

Jack London would publish more classic novels, including The Sea-Wolf (1904) and White Fang (1906). In The Sea-Wolf, pampered, rich intellectual Humphrey Van Weyden is on board a San Francisco ferry which collides with another ship in the fog and sinks.

Adrift in the sea, Van Weyden is rescued by Wolf Larsen, the captain of a sealing schooner. The misanthropic Larsen is no hero; he rules his crew with an iron fist and promptly shanghais Van Weyden, forcing him to work as cabin boy.

The formerly pampered rich man must toughen up fast in order to do his work and protect himself from the brutal crew. When the crew attempts a mutiny, Wolf Larsen fights them off, then tortures them in retribution.

White Fang tells the story of the title character, a wolf-dog hybrid who is adopted by an Indian tribe in the Yukon. The pack of dogs that live with the tribe see White Fang as a wolf and attack him. The Indians save him, but the dogs still persecute him relentlessly.

The morose and solitary White Fang grows up to be a savage and deadly fighter. The Indians sell him for a bottle of whiskey to Beauty Smith, a white prospector who runs a dog-fighting operation.

The savage White Fang goes undefeated until one opponent, a ferocious bulldog, nearly tears him apart. Left to die, he is rescued by Weedon Scott, a wealthy young prospector. After nursing White Fang back to health, Scott manages to tame the formerly vicious wolf-dog.

In 1905, Jack London bought a 1,000 acre ranch in Glen Ellen, California, on the eastern slope of Sonoma Mountain. He loved the ranch, and over the next decade, he invested his writing income (after 1910, he mostly wrote potboilers strictly for money) into making it successful, but it turned out to be a huge failure.

By 1916, he began suffering from both kidney failure and dysentery. He continued to work, both on his writing and on the ranch, even as his health deteriorated. On November 22nd, 1916, Jack London died at the age of 40.

Although uremia was listed as the official cause of death, London was taking large doses of morphine to relieve the extreme pain he was in, and most believe that he really died from an accidental or intentional overdose of morphine.

Throughout his remarkable career, Jack London wrote numerous novels and short stories. He also published several works of nonfiction, including two memoirs: The Road (1907), about his life as a tramp, and John Barleycorn (1913), about his battles with alcoholism.

A lifelong socialist, he wrote political books as well, including The People Of The Abyss, (1903) - an expose of slum life in London - and Revolution, And Other Essays (1910). He is, without a doubt, one of the greatest American writers of all time.

Quote Of The Day

“I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.” - Jack London

Vanguard Video

Today's video features a complete reading of Jack London's classic novel, White Fang. Enjoy!

Thursday, January 11, 2018

Notes For January 11th, 2018

This Day In Literary History

On January 11th, 1901, the legendary South African writer and activist Alan Paton was born in Kwa-Zulu Natal, South Africa, the son of a civil servant.

After earning his Bachelor's degree at the University of Natal, Paton became a high school teacher. Later, in 1935, he took a job as principal of the Diepkloof Reformatory for black African juvenile offenders.

Disgusted by the prior mistreatment of the boys at the reformatory, and hoping to truly rehabilitate them, Paton introduced a series of progressive reforms, all of which were considered highly controversial by his fellow white South Africans.

The most controversial reform was his new honor system, whereby offenders would be allowed to work outside the reformatory. Some boys who proved their trustworthiness would even be allowed to live outside the reformatory with a foster family.

Paton's reforms proved to be a huge success. During his fourteen years as principal of Diepkloof Reformatory, some 10,000 boys were granted outside leave, and less than 1% failed to return.

When World War II broke out in 1939, Alan Paton volunteered for military service, but was rejected. So, he traveled around the world, visiting juvenile correctional facilities in other countries. He also began working on his first novel, which would become an all-time classic and an international bestseller.

Cry, The Beloved Country (1948) told the story of Stephen Kumalo, a black pastor from the small village of Ixopo, who receives a letter from a priest in Johannesburg asking him to come and help his sister Gertrude, who is ill.

Kumalo's son Absalom had gone to Johannesburg to look for Gertrude, but never came home. So, Kumalo decides to go to the city himself. When he arrives in Johannesburg, Kumalo finds that Gertrude has become a prostitute and an alcoholic, but he convinces her to return along with her young son.

Kumalo begins searching for his own son, Absalom. The trail leads him to discover that Absalom served time in a reformatory, impregnated a girl, and is now facing execution for allegedly murdering a man during a burglary.

The victim was Arthur Jarvis, a white activist for racial justice - and the son of James Jarvis, Kumalo's neighbor in Ixopo. James and Arthur had been estranged, but after reading his son's writings, James decides to carry on Arthur's work on behalf of oppressed black South Africans.

Meanwhile, Kumalo and his son Absalom are reunited. Before he is executed, Absalom marries the girl he impregnated. She decides to return to Ixopo with her new father-in-law. Back home, Kumalo, with help from James Jarvis, tries to restore the barren farmlands of his village.

Cry, The Beloved Country would become a classic, as it explored the societal and political changes in South Africa that would lead to the introduction of the apartheid system in that country.

The novel was published in 1948, and later that same year, the right wing National Party would seize power. Within the next few years, they would pass the legislation that defined the apartheid system, stripping black South Africans of their citizenship and rights.

In 1953, Alan Paton founded the South African Liberal Party, (SALP) which fought against the apartheid laws. Paton would serve as president of the SALP until the late 1960s, when the party was outlawed by the apartheid regime because its membership was comprised of both blacks and whites.

Paton's friend, Bernard Friedman, would later found the Progressive Party. Paton's anti-apartheid activities often raised the ire of the regime. In 1960, the South African Secret Police learned that Paton's party was receiving donations from international sources.

Legally, they couldn't stop the transactions, so when Paton returned from a trip to New York City, (where he received the Freedom Award) the secret police confiscated his passport and didn't return it for ten years.

Alan Paton would write other memorable novels, which also dealt with racial injustice in South Africa, as did his short story collection, Tales From a Troubled Land (1961).

He also wrote collections of essays; his last one, Save the Beloved Country, was published posthumously in 1989. He died in 1988 at the age of 85.

Beginning in 1990, as the result of violent resistance at home and mounting opposition around the world, South Africa's apartheid system slowly but surely came to an end, culminating in the African National Congress's landslide victory over the National Party in the 1994 election.

Quote Of The Day

"The truth is, our civilization is not Christian; it is a tragic compound of great ideal and fearful practice, of loving charity and fearful clutching of possessions." - Alan Paton

Vanguard Video

Today's video features a clip from a rare 1960 Canadian TV interview with Alan Paton. Enjoy!

Wednesday, January 10, 2018

Notes For January 10th, 2018

This Day In Literary History

On January 10th, 1845, the famous English poet and playwright Robert Browning wrote his first letter to Elizabeth Barrett, a fellow poet who would become his soul mate. Ironically, at the time they first began corresponding, it was unlikely that Elizabeth would become anybody's anything.

As a young girl, Elizabeth Barrett was both intellectually gifted and physically weak. By the age of six, she was reading novels and writing poetry. At fifteen, she was struck with an illness that doctors were unable to diagnose.

Some have speculated that it was a debilitating heart condition that causes pain and weakness, such as angina. All three of her sisters contracted the illness as well, but for them, it didn't last long. They recovered quickly, but Elizabeth did not. She had a severe case.

Whatever the illness was, it and the opiates she took to relieve the pain made Elizabeth pretty much an invalid. She spent most of her time in her room, either in bed or writing at her desk. She earned a modest income writing poetry, essays, and literary criticism.

She saw few people except for her family, but she had a lot of family to keep her company - three sisters and seven brothers. Despite her illness, Elizabeth Barrett became one of the greatest poets of her generation.

When her classic poetry collection Poems was published in 1844, she became one of the most famous poets in England. Although she saw few visitors, she kept up a huge amount of correspondence.

One of Elizabeth Barrett's greatest admirers was the poet Robert Browning. Not only did he love her poetry, but she was one of the very few literary critics who had given his first poetry collection, Dramatic Lyrics (1842), a good review. A glowing review, in fact.

So, Robert wrote to thank her - and to proclaim his great admiration of her poetry. "The fresh strange music, the affluent language, the exquisite pathos and true new brave thought" is how he described her talent. Then he proclaimed his love for her:

I do, as I say, love these books with all my heart... and I love you too. Do you know I was once not very far from seeing - really seeing you? Mr. Kenyon said to me one morning "Would you like to see Miss Barrett?" then he went to announce me... then he returned... you were too unwell, and now it is years ago, and I feel as at some untoward passage in my travels, as if I had been close, so close, to some world's-wonder in chapel or crypt, only a screen to push and I might have entered, but there was some slight, so it now seems, slight and just sufficient bar to admission, and the half-opened door shut, and I went home my thousands of miles, and the sight was never to be?

Thus, Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett began a correspondence that would result in nearly six hundred letters exchanged between them. It would also result in a courtship, and a miraculous improvement in Elizabeth's health.

Though she would not recover completely from her illness, she would regain her strength, leave her invalid's bed, marry, have a child, and live to the age of 55 - far longer than was expected for someone with her condition.

Elizabeth's courtship with Robert Browning had to be carried out in secret, as her father, a domineering tyrant, had forbidden all his eleven children from ever marrying under penalty of disinheritance. Why? The answer lies in the family history.

The wealthy, aristocratic Barrett family came from a long line of plantation owners. Elizabeth Barrett's grandfather, who owned sugar plantations and other businesses in the West Indies, was known for his humane treatment of his slaves.

He was also known to take slave women as his mistresses. Elizabeth's father, Edward Barrett, believed that his father may have adopted the light skinned babies of his slave mistresses, and that he may have been one of them.

Politically conservative and a virulent racist, Edward Barrett was greatly shamed by the thought that Negro blood may be running through his and his children's veins. His children were white, but he feared that they might one day produce dark skinned offspring. So he forbade them all from marrying.

Elizabeth Barrett was the polar opposite of her father. A liberal intellectual, she despised slavery, wrote abolitionist poetry, and rejoiced when England outlawed slavery completely in 1833. This resulted in a huge rift between father and daughter.

Elizabeth never gave much thought to her father's decree forbidding marriage because she figured that her illness rendered her too sick too marry. She didn't plan on falling in love with Robert Browning. When they eloped, her father disinherited her and never spoke to her again. Her brothers didn't speak to her for years.

The happy couple settled in Italy, where Elizabeth regained her strength and after several miscarriages, bore their only child, a boy named Robert Wiedemann Barrett Browning, but known by his nickname, Pen.

Many years later, the Brownings' son published all but one of their letters to each other. The one missing letter was believed to have been burned by Robert Browning at Elizabeth Barrett's insistence because it was so passionate that she feared he might be arrested for sending it through the mail.

Quote Of The Day

"Love is the energy of life." - Robert Browning

Vanguard Video

Today's video features a reading from the first letter of Robert Browning to Elizabeth Barrett. Enjoy!

Wednesday, January 31, 2018

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Tuesday, January 30, 2018

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Monday, January 29, 2018

IWW Members' Publishing Successes

Friday, January 26, 2018

Notes For January 26th, 2018

Thursday, January 25, 2018

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Wednesday, January 24, 2018

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Tuesday, January 23, 2018

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Monday, January 22, 2018

IWW Members' Publishing Successes

Friday, January 19, 2018

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Thursday, January 18, 2018

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Wednesday, January 17, 2018

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Tuesday, January 16, 2018

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Monday, January 15, 2018

IWW Members' Publishing Successes

Friday, January 12, 2018

Notes For January 12th, 2018

Thursday, January 11, 2018

Notes For January 11th, 2018

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Notes For January 10th, 2018

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