My sense of community has changed in major ways over the years. With relatively early success as a writer, especially as a literary short story writer in the 1960s and 1970s, with citations in Best American Short Stories, I felt a strong sense of being part of the American literary community. This became more focused in the 1980s with my success as a playwright in the Pacific Northwest and a very strong sense that Portland was my home, both personally and professionally.
Much changed in the 1980s. My theatrical support group in Portland vanished (death, moving, retirement) about the same time I abandoned traditional theater for hyperdrama. I no longer felt very much at home in Portland, where my new irrelevance grew over the decades. But I found a new support group online, an international interest in hyperdrama that put me in the forefront of this new theater form. I ended up contributing to the canon of "first generation hypertext," about as obscure an honor as one can receive. I also had graduate dissertations written on my work in Egypt, Spain and Sweden. How strange! But a damn sight better than working in a vacuum.
As I returned to fiction in 2000 and beyond, in the short novel form, my sense of an audience was not visceral. I received just enough perks to let me know I wasn't yet stuck in a vacuum. Yet the sense of community I had earlier had vanished. My audience was invisible.
Was I writing for the future, for posterity? At one time I embraced the possibility but I grew to understand how little literature matters in my own culture. What serious audience I had remained overseas, I suspected.
I never set out to be a popular writer. I don't read popular literature. But I didn't want to work in a vacuum either. By and large, my career has gone just about the way it needed to go, given my interests and my talents. In fact, I am a better writer than I expected to be. At the same time, I am much more invisible than I expected to be.
In my old age, I write largely from habit. It is what I do. It is who I am. I do very little marketing, only as much as takes almost no effort, like entering my last play in competitions. I feel fortunate to have a fan in the publisher of Round Bend Press, my recent home. I am happy with the arrangement.
I still get excited about writing. I am excited about my new novel, the CJ sequel. It is enough for my old age.
Much changed in the 1980s. My theatrical support group in Portland vanished (death, moving, retirement) about the same time I abandoned traditional theater for hyperdrama. I no longer felt very much at home in Portland, where my new irrelevance grew over the decades. But I found a new support group online, an international interest in hyperdrama that put me in the forefront of this new theater form. I ended up contributing to the canon of "first generation hypertext," about as obscure an honor as one can receive. I also had graduate dissertations written on my work in Egypt, Spain and Sweden. How strange! But a damn sight better than working in a vacuum.
As I returned to fiction in 2000 and beyond, in the short novel form, my sense of an audience was not visceral. I received just enough perks to let me know I wasn't yet stuck in a vacuum. Yet the sense of community I had earlier had vanished. My audience was invisible.
Was I writing for the future, for posterity? At one time I embraced the possibility but I grew to understand how little literature matters in my own culture. What serious audience I had remained overseas, I suspected.
I never set out to be a popular writer. I don't read popular literature. But I didn't want to work in a vacuum either. By and large, my career has gone just about the way it needed to go, given my interests and my talents. In fact, I am a better writer than I expected to be. At the same time, I am much more invisible than I expected to be.
In my old age, I write largely from habit. It is what I do. It is who I am. I do very little marketing, only as much as takes almost no effort, like entering my last play in competitions. I feel fortunate to have a fan in the publisher of Round Bend Press, my recent home. I am happy with the arrangement.
I still get excited about writing. I am excited about my new novel, the CJ sequel. It is enough for my old age.
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