A Sure Thing?

A Utube version of Sure Thing is available for viewing by clicking on the title of the play or the title of this post. Thanks to Valerie! I'd welcome critical comments about this performance on your blogs concerning acting, direction, costumes, set, etc.

You Are Invited!

In honor of Confluence Press Founder Keith Browning’s 82nd Birthday. . .
LCSC Visiting Writers Series
Presents
Montana poet,
songwriter,
political satirist,
Latter Day worm
fisherman,
&
post-western
blues troubadour
GREG KEELER
READING FROM HIS NEW MEMOIR
And
performing some crazy and often politically incorrect songs. .
Thursday, May 7th 7:00 pm
Sage Bakery
1303 Main Street Lewiston
Free & Open
To the
Public

Fiction Assignment

Choose a particular short story from our text and study each of its elements—character, point of view, setting, symbols, themes, tone, and style. Then take a series of photographs with a digital camera that illustrates each element. Transfer the photos to a computer and edit the photographs and choose only the best shots for a particular purpose. Using direct quotations from the story, caption and title each photograph. Then write a personal essay that describes your experience with sensory detail and explains your choices. Create a new blog devoted exclusively to this assignment and post your essay and your captioned photos on the new blog. Create a link to your new blog on your class blog and station the link inside a new post.

An Open Letter to 150 Students

Simon Tucker with Kokanee 2009

Dear Students:

Please keep an active log of your fiction reading during this period of our semester, especially on your blog. Although I am generally very pleased to be able to award most of you the full twenty points possible for poetry, the hardcover copies of your papers were often less than professional in appearance and content. Please prepare your fiction papers using MLA style and format. Perhaps just as importantly, I'll be judging your next written work partly on style. Using "u" instead of "you," for instance, sloppy grammar, usage, mechanics, poor critical thinking, haste, poor organization, lack of supporting evidence and examples will all detract significantly from your grade next time.

On the other hand, several of your papers were fine, and I very much appreciated the analytical and personal comments about our class that many of you made concerning our experiences in poetry so far this semester. Almost of all of you apparently enjoyed Simon Tucker's Blues Workshop. Consequently, I have purchased three tickets for the "winning" group of the "A & P" (Updike) assignment to attend Simon's forthcoming solo concert at 8:00 p.m. in the Silverthorne Theater on 16 April. Tickets are $5.00 in advance and $7.00 at the door (or free if the class votes your group the best on the assignment).

Speaking of performances, you might want to mark your calendars as well for two other dates:
Fiction writer, singer and song writer, poet and essayist, Greg Keeler will perform in Lewiston on 7 May. He called this morning, however, to cancel his appearance in our class. Greg's Lewiston performance will be free of charge. You can click on the link to his web site by clicking on Greg's name in this sentence. He called me just now and asked me to give you all his greetings. His new book is a kind of non-fiction memoir called Trash Fish.

The first and current Poet Laureate of Washington State, Sam Green, and I will be reading at the Asotin County Library in Clarkston soon to celebrate National Poetry Month. I've forgotten the date. Maybe next weekend or (yikes!) maybe this coming one. Of course, you're invited. Saturday 11 April 7:00 p.m. Free.

There is no extra credit available, however, for your attendance at any of these events. Your attendance is desired and welcomed but neither required nor coerced.

By the way, author John Daniel had to cancel his classroom visit. He's at home nursing his wife, Marilyn, back to health after recovering his own.

Trevor and I also invite you to the LCMYK fundraiser. Click on the link for more details.

Assignment in Point of View

Retell Updike's story, "A and P," from the PointOfView of one of the following characters:

Queenie
Stoksie
One of Sammy's parents or siblings
Plaid
Lengel
A customer
Big Tall Goony-Goony

Make sure your original story has a clear beginning, middle, and end; a conflict, crisis, and climax; and a supermarket setting. Be sure to employ at least some foreshadowing and include a backstory. You may change the setting to a store in the contemporary western United States.
Be sure readers of Updike's story can identify your character without a name. On second thought, let's keep the same time period as the original story. Write from the first person point of view in the voice of the character. Your story, keep in mind, needs to stand on its own as its own story. If successful, your story will appear as one chapter in a work of fiction that includes the original Updike story alongside the stories of other characters listed above.

Please

Please post at least some of the writing we do in class on your blog. Thanks.

Win A Full Scholarship to the Jackson Hole Writers Conference

As part of our introduction to literature course, you may want to investigate the link to this post and enter the contest. As a former faculty member at the conference, I can highly recommend the experience to student writers and emerging writers who are serious about their work as well as to serious readers who would like to know more about what goes on "behind the scenes" of contemporary writing in the United States.

Historic Jackson Hole, of course, is a nearly ideal setting for a writers conference. The conference's director, Tim Sandlin, is himself a fine American writer. Here's what he has to say about himself on his website.

I wrote five novels about my problems and then I ran out of problems so I wrote movies because you don't have to have problems to write movies. After a few years of that I developed all new problems so I went back to novels and that's where I am now. If you want the bio stuff, keep reading. If you don't, stop here. I suggest you go to bed, or read a book. Make yourself useful.

"He was born in Oklahoma and his mother's name was Thelma Liz." That's a Ray Wylie Hubbard song but I lived it. I spent my summer rite-of-passage years in Wyoming. I worked over 40 entry-level jobs including driving an ice cream truck, skinning elk, cooking in a Chinese restaurant, trail inventory for the Forest Service, gardener for the Rockefellers, pizza parlor manager, belt buckle buffer, and countless dishwashing jobs. Throughout this period I lived most of the year on public lands, first in a tent and later in a Cheyenne tipi. The more mind-numbing jobs have helped me to hone my creative skills, but all of these experiences have helped me to learn to appreciate life and its inherent follies.

I have published eight novels and a book of columns. I wrote eleven screenplays for hire; two have been made into movies. I turned forty with no phone, TV, or flush toilet and spent more time talking to the characters in my head than the people around me. Now have seven phone lines, four TVs I don't watch, three flush toilets, and a two-headed shower. My wife and I recently adopted a little girl from China. I'm now living happily (indoors) with my family (wife, Carol; son, Kyle; daughter, Leila) in Jackson, Wyoming.