Date:         Thu, 18 Sep 1997 09:48:09 -0600
From: John Herrmann <herrmann@LIBBY.ORG>
Subject:      FILLER: Software, Intro, univ. writing programs

WRITERS: I'm new to this list and have enjoyed the beta testing posts of
that very promising poetry software. To combine threads here, I'm in the
process of testing Microsoft Sex for Windows 69. You launch into the
program by playing with your mouse.

Personal stuff:  I live now at the northwest tip of Montana near Briotish
Columbia & the Idaho panhandle in a small log house amid fine pine-covered
mountains with my border collie, Mackie, and "her" four sheep (we make
regular fools of ourselves at sheep dog trials). And -- I write full
time... for myself. Everyone's dream, right? Well -- try it. The pressure
is terrific. The area here is so gorgeous that it often seems like a waste
of my life to sit at my desk and not be out with the moose and deer. Also,
I am about 10 miles from a small village where you can hardly buy a pair of
Levi's without an L.L.Bean connection. The one glorious distraction is the
Red Dog Saloon, just 2/10ths of a mile down Bobtail Cutoff (my road) to
Pipe Creek Rd. (I'm just finishing the revision of my novel "Murder at the
Red Dog Saloon"). No other shops or business out here in the Outback to
destroy the quiet. You often hope for a local war just to break that quiet.
A visit here by a NYC family told me just how quiet it is: They asked about
"that noise!" Turned out it was a light breeze through the pines that
border my acreage. So -- as the joke goes -- enough about me; what about
you? What did you think of my last book?

Y'all come visit, hear?

Anyone out there want to talk about writing programs? I took a grad degree
from that Iowa program a long while ago and found it oppressive but helpful
in some ways (contacts, agents, editors...). The actual workshop sessions
were awfully bitchy,. and you had to *conform* to a workshop style or be
hooted. Many of my contemporaries there were indeed disappointed, often
leave school without the degree. Among the disgruntled: Ray Carver, Joe
Nicholson, Dick Hugo (faculty), who left after about one month of a year's
contract.... Others succeeded *because* of the place: Mark Strand, Marv
Bell, as students, and Donald Justice (faculty). Mostly the poets got a
better deal out of the place than we fiction writers.

So -- any opinions of the good and evil of these program?


John Herrmann
herrmann@libby.org