Audience

As a writer, my relationship to my audience has covered the wide spectrum of possibilities. In the beginning, writing literary short stories, I sought the literary audience who reads literary journals, small and specialized, to be sure, what today would be called elitist. It took a while but in time I began publishing in the literary journals I admired -- Prism International, The Literary Review, others -- and received the unexpected (but wished for) honor of having three Roll of Honor stories in the Best American Short Stories anthology in four consecutive years. Agents wrote if I had a novel, and I was working on one. But for a variety of reasons I changed my focus to theater before I finished it.

Although I had immediate success as a playwright at the national level, most of my first decade as an MFA Playwright was in learning theater language and dynamics, primarily as an actor. I was fortunate to have a mentor and director to guide me. Then I ended up in Portland in the late 1970s, in the right place at the right time, and became a resident playwright, the best of worlds. This was the most popular decade of my career, as traditionally defined. I was a regional star.

Ironically, it was a commission in this period that changed my direction, driven by an obsession for what now is called hyperdrama. I even produced my own, and COCKTAIL SUITE was an artistic and commercial success from which I should have built a permanent company but I hadn't yet figured out how to root hyperdrama in a static, permanent location.  It was still too "space" driven. At the same time, it was clear that a greater audience for the new form was across the ocean, and I ended up focusing my efforts, via the internet, overseas. This resulted in considerable artistic success but not much financial reward. A one act hyperdrama commissioned from a company in Chile, and never performed in English to this day, is now considered to be "in the canon" of early hypertext literary work.

I had no sense, however, that I was this successful overseas. The book Canonizing Hypertext that devotes considerable discussion to my work and puts me in the canon was published in London years before I discovered its existence. In other words, my esoteric fame was completely unknown to me. My esoteric overseas audience was unknown to me. I did hear from several foreign graduate students who were writing dissertations on my work, no small pleasure, but otherwise I was writing in a vacuum, or so it seemed.

So audiences can exist without knowing about them. The important thing is to have work available, and the internet makes this much more possible than earlier. But even publication in obscure places can pay later dividends, such as the discovery of my essay on teaching writing decades later by someone who ran with the controversial themes I proposed.

This, perhaps, is why my favorite historian, Morris Berman, says that the only way to be a serious American writer is to write for posterity. The culture has no place for us. I wouldn't go this far but he does have a point. I have no sense of an audience today, really, but I keep writing and keep putting it out there. I remain excited about a novel I am working on, though my energy in old age is a fraction of my past writing energy. I want to finish it before I pass! I think I will.

So I've had a visible audience, a time of popularity, and a time of overseas fame without knowing about it, and a constant sense of writing for invisible literary folks who may or may not exist. I don't think my situation is different from many others not interested in pop culture.

The secret is to keep the faith. For me, in old age, this sometimes is a struggle.