PSU Stands Up for the OLR

(The late Jim Wylie and CD)

CD explains how his Oregon Literary Review (2006-2011) has made a soft landing at Portland State, where the author of five Round Bend Press books taught screenwriting for 17 years until his recent retirement.

CD and the OLR are old friends of mine.  I first met the author/educator in the late '80s in the raggedy neighborhood of Northwest Portland before that place turned into a gentrified tourist trap.

I lost contact with CD around 1993. You see, once upon a time I'd been one of CD's bartenders, a drinking buddy on occasion.

Around then CD made a serious lifestyle change, moved out of Northwest.  He went off the sauce and would soon remarry and settle down. The wild, Northwest bohemian years were long gone.

In 1995 he was asked to start the first screenwriting curriculum at PSU. The school noted that he'd founded an online screenwriting tutorial through another college that was garnering a lot of attention.

In 2004, after years of floundering, I enrolled at PSU in what would become another failed attempt to find a career more to my liking than the restaurant trade, where I'd languished off and on for twenty years.

I was 53 years-old in 2004, a desperate old codger in academia, an undergraduate, and I had it in mind that I might get a teaching certificate and try my hand as a high school instructor.

Sponsored by a real pro named Bart Millar, whose history classroom I landed in at Lincoln High to scope things out, I observed and listened and quickly ascertained that I'd made yet another mistake. A good teacher, Millar had told me the first day, "You've got to like children to do this. Do you like them?"

The comment resonated and I mulled it over, soon realizing I was indeed ambivalent about children, and in fact may not have liked them much at all.  Though people do it, it's tough to fake love.

The Lincoln students, many from the upper-classes, both scared and disgusted me.  If I wanted to teach, I realized, the students would have to be a little older and unspoiled.

There I was at PSU, then, as uncertain as ever.  I enrolled in CD's screenwriting class at his suggestion and over a ten-week span suffered along with the rest of his students the consequences of not quite "getting it."

CD showed "Adaptation" in class that year, and he was just like the mean-old screenwriting lecturer in the movie, only CD didn't cuss.

I wrote a shitty screenplay for the maestro, and he gave me the requisite A-minus, which is how he graded everyone who showed up consistently (I had perfect attendance) and made an effort.

So screenwriting wasn't in the cards, although you can buy this one here to verify the fact.  And here is another one.

I had to do something, so I loaded myself up with history classes--a Mexico seminar, one on Iraq, one on Japan, a couple of others.  I read extensively in US cultural history, the Cold War, the American Revolution, the history of cinema related to international conflict, Just War Theory, and a lot more.  Much of it was stuff I'd learned long ago and forgotten.  Some of it was new and exciting as hell.

Turns out I had enough brain cells left that it came sort of naturally.

I had to write, which was beautiful.  I got into it, got the gears working again, turned in my papers and did well enough to qualify for the  honor society as a budding historian (I haven't joined because it costs fifty bucks).

By 2008, I was out of there, walking away unqualified for anything like a career once more, and well aware of CD's online Oregon Literary Review.

So I gathered my history essays in an email bundle and wrote to my old prof, "Sir, perhaps one of these might interest you for publication in your wonderful online OLR?"

(Knowing how to flatter an editor is important; keep that in mind should you decide to submit here.)

CD wrote back soon thereafter. His non-fiction editor "loved" (it was about time somebody spoke of love) the book of undergraduate essays.

He said he would publish them in their entirety.  I was shocked, but pleased.

Here's the slightly revised paperback version.

PSU did the right thing in taking over the OLR archive and keeping alive all of the work collected therein for generations to come. Having had coffee a few days ago with the OLR founder, I know he is delighted with PSU's decision, and so am I.


TS