What it is I do in this space for the moment: bit by bit I enter bits of things I’ve written in various venues: newspapers, magazines, radio shows, professional publications, courts of law. Many of these things were written before my host publications had consistently managed archives. Even to the degree my former editors attempt to scan past work into their accessible archives, well, they probably wouldn’t do mine. Hence, most of my published work is not currently available on-line.
I do, however, retain what we affectionately call in the business my “clips,” hard copies of the printed pages of my work. I enter here the text from the clips as blog posts, along with the original article cites. Stay tuned for the occasional scan of the clips themselves. (Have to make a nice dinner first for my college professor friend with access to groovy 11″ by 17″ scanner capability.) To allay any concerns from my former host publications, I have linked them extravagantly. I will tell anyone who asks what swell people and places they all were, each and every one of them.
I begin with two pieces I wrote about Ned Rorem in the summer of 2000. I love his work. I will follow up with more feature pieces, but also some straight news from that era, some [well redacted] legal memoranda written on complex immigration law topics, my law review comment …..
One admission: I edit myself as I enter the text. Material written under deadline is kind of embarrassing to re-read years later. Why not make oneself sound more elegant in the process of self-transcription? Indeed, I am thinking this should be the goal of us all.
More organization, and much more material to come. I contemplate a move soon, in which I can spend good time in this space and the world of my own work. The novel, the poetry, the book on feminine spirituality. Onto it!
Dawn Aberg 