*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***

Sesame Workshop Writers’ Room is a writing fellowship from the creators of Sesame Street. And we’re looking for YOU! Fresh new writing talent from writers with diverse racial, ethnic, and cultural identities. Emerging storytellers who are selected to join the Writers’ Room will receive hands-on writing experience guided by Sesame Street veterans and other media industry leaders. Each participant will develop and write a pilot script for their own original kids concept. Past fellows have gone on to develop their own original content with Sesame Workshop, as well as write for Sesame Street and various programs at Nickelodeon, Disney, DreamWorks, and more.

***
Platform Presents are thrilled to announce submissions for the 2022 Platform Presents Playwright’s Prize are now open.
This is an open call for distinctive, dynamic plays, no more than 10,000 words.
The prize includes ongoing mentoring and producing the winning script, as well as the £5,000 cash prize.

***
Molecule accepts submissions of poetry, prose (fiction & non-fiction) plays, reviews and interviews in 50 words or less (including titles and interview questions). Visual artwork of tiny things like tea bags and toothpicks, or tiny paintings, also wanted: no skyscrapers please!

*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***


*** KENNETH THORPE ROWE ON THEATER ***

Available for free:

WRITE THAT PLAY
https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.183007/page/n13/mode/2up

A THEATER IN YOUR HEAD
Analyzing the Play and Visualizing Its Production
https://archive.org/details/theaterinyourhea00rowe

***
Kenneth Thorpe Rowe was a professor at the University of Michigan. Rowe taught Shakespeare and modern drama, but was best known as an influential teacher of playwriting.

Rowe regarded playwriting not as a mystical experience, but as a craft that could be understood and analyzed; he had remarkable insight into how a writer could construct a play with an eye toward the most effective development of plot and emotion. Across the span of six decades at Michigan, he taught and inspired legions of notable students, including Josh Greenfeld, Lawrence Kasdan, Dennis McIntyre, Robert McKee, Arthur Miller, Davi Napoleon (aka Davida Skurnick), Betty Smith, and Milan Stitt.

Professor Rowe began his playwriting seminar each semester by asking his students to read "The Poetics" by Aristotle. He then taught them how to identify the workings of classic structure. In Rowe's view, all successful plays built dramatically from an "attack" (the introduction of a conflict) through a crisis and finally to a resolution. He applied his methods even to modern plays that were not unified in time and place; it was Rowe's contention that even non-realistic plays had the classic underlying structure.

Arthur Miller enrolled in Rowe's seminar in 1937. He later described learning from Rowe that the theater "was not a carousel one jumped onto but an instrument one had to learn to play." His early plays Honors at Dawn and The Grass Still Grows were written under Rowe's tutelage, and his teacher's influence was evident in the careful structural revisions that Miller made as he revised them over time. Honors at Dawn was recognized with a Hopwood Award at Michigan (1937), while The Grass Still Grows won the attention of a theatrical agent. Thus for Miller, Rowe became "a combination of critical judge and confidant," bringing together a unique "interest in the dynamics of play construction" with "his friendship, which meant much to me."

More...
https://alchetron.com/Kenneth-Thorpe-Rowe

***
Kenneth Thorpe Rowe (September 19, 1900 – October 27, 1988)[1] was an influential professor of drama and playwriting. For decades, Rowe taught playwriting, Shakespeare and modern drama at the University of Michigan. There he had an enormous impact on students, from Arthur Miller (All My Sons, Death of a Salesman) to Lawrence Kasdan (Star Wars). His book Write That Play become a widely used college textbook for the teaching of playwriting

More...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Thorpe_Rowe

***
What advice do you have for playwrights starting out?

Write, write, write. Be honest in your writing. Knock out any sentimentality from it. Sentimentality runs both ways: dishonestly happy or dishonestly bleak. Listen to how different people talk. Read and reread Kenneth Thorpe Rowe’s book, Write That Play, and devour Aristotle’s Poetics. Break or bend dramatic principles only for good reason, and after you know how to use them. Kenneth Thorpe Rowe taught Arthur Miller and Milan Stitt, among others.

More...
https://portlandshakes.org/interview-with-playwright-simon-fill/

***
Lawrence Kasdan was honored with a Maverick Spirit Award at the recent Cinequest Film Festival, which is where I got an opportunity to interview him  about his long association with George Lucas, and his writing and the influence of his professor Kenneth Thorpe Rowe, who taught at University of Michigan. Why did Kasdan want to study with Prof. Rowe?  It was because of Arthur Miller. You see Miller was a student of Prof. Rowe and Kasdan was a fan of Miller’s writings.  So, we talked about Rowe, who is the author of two seminal books, “Write That Play,” and “A Theatre In Your Head.”

https://kamlashow.com/2015/03/19/video-lawrence-kasdan-on-star-wars-george-lucas-and-writing/

***
FROM THE THEATER IN MANUSCRIPT
by Kenneth Thorpe Rowe

If the theater were a simple hierarchy in which the best and most significant plays would assuredly be promptly produced, the potential theater in manuscript might be of only professional interest. Actually, by a variety of pressures toward conservatism, the process of selection for production lags behind the theater in manuscript, and sometimes never catches up. Enough good plays are available at any time to the commercial theater in New York so that there need be no excuse for a bad play to ever be produced. It is not, however. the miscellany of merely good plays that gives to the theater in manuscript its greatest interest, but the trends of thought and feeling reflected. The theater is sufficiently a social art that only occasionally are plays of highest quality and distinction isolated in meaning; while the playwright of force of imagination finds sometimes an even startlingly individual means of communication, his play usually reflects something more than his individual consciousness.

New trends in subject matter, thought, and technique appear in manuscript one to two or three years in advance of the theater of producition. When DEEP ARE THE ROOTS by Arnaud D'Usseau and James Gow was finally produced, a trend of plays on the problem of Negro-white relations had been predictable for a year or more by the number of playscripts, but producers had been holding off in doubt whether people would want to be agitated on the subject in the theater.

More...
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Quarterly_Review/qhNYAAAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=kenneth+thorpe+rowe&pg=PA317&printsec=frontcover

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "NYCPlaywrights" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to nycplaywrights_group+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/nycplaywrights_group/af741e79-6a04-431b-8e79-3df308d9800fn%40googlegroups.com.

Was Meriwether Lewis murdered?

  

Most of us have heard about the Lewis and Clark expedition. Meriwether Lewis was a close friend of President Thomas Jefferson, who had ordered the expedition. On September 3, 1809, Lewis set out for Washington, D.C. to resolve a number of issues regarding his denied payments of drafts he had drawn against the War Department while serving as governor of the Upper Louisiana Territory. If the payments were granted, he face bankruptcy. Lewis was not in good mental health at this point in his life. He was depressed and had written his will before his journey and also attempted suicide but was restrained.

Lewis stopped at an inn on the Natchez Trace, a very dangerous and lawless place, called Grinder's Stand. After dinner, he retired to his one-room cabin. In the innkeeper's wife, a lowly character named Priscilla Grinder, said she heard gunshots. Servants rushed to Lewis’s cabin and found Lewis badly injured from multiple gunshot wounds, one each to the head and gut. He died shortly after sunrise from loss of blood. Money that Lewis had borrowed from a friend, Major Gilbert Russell, at Fort Pickering to complete the journey was missing.

Historians generally agree that the account of the events attributed to Priscilla Grinder are fabricated.. Grinder claimed Lewis acted strangely the night before his death: standing and pacing during dinner and talking to himself in the way one would speak to a lawyer, with face flushed as if it had come on him in a fit. She continued to hear him talking to himself after he retired, and then at some point in the night, she heard multiple gunshots, a scuffle, and someone calling for help.

She claimed to be able to see Lewis through the slit in the door crawling back to his room. However, she never explained why she never investigated further at the time, but only the next morning sent her children to look for Lewis's servants.

She also claimed that three men followed Lewis up the Natchez Trace, and he pulled his pistols on them after they came to his cabin that night. Grinder said, in this account, that she heard voices and gunfire in Lewis's cabin about 1:00 am. She found the cabin empty and a large amount of gunpowder on the floor. Thus, in this account, Lewis's body was found outside the cabin.

Lewis's relatives and contended it was murder. (When William Clark and Thomas Jefferson were informed of Lewis's death, both accepted the conclusion of suicide) A coroner's jury held an inquest immediately after Lewis's death as provided by the local government but proved fruitless.

There are some factors that may support Lewis's suicide including big debts, heavy drinking, possible morphine and opium use, failure to prepare the expedition's journals for publication, repeated failure to find a wife, and the deterioration of his friendship with Thomas Jefferson.

Some 40 years later, in 1848, the Tennessee State Commission decided to erect a monument Lewis’s grave. Dr. Samuel B. Moore ordered Lewis's grave to be opened and reported that “it (The death) seems to be more probable that he died by the hands of an assassin."

Interesting....

   

William Pelham Barr is an impressive guy. He served as the 77th and 85th United States Attorney General in the administrations of Presidents George H. W. Bush and Donald Trump. From 1973 to 1977, Barr was employed by the Central Intelligence Agency. Barr’s father, Donald Barr, was also an impressive guy. He taught English literature at Columbia University before becoming headmaster of the Dalton School in Manhattan and later the Hackley School in Tarrytown, New York, both members of the Ivy Preparatory School League. Barr was Jewish and raised in Judaism. He served in the OSS (Which later became the CIA) and earned an MA from Columbia.

He was headmaster of the Dalton School from 1964 to 1974. During his time as Dalton's headmaster, Barr is alleged to have had a role in hiring future financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein as a math teacher despite the fact that Epstein (who graduated from high school at the age of 16 and secured a full scholarship to Cooper Union) had failed to complete his degree and was only 21 years old at the time. In 1973, Barr published Space Relations, a science fiction novel about a planet ruled by oligarchs who engage in child sex slavery. The novel’s plot anticipates the crimes of Epstein and his alleged accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell.

Literary suicide

  

 

Robert E. Howard dreamed of becoming an adventure writer since he was a child. At age 23, his dream came true. He created the character Conan the Barbarian. One of the best-selling fantasy writers of all time, his works are still reprinted to this day.

In June 1936, Howard’s mother was gravely ill and had slipped into her final coma. Howard, who had been sitting vigil at her bedside, left the hospital and, while sitting in his car in the parking lot, shot himself in the head. While his wounds were grave, he did hold on for another eight hours before he passed away. His final words read, “All fled, all done, so lift me on the pyre, the feast is over and the lamps expire.”

 

Hunter S. Thompson was the founder of the gonzo journalism movement. Thompson grappled with depression for most of his life, his then-recent hip replacement and broken leg caused him weeks of pain and immobility. On February 20, 2005, while on the phone with his wife Anita, Thompson shot himself to death. He left a note entitled “Football Season Is Over” which read, “No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun – for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax – This won't hurt.”

 

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a utopian feminist born in 1860. A humanist, she spread her beliefs through her novels, short stories, poetry, and as a lecturer for social reform.

In January 1932, Gilman received the news that she had been diagnosed with incurable breast cancer. As an advocate of euthanasia, it was her firm belief that people should be allowed to die in peace without suffering. On August 17, 1935, she committed suicide by overdosing on chloroform, leaving behind her final words, “When all the usefulness is over, when one is assured of an unavoidable and imminent death, it is the simplest of human rights to choose a quick and easy death in place of a slow and horrible one.”

  Poet Vachel Lindsay is considered the founder of singing poetry. His fame began to grow in 1910 and, by 1915, he was reciting his works for President Woodrow Wilson. However, he was constantly struggling financially especially during The Great Depression. On December 5, 1931, he committed suicide by consuming a bottle of lye. The last words of this ever so articulate and poetic thinker were “They tried to get me; I got them first.”

 

Nicholas-Sebastian Chamfort was a French writer best known for his epigrams, aphorisms, and stimulating conversation. He became a radicalized Republican during the French Revolution and his criticisms eventually landing him in prison. 

After his release, he was threatened with additional jail time which he could not tolerate. Instead of facing a court, Chamfort shot himself in the face. His suicide note read, “I, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas de Chamfort, hereby declare my wish to die a free man rather than to continue to live as a slave in a prison."

 

Poet Sara Teasdale released four collections of poetry, one of which earned her a Pulitzer Prize. Although she and Vachel Lindsay were in love, she married Ernst Filsinger who left her feeling lonely as he was away from home the majority of the time. Two years after Lindsay’s suicide of Lindsay, Teasdale also took her life by overdosing on sleeping pills. Her suicide note entitled I Shall Not Care read, “When I am dead and over me bright April Shakes out her rain-drenched hair, Tho' you should lean above me broken-hearted, I shall not care. I shall have peace, as leafy trees are peaceful, When rain bends down the bough, And I shall be more silent and cold-hearted Than you are now.”

 

Ha!

 

There are......

 

Art for the Blog of It: The iconic promotional image of Willem Dafoe.

Art for the Blog of It: The iconic promotional image of Willem Dafoe.:     The iconic promotional image of Willem Dafoe with his hands raised in anguish from movie “Platoon” was inspired by a real photo. This ...

Art for the Blog of It: Scream. (Now we know why)

Art for the Blog of It: Scream. (Now we know why):  

From sitting and writing, I might add

 

The Assassin Richard Lawrence

  

Richard Lawrence was born in England in or about 1800 and arrived in the US when he 12 or 13 years old. His father died in the District of Columbia, in the old Ward One sector, in or about 1829.

Lawrence, a handsome young man, was known to be sober, well spoke but shy and reserved and by 1832, according to his family, seemed be losing his sanity. He lived with his sister and brother-in-law for a while but after an attempt to murder his sister for no known reason, he was arrested and later moved to a boarding house.

Since he made his living as a house painter, there is considerable speculation on the possibility that exposure to the chemicals in the paint had affected Lawrence’s mind.

On January 30, 1835, a cold, rainy and generally miserable day Lawrence was seen in his paint shop in Georgetown (then a part of Maryland) on the corner of Pennsylvania and 21st Street, having a very loud argument with himself which ended when he screamed “All right, I’ll be damned if I don’t do it”

A few hours later went up to the Capitol building to murder President Andrew Jackson while he attended to the wake of Rep. Warren Davis of South Carolina at a State Funeral Service at the Capitol.

As the frail President, leaning on his walking stick, enter the building, Lawrence leaped out from behind a pillar near the East Portico, brandished two single-shot brass pistols that had belonged to his father.

Lawrence leaped out from behind the pillar and standing less than five feet from the President fired his pistol, but it misfired. President Jackson, with Treasury Secretary Taney on his left, had been expecting an attempt on his life, cussed Lawrence, raised his cane and charged the assassin thrashing him.

Lawrence stepped back, fired the other pistol, but that too misfired. (US Marshal’s tested the pistols he used and retested them and each time they performed flawlessly. A New York Times article calculated the chances of both of Lawrence’s pistols misfiring to be 1 in about 125,000.) A navy Lieutenant named Gedney, who was with Jackson, leaped on Lawrence, wrestled him to the ground and pulled the two pistols out of his hand.

Richard Lawrence’s act was the first instance of a President of the United States being the target of an assassination. A few years before, Jackson had become the only president to be physically assaulted.

On May 6, 1833, Jackson, age 66, ill and frail, sailed on USS Cygnet to Fredericksburg, Virginia, where he was to lay the cornerstone on a monument near the grave of Mary Ball Washington, George Washington's mother.

(Jackson was rarely in good health to begin with. During his life he suffered from

smallpox, osteomyelitis, malaria, dysentery, rheumatism, dropsy, “cholera morbus” (widespread intestinal inflammation), amyloidosis (a waxy degeneration of body tissues) and bronchiectasis (inflamed and dilated bronchial tubes). He also had a

bullet lodged inside his lungs from a duel.)

Jackson had fired Navy lieutenant, Robert Randolph for embezzlement. During a stopover near Alexandria, Jackson decided to entertain visitors to the boat and Randolph, walked aboard, said nothing, walked up to President, removed his gloves and punched him in the face. (Some say that Randolph punched the President, some say he slapped him and other say he tweaked the President’s nose)

Jackson, who had been reading a book, fell back and was trapped in his chair behind the table as Randolph was quickly held back by some of Jackson’s associates and some of Randolph’s own friends who had boarded the steamboat with Randolph.

Jackson angrily yelled, “What, Sir! What, Sir!”, as he scrambled to get out of his seat and lunged for his cane. Rather than face an angry Jackson man to man, Randolph broke lose and fled only to be run down and captured by Jacksons staff and friends including the writer Washington Irving.

Jackson was not seriously hurt but he was furious and embarrassed. “Had I been apprised that Randolph stood before me” he said “I should have been prepared for him, and I could have defended myself. No villain has ever escaped me before; and he would not, had it not been for my confined situation.”

Jackson declined to press charges, but Randolph was arrested anyway. By the time Randolph went to trial for attacking Jackson, the President was retired to his estate in

Tennessee. In a letter to the new President Martin Van Buren, Jackson said, “I have to this old age complied with my mother’s advice to ‘indict no man for assault and battery or sue him for slander’, and to fine or imprison Randolph would be no gratification." Jackson asked President Van Buren to pardon Randolph if his assailant was found guilty for the attack.

Back in Washington in 1836, during questioning, it quickly became clear that the shooter Richard Lawrence was a babbling lunatic who offered no less than six reasons to explain the shooting including his belief that he was the secret king of England, Richard III who died in 1485 and that Jackson was his clerk. In fact, on his first day in court, where he was defended by Francis Scott Key, Lawrence, impeccably dressed and well spoken, rose and addressed the court with great dignity and said "I am under the protection of my father at home. The throne of Great Britain and the throne of this country of right belong to me. I am superior to this tribunal. I ask you to consider whether you are safe in your course of proceedings.” The judge respectfully reminded Lawrence that he would be heard through his Counsel, and politely requested him to take his seat.

When the Jurors were called in and sworn on the bible, Lawrence rose again and shouted "Swear on that book, but remember that I am King of England and of this country, and will most assuredly punish you"

When the court ordered Lawrence to sit and be silent he said, "I will not" and remained standing until a federal marshal sat him down and stood by his chair for the rest of the trial.

A half a dozen doctors testified that they believed that Lawrence was insane; and that he was unable to discriminate between right and wrong in a case connected with his delusion; and that if the act of assaulting the President was connected with the subject of his delusion, he was not to be considered as morally accountable for the act. Lawrence was institutionalized at what would become St. Elizabeth’s hospital (He was the institution's seventh inmate) until his death in 1861.

Jackson suspected that a circle of his political enemies orchestrated the attempt on his life, but his suspicions were never proven. His primary suspect was his decades-long enemy Henry Clay and Senator John C. Calhoun. Jackson told aides that he suspected both were involved in his potential assassination and had likely hired or convinced Lawrence to pull the trigger. Speculation grew so severe that Calhoun made a statement on the Senate floor that he was not connected to the attack. Jackson also suspected Senator George Poindexter of Mississippi, (Below) who had used Lawrence to do some house painting a few months earlier. There were several reports, by reliable witnesses, that on the morning of the failed assassination, that Lawrence had been to Poindexter’s house. Poindexter denied the charges but was soundly defeated for re-election anyway.

(Foot note on Poindexter’s interesting private life. In 1804 Poindexter married Lydia Carter the daughter of a prominent Natchez businessman and plantation owner. The couple had two sons , George and Albert but Poindexter publicly accused his wife of infidelity and claimed that their second child, Albert, was the product of an extramarital affair between his wife and their neighbor. In 1816 Poindexter married Agatha Ball Chinn, part of an old and distinguished southern family, but had a life-long liaison with a slave woman who worked on his plantation.)

 

 

Cheating death

 On December 13, 1977, the University of Evansville team boarded a plane at the Evansville

 Airport along with head coach Bobby Watson, members of his staff, a radio broadcaster and

 some fans. They were on their way to Tennessee for a game against Middle Tennessee State.

The plane crashed into a hillside not long after takeoff. All 29 people on board were killed.

The only member of the Evansville team who was not on the plane that night was David Furr, an ankle injury kept him home. Two weeks after the crash he was killed in a car accident.

 

Dollar rumors

 DOLLAR BILLS PRINTED IN DALLAS BEAR A "K" SIGNIFYING OR PREDICTING KENNEDY'S DEATH!!!!!!

Well no.

The inter loons have come up with a theory that states that the Federal Reserve symbol of bills printed in Dallas, they all have the letter "K" in them as in Kennedy, who was shot in Dallas. Each corner shows the number 11, the month he died. Even bills printed before 1963 also have the same lettering.

The reality is that the Dallas Reserve is the headquarters of the 11th Federal Reserve District and has been since 1911 (three years before Kennedy was born). "K" is the 11th letter of the alphabet.

 

Michael Clark Rockefeller, one of the wealthiest men in the world disappeared

 

 

Michael Clark Rockefeller, one of the wealthiest men in the world and the fifth child of New York Governor and future U.S. Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, disappeared on or about November 19, 1961, during an expedition in the Asmat region of southwestern Netherlands New Guinea (Now a part of the Indonesian province of Papua.)

Michael was a little bit different from the other Rockefellers. Although he attended The Buckley School, Phillips Exeter Academy, and Harvard (Cum Laude) He served six months as a private in the U.S. Army and held a series of low level, low paying teaching positions.

He volunteered for an expedition for Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology to study the Dani tribe of western Netherlands New Guinea. On November 17, 1961, Rockefeller and Dutch anthropologist René Wassing were in a 40-foot) dugout canoe about 3 miles from shore when their double pontoon boat was swamped and overturned.

Their two local guides swam for help, but it was slow in coming. After drifting for some time, early on November 19 Rockefeller said to Wassing "I think I can make it" and swam for shore. The boat was an estimated 12 miles from the shore and its probable that Rockefeller died from exposure, shark attack, or saltwater crocodile, exhaustion, and/or drowning.

There is also the probability that since the area was filled with headhunting and cannibalistic tribes, that he may have been murdered as well.

In 1969, the journalist Milt Machlin investigated Rockefeller's disappearance and concluded that circumstantial evidence supported the idea that he had been killed by the locals in or near the village of Otsjanep where he likely would have arrived had he made it to shore. In 1958, several villagers had been murdered by a Dutch patrol, providing some rationale for revenge by the tribe against a white man.

There is a persistent story and testimony that men from Otsjanep killed Rockefeller after he swam to shore. The tribesmen killed and ate him by the shore. Soon afterward the villages were swept by a cholera epidemic and the villagers believed that it was retribution for killing Rockefeller.

In 2011, Agamemnon Films released a documentary stating that Rockefeller survived and was living among the locals.

Writer Paul Toohey claimed that in 1979, Rockefeller's mother hired a private investigator to go to New Guinea and try to resolve the mystery of his disappearance. She also may have offered a $250,000 reward to the investigator that gave her proof positive that her son was alive or dead.

Whatever happened, after he left the boat, he was never seen again. His body was never found. He was declared legally dead in 1964.No remains or other physical proof of his death have been discovered.

Lewis Carroll as Jack the Ripper

 

Author and Lewis Carroll scholar Richard Wallace put out a book called Jack the Ripper’s Light-Hearted Friend that proposes that Lewis Carroll could have been Jack the Ripper.

Although Carroll was widely known as a gentle soul and scholar-Mathematician, Wallace says that Carol had a nervous breakdown and as a result developed a separate persona as Jack the ripper, Carroll’s psychotic breakdown had come from years of abuse that he took from older boys at school and that he took his vengeance on prostitutes.

“CROATOAN” that was carved into a tree stump on Roanoke Island (In North Carolina and not Virginia ) is the mystery of the lost colony in 1590.

Well it is and it isn’t.

John White, the colony’s governor had returned to England in 1587 for badly needed supplies, returning to the oddly empty fort on August 18, 1590. England’s war with Spain delayed his return. Among the missing was his granddaughter, Virginia Dare, the first (documented) European born in North America.

White reported in his diary that the word in "fayre Capital letters was graven" on one of the palisades that had been used to build the colonist's fort on Roanoke Island, not on a tree.

Earlier in the day's search, White had seen the three Roman letters " CRO" carved into a tree on the bluff of the sound shore. In neither place did the colonist returning from England discover a cross, the secretly agreed upon a sign that the colony, now known as the Lost Colony, was in distress.

White said he took comfort in the fact that since no cross had been found that the entire colony, which number about 120 persons, had come across hard times and relocated to Croatoan, the principal town of the Croatoan (or Hatteras) Indians near Cape Hatteras and had left the word Croatoan on the fort as had been agreed before White left for England.

White knew that the colonists had discussed leaving that sort of simple message for him when he left for England in 1587, although they had then considered moving 50 miles into the mainland rather than about 60 miles south to an isolated barrier island.

Croatoan, White knew, was the home of an Indian named Manteo, who made two trips to England in the 1580s and seemingly had embraced the English colonial efforts. Manteo's mother was probably a tribal monarch of the Croatoans.

Or maybe the colonist hadn’t left the message at all, something that needs to be considered. Ethnologists and anthropologists believe that the word "Croatoan" may have been a combination of two Algonquian words meaning "talk town" or "council town." It is also likely that the colonist simply moved their fort to another location on the island, but that location, like the location of the original fort, is now underwater.

White was forced to return to England, by rough seas and a lost ship's anchor, before he could mount a search party. A later investigation by the English government concluded that the colony had been massacred by Indians, but there is no hard evidence to confirm that story. Further, when White arrived, there was no sign of battle or withdrawal under duress, although the site was fortified with valuable weapons. There were no human remains or graves in the area, suggesting that everyone was alive when they left.

It’s possible that the colonist tried to return to Virginia, an arduous trip in 1587, and became lost and gave up, either being killed by hostile tribes or married into local tribes. Modern research has still not produced the archaeological evidence to solve the mystery.

John White later retired to his home in County Cork in Ireland, never giving up hope that his daughter and granddaughter were somehow still alive in the New World.

at his mother was still alive and locked up in a lunatic asylum

Our lives

 

Words to use and where they came from.

 

Abrasive means, literally, "causing damage or wear by rubbing, grinding, or scraping." Figuratively, it is used to describe people or things that are unpleasant or irritating. Once upon a time, English had abrade and abrase. While abrade remains a familiar word, abrase is rare but survives in abrasive. Both verbs come from abrādere, meaning "to remove by rubbing" or "to scrape off."

Sour grapes noun: Finding fault with or expressing disdain for something one cannot have. From the Aesop’s fable The Fox and the Grapes, in which a hungry fox tries to reach grapes hanging on a high vine and when unsuccessful, declares that the grapes are probably sour. Earliest documented use: 1760.

 

Yet again

 

A dissatisfied customer

 Mr. Goumas

 Your diatribe on Amazon has promoted my book. Thank you. (“For whatever reason, people continue to be fascinated by our family tragedies”)

And thank you for buying my book, as well.

The novel clearly state’s “This is a work of fiction”….that means “not real”, or “made up”. Did you read the book? (By the way, you wrote “This author focuses on Ansonia, a small industrial town in Connecticut's Lower Naugatuck Valley”…..you should have written “The author’ not “This author” and I have a name, it's in big bold letters on the book cover, but anyway) the book isn’t about the Valley. The book is a collection of stories about the human condition that happens in a dinner, over the course of a day.

And why, oh why, would I engage you before writing a piece of fiction? (“Authors don't have the courtesy to engage with us before writing and publishing”) …and don’t use the word “Engage” when you mean “contact”. Keep it simple and say what you mean, that’s the basis of good writing.

In your demand for privacy, you did two things I would never do, you gave people your family name and where they lived. Now, literally, for decades to come, the world will associate a simple faction story with your family. Nice work.

I knew your father, your mother, your grandmother, your brother Rocky and went to school with one of your sisters, who was beautiful and extremely intelligent. I saw your parents several times a week at their store, which was down the hill from us. Your parents were kind, generous, and considerate people. I admired Rocky’s talents on the football field.

 You and I have several mutual acquaintances. I’m easily reachable. If what I write disturbs you, why didn’t you simply contact me ……or as you so badly put it, “Engage me”, and talk to me? After all, it's your demand that I “engage” you before writing.

What’s that saying? “Rules for ye but not for me”

 I take pride in being a reasonable man. You might want to consider thinking things through before putting them to paper.    John William Tuohy

       

(From Amazon)

While this book was published in 2011, I was only recently made aware of its existence. This author focuses on Ansonia, a small industrial town in Connecticut's Lower Naugatuck Valley. In particular, I found the author's story "Small Town Tragedy" in this collection deeply troubling. It's a thinly-veiled telling of two real-life tragedies experienced by my family in the late 60's-early 1970.

The portrayals of my late father and brother are both unflattering and frankly wrong. My sister's accidental death does not need to be relived yet again. For whatever reason, people continue to be fascinated by our family tragedies, which is deeply troubling to the surviving members, and authors don't have the courtesy to engage with us before writing and publishing. I'm only grateful that both of my parents didn't encounter this book before they passed away.

                                                                                                                       Mark Goumas

Words to put into use

When rankle was first used in English, it meant "to fester," and that meaning is related to French words referring to a sore and tracing to Latin dracunculus. The Latin is from draco, the word for a serpent and the source of English's dragon. The transition from serpents to sores is apparently from people associating the appearance of certain ulcers or tumors to small serpents.

Palisade comes from Latin palus, meaning "stake." The word originally applied to one of a series of stakes set in a row to form an enclosure or fortification. In time, its meaning was extended to a fence of stakes and, by association, to stretches of steep cliffs bordering a river.

When its cold