Jonathan Harris. Click the image to read the accompanying story.

I recently started a new support job that I actually like. After working a job that made me miserable for many years, I got a job working for an online publishing company that produces gorgeous photobooks. My recruiter knows I’m a writer, and when she first called to pitch me the job she prefaced it by saying: “Well, it’s in publishing…but don’t get too excited: they publish photos, not text.”  Now a month into the job, I can see that I’ve stumbled into a veritable wonderland of artistic inspiration. I spend my days looking through photobook after photobook…bearing witness to the photographic stories of the lives of random strangers. And I’m discovering: sometimes it can do a writer good to get away from words for a while.

I ran across a post praising the benefits of linking photography to writing. Photographer/writer John Oughton says that they both offer “a way to represent a unique view of the world to others.” He also presents photography as a way to be present, “to pay attention,” and to truly see what is around us.

“Good photographers are not necessarily those with better equipment; they are those who can see something unique and capture it in an interesting form,” says Oughton. I think the same can be said for good writers. Half of being a writer is seeing, and the other half is finding an appropriate and exciting form in which to pour the results of that seeing. The world offers us so much creative material, if we only pay attention. Read more »

My Grandfather in Venice Way Back When

I have always suspected the missing links between the scattered parts of my being lay within the life of my maternal grandfather.

My paternal grandparents are open books – my grandmother with her inexorable tongue and my grandfather with eyes that can’t betray a single emotion.  My maternal grandmother is a storyteller on speed – something always reminds her of something else and various tangents can be made within a single sentence.  My paternal grandfather, however, was a little less clear in his communication.  My uncle used to joke that all it took to keep my grandfather happy was his daily newspaper and a bowl of mixed nuts.  For years, I believed this to be the case – but as I got older, I suspected something much more existed within his alleged simplicity.

After he passed away in the fall of 2005, my aunt emailed our family scanned photos she found of him.  The photos dated back to the forties and consisted mostly of posed portraits.  I was excited to find that I looked quite a bit like my young grandfather since I grew up looking not quite like either parent.

It was, however, in a photo where his face was less visible that I found myself identifying with him most: in the middle of Piazza San Marco, stood my grandfather in an ascot and a three-piece suit – tall and full of quiet confidence.  Though we all knew that my grandfather suffered from a hushed case of wanderlust, we never knew he ever had the means to treat it. Read more »

With 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and even Star Trek, the notion of transformative work has been a particularly hot topic these past few months. Transformative work not only plays havoc with intellectual property law, but also with the audience as storytellers take our familiar, beloved characters and then subvert them entirely. Holden Caulfield is 76 years old and on the run from a nursing home, Elizabeth Bennett defends her family from hoards of zombies, and James Tiberius Kirk finds himself without a father and a long way to go before he can become captain of the USS Enterprise. The result is all the more shocking and enlightening given the juxtaposition of the transformed work with our knowledge of the original work.

It’s a compelling artistic endeavor. And transformative work is nothing new. Fans of Homer’s The Odyssey and The Iliad wrote their own books based on his works. Cervantes’ Don Quixote saw more than a few unauthorized published sequels. John Gardner’s Grendel, a re-telling of Beowulf from the monster’s point of view, was published to great acclaim (which, being one of my favorite books, I definitely recommend you giving it a read). Gregory Maguire’s best-selling Wicked, an alternate take on The Wizard of Oz, is now one of Broadway’s biggest hits. You get the idea.

But what about fan-made transformative works? While there are countless pieces of fan fiction and fan art out there, in which fans take their favorite characters and merely continue their stories, genuine transformative works are far less common. But as few and far-between as they may be, their stories really resonate.

After the jump, a short list of lesser-known, but by no means lesser-quality, fan-made transformative storytelling that challenge the old adage “there are no new stories.”

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