Introducing the Burnt Woods Review
When I was a kid, I loved reading comics. Every Sunday my father bought the newspaper and with it, the comics section. I could read about the adventures of Beetle Bailey, catch up with Dennis the Menace, and see what new ways Garfield could hate Monday — which, by the way, I have never understood as he has no actual job to go to and since everybody else in the house is either an animal or a work from home professional, every day is like every other day. Forgive the tangent. I loved comics so much that to me the most natural thing was to try to make some of my own. There was just one tiny problem — I was (and continue to be) dreadful at drawing.
I tried and tried and tried again — tried to improve, that is. I bought books on technique and studied and the only change that took place was how much money I spent on books — it kept on going up. Meanwhile, I continued to read comics both in the Sunday paper as well as book format. My father regularly went to garage sales on weekends when the weather was warm enough, and would buy all kinds of books including comics and old issues of MAD Magazine and Cracked. That’s right, Cracked was a full fledged magazine before it was the Internet’s home for lists about things you didn’t know and funny videos.
I had something of a revelation in the basement of my parent’s house in Princeton, New Jersey, while looking at a dot matrix printout of a story I had written. I really enjoyed writing the story, and it came very easily to me. It had not been at all a struggle — and when I had showed it to other people, they liked it as well. It was recognizable as good readable writing. A stark contrast to my pained attempts to draw, which all resulted in, well, a comic called RoboSlug that was horrible to say the least.
I started writing more. Then my parents had some issues, and I thought my father was going to leave. I was devastated. I wrote a poem about it and a friend of the family said I should send it to literary magazines. (I still don’t think it was that good — I mentioned The Addams Family at one point.)
At one point I wrote a trilogy of children’s fantasy books, called the Dlaxorion Trilogy. To date those works are gone… I know I gave a copy of each one to my mother, but they got misplaced over the course of a couple of moves and I only had them saved to Apple II GS floppy disk. I guess I’m dating myself? (Who else would? I mean, other than my wife.)
I was relieved that the family issues got resolved. My grandmother on my mother’s side passed away and I lost my biggest cheerleader. She used to challenge me when I would correct her pronunciation of English words by having me try to pronounce long sentences in German… in retrospect, they may have just been super long words. (She never translated… I guess that was part of the challenge.)
I loved writing, from short stories to poetry. I wrote in school and at home. I tried dipping my toes into the world of publication but after buying books with lists of magazines that accepted manuscripts, I chickened out year after year and nearly sent nothing, year after year.
I read but not nearly as much as I should have. I went to writing camps in the summer. Flash forward to more recent times. There was more family trouble for me in this same time period, unfortunately. My father left on my birthday — July 30, 2000. That’s no way to celebrate twenty-three.
From August 2000 to May 2013, I wrote a monthly column for an online magazine and contributed to a number of blogs by the same publisher. (If you do a search for my name you will quickly find over a hundred articles published there.) I parted ways with the publisher and started my own blog, the simply named blog of gordon davidescu (e.e. cummings, thanks a lot!)
After many years of loving and being influenced by the brothers Jay and Mark Duplass, I decided I wanted to up my writing and creating game and therefore… created a Patreon page. I call the weekly e-mail The Burnt Woods Review.
You may have noticed this publication is also called The Burnt Woods Review. Well in the spirit of sharing, I am going to publish my creations here as well… after the people who subscribe to the e-mail have had it for awhile. In fact, the first things I will be publishing here after this introduction were sent to subscribers last September, to give you an idea.
Feedback welcome. Thanks in advance — and I look forward to sharing with you soon.
