Doris Piserchia Weblog


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The Doris Piserchia Weblog.

The following posts include (1) "footnotes" for The Doris Piserchia Website (link at left), (2) texts-in-process that will eventually appear there, (3) texts from other websites, and (we hope) (4) stimulating discussion threads. The picture to the left is the back cover of The Spinner (book club edition), depicting a citizen of Eastland "hanging out" while Ekler the cop and Rune the idiot-superman look on.


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Here's an update on this site. Obviously I haven't been working on it much lately. I admit to sort of having the wind knocked out of my sails by the author, who, as you can tell from the interview, is pretty ambivalent about being back in the writing game. For someone who professes to "just write for me" these days she is very protective of her canon. I made a mistake and posted the text of an early short story that a fellow fan transcribed. When I asked the author's permission (I know, I should have asked first) she sent me a formal email requesting that I remove it immediately. When the Google Directory (via DMOZ) embellished on my site description and called this the "official" site, I wrote Doris asking if it was OK and got no reply.

While I'm a bit disappointed not to get warmer treatment from the author, it's not the reason I started the site. I like many artists' work without having to be buddies with them. I saw it as filling a gap, since so little critical writing on Doris can be found--putting as much of it as I could find under one roof and adding my own thoughts. I like certain other people's writing about Doris much better than my own. (Liz Henry, where are you?) I would still like, during my dwindling spare time, to do a chapter-by-chapter analysis of Doomtime, as I did with Blood County. It was the first book of hers I read and still tugs at me as a singularly strange piece of writing.

The good news is I have had a few inquiries that I have passed along to the author. One was from a screenwriter looking to adapt one of her short stories. The other was from a publisher specializing in print on demand books. The latter seems like a great way to keep good but cult authors in print. If the technology and the economies of scale are there, why not?

I can imagine Doris not going for it, though. For someone who made her mark in science fiction she's kind of retro. She doesn't really get the Net, for example. She was well within her rights asking me to remove the above-mentioned story, but her reason made no sense. I wasn't charging to read the story; it was 35 years out of print, after it appeared once in a science fiction monthly. In so many words, she said people could still find copies of the stories in libraries and secondhand book stores. True, but by putting it on the Net they could find it much easier and faster. A copyright notice was posted giving her full credit, and the text was accurate and readable. In her overweening concern to keep her work out of the public domain, she is also losing an opportunity for a new, computer-literate generation to know and discover it.

Lastly, another reason the site has been moribund is that no one's come forward lately with any critical thoughts to add to it. I get a fair amount of Doris search requests but no dialogue going about the author. One can only go so long working entirely on one's own before interest starts to wane.

- tom moody 12-02-2003 3:01 am [link]