Douglas Barone
Douglas Barone
A Post-postmodernist with Objectivist leanings, fighting to catch up with his art after serving time as a capitalist oppressor of the people.
Doug Barone retired from corporate life after 20 years in the finance industry and is fooling everyone into thinking he is a writer. Having been a corporate strategist, finance executive, and IT executive he has found almost nothing of use to him from those years except the zany people and crazy stories that no one in their right mind could ever dream up. He uses these real life experiences in his work and this separates him from other writers who never really worked a day in their lives either.
His work, his prose fiction, is focused on power, its entanglement with emotional fulfillment, the impact of institutional concentrations of authority, and our struggles in the space created between. It deals with the ontological-deontological tension of existence in a post-postmodern world, where ideas have re-emerged as vastly powerful things even in the simple acts of everyday life. Sometimes his work allows just a bit of the mystical to cross over into reality, breaking the barriers of perception, heightening a sense of the possible.
Since this is all antithetical to the held narrative of our time, he fully expects to be pilloried by the academic left as well as the religious right, and looks forward to every lashing.
Writing
At the same time I have been going through myMFA. (for which my reading list is posted.)
How’s it coming? Well, I was just accepted to the New York State Writer’s Institute summer program at Skidmore, in Rick Moody’s section (the masters section) which felt realy good. It was a life changing experience.
I recently sent out covers for program applications and the text still seems to fit the topic so, here’s an excerpt…
>I began writing prose fiction full time in September of 2007. At first I was full of misplaced self-confidence, thought I knew everything I needed to know about writing, if for no other reason than ideas were flowing and a twenty year backlog of stories were rushing out. Most of what I was doing was just keeping up with the typing.
> A friend, who had also gone through a mid-life change from commerce to writing fiction, pulled me aside and said the writing programs he was engaged in were very helpful. “Even though we have been writing our whole lives, you and I, we have not been writing like this.”
> Since he was successful, and published, I listened and he was so right. I followed him over to The New School and started collecting all those skills I quickly I realized I didn’t have. I’ve learned, now, that there is so much to learn about what we do; that writing fiction is a constant form of exercise, like doing Tree Pose every day, and that a surrender to external structure makes the internalization of the craft much more productive.
> I’ve taken number of workshops and courses so far, at The New School, and at the Writers Studio.
> - Fiction Writing – Sidney Offit’s class – An amazing experience in the hands of an old NYC writing and publishing hand. - Accidental Realities – Sharon Mesmer’s experimental writing class – Also amazing to have a poet of her caliber comment on your work, sometimes not so gently. Writing in the form of Ginsberg or Burroughs was not something I would have naturally done if she had not shown the way. >- I have completed four terms, and am still enrolled in the Writer’s Studio, 2008 Pulitzer Prize winner Philip Schultz’s writing school in New York. >- In the past six months I have also focused on craft and grammar fundamentals from a writer’s perspective, and pursued a literary criticism track. > > Besides that, I have a BA from St. Lawrence University and a graduate degree from from Loyola in an unrelated field, and I’ve done a bunch of post graduate work, but that was so long ago. > > My work, my prose fiction, is focused on power, its entanglement with emotional fulfillment, the impact of institutional concentrations of authority, and our struggle in the space created between. It deals with the ontological-deontological tension of existence in a post-postmodern world where ideas have re-emerged as vastly powerful things in the simple acts of everyday life. Sometimes it allows just a bit of the mystical to cross over into reality, breaking the barriers of perception, heightening a sense of the possible. > > But as Doctorow frequently says, first we invent the book then we invent the way to talk about the book. >
Other study notes
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