The Maryland Writers’ Association created the Writers’ Round Table Program to encourage writers, poets, playwrights and authors through monthly articles and activities.
The Notable Maryland Author articles and associated Fun With Words writers’ prompts are the centerpiece of the program. Each month, Southern Maryland Newspapers will feature a Maryland Writer’s Association article about an author. Marylanders are encouraged to read the articles and try their hand at the writing prompts each month.
Author: John Simmons Barth
Genre: Metafiction. Coined in 1970 by William H. Gass, metafiction is a form of fiction that through its narrative structure reminds readers they are reading or viewing a fictional work. Metafiction is frequently used as a form of parody or a tool to undermine literary conventions and explore the relationship between literature and reality, life, and art.
Sample reading list: “The Floating Opera,” “The End of the Road,” “The Sot-Weed Factor,” “Giles Goat-Boy,” “Chimera,” “LETTERS,” “Sabbatical: A Romance,” “The Tidewater Tales,” and “The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor.”
“Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story.” — John Barth
John “Jack” Barth, born in Cambridge on May 27, 1930, and was famous in the 1960s as a writer who challenged standard conventions of language and plot. It was in the 1960s that he wrote his most well-known books, “The Sot-Weed Factor,” a whimsical retelling of Maryland’s colonial history; “Giles Goat-Boy,” a best-selling satirical fantasy in which a university is a microcosm of the Cold War world and the hero is a character who is part goat; and “Lost in the Funhouse,” an experimental collection of short stories.
Barth wrote for the Cambridge High School newspaper and graduated in 1947 where he wrote for the school newspaper. Being raised on the eastern shore and following the adage to write what you know, many of his works take place, including there including “Sabbatical: A Romance” and “The Tidewater Tales.” He received a bachelor of arts in 1951 and a masters in 1952, both from Johns Hopkins University.
The metafiction genre, where he undermines literary conventions, shows clearly in his novel “LETTERS” where Barth corresponds with characters from his other books.
“The Tidewater Tales” and “The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor” are also metafiction, with writers as protagonists who interact with their own and other stories in elaborate ways.
Barth married, had two children, divorced, remarried and had a third child. He was a professor at Pennsylvania State University, at the State University of New York at Buffalo, at Boston University, and then at Johns Hopkins University from 1973 until his retirement in 1991.
He received or was nominated for several awards including National Book Award finalist for “The Floating Opera” (1956), The Brandeis University creative arts award (1965), shared the National Book Award for “Chimera” (1973), and the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Fiction (1997).
Barth died April 2, 2024, at the age of 93.
Fun With Words
The MWA invites writers to have fun writing metafiction like John Barth. Using up to 100 words, pick a literary convention and parody it or explore a relationship between literature and reality, life and art. Title your work and send to https://marylandwriters.org/Notable_Maryland_Authors by the 22nd of the month to receive an MWA Fun With Words submission certificate.
Last month writers were asked to write historical fiction like Erika Robuck.
Here are some regional selections:
The tragic tale of Moll Dyer, the accused witch, is consistent across various oral traditions; a solitary herbal healer from Ireland, clad in the remnants of a once prosperous life, froze to death on a frigid night in 1697 when a vengeful mob reduced her cabin to ashes.
Minimal historical records preclude definitive parallels between her life and others, but her tragedy speaks its own truth and resonates with everyone facing injustice.
Moll can find peace in stories told today. Once a cautionary tale, we invoke Moll’s memory whenever facing bullying or loneliness. Good emerges from tragedy, Moll’s final bequest.
- David Thompson,
Leonardtown
Attending to Frida Kahlo
“I’m your enfermera Frida, here to sit with you. Shall I bring a soothing drink? Do you prefer hot or cool?”
No answer. Witnessing bold paintings, her beating heart on canvass, I’m silent. Frida’s colorful images scream, I must attend to my weeping.
“Frida, I promise to take care.”
Serving juice, I pray that someday Frida will be known as the true brilliant artist. A world in chaos, words left unsaid, I’d always meant say: “You grasped that whatever comes, adapting was necessary. We can never dismiss love. Your stories carry on forever in your art.”
- Ruth Ticktin, Chesapeake Beach
Dark Night, Strong Winds
Tension strained Dottie Meredith’s old bones. She gripped the tiller of her late husband’s three-log canoe, sailing away from a British frigate under summer stars.
Earlier, a British sloop had overtaken her boat. Royal Marines brought her before their lieutenant who, after questioning, proposed she smuggle goods for the Crown.
When she refused, he said, “Smuggling beats fishing on a rumbling stomach in the slapping dark.”
Dottie now sailed north, toward Fort McHenry. Whoever smuggled goods for England deserved death. You, old girl, a smuggler? I already have my stiff hands full serving as a spy for the Republic.
- Lawrence McGuire, Waldorf
Indentured
He gurgled something unintelligible as those last few words and blood came to his lips with Ellie’s dressmaking scissors buried in the Captain’s neck. His thrashing broke and ignited a liquor bottle. Flames engulfed the shack.
Abused on her transatlantic voyage by Captain Stoleman and enduring seven years of debt slavery hardship, Ellie was one of the few who completed her indenture.
She rose to become a successful member of Baltimore’s elite. As a miserable drunkard living alone near the Chesapeake Bay, Stoleman’s death was deemed an accident. Ellie escaped judgment, never mentioning the fishing shack incident with the Captain.
- Ken Stepanuk, Prince Frederick
Before Sky Mall
Two unknown brothers poured into an Eastern Carolina tavern. The tavern was owned by an ex-burlesque dance hall gal named “Kitty Hawk.” While enjoying the tavern’s trademark gimmick (booze served in miniature bottles) they lamented to Miss Hawk:
“We’ve just invented a spectacular new contraption know as: ‘THE AIRPLANE’...but we can’t convince anyone to ‘fly the friendly skies’ with us.”
Miss Hawk replied, “I don’t know if I can help. The only things I have to offer are a bunch of leggy girlfriends, an out-of-work brother-in-law who knows all the latest showtunes, and a warehouse full of honey roasted peanuts.
- Steve Baker, Waldorf
Cherokee ancestors of the North Carolina mountains
Our dear friend and neighbor Davy Crockett gave us the warning that President Andrew Jackson was sending troops to forcibly take us from our native lands– the lands inhabited by our ancestors for thousands of years. Davy Crockett had spoken to Congress in our defense.
We had heard of the plight of the other tribes that had come to be known as the “trail of tears.” They were coming now for our people, the Cherokee. We knew what we must do. With footsteps soft and light, we disappeared into the North Carolina mountains like a fog passing into the night.
- Teresa Bilzor, Calvert County
Judas’s Lament
They hated me. They still hate me. I do not know why; they owe everything to me. They’d be all as forgotten and loathed and left completely to the Arch-Fiend’s evils as they were before, had I not done what I did: had I not willed and sought for the one Death that, purchased merely with thirty pieces of silver, gave Life to everyone.
It is my eternal lot to be despised, by the Highest and Lowest. It is my place to be forever gnashing… tortured!
But never will I yield, never will I regret my wrought salvation — my holy sacrifice.
- Eric Waldow, La Plata
Fingering Secrets
The Secretary of State was finally a woman! It was every bit as stressful as being President, and Madam Secretary carried the stress in every muscle in her neck and back as though the nation’s troubles were robes of stone. She trusted Marla, her masseuse, to knead the world’s woes from her weary shoulders.
Marla suggested Madam name each stress as a way to release it as Marla kneaded the rigid muscles. Madam spoke of the Middle East as her right shoulder began to relax; Russian was the left shoulder. So began the confessions and secrets that only Marla knew.
- Cindy Herndon, Calvert County
