Booker's Blog

A couple of expressive gentlemen with local connections have recently won literary awards for their creative writing. David Booker and Mark McGinley achieved first-place recognition from the Knoxville Writers’ Guild through its annual writing contest.

Booker, a Jefferson City native, won a first place for the second chapter of a science fiction/fantasy thriller that he calls a “work in progress.” This was not Booker’s first Writers’ Guild win. He won last year for a short story in the mystery genre.

Booker has written and published several short stories, and he has been a contributor to a few area newspapers, including the Morristown Citizen Tribune.

He earns his living as a writer, currently doing technical writing for Y-12. Earlier, he did technical and promotional consumer writing for Phillips Electronics (formerly Magnavox), and has done some promotional writing for Log Home magazines, as well. For the past three years Booker has served as editor of his neighborhood newsletter, and he continues working on his novel.

About writing Booker says: “It’s what I enjoy doing, even though sometimes I sit frustrated in front of a blank screen.” He is a long-time member of the Knoxville Writers’ Guild, and invites other interested writers to join and enjoy the support of an active, dedicated and diverse writing community.

Mark McGinley, another former resident of Jefferson City who is now Assistant Professor of Theater and Technical Director of Stage Design at Lincoln Memorial University, is also a winner of the Knoxville Writers’ Guild 2014 contest.

McGinley’s writing primarily focuses on his work as a playwright. His winning entry “Still Waters,” is a one-act play set in the Tennessee hills in the 1930’s, with a ragtag cast of characters and a moonshine theme. It hasn’t been performed on stage yet, but whenever that happens, the 32-page script will take actors about 30 minutes to execute.

He has had one play entitled “Sold” performed by a theater workshop group (now disbanded), but McGinley still has plenty of other ideas and plays he hopes to produce. It’s possible that one of his plays will be performed at the Tiger Lily Theater in Knoxville, in April.

McGinley earned his undergraduate degree at Carson-Newman University, and while he lived nearby he worked for the Comedy Barn in Pigeon Forge and doubled as a massage therapist. Today he stays so busy he only has time to concentrate on his primary vocation, which is theater. He received his graduate degree, a masters in theater design and stage combat, from Louisiana Tech.

About writing McGinley says: “It’s hard work until you come up with an idea that burns inside of you until you put it on a page. Then it’s more work, work, work.”

Of course, he would never want to do anything else.
Finishing first earned Booker and McGinley $100 each in prize money. Aspiring writers who might be interested in joining the Knoxville Writers Guild are invited to go online to http://www.knoxvillewritersguild.org and see what they have to offer, or write to them for an informational brochure, at Knoxville Writers’ Guild, P.O. Box 10326, Knoxville TN 37939-032.

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Tagged as award, contest, David E. Booker, Knoxville Writers' Guild, science fiction, Sunday

February 27, 2015 · 3:43 pm

Leonard Nimoy obituary: “Star Trek’s” Spock, dies at 83 – LA Times

Source: http://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-leonard-nimoy-20150227-story.html#page=1.

Kirk (left) and Spock (right).

When Leonard Nimoy was approached about acting in a new TV series called “Star Trek,” he was, like any good Vulcan contemplating a risky mission in a chaotic universe, dispassionate.

“I really didn’t give it a lot of thought,” he later recalled. “The chance of this becoming anything meaningful was slim.”

By the time “Star Trek” finished its three-year run in 1969, Nimoy was a cultural touchstone — a living representative of the scientific method, a voice of pure reason in a time of social turmoil, the unflappable and impeccably logical Mr. Spock.

He was, as The Times described him in 2009, “the most iconic alien since Superman” – a quantum leap for a character actor who had appeared in plenty of shows but never worked a single job longer than two weeks.

Nimoy, who became so identified with his TV and film role that he titled his two memoirs, somewhat illogically, “I Am Not Spock” (1975) and “I Am Spock” (1995), died Friday at his home in Bel-Air. He was 83.

The cause was end-stage chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, said his son, Adam.

Nimoy revealed last year that he had the disease, a condition he attributed to the smoking he gave up 30 years earlier.

While he was best known for his portrayal of the green-tinted Spock, Nimoy more recently made his mark with art photography, focusing on plus-sized nude women in a volume called “The Full Body Project” and on nude women juxtaposed with Old Testament tales and quotes from Jewish thinkers in “Shekhina.”

He also directed films, wrote poetry and acted on the stage.

As Spock, he was the pointy-eared, half-Vulcan, 23rd-Century science officer whose vaulted eyebrows seemed to express perpetual surprise at the utterly illogical ways of the humans who served with him on the starship Enterprise.

Spock could barely wrap his mind around feelings. He was the son of a human mother and a father from Vulcan – a planet whose inhabitants had chosen pure reason as the only way they could survive. When he thwarted deep-space evil-doers, it was with logic simple enough for a Vulcan but dizzying for everyone else, including his commanding officer, Capt. James T. Kirk, played by William Shatner.

While worlds apart from the racial strife and war protests of the 1960s, “Star Trek” explored such issues by setting up parallel situations in space, “the final frontier.”

“Spock was a character whose time had come,” Nimoy later wrote. “He represented a practical, reasoning voice in a period of dissension and chaos.”

He also turned Nimoy into an unlikely sex symbol.

More at: http://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-leonard-nimoy-20150227-story.html#page=1