Getting It Write

Getting it Write is a collection of some of the author's favorite unpublished (mostly) essays, poems, one-act plays, and humor pieces from his 40-year-plus freelance writing career. Subjects include dogs, lounge singers, hats, baseball, lumber yards, fishing, music, and Celtic lore. The book begins with a short piece about how Metzger more or less stumbled into his writing and teaching careers after a simple misreading of a comment by a Chico State fiction-writing professor, and also includes the very first essay that he wrote for his freshman composition class at Marin Community College. Most of the plays in the book have been performed before live audiences, including for Chico's Blue Room's new-works festival (one won the audience award for best script) and for Chico's Bloomsday festivals, the annual international celebration honoring James Joyce's novel Ulysses. Most of the humor pieces were rejected by stuffy publications such as The New Yorker, with apparently no sense of humor themselves ����. Some of the poems are serious, others playful, including a limerick about the San Francisco Giants and two "riddle poems."