Tag: RayBradbury

Margerumalia – My Play Was Chosen!

Eric Margerum

Newsletter – April 24, 2026

I’m pleased to announce that my 10-Minute play “Out of the Abyss” was chosen for this year’s Civic Theatre Play Festival in June. There are so many talented playwrights on this list and I am both honored and humbled to be among them.

“Out of the Abyss” is an homage to Ray Bradbury’s short story “To the Chicago Abyss” which he also adapted into a one-act play by the same name. In it, an old unhomed man is muttering memories of brands of coffee, cigarettes, candy bars, movies, and fresh fruit when someone tries to shut him up for fear he’ll get taken away. Remembering things is not allowed in this dystopia.

I thought I could capture a similar feeling by having my unhomed man muttering the words of famous documents and speeches that define who we are as a nation. He, too, is in danger of getting hauled away by the authorities so a social worker desperately tries to make him stop. My title suggests a hopeful outcome if it’s received as I imagined.

My daughter read the play and commented that the feeling of my short play is “uncanny” and I like that description a lot. She said it feels like something out of 1984. I agree.

The festival director asked if I wanted to direct my play and I enthusiastically said yes. I’ve directed short plays in the festival for the past three years, and one full-length play for the youth theatre. I’m particularly excited because the atmosphere is mutually supportive, generous, and encouraging.

After auditions, for example, directors discuss who they want in their plays, and follow up with alternate choices in a give-and-take process to help every play to achieve its best.

I remember realizing one year that a young man hadn’t been cast in anything even though he did a good job in the auditions so I volunteered to give him a role in the play I was directing. He did a good job and has continued to be involved in Civic Theatre since. That’s the outcome we want! 

The last time I directed my own play in this festival I was encouraged by fellow playwright Steven G. Martin to submit it to other festivals and competitions. That play, “Just Book Club,” ended up getting collected in The Best 10-Minute Plays 2024. (You can see the book cover on my website at ericmargerum.com.)

The county library Spring Author Fair was sparsely attended due, they said, to an all-morning rain followed by a university bug fair that drew a lot of attendance. 

Ever eat a bug? Not on purpose! Me neither. Apparently scorpion pops have been a big draw in years past. Eww.

The one book I did sell was to an old friend of my parents who told me that he belonged to a play-reading group and they had read my play “Just Book Club.” He said it was very good and he and his wife plan to come see my next play in June.

TTFN

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My middle grade novel, The Most Amazing Museum of Los Angeles is available through The BookBaby Bookshop at https://store.bookbaby.com/book/the-most-amazing-museum-of-los-angeles

Margerumalia – Encountering Bradbury

Eric Margerum

Newsletter – October 17, 2025

Ray Bradbury. On campus. In person!

It was my first semester at the University of Southern California where I was working on my Master’s Degree, and one of the great icons of science fiction was coming to campus to speak!

The man who wrote Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and countless short stories. THAT Ray Bradbury. 

And because I was born in October, he clearly wrote The October Country just for me. I had to meet him!

What made me think of him for this newsletter? I’ve been listening to his novel Death Is A Lonely Business, another Bradbury masterpiece that he wrote in 1985. It features a young aspiring writer in 1949 living alone in Venice, California, who gets caught up in a murder mystery that’s rife with haunting metaphors of fog and mist, and a pay phone that rings in the middle of the night only to deliver the sound of a distant person breathing.

Bradbury doesn’t write horror, he writes the stuff that makes you pull your covers over your head to protect yourself from the monsters under the bed. The psychological terror of childhood fears. He’s a poet of anxiety, a purveyor of winds off the graveyard.

In this novel, his protagonist is writing some of the same stories that Bradbury himself wrote in his younger years. An informed reader will hear the echoes of stories like “The Fog Horn,” “The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit,” and many more. I was transported to when I had first read these stories and felt like Bradbury was telling me the origin of each story.

In his talk at USC, he pointed through the dark auditorium, his finger penetrating the walls and across the quad. “The library,” he told us, “that’s your most important education of all right behind you.” The university had a huge library. “Go read,” he told us, “anything you can get your hands on. That’s where you’ll learn the most. One book will lead you to the next and the next… Never stop.”

I never have.

While I sat listening to him speak I thought about the many stories he had adapted into short plays, and I wrote him an invitation to see me in my first play at USC, Eugene O’Neil’s “Ah, Wilderness!” I promised to reserve two tickets for him if he could make it.

The other advice he gave about writing was entirely practical: begin by writing short stories. You can spend a year writing a terrible novel and it’ll waste a year of your time, or you can write fifty-two short stories, one a week, and sell at least one. He defied anyone to write fifty-two terrible stories in a row, one of them was going to be good!

A few years later I wrote one story and sent it in to Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. I sent it on paper, through the mail, with an SASE (Self-Addressed Stamped Envelope) so they could send me their reply. I still have that story in my files, and my rejection slip. I was too embarrassed to send it out to another magazine, or to write fifty-one more. My bad.

I was also embarrassed when I handed Mr. Bradbury my hand-written invitation to see my play. Others were waiting in line for autographs but I had to run to class so I just handed him the folded paper. 

“Does it have your return address?” he asked, stopping to take me in, probably seeing a reflection of himself in my eyes. 

“No,” I answered, “you don’t have to answer it.” 

I still picture him opening up my note and reading it long after the play was done, thinking to himself “I’d like to have seen that.”

TTFN

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Tabitha is still coming to eat her medicated food, but we’re going to run out. We need to capture her soon. Her son, GG, looks in the window to see if I’ll come out to pet him while he eats. He also lies on top of the picnic table outside to watch TV with us every night.

He’s so ready to be domesticated.

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For anyone who lives around Lafayette, Indiana, I’ll be signing copies of The Most Amazing Museum of Los Angeles at Main Street Books on Saturday, October 25th from 10:00 AM to 2:00 PM. 

The books make a good holiday gift for children ages 8 to 12. I’ve heard from parents and grandparents who have read the book aloud—the original audiobook—saying they created special memories with the young folk. 

I can sell you a MAMLA coffee mug for your hot apple cider, and I’ll be giving away bookmarks and mazes if you just want to come by and say hi.

October 25th is the last day of the Farmer’s Market for the 2025 season. Always a fun time and just a block away from Main Street Books.

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If you received this email because it was forwarded to you by a subscriber, welcome. You can subscribe as well by following the link on my website: ericmargerum.com. A free story awaits you there.