Steven C. Levi

CREATIVE BIOGRAPHY

I am a 56 year-old commercial writer who lives and works in Anchorage, Alaska, my home for the past 30 years. I have a BA in European History and MA in American history from the University of California Davis and San Jose State respectively and I earned a Teaching Credential from the University of California Riverside. In Alaska, I have been making my living as an adjunct college European and American history instructor and contract technical writer.

It has always been my belief that works of originality, creativity and quality will survive the test of time and, given enough time, will find a commercial niche. I have been somewhat successful in getting my concepts developed and sometimes even published. I strive to be original in all of my writing fields which, considering that I am both an historian and technical writer, can be difficult. A sample of my successes includes :

COMMITTEE OF VIGILANCE

For my Master’s degree, I chose to do a thesis rather than take the comprehensive examination. For my subject I chose a then-unknown vigilante committee in San Francisco that was spawned out of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce because of the Preparedness Day bombing and associated union violence in July of 1916. Using legal and extralegal maneuverings, the Committee forced the conviction of two innocent men – Thomas Mooney and Warren Billings – who both spent the next decade on Death Row. (Both were eventually pardoned.) The work was unique because it chronicled a ‘transitional’ vigilante committee. Such a committee didn’t lynch people directly; it pressured the forces of law and order to do it legally. The thesis was published as a book in 1983.

USE HISTORY LIKE A TOOL, An Unconventional Guide to Reading the Past and Managing the Future

 My most recent work of creativity with regard to history was published in 2003. History is the most hated of academic subjects because it is taught as a dry, boring subject. But history is the single most important academic subject because it is the only subject that will teach someone how to ‘see’ into the future. While many historians know this, very few can explain the technique and even fewer teach it. USE HISTORY LIKE A TOOL was written as a nuts-and-bolts guide on how to use history as a tool to solve present day personal and business problems.

HEINZ NOONAN Detective Stories

I also use creativity is my works of fiction. As an example, in American commercial literature today “mystery” means “murder.” Because of this perception, it is very hard to find a publisher who will take mysteries that do not involve a murder. This is understandable because most people believe there are only two ways of solving a crime: inductive or deductive reasoning. Programs like CSI and Law and Order reinforce this myth. But many of the greatest crime fiction do not involve murder, notably “The Gold Bug,” “The Purloined Letter,” “Problem of Cell #13” and “The Thomas Crown Affair.” To fill this literary void, I created a detective that solved unusual crimes such as a corpse that was making obscene phone calls, a boxcar that disappeared off a moving train, a greyhound bus that disappeared off the Golden Gate Bridge in full view of the police and a jewelry heist pulled off by a woman locked in a cell under 24-hour guard by the police. Many of these stories can be found as part of my creative thinking website at www.parsnackle.com; enter through MEMBERS and go to U SOLVE IT!

MULTIMEDIA

I also strive to be creative with my own poetry, rhymed and unrhymed. Currently I am mixing poetry with visuals and sound to create a short movie. Two of them, BRACELET and GRANDPA, have been sent to you by snail mail on March 11, 2005. I am now applying for an Alaska Humanities Forum grant to create a longer movie titled “The Bandersnatch Beast of Tazlina Lake.” This is an epic poem that will be illustrated with color photographs of humans acting the story of the poem. The poem is the saga of two miners on the shores of Tazlina Lake during the winter of 1903 who have run out of cash, credit and good luck. They scheme to pay off their debts by convincing the saloon owner that they have a rare but dangerous beast that will make them all a fortune. All they have to do is bring the beast into the saloon and charge miners a nominal fee to see the animal. The saloon keeper agrees and the two miners proceed to scare the living daylights of all who would see the animal. When the beast finally makes an appearance, it is able to break free of its chains and chase everyone out of the saloon. The beast, in fact, is one of the miners in disguise. As everyone in town is running madly for their lives, the two miners clean out the cash in the saloon’s till and leave town.

A second grant application has been made to the Rasmuson Foundation to create a movie of my poem, “The Phantom Bowhead,” the story of a bowhead whale that saves a whaling ship from being swept on the shoals.

I am also pushing the envelope with my narrative Alaska Gold Rush poem “The Canyon of Bones” a novella in rhyme. Ithas an unusual format: a story within a story within a story within a story within a story. The narrative leads the reader into the fifth level of the saga and then out again. The poem will be illustrated with Alaska Gold Rush photographs, pen-and-ink drawings, historic illustrations, freehand drawings and woodcuts from the era.

CREATIVE THINKING and FACELESS MEETINGS

In the nonfiction field, I have developed and I am continuing to refine my creative thinking software. I have covered my concept this in depth in my application and the actual software is available at www.parsnackle.com. Another concept I am developing – which I call FACELESS MEETNGS – is in response to military BAAs (Broad Area Announcements) for cyberspace techniques. The problem the military is trying to solve is how to get 300 people in 300 locations to meet in cyberspace and solve a problem. I developed a mechanism to not only allow for a functional meeting in cyberspace, but for ideas developed in subgroups to be numerically rated so a good idea that was not considered workable by Group Alpha could be compared against other rejected but good ideas by other groups. Thus good ideas can be saved so that when a similar problem surfaces later, there is an ordered list of ideas that can be pulled off a computer. I am currently in the process of writing a text for this technique.

MISCELLANEOUS

With regard to miscellaneous but noted aspects of my career, I and three friends created the Alaska Historical Publications Association to find funding for scholarly manuscripts on the history of Alaska by local historians. The market demand for scholarly Alaskan history books is very low – and that’s on a good day – and the only publisher of such works, the University of Alaska, only publishes a few books each few year and these are mostly by professors. We pair a foundation with the local historian and print about 500 copies of the book. 250 go to the Alaska Library Association for distribution to small Alaskan libraries that cannot afford to buy the book. The author gets the other 250. One of our successes was the production and distribution of a 60-minute audiotape on the History of the Alaska Gold Rush for secondary schools.

My 45-minute dramatic play, FANNY QUIGLEY'S PLACE has been presented by Denali Park Resorts for Alaska Cabin Night, in Denali National Park for 320 people per night, seven nights a week from May 15th to September 15 th since the summer of 1994. (Fanny Quigley, a real person, was part of the Kantishna Gold Stampede and the driving force in making Denali a National Park.

I am also one of the longest serving board members of the Alaska Moving Image Preservation Association – since its inception in 1991. We collect, preserve, house, catalog and maintain historic Alaskan moving images and audio tapes.

I am the originator of the Alascattalo Day Parade, the longest running shortest parade in American history. It is one block long down an alley and has been held every November for the past 25 years. It honors the alascattalo, a cross between a moose and a walrus, which represents Alaskan humor. I was even able to get an asteroid named after the alascattalo.

I donate my script writing abilities for worthy causes. Recently I did two scripts for documentaries on Tibet as well as a half-hour presentation on Friendship Village, an orphanage outside of Hanoi for children whose birth defects had bee the result of exposure of their parent to Agent Orange during the Vietnam War.