w. e. turner Profile

Just an old hippie who don't know what to do. Should I hang on to the old or grab on to the new? I have been writing short stories and beginning novels since high school. I started college to become an engineer on the advice of parents and school counsellors who saw my high math and science aptitude. No one took into account that I had no interest in engineering but had a great interest in literature and history. The result was dropping out after one semester studying engineering-base curriculum with a 0.8 GPA. After bumming around for about a year and a half, with the draft board breathing down my neck the whole time, I joined the Navy in January 1968 and spent the next 3 years, 9 months, 15 days (but who was counting, anyway) serving Uncle Sam. I actually joined the Navy to see the world, but all I got to see was San Diego, California and Charleston, South Carolina. After the Navy I spent a couple of years working as a photographer in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, before going back to my home town of Wichita, Kansas with the purpose of buying a Nikon F-2 camera. While working in Wichita to get the camera and other photographic equipment paid for, I met my first wife. It was also about that time I discovered I wasn't nearly as smart or educated as I thought I was and decided to go back to Wichita State University (where I had done my first semester) with the aim of becoming a photojournalist. But to study photojournalism, you have to first take Beginning Journalism. That's when I rediscovered my love of writing. I ended up working the next several years as a writer of sales and technical manuals, public relations writer, publicist, presentation writer & photographer for the Wichita Public Schools Food Service, and as a Technical Writer for companies ranging from Aircraft Manufacturing to Industrial and Oilfield Fiberglass Products Manufacturer to an Amusement & Carnival Rides Manufacturer. During work and after getting laid off from numerous jobs (I must have always seemed to be at fault when those companies had financial difficulties) I finally finished my degree at WSU in 1985. Though I didn't have the classes completed in the correct area for a BA degree in Journalism or History (my twin majors), WSU finally gave me a BA in General Studies because I had 142 credit hours when only 124 hours were needed to graduate. I thereupon began a Master's Program in Creative Writing from WSU, but never finished it. The basic cause for this unfinished program was the fact I was still working as a Technical Writer at the time. I was not, as most other students in the program, a "professional student" who went from high school to college to graduate school and was not working as a Teaching Assistant for the English Department and who taught English 101 & 102 to incoming Freshmen. This seeming "lack of support" for the English Department resulted in a lack of support from the English Department head when my work was savagely berated by other Masters candidates during workshops. The result was a crisis in confidence in the validity of my writing; so much so that most of it was shelved and is only now being exhumed and submitted on this site. Yet, I am also doing some fresh writing which I will also submit for review.