November 19, 2024
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Best-selling writer Stephen King (photo) is too busy to make good this year on an offer to teach a writing class for the state’s middle school students through their laptop computers. Last November, King said he would like to teach an interactive, seminar-style writing class to the state’s seventh- and eighth-graders. At the time, he said the class would illustrate the learning possibilities that the laptop computers brought to Maine classrooms. This is the second of a four-year program that puts a laptop into the hands of all 36,000 public middle school students. The announcement made national headlines. But now, King will be another year or more before he starts teaching, said his personal assistant, Marsha DeFilippo. “That’s something that’s really sort of on hold right now,” DeFilippo said from King’s office in Bangor. King is currently in the middle of final production for “Stephen King’s Kingdom Hospital,” a 15-hour TV drama series that will premiere on ABC in February. He is also writing a monthly column for Entertainment Weekly and is editing his final book in the famed Dark Tower series. “And trying to have a personal family life,” DeFilippo added. Tony Sprague, director of the laptop program, said King’s writing class is “still in the planning process” and that the logistics are still being worked out. King is best-known as the author of more than 30 best-selling books. But he is no stranger to teaching or to the Internet. He taught English at Hampden Academy in the early 1970s and two years ago wrote “On Writing,” a book about his life and his craft. King a couple of years ago distributed a 66-page short story, “Riding the Bullet,” over the Internet by allowing users to download it for $2.50. He also distributed a book, “The Plant,” over the Internet using an honor system where readers were supposed to pay a dollar for each installment of the book.


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