Richard L Rose

ACCESS TO ROSE’S WORKS at the dot com site for richardlrose and converse at the dot com site unsettling-things.

All works and productions were funded by Richard Rose. They are for sale from Brandylane, Atmosphere, and Amazon, and sometimes available at cost or no cost from the author, if you can find him. Partial recordings of some productions are on the YouTube channel. He also moderates the community-based platform, Unsettling-Things, which is an ongoing conversation about the human project by the Fellowship of the Attentive. Subscription is at no cost and the site does not sell any products or seek to make you do or think anything. It takes seriously Socrates' challenge to let no day pass in which you do not discuss goodness.

RATIONALE

Richard Rose’s self-published work is about the human project—to care for and about each other and to keep the long human conversation going. Whatever can be done on behalf of life-fostering concerns is promoted in his stories, poems, operas and performances. Drawing from his experiences as soldier, teacher, composer, and researcher, Rose has many stories to tell. He calls his practice folk-writing because he pursues it not as an influencer but as a giver.

From the publication of Frameshifts in 2011 to The Bulletins of Mashkinonge in 2025, Rose has written for the Fellowship of the Attentive. This fictional audience, first described in Frameshifts, looks for intriguing stories, poems, plays and musical narratives that challenge their frame of reference. They expect a creative work to go beyond entertainment. They ask,

A good story or poem or aria—yes, but how are my attitudes, feelings, and perspectives heightened by the experience?

Members of the Fellowship of the Attentive are accustomed to bringing sustained attention and creative engagement to their experiences because they want to become more attentive, knowledgeable, compassionate, and alive. They are attentive to life-fostering concerns and respond sympathetically to the personal and existential grief underlying the Frameshifts project.

Writing for this imagined audience, Rose produced stories, poems, and operas with linked themes and characters. Performances of the musical works and author readings were opportunities for fundraising for charitable causes and for giving books away. These events were also opportunities to discover that the Fellowship actually existed. Perhaps you are a member of the Fellowship of the Attentive and will be interested in these works:

THE FRAMESHIFTS PROJECT

Beginning with Harry Pettiford’s discovery of his dead boss, a Northern Virginia political hack who had just won a councilman’s seat in an election in the city of Holburn, the first volume of FRAMESHIFTS introduced Richard Rose’s off-center, speculative-fictional world in 2011. The over-arching plot of the collection weaves through interconnected stories and poems in multiple genres—mysteries, military thrillers, and science fiction. Then the characters and themes in the speculative world of Frameshifts reappear in subsequent works.

Spinning off the two volumes of FRAMESHIFTS, Rose produced more story and poetry collections, culminating in the poetry anthology, HOUSE OF A THOUSAND ROOMS. These works were often released and distributed at charity performances of his operas. Over the years, Rose performed, produced, and published his work, and simply gave it away at literary events, book fairs, readings, or concerts. This was the extent of his promotions.

Rose's poems and stories have appeared in Artemis, The Piedmont Journal of Poetry & Fiction, Lingering in the Margins (River City Poets), Journal of the Blue Ridge Writers, and the Centennial Anthology of the Virginia Writers Club. Some poems have won prizes from the Poetry Society of Virginia.