The Owen Fulrice Project: Update

From one of my numerous email sources:

I used to have all of the "Just Ask Owen" column, but I had a hard drive crash a few months back and I don't think they survived that. I know that there were some political columns, stuff done in 1996, that
were archived somewhere on the Net; some quotations, too.

I also know that there was a blog post somewhere that had Owen Fulrice's real name, Jody Stitt; he's a untenured English professor in a Southern university now. I haven't researched far enough into that; imagine a scholarly paper written like these columns, Frederico Jalapeno being cited, etc.

A Jody Stitt did not win the English Core Teaching Award in 2006, but was a finalist. Jody Stitt: not a lot of help.

But! Until about 2008 UAB had a Joseph Stitt teaching. People seemed to like his classes. He is a 1995 graduate of the University of Alabama, which with working at UAB fits both the time and the place, plus: "Stitt is a writer and editor who has published book reviews and essays for several Birmingham area publications. He has also been a consultant for GreenThink.com." Here's something by a Joseph Stitt that certainly sounds like Owen Fulrice.

The biography here makes me think we've got our man:

Joseph Stitt grew up in Cullman, Alabama, went to college at the University of Alabama (B.A. and M.A. in English, 1993 and 1995), taught composition for a year at Wallace State College, then worked for four years as a writer and editor for the web sites Hecklers Online and Greenthink.com. For the last two years he has taught composition and literature at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. His story “Sunset for a Tennessee Mule” was in the spring issue of the Aura Literary Arts Review. He has published numerous essays, articles, book reviews, and parodies both in print and online.

Next up, I guess, is sitting outside his house in my car, waiting for him to come outside.

The Owen Fulrice Project

So, back when people got on the internet using phone lines and dial tones, AOL had a feature called Hecklers Online. It was pretty good. This was the high times of the mid-1990s, when if you wanted to open a web page, you better have a magazine or short novel to read while it loads. If you wanted something that took less than twenty minutes to load, you had to go through AOL's exclusive small content partners. Most of these were forgettable, but Hecklers Online was big and varied The HO Mailbag was always interesting, and some of the games were fun (my personal favorites were the Random Game and especially Three Line Novels, probably because it was the only one I ever won). It is dead now. They tried to offer content with Playboy, but that didn't end up working out, and now they're gone.

The best part of HO was Just Ask Owen, which started in the mid-late 1990s, a question and answer column written by Owen Fulrice (he went out of his way to assert that it was not and advice column). Just Ask Owen was awesome -- insightful, well-read, biting, intellectual, hilarious. It was the highlight of my week when a new Just Ask Owen came out. I don't know if Owen was a real person or not. It was a fake name, but hints of a life story indicated he was in his mid-50s, with a PhD in philosophy.

It appears that much of Owen's work is lost, at least to internet searchers like me. This guy (who is the same as this guy?) used to have some of it, but that seems to be gone. Some of it is available at the Internet Archive, God bless them, but much is missing. Still, it does have an enormous Best of Just Ask Owen.

Hopefully, when this post is added to the single digit number of search responses for "Owen Fulrice," Owen will see it, and come tell us why he left.