It is going to take me some time but I have to "edit my presence on the internet."
The story:
Last night I was sitting in Ground Effects with my computer getting a few friends' mailing addresses from emails they have sent me over the years. I am in a actual snail-mail letter writing mood. So I was collecting these addresses from my email and I got into the whim to try to do a thorough search for Rano.
Rano was an exchange student who stayed with my family my senior year of high school. She was from Tajikistan, a little country nestled between Afghanistan and Pakistan with a handful of other small countries. These were newly independent states (NIS) from the USSR. Rano was part of an exchange program to help young smart students of these NIS explore the concepts of democracy and apply what suits their country's needs. At least that is what the students were taking from the exchange. I think the US Government might have had ideas that all these countries would become capitalist democracies, but who knows. I won't speculate on that. I just know that Rano benefited from the program because she's been active in volunteer and non-profit organizations in Tajikistan since then, helping people know their human rights, handing out information, etc.
Anyway, so when I was an undergraduate student at the University of Mississippi I wrote an essay for a creative writing course about my personal experience having an exchange student stay with me, how we both grew that year, social situations and cultural conversations, etc. The essays I wrote in this course were some of my favorite ones because I was writing prose and biography into one piece. So, since I was proud of this work, I wanted to showcase it and what better way to do that than to post it on my own personal website. So I did. And I did have "Copyright 19XX by Laura Anne Heller" on these pages, etc. I didn't really think much of it.
Last Fall I started feeling a little more paranoid about my poetry and essays on my website not having a true security in their place on the web. I had a gadget set up so that right-clicking would not allow someone to copy and paste, but I even know how to get around that and so do a lot of other savy internet folks. So I took all my writing down off my website with plans to put it back up when I have formatted it as protected .pdf files. This is a Maybe. I want to share, but I don't want it stolen and claimed by someone else.
So while I was looking for Rano's contact info on the 'Net, I came across my essay "Tajik Eyes." Well, at first I thought this sounds really familiar, and I thought it was odd that someone was writing about my "sister" Rano. So I went to my "writing" folder on my hard drive, to the essays, and opened "Tajik Eyes" to compare it with the essay on Azete.com titled "The Exchange Student." Exact same writing. The essay was for sale on Azete.com and did not appear to list my name as the author anywhere. It did, however, have a link to "report plagiarism." So I did. And I sought out 8 more of my essays and papers on this site and reported them all to the site master as plagiarism.
I check my email this morning and the site master had very quickly responded and took down the stolen essays. If they had argued, I guess I would have had to seek out other measures to have them removed.
I am curious as to how many other sites have my writing on them.
(I have just realized how much I like this song by Beth Orton, "Stars All Seem to Weep." I need to read the lyrics, but like the flow and feel of the song... )
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