Category Archives: playwriting

Year Without A Spring

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by Chelsea Sutton

1816 was a miserable year. Known as the Year Without A Summer, global temperatures decreased thanks to a large volcanic eruption, leading to failed crops and famine, and…wait for it…disease.

It was also the year Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was born.

Many of us have heard the story. A group of friends, shut in from the cold, locked away from much of civilization, haunted by their own individual fears and worries and distractions, challenge each other to a ghost story contest.

Here is what Mary writes about that challenge, which eventually led to a nightmare that eventually led to Frankenstein:

I busied myself to think of a story, —a story to rival those which had excited us to this task. One which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature, and awaken thrilling horror—one to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart. If I did not accomplish these things, my ghost story would be unworthy of its name. I thought and pondered—vainly. I felt that blank incapability of invention which is the greatest misery of authorship, when dull Nothing replies to our anxious invocations. Have you thought of a story? I was asked each morning, and each morning I was forced to reply with a mortifying negative…Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself. 

We have officially entered our own Year Without A Spring with the COVID-19 pandemic. The sun may shine, rain may fall, the mayor of LA is THIS CLOSE to mandating hikes. The shelves may be empty but food is being delivered. It is not the desperate darkening of the Earth in the same way as 1816 – but 1816 and 2020 are kindred spirits. People are still dying. People are isolated. People are not supported by the systems we swore were solid weeks before.

There is a general chaos, a general undercurrent vibration of uncertainty and anxiety and fear. If you don’t believe me, spend 5 minutes on Facebook.

There is also a lot of hope and community support. Artists coming together. Creating things. Certainly I’ve seen the story of how Shakespeare wrote King Lear during a plague. Ugh. As if we weren’t under enough pressure already.

And then of course here I am offering up Mary Shelley writing Frankenstein during another deadly year. But I don’t offer up this story as an example of unending production. I don’t want to say, “Hey, this is our chance! Write that Great American Rona Play/Novel!” Just because we are locked in our homes does not mean what we produce must be a novel that transcends 200 years of literary history.

Instead, reread that quote from her introduction. Invention comes out of chaos. It comes out of the moment of change, of wonder, of fear. All you may accomplish right now is a lot of walking around in silence, a lot of nightmares. But that, too, is creation.

I went to a writing residency in 2017 in the month between leaving my day job and going off to grad school. As much as I wanted to, I could not turn off the world. I was in a tailspin of work and change and uncertainty. And I was at a beautiful place where I was supposed to be writing. I did, a little. But my writing to-do list was barely touched. Instead I went on walks, hikes, cried into oysters, had nightmares. I felt lonely. I was alone.

When I talked to others who had been in similar situations, I heard many a story of writers going to residencies and writing little to nothing – only taking the time to sit and breathe and try to remember what it was that was interesting or terrifying or beautiful to them….the thing that led them to writing in the first place.

So I think that’s all we can ask now. Wander around your gothic mansion/studio apartment and indulge in a little ghost story challenge. Gather around the fire and let the nightmares play and dance and then burn out. If something lingers on, maybe you got something.

Work-at-Home-Parent Hacks: 5 Ways to Involve Your Child in Your Career

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Thanks to longtime LAFPI Instigator Cindy Marie Jenkins for this post , which we thought might speak to writers at home right now with kids!

By Cindy Marie Jenkins

“These are new books we just got,” I hear my five-year-old tell his friend in the pantry, otherwise known as my office. “My Mommy has a story she wrote in there. It’s about losing things. I helped her with it.”

My heart beat faster. For weeks I’d been telling him about this anthology and the story I wrote for it. He sat doing puzzles next to me while I drafted it, did bedtime with his Dad for a week while I finished it, and “helped” me set up marketing emails and social posts for the week that it was published.

Hearing him tell his friend about this, my first story published in a physical book, took me by surprise. He’s proud of me, I thought. He feels ownership of it, because of the time that he gave me to work and the ways I was able to involve him in my success.

Thinking back, I’ve included him since the day I started working again, three weeks after he was born. It wasn’t a traditional 9-5 job. I ran a small team of reviewers for the Hollywood Fringe Festival, and part of our job was to pitch our services to the artists and publish micro interviews on their shows. I attended a workshop for the theater artists with my three-week-old baby in a Moby wrap, also learning how to navigate a bathroom decidedly not designed to change a diaper. When it came to my turn to speak, he was nursing, so I just stood and pitched this review site to over fifty people while my son happily drank milk from inside his wrap. Some people realized what was happening and cheered me on, but many didn’t notice and just thought I was wearing some elaborate infinity scarf.

I’ve continued to work from home as a writer and arts communicator. It isn’t always as easy as that first day, but I have found some interesting ways to involve my children and make it work as a work-at-home-parent, which is my motto. I hope you can apply a few of these hacks to your writing life!

  1. Clearly designate work time from non-work time. I go into this in more detail on my blog, but you can use clocks and timers to your advantage. Count down to the time that you will work, prepare snacks beforehand, and set a timer so they can see exactly how long it will take. Then the important part: that timer goes off and you immediately give your patient children a good tickle or cuddle! The instant connection helps them understand that it is family time once again.
  2. Create their own work to do along with you. They got into a big maze phase, so when I had a deadline, we made a challenge. Who can finish more mazes correctly in thirty minutes? A bonus tip here is to get the dry erase puzzle books for very busy work weeks on a budget. When I really needed to write and they really needed my attention, I folded construction paper in half and encouraged them to draw their own stories. Once they drew on every page of their book, I would write the words with or for them. That gave me twenty more minutes to write that day!
  3. Answer their questions, satisfy their curiosity, and they’ll happily give you time. One day, I sat down to write content for a website. My five-year-old son crawled inside my hoodie (a sure sign he needs connection) and asked what I was doing. Then he asked: “What’s a website?” Then he wanted to make his own. By taking twenty minutes to connect, show him how to write a short story and put it into a website, he was thoroughly satisfied and drew pictures beside me for the rest of the hour I set aside for work. He may never touch that website again, but it’s there for him.
  4. Involve them in research. I write a lot of marketing copy for live shows. When appropriate, I show my kids the video clips or pictures and talk to them about the shows while I take notes. Another example is that I’m writing a retelling of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”. While researching how long it would really take to travel from Wittenberg to Denmark, we made it a mini geography and math lesson. We watched the first scene of Hamlet together from five different film versions and talked about which “ghost stories” were scariest and why. Then they wanted to make their own ghosts and I pulled out construction paper, glue and cotton balls. That activity gave me an extra thirty minutes after we researched together.
  5. Spend time at the beginning of your work-time to explain what you are doing and why you need that time. Involve them in your long-term goals. We go to the library and bookstore a lot, so one day I was trying to tell my three-year-old why it was important to focus without answering his deep questions about Bob the Builder. “What do you see when we go to the library and the bookstore? What are on the shelves?”

“Books.”

“That’s what I’m writing right now. And if I get the time to work on my book, then one day we will walk into the library, and the bookstore, and see your Mommy’s books on the shelf. You can point to them, and say that you Mommy wrote that book. Won’t that be cool?”

“Wow, Mommy. Yeah!”

That will be cool. And he’ll feel like he helped, that it’s as much of his success as mine.

This article was originally published at Writer’s Atelier in October 2019.

Cindy Marie Jenkins is currently a write-at-home mom in Beijing for [NDA Redacted]. Cindy’s editorials and articles have been published at The Mary Sue, StarTrek.com, Theatre Communications Guild, The Clyde Fitch Report, The Mom Forum, No Proscenium, Dwarf+Giant (a blog of The Last Bookstore), Better Lemons, Theatre @ Boston Court, and more. You can find more at her website, Patreon, Facebook and Twitter.

Oddities of Writing…

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by Robin Byrd

The hardest thing about writing is that you must write to get better at it. One must invest time. There is no substitution for doing the work. One must actively make time to write. One must put words down on the page.


Although…


Spoken Word drills are great for getting the blood flowing, bring a tape recorder into the mix and all the brilliant impromptu lines are not lost. I have been running drills all week. I just haven’t worked out the conscious effort to record myself yet.


Verbal writing is a real thing… I use it mostly when writing poems but sometimes it just happens when I am writing other things. The more stuff going on in my world, the more I tend to blurt out snippets and tidbits.

The odd thing about that is my whole being seems to be calling me to steal away to do the work. Steal away to write…steal away, the words are calling…

peace is calling

and that is the oddest thing about writing, it brings me peace in the midst of my storms…

LAFPI Congratulates Madhuri Shekar, Recipient of the 2020 Lanford Wilson Award!

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Madhuri Shekar is the 2020 recipient of the Lanford Wilson Award. She is a former blogger for LAFPI. We celebrate her! Congratulations, Madhuri! May you continue to soar…

LAFPI

You can read the February 28, 2020 Press Room announcement on the Dramatists Guild website at www.dramatistsguild.com.

Madhuri Shekar

An Immersive Performance

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by Cynthia Wands

Years ago, I was involved in a kind of “immersive theatre” – portraying living suffragette characters from history when I lived in Boston. It was more of a “yelling at people” kind of theatre – any interaction from the audience was viewed as a disruption. I was painfully reminded of those characters during the recent Democratic debates. I did, in fact, turn off the television and did not watch the rest of the last debate when the candidates started screaming at one another.

But it did remind me of this style of performing – a sort of living out loud conversation with the audience. This was a kind of “passionate role playing” that attempted to share the experience and rage of the women’s movement in the early 20th century. Mostly what I remember is that I blew out my vocal chords, (not using the right kind of vocal training here), and that I wore a really uncomfortable corset that squeezed me like a lemon.

Cynthia Wands as Lucy Stone, A Suffragette from Massachusetts

Here is a link with a 22 minute video that shares some of the performers/creators of some of the current immersive style theatre being performed in New York City. The folks that I know that have gone to see “SLEEP NO MORE” have really enjoyed the experience (with some reservations). I think there is a kind of intimacy, not just physical, but energetically, that connects people to this style of performance. It speaks to how our audiences need to feel connected to the world and what they feel. 

https://allarts.org/programs/immersive-world/immersive-theater-qy9hup/?fbclid=IwAR2SorOmunyEJoKmguJOpWKPLPBsieS_5HtMK-uU9RtsSTYICpgrAVJcyJo

That First Broadway Show

playwriting

by Cynthia Wands

Last week, my twin sister took me and our ten year old twin nieces to see FROZEN on Broadway. We could have seen some other shows: WICKED, THE LION KING, the Harry Potter play. (I have yet to see HAMILTON. I’m saving up my big bucks for that).

But when our nieces were three years old, I gave them the unfortunate Christmas gift of FROZEN dresses that would light up and sing “LET IT GO”. I kid you not.

Yes, I bought into the commercialization of our American Theater. Worse, I seared the memory of that damn song into our entire family’s collective memory, as we had to listen to that melody over and over again during that Christmas.

So here we are, some seven years later, and this is the first time that our nieces have been in New York City. We were destined to see FROZEN, the musical that they had memorized the songs and dialogue since they were three.

The evening that we went to the show, a new cast of leading characters were put into the show – the previous contract had ended for the year, and this was the opening night for this new group. The house was sold out, and filled to capacity with a kind of hysteria that was a little unnerving.

We were sitting way, way up in the last balcony, and the stage seemed very far away and below us. The announcements were made, the house lights dimmed, and the music started. And I have to tell you: it was incredible. The music especially, for actors who were going on for the first time in these roles on Broadway – their confident and beautiful voices filled the house. (We couldn’t see any of the details of the microphones or sound system – but it was beautifully balanced between the orchestra and the performers.). The special effects were outrageous, and the characters were easy to follow in the fairy tale genre.

I wondered if our nieces were a bit too old, at ten years old, to be watching this, but every time I glanced over at them, they were in the grip of a fierce and rapt attention mesmerized by the performers. They had that kind of laser beam focus on what they were watching that had them completely in the moment. (Albeit with a singing snowman puppet, and a reindeer named Sven.) I saw them completely in love with the spectacle. The crisis for a musical character that is saved by a sister’s love. Feisty young girls that have secret powers. All that.

A friend of my sister’s was in the show, and afterwards, he graciously gave us a tour backstage, and he chatted with our nieces about the mechanics of the costumes changes and the evolving casts. He treated them as though they were part of theatre community, and they were in turn, were shy and fiercely inquisitive about how things worked onstage. (“What is the snow made of?” “How did she change her dress so quickly?” “How does the snowman walk around?”) At the very end of his tour, he discovered that they spoke French, (he does too) and they had a brief, charming conversation in French. He gave them autographed photographs from the show, and they floated out of the theatre like helium balloons.

I had a couple of thoughts about the evening, the production, the connection with the people onstage. As a ridiculously over produced, absolutely expensive, wildly imaginative production – the audience loved it. They were charged as if they were at a football game. The cheers at the end of Act One were cathartic. There was a reminder at the beginning of the show that the audience was prohibited from singing or talking during the show. Even with that admonishment, during the show I could see audience members mouthing the words to the songs. Small children were crying out for Anna during her dying by poison scene. There was yelling and crying at the curtain call.

The human contact backstage after the show was the real highlight of the evening. Watching our nieces as they were included in the conversation about the performances onstage, and to be able to pick up a prop and feel that it’s real: that was the real magic. It’s a reminder for me, that the human connection to our artwork, whether or not it includes singing reindeers, is a part of our place in this.

The FPI Files: Kate McAll’s “Frankenstein” at LA Theatre Works Breathes Life Into Mary Shelley’s Timeless Words

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By Chelsea Sutton

Frankenstein is having a moment.

If you trace the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of adaptations just in the last 100 years or so, it is easy to see that the classic story never quite went out of style. It is beyond trend. It is the origin story of our collective unconscious.  

LA Theatre Works is bringing its own voice to the cannon this month with its upcoming radio drama production of Frankenstein, adapted by former BBC producer Kate McAll. The audio format allows McAll and LA Theatre Works to get back to the language of the book itself, and offer a version of the story that strips away the visual influences of television and film that have created the pop culture ideas of what we assume Frankenstein to be. 

“I like to get to the heart of the original material,” says McAll about her approach to adapting work for the radio. “My adaptation uses Mary’s structure and language. If she saw it – or heard it – she would recognize it.”

McAll, like myself and like many people who consume pop culture, didn’t read the book until she dove into the work of the adaptation, and so her cultural touchstones were mainly based in the movies. When she began talks with LA Theatre Works to do this adaptation, she thought this might be a great opportunity to try something new – last year she adapted A Room With A View which had a lot of comedy in it and made people laugh. This was a moment to do something scary. But when she read it, she completely changed her mind about it. 

“I found it to be about something else altogether,” says McAll. “My version of it was not going to be like the classic scary monster thing. Because that’s not what I found in the book.” 

Kate McAll

What did she find in it? Not the same horror box in which we tend to place the Frankenstein of pop culture. “There are horror moments in it but they are not at all like the movies…The book is surprisingly poetic,” says McAll. “It is very powerfully about loss.  It is really about seeing Frankenstein descend into the deepest, most scary depression and obsession after the loss of his mother. As for the Creature, his loss  – of a parent of any kind –  was the greatest of all.”

That’s the heart of what the story is about for McAll. Grief. And that’s what keeps it so fresh and timeless. It’s this very personal story about grieving, about fighting against death, about abandonment (which grief often feels like), and how different characters deal with this process – for better or for worse.

McAll has been personally coping with grief over the last two years, “so it was quite strange to come to this and find that’s what Frankenstein is about. It’s got immense emotional maturity given that Mary was only 19 years old when she wrote it.”

Connecting the storytelling style in the book to the genre of radio drama has been the structural exploration of this adaptation. “I’ve just let the storytellers tell their stories….in its purest form. I haven’t imposed anything on it, ” says McAll. 

The process of adapting Frankenstein and leaning into this kind of oral storytelling tradition reminded McAll of a memory she’d forgotten, a pure enchantment with storytelling before she was old enough to think about a career at the BBC – or any career at all: “It made me think of when I was little…there was a show on the radio called Listen with Mother…My mother was pregnant with my younger sister, so I must have been four. We’d lie down on the floor and I’d curl into her tummy, and we’d drift off together, listening. It was lovely to have that memory back.”

Based in the UK, McAll has come out to the US every year for the last 20 years. Perhaps fittingly for the theme of her current adaptation, the first project she pitched for production in the U.S., a possible adaptation of the book The Blood of Strangers, began with a phone call asking for advice with the actor Martin Jarvis on September 11…2001.  The news was only just breaking and she pointed out to Martin, who was in LA at the time and just waking up, that there seemed to be something happening in New York. 

And so grief seems to follow us.

“Frankenstein feels very relevant for the times we live in.  Many of us are dealing with a kind of political grief. It’s a state of shock,” says McAll. “Grief for how you believed the world was. And as you get older and the losses become more likely, this kind of story just makes you think about it all.”

Stacy Keach stars as the Creature in LA Theatre Works upcoming “Frankenstein” – Photo by Brian Cahn

McAll is a freelance producer, director and writer working mainly for BBC Radio 4, which produces new radio dramas daily. While radio dramas mostly died out in the U.S. with the introduction of television, that didn’t happen in the UK. “Radio stayed. It’s always been strong,” says McAll. “In radio, the most important thing is to keep people listening. There are a million ways they can stop and switch off. You might have 30 seconds when they’ll concentrate. You’ve really got to capture them from the start and hold onto them.”

McAll didn’t always know that her place was in radio drama. “I came from a very working class background where nobody was educated past the age of 16.  I remember one day at school, then I was about 9, the teacher said we were going to create a radio drama complete with sound effects – coconut shells for horses hooves and everything…I remember being very fired up at being introduced to this world of imagination. It was different from books. That stayed with me for a long time.” 

McAll was the first to go to university in her family. “After I graduated, I didn’t know what I wanted to be or could be. I sort of reverted to being this child of a working class family. I couldn’t imagine having a profession.  I just didn’t have a template for it in my head.”

She started with a “very very boring job” working as a secretary for the head of engineering at the BBC, but realized Radio 4 was just across the car park. “I smoked at the time, and a lot of the radio producers smoked, so they were the first people I met – in the smoking area! It was as if a light went on. It was so thrilling and exciting,” says McAll. “I managed to find where I was meant to be, figured out how it worked, applied for jobs since I was already in the door, and worked my way up from secretary to a producer in just over a year.”

With her 30 year career in radio documentary and drama, McAll knows the importance of voice actors, and the LA Theatre Works production of Frankenstein is pulling no punches with Stacy Keach in the role of “The Creature” and Adhir Kalyan (Arrested Development) playing Dr. Victor Frankenstein. “If anybody can tell you a story, Stacy can,” says McAll. Radio acting takes an abundance of talent: “You’ve got to keep people absolutely enchanted with what you’re saying.” 

Actors Mike McShane (Whose Line Is It Anyway), LA Theatre Works favorite Darren Richardson, Seamus Dever and Cerris Morgan-Moyer round out the cast;  LA Theatre Works associate artistic director Anna Lyse Erikson directs. “Actors who do comedy are really great at drama because they have the timing,” says McAll. “They know exactly how something should be. If you can do comedy, you can do anything.”

Cerris Morgan Moyer – Photo by Matt Petit

Watching live foley, amazing actors, and listening to a classic tale in an LA Theatre Works show is more than enough for a great evening at the theatre, but it is the heart of the story that will stay with anyone listening – the purity of how Mary Shelley describes and explores the idea of birth and death and our own grieving for both moments. “How the Creature describes what it was like for him to come into being is so beautiful and thoughtful,” says McAll. “And if you’re coming to this with the movies in your head, it is so unexpected.”

McAll writes in her introduction to the play how the original novel was birthed from the most primitive and important rituals of human experience – telling stories around a fire to ward off the darkness. “There have been many adaptations of this tale, and it’s a daunting task to present another, but what I have wanted to keep in mind is that this was originally a story told in a single voice, from a young girl’s imagination; that it was born of a waking dream, and recounted in a creaky old mansion, on a dark, cold, rainy, candle lit night.”   

Frankenstein runs Friday February 28 – March 1, presented by LA Theatre Works at the James Bridges Theater UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, 235 Charles E. Young Drive Los Angeles, CA 90095. Call 310-827-0889 or visit www.latw.org for information and reservations.

Know a female or FPI-friendly theater, company or artist? Contact us at [email protected] & check out The FPI Files for more stories.

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Ruthless, The Musical

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by Diane Grant

Theatre Palisades just finished a run of Ruthless, The Musical,  by Joel Paley (book and lyrics) and Marvin Laird (music).  It’s a dark comedy about a ruthless little girl who would do anything ANYTHING to play Pippi Longstocking in the school play.  And she does, of course. 

Spoiler.  Bodies all over the place at the end!

When I heard about the play, I was drawn to it immediately because my daughter and I watched all (I think all.  I’d hate to think we missed any) of the Pippi Longstocking movies.  For those deprived of that pleasure, I must tell you that Pippi is a little Swedish girl with amazing powers.  On fact, she is the world’s strongest girl.  She can leap from the ground and into a high tree branch just like that!  She has red hair and a gap tooth and a father who is at sea.  

Her Mother is no longer living and Pippi lives in her house with only her horse and her monkey.  She has two other best friends, too, her neighbors, Tommy and Annika, and they all have many adventures together. (Wikipedia tells me that the original Swedish language books set Pippi’s full name as Pippilotta Viktualia Rullgardina Krusmynta Efraimsdotter!)

You can see that it would be a thrill to play such a girl in the school play.  More importantly, it is the lead in the school play.  The LEAD! 

The little girl in Ruthless is nothing like Pippi.  She is much more like the girl in The Bad Seed.  (The writers couldn’t get the rights to that and just ran with the idea!)

The music seems to come from the heart of the writers and one of the songs, in which a third grade teacher sings about being a third grade teacher as “something to fall back on” sent all the show biz aspirants, in the theater, including me, into a swoon.

It started me thinking.  Wouldn’t be wonderful to invent a girl protagonist, people would fall in love with and want to follow through many adventures?  Anne of Avonlea?  Ramona Quimby? Nancy Drew? Harriet, the Spy?

Where do these characters come from?  Beverly Cleary said that she heard her neighbor calling her little girl, Ramona, and Ramona Quimby was born.  Nancy Drew was a detective in a mystery series created by publisher Edward Stratemeyer, ghostwritten by a number of authors and published under the pseudonym Carolyn Keene. She was the counterpart to the Hardy Boys series.  

In 1908, Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery, was published by a company in Boston and sold just under 20,000 copies in under half a year.  Montgomery had made notes as a young girl about a couple who were mistakenly sent an orphan girl instead of the boy they had requested and the notes became the inspiration for the book.

In 1964, Louise Fitzhugh created eleven-year-old Harriet M. Welsch.  Harriet is an aspiring writer who lives in New York City.  She’s precocious, ambitious and enthusiastic about her future career. Encouraged by her nanny, Catherine “Ole Golly,” Harriet carefully observes others and writes her thoughts down in a notebook as practice for her future career, to which she dedicates her life. She follows an afternoon “spy route”, during which she observes her classmates, friends, and people who reside in her neighborhood.

In 1990, J.K.Rowling was on a train from Manchester to London when the idea for Harry Potter suddenly “fell into her head”. Rowling gives an account of the experience on her website saying:  “I had been writing almost continuously since the age of six but I had never been so excited about an idea before. I simply sat and thought, for four (delayed train) hours, and all the details bubbled up in my brain, and this scrawny, black-haired, bespectacled boy who did not know he was a wizard became more and more real to me.”

I don’t have a train to take but can invent my own spy route.  I’ll just be more observant on my daily walks, maybe even change the route a little.  Diane, the Spy.  (It could work!  No?)

Remember that writing is to put love in the world, not to use against your friends. But to yourself you must tell the truth.” –Ole Golly, Harriet the Spy, Louise Fitzhugh

it’s storytime

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ICYMI, the Academy Awards were last Sunday and all week I have been seeing post after post about Taika Waititi and quotes from his speech. 

“I dedicate this to all the indigenous kids in the world who want to do art and dance and write stories,” Waititi said in his acceptance speech. “We are the original storytellers and we can make it here as well.”

A well deserved reactions considering how long we have been telling our stories.  

Storytelling is part of who we are, regardless of indigeniety.  Every culture, race and ethnic group has some kind of tie to it.  Otherwise how would we, today have a link to our past.  Sometimes, we live so deeply in these stories they consume us.  Once just a tale to pass the longs and nights and to entertain, we now believe wholeheartedly in them.  We give them power and when someone tries to disprove the story; we fight for it and cling to it like bubblegum stuck to your shoe on a hot summer day.

As a child, my father ran the summer camp program, where we he would take the group camping for a night.  Although not that deep into the woods, yet a good 20 minutes outside of town, we would camp next to the rapids.  At night while roasting smores, dad would spin yarns that still make me think twice before I jump into a lake. 

Growing up I never considered the history of my people’s stories, I have never really thought of where they come from, or who they come from, until now.  I remember my dad telling stories around the campfire during summer camp.  Sitting around the fire, roasting smores, while he told of water monsters and things that live in the woods.  Which as a kid that was afraid of the dark and hated bugs did not bode well.  My favourite was of the a creature that lived in the water and always made me pause before I jumped off the high rock into the water.  

It wasn’t until I started writing that my dad told me we come from storytellers, that was who our family was an I am finally coming home by writing. In telling stories, I am torn.  By myth, tradition and technology.  I live in social media, not realizing that these snippets of life give a glimpse into stories, made to look pretty with filters and the right angle,  cultivating, creating a new story, a myth so we can carry on with the day.

As I look back to this story my dad would tell and I remember, I wonder the true meaning of it is as it most likely been re-told and distorted through time by the lens of the teller.

Jennifer Bobiwash

Music X Writing

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My writing tends to be very inspired by music—either because I am listening to my 272-track (19 hours, 51 minute) Spotify playlist, Musica X Escribir (It’s private, so you won’t find it) or because I’ve created a mental playlists that speaks to a certain story I am putting together. For this post, I thought it might be fun to share some of those tracks with you all. Who knows, maybe they’ll become songs you play in the background while you write or, at the very least, fun new contributions to your everyday playlist.

Enjoy!

Immunity – Jon Hopkins

I first heard of Jon Hopkins by way of the film How I Live Now, which he scored. I ended up checking out more of his work and really clicked with his 2013 album, Immunity. The title track is particularly special. I tend not to listen to music with vocals when I’m writing—I know myself, I will stop focusing on the work and sing along—but I somehow never have trouble with this song. That all being said, I want to stress that this IS an electronic music album, so I can’t advise anyone to listen to the entirety of this record when writing. HOWEVER, it is a very good album that I would highly recommend for a listen during a road trip.

It’s Not Your Fault (It’s How Air Works) – The Boats

I freaking love the title of this song. It puts a dumb smile on my face for sure, which is probably the main reason I’m listing this specific track. The truth, however, is that unlike the previously mentioned Immunity, the Boats’ Songs by the Sea is definitely an album you can listen to its entirety while you write.  

Songs by the Sea is from 2004 but I did not come in contact with it until three years later when I found a lost ipod on the city bus. Having some time to kill until I made it downtown, I plugged my headphones in and hit shuffle. Musically, that lost ipod was one of the best things that happened to me.

If you’re wondering what happened to that lost ipod… Dear Reader, please know that I tried turning it in to the bus driver who told me to turn it in at the lost and found when we hit the station, but then, I forgot. I’m serious, I forgot!

It’s one of those things that keeps me up at night.

Anyway, Songs by the Sea was one of those albums that I listened to a lot—for writing, for studying—it did and does the trick.

Wede Harer Guzo – Hailu Mergia & Dahlak Band

Did Beyonce recommend this track somewhere at some time? I only ask because the comments section of this link seem to allude to the fact. Huh.

Anyway, I don’t follow many other accounts on Spotify, mostly because I don’t go looking for them, but the one I do follow belongs to a friend of a friend. We’d all collaborated on a project together and during our lunch break said friend of a friend put on his playlist and this song came up. Something lit up within me. “This will go on my writing playlist”, I thought. And it did. And I’ve played the hell out of it, and maybe Beyonce did. I think you should too. 

La Presumida – Trio Xoxocapa

During my high school years I was part of a Mexican folkloric dance group. I hated it. You had to smile a lot. Not my thing. The music, however, I really appreciated. A few years later, while working on a screenplay, I wrote a character who, unlike me, was really interested in Mexican folkloric dancing but, unlike me, was pretty terrible at it (who am I kidding, I was bad too!). One of the songs that she masters during the course of the story is “La Presumida” (The Conceited Woman). I thought it would fit perfectly for her snooty persona. 

I’m not snooty, you are.

Love Is Strange – Buddy Holly

I don’t know why but I listened the HECK out of this song last summer. I really have no clue where I picked it up from but it seemed to be in my head all of sudden. I can’t say that I actually wrote while I listened to it. It was more like I would write a little and then listen, as some sort of treat. Good writer, good writer.

Mucha Muchacha – Esquivel

My earliest recollection of this song is by way of one of my favorite authors, Michele Serros. An early iteration of her website would play this song as an image loaded up of a coquettish Serros concealed by a mound of chicharrones (fried pork cracklings). A banner at the top read, “Mucha Michele”.

Michele Serros

Man, I really miss her. (I could write more about her here but I will save that for a future post I have planned up.)

I remember at the time (how old was I then—14? 15?) I looked up the song, thought it was cool, but sort of left it at that. It wasn’t until the summer of 2018 that I was producing my play, Senorita Monthly Juice, via the Hollywood Fringe Festival that my brother-in-law reintroduced me to the song by way of his interest in its composer, Esquivel (Juan Garcia Esquivel). Often referred to as the “Busby Berkeley of Cocktail Music”, it felt appropriate to use “Mucha Muchacha” for a group dance number in the play.

That summer I ended up going through an Esquivel rabbit hole and started checking out more of his music, some of which I still listen to when I write, if the vibe is appropriate 😉 That being said, I’d like to show you the following song:

Popotito 22 – Burbujas

“Popotito 22” was one of many songs composed by Esquivel for the late 70s Mexican children’s show, Odisea Burbujas (Bubble Odyssey). I mean, how cool is this song?!

First of the Gang to Die – Morrissey

This one is hard to write about because man-oh-man: Morrissey, YOU HAVE CHANGED! But I feel the need to include it because this song really sparked something for me during the time I was writing my first play.  I can still remember being sprawled out on the living room floor of my Santa Cruz undergrad residence, feeling stuck in my first draft, when this song came on—I shot up from the floor and knew where the story had to go. 

Mossbraker – Broken Social Scene

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m61Hw1XZcxI

Broken Social Scene is one of my favorite bands. They have really good energy and I’m glad to have finally seen them live for the first time about two years ago because for a while I didn’t think I’d get the chance. This particular track, Mossbraker, is from their debut studio album, Feel Good Lost. For me, this is a pretty good album to listen to when writing as the instrumentation is gorgeous and there are minimal lyrics. As my pal, Wikipedia, will tell you, this album is very much a stylistic predecessor of work by the band KC Accidental which can be classified as ambient, post-rock. I mention this because its important to note that Broken Social Scene’s style has had its own musical evolution thereafter. Just letting you know in case you go looking at their other records to play while you write.

Unknown Kohoutek – The Sun Ra Arkestra

Concert for the Comet Kohoutek by The Sun Ra Arkestra makes me happy. For some reason, this album reminds me of traditional Oaxacan music. I really don’t know why—I don’t have the musical background to be able to explain how that works itself out in my mind, but it just does. So I did a lot of listening to this album when I was writing the screenplay I’d mentioned above. Then I also went back and listened to it when I was working on a play that I’m still not sure how I feel about, so I’ll just leave it at that -_-

In case you’re wondering, here’s an example of traditional Oaxacan music:

MUSICA DE OAXACA GUELAGUETZA EN VIVO (REGION DE TUXTEPEC)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fg72TaRFGIc

If you cut to the 4 minute, 10 second mark you will hear a song I am expected to dance with my dad at every Oaxacan party we attend because my mom sure isn’t going to.

That’s it for this post!

Please let me know if you listen to any of the tracks and have plans of incorporating them in your life or work, somehow. And please, tell me about the songs that have inspired your writing– I’d love to check them out.

Zury 🙂