Ok. New Idea. Sort of. But where do I start. How do I start? What do I write? What kind of play is it going to be? How many characters should I have? When is enough? Ok, deep breath, step back, take a minute, take off the perfection hat and start writing. More deep breaths, panic has set in. I don’t know what I’m doing….
Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeep.
We interrupt this blog post for a tiny meltdown. Please enjoy this calming landscape, while we collect ourselves.
The act of telling stories, creating work with strangers, friends or repeated colleagues in the theatre is the greatest gift and seems at times a hard action.
The merging of ideas. The coming together to birth then share a common vision requires an artist to shed old fears, break repetitive habits and go beyond their own abilities to fuse a groups talents into a collaborative manifestation all can stand by.
Active listening, being aware of how my verbal / non verbal communication affects the group, knowing when to be assertive, as well as being able to negotiate are social skills that I continually am practicing.
I do not need to always win nor am I conforming with a loss. Instead, I’ve come to see that I am expanding/growing as a storyteller. Giving the work a chance to be great and since the work cannot be fully done alone; I’m learning to bend with the wind in all aspects of my life. That way the work stays fluid. Making sure that I do not allow fears to get in the way. Trusting the team, relying on practiced social skills and believing in what you’ve created are the first ingredients of theatre magic.
When I was in 8th grade, transitioning to a Catholic high school, my teacher advised my mother to send me to a co-ed school. The reason: I didn’t know how to act around boys. The nun wasn’t worried about my body. She was worried about my mouth. I wasn’t afraid of speaking out – loud and often – behavior she suspected would make me an outcast for life. I didn’t defer to the boys.
My mother did send me to a co-ed high school where I continued to speak out – loud and often. And indeed I did find myself the outcast, but luckily I discovered theatre and the power of the written word.
And yet.
How often do we apologize for our writing, telling anyone who will listen that it’s “not quite finished” or “just a first draft” or whatever qualifier we attach to it. Have you ever heard a male playwright describe his work that way?
STOP BEING A GIRL!
That’s my mantra to remind myself to just finish the damn play and get it out there. How often do you hear a male writer apologize for his work? Uh – never? Helaine Becker put it a different way.
Helaine is a very successful non-fiction writer for kids. Her latest work
“Counting on Katherine” profiles Katherine Johnson, the NASA math whiz from the film “Hidden Figures.” I was lucky enough to hear her speak to a group of children’s book writers in San Diego last month. Her talk covered the usual topics: putting together a non-fiction proposal, creating a target list of places to send your work, following the decision makers on Twitter, and all the nuts and bolts of the topic.
The room was full of women. Children’s book writers are almost always women, despite the fact that the industry itself overly celebrates male writers for kids. (For more on this sad topic, check out the essays and podcast Kidlitwomen.)
Helaine looked around the room, shook her head, and started to give a different lecture. She laid down the law for the ladies who wanted their work to see the light of day: send out your manuscript when it’s “good enough,” she said. Don’t wait for perfect. She insisted that “not open for submissions” was a mere gatekeeper to keep the timid out of the system. Sitting around waiting for someone to get back to you was unprofessional. “You have an obligation to followup.” After six weeks, write back, ask whether they’ve had a chance to look at your work yet, and ask when you might expect a response.
In other words, STOP BEING A GIRL.
My plays are not perfect. It’s unlikely any will ever make it to Broadway or Arena Stage or South Coast Rep. That doesn’t mean they aren’t worthy of productions and reviews and publication. (In fact, my adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s “The Nose” was indeed just published by YouthPLAYS!) Instead of apologizing,I’m sending them out, trusting that I just haven’t found the right audience for them. Yet.
The same can be said for my first kids book. It will likely never win a Newbery Award, but it was “good enough” to get me an agent, to get great feedback from big-deal editors, but it was soundly rejected by the big five New York publishers.
That hurt. A lot.
STOP BEING A GIRL, KITTY!
I thought a lot about who was the audience of this book. I decided that “Welcome to Washington, Fina Mendoza” would resonate with folks inside the Beltway and with kids who are from California, Texas, and the west. So I shopped it to independent publishers thousands of miles away from New York and it found a home with
Black Rose Writing out of Texas.
Think about your work. Which audience can it particularly inspire? Out of towners visiting Broadway? Students who stumble into a reading of your play at a neighborhood coffee house? Senior citizens who would adore a play about a famous woman from their lifetime? There is an audience for our work. Our “good enough” work. We just have to find it.
In the meantime, let’s stop apologizing for our work. The only way our voices can be heard is if we have the guts to put it out there…over and over again.
Be brave. Be persistent. Be a new kind of girl.
Kitty is on book tour with her first middle grade mystery “Welcome to Washington, Fina Mendoza” (Black Rose Writing, 2019) and will be reading from and signing books at: Politics & Prose, The Wharf, Washington, DC Monday March 18 at 7; Children’s Book World, West LA Saturday March 30 at 2:30; and Vroman’s Pasadena Monday April 1 at 6pm.
I used to binge write. It kept me tied in to my creative side. Now, all I want to do is write something every day. One sentence will do. I want to turn off my edit machine and just write.
I’ll even settle for re-writing. It is never good to be a writer who is too busy to write; it is suffocating me…
Today, I decided to create an in-house retreat – set the date, take vacation, create the itinerary, and just do it.
Sometimes you spend all weekend writing out a book idea about haunted houses and choose your own adventure books and the meaning of home but then you miss the deadline for the application you were writing it for because you can’t tell the difference between am and pm, apparently.
Sometimes you get big rejections all in a row and your summer is already feeling empty and long and what the hell are you going to do after you graduate from this MFA program anyway?
Sometimes people ask you what are you going to do with your degree? As if the answer isn’t what I always did before, but, like, older.
Sometimes you meet your best friend’s new baby and love her immediately.
Sometimes you finish something. Sometimes you feel as if you’re never going to finish anything. Sometimes you feel as if nobody cares anyway and what are you doing writing about monsters and ghosts and weird shit when there are politics to worry about, real monsters just around the corner.
Sometimes you sit in a room of people you adore talking about creative things and you just want to run out of the room, out to the street, tossing your notebook in the air, the hell with shoes, your bare feet slopping in the puddles along Laurel Canyon Blvd, a street not built for this sort of rain, the endless, all-at-once, confusing Southern California rain that you will miss terribly when it’s gone.
Sometimes you grieve for things years before you have to. Like this moment. And this one.
And this one too.
Sometimes you see the rest of your life spinning out from you, circling back upon itself like a rope tied to an anchor and thrown overboard of a ship, twisting down and around itself on and on, into nothingness and you realize too late that the free end is not tied to anything, and there it goes, your life, twisting down into the water for some dolphins to laugh at.
Sometimes you make scones.
Sometimes you drink too much coffee and don’t sleep enough and your heart feels like it wants to choke you.
Sometimes you write a meandering monologue just to get something out and it suddenly opens up your play, and it doesn’t seem scary anymore. Not anymore.
And then another rejection comes.
Sometimes you buy a typewriter from 1941 off of Craigslist for a project in which you don’t end up using it anyway, but you have always wanted a typewriter so, what the hell. The guy selling it is also a writer – TV, he says – and he’d bought the thing with big plans to write his poetry on it – the romantic poet with his typewriter and coffee and cigarette. But he never used it. And the poetry was never written. And now it’s yours, along with its two unused ribbons. And it scares you, to type on it, because it feels so much more permanent than a computer. If you want a rewrite, you got to type it all, word for word – and it makes you realize that the kind of relationship writers used to have with their words was perhaps different, having to rewrite them over and over. An intimacy we don’t know in the same way these days. The intimacy of old friends. The intimacy of old lovers.
Sometimes you dream of traveling the world with this typewriter, creating a one-woman show with it, building a whole magical event around it that you can take to festivals, perform in grand halls and in elementary school classrooms.
And this, too, has already been grieved for. Remember that time I could dream about traveling the world with this typewriter? Remember when that was a possibility?
Sometimes you think, boy, everyone makes it look so easy.
This computer is new and even getting to the email has been an adventure and one I’m not happy to take. I seem to spend so much of my time lately wrestling with machines and devices and things that talk to me but don’t tell me what I want to know. But here goes.
I can’t believe that it’s 2019 and even worse, the second month of 2019. I know that we’re supposed to be thankful for every day. I am thankful for every day. (Even the cold, blustery, rainy days.) But January 2019 was the month that I was supposed to be greeting everybody in Italian. “Hello,” I would say in Italian. “Welcome!” And even more proficiently, “Do you think the rain will stop?”
I fell in love with Italy when I became a huge fan of an Italian series, with English subtitles, called Don Matteo (Father Matthew). Don Matteo lives in a beautiful city called Gubbio. His home is a rectory which he shares with a collection of recurring characters, all of whom meet in the rectory kitchen. He spends his free time solving mysteries. He rides a bicycle, sometimes through fields of tall golden sunflowers, helps all and sundry, drives the local police quite mad (except for his pal on the force) by solving all the murders before they do, and of course, speaks Italian. He’s also very handsome.
2018 was the year that I was going to learn Italian. I mentioned that way back to my husband and daughter and even as I heard that intention coming out my mouth, I knew I was in trouble.
Delighted, they bought CD’s – 1,000’s of them in big boxes with photos of happy men and women on them speaking fluent Italian, and books with lined pages in them for making notes in (Italian) and practicing, practicing, practicing.
Will I ever learn? Just as I finally settled in and cracked the first CD, we changed TV sets and bought a beautiful 50”. Which brings me back to my first paragraph. To date, I haven’t been able to set it up with Roku, the device with which I watched the MHZ Choice Channel that carries Don Matteo (and many other enjoyable other programs from Italy and Germany and France, etc. ) Furthermore, the Web tells me that the latest episodes of Don Matteo haven’t been subtitled. And last week, my husband found an article saying that the program will now be shown in L.A only on Tuesdays at 5:15 pm.
Of course, there is always Tosca. I have that CD, too. With the lyrics in translation.
An image of the book I’m reading, and some of my belongings that watch over me
By Cynthia Wands
I’ve just finished reading the book “Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home” by Toko-pa Turner, and it’s a wonderful examination of attachment and identity. She’s an interesting writer, and really includes the reader in her journey to find her place in the world.
Belonging is such a loaded word for me right now, as I’m
looking at characters who suffer from hoarding, or from a detachment in
belonging to family.
I’m examining issues of belonging to friendships, memories, blogs, exile, debts, illness, cats, theatre companies, journeys, writing groups and teams.
I’m particularly interested right now in the sense of
belonging to a house, witnessing a sense of our personal history there, and the
attachment we feel when we find it as our “home”.
I found this quote from Toko-pa’s book just as I was thinking of the imprint of the place of home:
“It’s said that after arriving in a new place, we will have replaced the entirety of the water in our bodies with that of the local watershed in just a few days. Though these adaptations happen at a biological level, we are vastly unconscious of the implications a place has on our psyche. Just as humans carry an energetic signature, so too do geographies. However, like fish swimming in water, we are rarely aware of what energy a place holds until we leave it, or return to it after time away.”
Toko-pa Turner, Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home (belongingbook.com)
Alyson Mead speaks with Jacqueline Goldfinger about designer babies, scientific advances, and her new play Babel, presented in a staged reading by Sacred Fools for one night only, on Sunday, January 27th.
What conversations do you want to have? Send your suggestions for compelling female playwrights or theater artists working on LA stages to Alyson Mead at [email protected], then listen to “What She Said.”
I’m writing a play about hoarding. Ghosts. A truly evil
woman who might have been in my family history. Trees. Slaves that were bought
and sold by the Quaker families in Upstate New York. And the gravitational
weight of objects that define our place of belonging.
Yesterday I said goodbye to almost one hundred friends.
Enemies. Reminders. Nags. Planets that rotate around the center of my memories.
I gave myself the project of cleaning out my closets, where
I keep all my clothes from the last several years. Okay, the last dozen years. Okay, okay. The
last two or three decades. I tend to keep all my clothes. This includes the
denim jacket with the studded rhinestones, the embroidered black pants from
Chinatown in Manhattan, the fuzzy sweater that is the size of a refrigerator.
They’ve all been living in my closet. Taking up space.
Reminding me that I don’t use them, but they have a claim on the real estate in
our small house with the small closets.
When I started researching the pathology of hoarding, I was
horrified by the awful consequences of this difficult behavior. I know I’m not
a hoarder, I don’t have the space.
But I do tend to keep all my clothes. I’ve bought clothes in
thrift stores, online, at Nordstroms, Macys, designer outlets. Even though my
size has changed a lot in the last few years: cancer, chemo, hip replacement, plantar
fasciitis, getting older, gaining weight, getting less agile. I don’t fit into
most of these clothes anymore. So, I thought this was a simple challenge: get
rid of the clothes that I haven’t worn in a year. Or two. Or Five.
I had a kind of conversation with every item as I held it up
to review its life span and value.
Hello darling. The Evan Picon suit, silk and wool, with
beautiful trim. Last worn in 1992. I love you. But I can’t keep looking at you
if you’re not going to get out of the closet.
Baby: My vintage hippie denim jeans with the wonderful
patches all over them. Purchased in some thrift store in Hollywood. A size 8.
(My friends will know that I have not been a size 8 in a long time.) I
loved looking at these. That was the basis of our relationship.
An azure blue silk Henri Bendel tunic, tiny jewel like
buttons for trim. Worn once. Loved the idea of it. It didn’t love me as much.
So many jackets and blouses and pants and skirts. I’d
forgotten about most of these. We didn’t have much to say to one another.
White Victorian linen shirtwaists, high collared blouses.
Gorgeous. Not useful in my current lifetime. Maybe if I was going to do another
play on Emily Dickinson.
The black jet tulle dress I wore on the night we went to the
theatre in the West End in London and met Judi Dench backstage. We had
champagne in her dressing room. I have a picture of that night and that dress.
So I’ll keep the image and not the dress. I’ll always have London.
And so it went. I had to rally my flagging spirits and cart
all the bags of clothes out of the house before I could change my mind. I
really didn’t think it would be this difficult to let go of my stash, my
collection, my hoard, of clothing.
I’m including this amusing graphic of “Reading Between the Lines”, as a warning that the “provocative” ( – irritating) story I’m about to tell, could be seen as something written “in the tradition of” (- shamelessly derivative) as multiple points of view. Like every story. Like every play.
In November I was invited to the opening night of “THE HARD
PROBLEM”, by Tom Stoppard at Lincoln Center.
(I know how posh that sounds – I loved writing it.) When I was a young
actor I performed in a couple of Tom Stoppard plays and I’ve always delighted
in his witty characters, the mental gymnastics, the world of words in his
writing.
My sister was taking me to this opening night performance,
and we went out to an early dinner, (yes, she got us a table at Joe Allen’s). Someone
I love very much was in the cast, and like a lot of writers, I tend to live
vicariously through the lives of others, this was a peak experience. Flowers
for opening night. Joe Allen’s. My sister. Lincoln Center. A star performer I
have always championed doing incredible work in the show.
That’s the top line of this story.
Other threads in the story: I’ve been in and been to dozens
of opening nights in my lifetime. This one was intense. This Lincoln Center opening
night had celebrities (Rosemary Harris – who I have always loved as an actress
– sat in front of us), a new play for New York, a famous playwright, a
glamorous setting. You could feel that live wire electricity in the audience.
I was sitting next to my sister on one side, and a very
elegant gentleman on my other side. I had a brief, theatrical conversation with
him. (He reminded me of Colonel Pickering in “MY FAIR LADY”; very cultured,
articulate, and handsome. Perfect casting.)
Another thread: I was feeling very protective about my
sister that night; she had recently sprained her ankle and was walking with a
cane. She fearlessly walked into the theatre. I was on high alert watching out
for her; something I have to try and hide from her as she hates to be fussed
over by me like that.
The connecting thread: when we entered the theatre, we saw
that a young man in the seat next to us had his large suitcases wedged in our
row. We hesitated – this seemed odd. But there were no ushers to be found to
sort this out, so we had to climb over his suitcases to get to our seats. We
eventually were able to sit down, and we waited for the play to begin. We were
in high spirits, and I suppose, rather nervous.
I love opening nights: the whispers in the lobby, the ebb
and flow as the audience comes in, the scuttle of the ushers up and down the
stairs. I know what it feels like to be backstage waiting in the wings before
the lights come up. Nowadays I see myself in the audience as a kind of
satellite receiver, boosting the transmissions being beamed across the theatre.
But on this night…
Yes, on this night, I had my first case of sudden and severe
gastric distress. It started as soon as
we sat down in the theatre and I started reading the program for the play. Like
the first scary music in a horror film, I heard this growling sound. And then
more noises, like a garbage disposal chewing up your forks from a dinner party.
But then I realized that these thumping noises were coming from me. I’d never
heard these sounds before. And then this wrenching bolt of intestinal pain shot
through me. It was a spontaneous gastrointestinal nightmare.
(Thinking back on the dinner at Joe Allen’s: it was a simple
supper of chicken and vegetables. And a glass of champagne. And then a cup of
coffee. And I seem to remember that we split a dessert of some kind. It all seemed
like an innocent menu at the time. Was it the chicken? The coffee? It couldn’t
possibly be the dessert, could it, the one I can’t remember?)
But back at the play: an announcement was made that all cell
phones should be turned off, the house lights changed, and the play started. I
seemed to be okay. I focused on the words from the actors. I used mindful
meditation breathing. The play was unfolding into twists and turns, I thought I
was good.
But during the play, the young man sitting next to my
sister, the man with the big suitcases, pulled out his cell phone, turned it
on, and started to watch a soccer game. On his phone, during the play. The
sound was off, but the flickering light from the phone lit up the entire row.
You could see the audience members turn around as they tried to gesture to him
to turn it off. He ignored them.
The people next to him asked him to turn off his phone. He
shrugged his shoulders. They left to find an usher. They returned, without an
usher. He continued to watch his soccer game on his phone. After a moment, my
sister turned to him and in a sotto voce tone like the serpent in the Garden of
Eden (after the fall), she told him to turn off his phone.
He turned off his phone.
The audience’s attention returned to
the play. It was a Rubik’s cube of ideas, characters, and intentions. I’m still
thinking about it two months later. At one point there is a revelation
of betrayal in the play, underplayed so quietly, you might not be sure you heard
it.
There was a moment of quiet in the
audience.
And then it started up again. My growling noises. It sounded
like the rumbling sounds coming from a brass cannon in a far away civil war. Or:
It sounded like a huge garbage truck digesting a weeks worth of garbage. Or: I
was the only person who could hear it and I was mistakenly afraid that others
were bothered by it.
I’m not sure which version is correct, but I tried to look
unfazed and focused on the play.
And while I tried to make it look like it wasn’t me making
that noise, inside, I was trying to scold my digestive system into silence.
Knock it off! You’re
as bad as the guy with phone watching the soccer game! Stop that! I mean, cut
it out!
I wrestled with the idea of getting up, climbing over my
sister and the man with iPhone and the large suitcases, scrabbling over the
other audience members, and taking my borborygmus with me.
(I found out later that what I experienced has the scientific name borborygmus,
which is related to the 16th-century French word borborygme, itself from
Latin, ultimately from Ancient Greek. It sounds better than the other available
diagnostic titles: bubble gut, bowel sound, or stomach rumble.)
But then. The play ended. The applause and the ovations were
over. And as we left, my sister turned to the young man and in a low voice,
gave him such a warning that I don’t think he’ll show up with his iPhone and
soccer games in an audience again.
We made our way to the opening night party, and eventually
my digestive system quieted down. Or it might have been that the music and the
noise from the party was so loud that no one could hear me and my personal
rumblings. I guess it all depends on what line reading you choose.
January, 2019
