MFA in Creative Writing Program
I grew up in a post-war housing development in Skokie, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. My parents were card-carrying agnostics living in a neighborhood of Traditional Jews (the synagogue was at the end of our street) and Catholics (their church was across from my school.) I spent many a Saturday morning sitting in our window watching those going to temple walking past our house in their best clothes on their ways to Skokie Valley Traditional, and many a Sunday morning watching those going to church pile into station wagons for the short trip to St. Joan of Arc. On steaming hot days in the summer, I didn’t envy them. All the rest of the time, I did.
From childhood on, I actively searched for a religion to which I felt I belonged. I tried the Big Three; I chanted with Buddhists; I visited the B’ahai, who’d built by far the coolest temple up north on the lake. Meanwhile, my mother constantly took us out of school for matinees downtown: I saw Eve Arden rave in The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, Sandy Dennis run her fingers through raw hamburger in And Miss Reardon Drinks A Little, As You Like It, with a whole bunch of old people in it, The Organic Theatre’s famous mostly-nude adaptation of Animal Farm, with a whole bunch of young people in it, Oliver! and a million high-school productions of Oklahoma! When I graduated from Goddard College in the late ‘70s, I thought I had found my true religion: poetry. This was because I got into the Iowa Writer’s Workshop in Poetry, and I thought it was a sign.
A week into grad school, I realized that sitting around all day writing poetry was not enough for me. Also, I could not quote Yeats. I had wasted my youth on horses, odd jobs and road trips, and couldn’t quote one great writer, let alone a poet. I was an embarrassment to myself. I avoided facing this by enrolling in a course called Basic Playwriting taught by a grad student named Lee Blessing. When the head of the Playwriting Department suddenly quit his job, he was replaced in a matter of hours by an insane Scottish playwright named Tom McGrath, whose exquisite play, The Hard Man, was a huge influence on me, and subsequently by Phil Bosakowski, who taught us that plays were agile things which could be written in a matter of minutes, put on by oneself, and moved on from, like stepping stones, to new places. To me, it seemed like writing a play was just a matter of pumping up a poem. Thus began my journey towards Theatre, my passion, the temple, the church where I belong.
The sheer joy of writing sustains me through good times and bad, allows me to discover things I didn’t know, to work out problems I’m too immature to handle yet, to feel love and gratitude in an often unlovable, ungracious world. I like lending this out in teaching. A practical person, I like teaching people how to sell what they write. I crave the freedom of working on a novel in obscurity, and I enjoy the restrictions inherent in writing a villanelle, or a play, or a screenplay. I love inventing people and deeds, and I love working my own life into a character’s, so that I can deny that I ever personally thought or did such things. I teach from the experience of almost thirty years of daily fighting and flying with my talent and my shortcomings and the infinite possibilities inherent on a blank page. I like engaging in dialogue over new work. I ask students to read constantly in order to find out how other writers handle certain things. I encourage a habit of writing to form. I know the psychology of being a writer as well as structure and form, and enjoy sharing this as well. I like helping writers get over the fear of revision, find inspiration, and see all the fantastic possibilities in their ideas. I love narrative and I love busting narrative. I love the stage picture and all the elements of performance that one can bring into an evocative piece of theatre. If I have a static philosophy, it’s something like, as Roethke put it, “…I learn by going where I have to go…”
On to credits: poetry published in small magazines; many plays produced around the country and the world, including The Stick Wife, the adaptations, with composer Kim D. Sherman, of Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!, and The Boxcar Children (book & lyrics, musicals), The Mud Angel, HeartLand, The Sirens, a version of Snow White, now playing at Disneyland, Hearts Are Wild… I’ve worked in television since 1990 when I wrote my first MOW, The Haunted, which still plays on the Sci-Fi Channel. That was followed by a dozen or so movies for NBC and CBS. I just finished my first novel, Mass for Shut-Ins, and am working on two new musicals, Club California, with composer Craig Safan, and Makeover, with my writing partner of 20 years, Kim D. Sherman, and a new play, The Posthumous Democrat. I am a member of New Dramatists in New York, and co-owner of a working horse farm in Dutchess County, NY. In addition to writing, I’m raising two kids with Dave Owens, who was playing Ivar in O Pioneers! when we met.
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