Look. Listen. I’m what they call “mid-life.” I’m what they call “late-blooming.” And even though I was just an “average-Joe” and a “working-mother,” I happened to be in the “right-place-at-the-right-time” when the “opportunity-presented-itself.” I was “ready-willing-and-able” to “follow my dreams.” I’m lucky. I went back to school. I went to Goddard College. When I was […]
…disability is too often excluded in discussions of diversity, a good deal of which, for good reason, focuses on race. This silence is especially noteworthy because disability crosses racial, gender, sexuality, class, and national boundaries.
“I get it: I keep trying to build cathedrals when I should be building yurts.”
Dear John McCain,
I think of your tap code late at night when I am lonely. You broken and spent in the Hanoi Hilton tapping out “Are you okay?” to the guy on the other side of the wall.
On Writers, Writer’s Block, Generosity, Creativity and Community
I just started rehearsals for a ten-day workshop a relatively new play of mine: BORN IN EAST BERLIN. The workshop is at TheatreWorks in Palo Alto. I decided to blog the first day.
At this past residency in Vermont, a few faculty members were sitting around before a meeting, talking about nothing in particular, and then one of us, for whatever reason that made sense in the moment, was describing a scene in a Martin Scorsese movie. Maybe Casino; maybe Goodfellas. Doesn’t matter. What matters is what happens […]
Whenever you bump up against a writing situation that feels impossible, remember the Sugar Balloon, and all the experimentation, tenacity, innovation, determination, and risk that it took to arrive at this floating answer to a once-thought-impossible question.
The paragraph or so of writing in preparation for this post I began on an empty page of an old, located notebook, one that flips vertically like a police ticket or meter maid book, but unlike law enforcement trappings
By chance or design, I held the words of the Salvadoran poet Claribel Alegría, later translated by poet Carolyn Forche and published by Pittsburgh in Flowers from the Volcano.