2013 Resolution Bunch #3: Creative Life

Creative Life: writing, style, photographs and painting, new ideas and making them into something tangible. Primarily, for me this refers to my work as a writer and academic and teacher, but I believe creativity extends into all areas of life.

In 2013, I plan to stimulate my creative spark every month into a new project, as well as make collaborations with other creative people. This worked very well last year, mostly in the area of teaching.

But I need new projects, too -- like taking up photography again and getting back to sewing.

Resolutions 2013:

• Finish one new play and have a draft reading.
• Finish three new novels and get them in the publishing pipeline.
• Buy a new camera.
• Set out a local photo project.
• Print and frame three photos from Paris.
• Blog consistently, keeping content fresh.
• Take sewing class.
• Set out photo & blog project for London in June.

And the good news keeps coming...

Today I had three productive meetings. (I know: hardly seems possible!)
First, with one of my writers to talk about her play. Lovely meeting, lovely discussion. Very productive.

Second, with a colleague in French who is part of a conference bringing in an African playwright next semester. I have agreed to stage excerpts from one or both of her plays during the conference with our students; we might find a second staging and an opportunity for students from multiple departments to meet and question the playwright, depending on how my chair responses.

Third, with a colleague from Creative Writing with whom I hope to form an alliance to connect our students in projects writing across genres: plays, screenplays, prose, and poetry.

Great "first step" meetings, all of which will bear great fruit, I hope.

Great Fruit

Binging... in a good way

As I noted last week, I recently participated in a submission binge with other playwrights. Throughout the month of September, fellow writers and I shared submission opportunities as well as advice, support, and cautions.

I chose to focus on submitting only short pieces: monologues and ten-minute plays. I did so because I knew I had one monologue and two short plays ready--in my opinion--for submission, unlike the longer pieces I have written. All of these different pieces are older, not written recently, and because I didn't really plan ahead, I hadn't read and "rid up" the longer pieces. And I thought that with only a few short pieces I'd be more able to determine what I should send where: only short pieces, with certain styles or subject matter, or number of actors, or minimal set.

What happened was a surprise, on several levels. First, I ended by submitting one monologue and eight different ten-minute plays to a total of thirty-nine different sites, with a total of 54 submissions. Since my goal was 30 total submissions, this was far and away a success.

Second, although I started out planning on submitting only one monologue and two plays because they were "ready," I ended by making minor and major fixes on six more plays and sending those out, too. In one case,only to one site, but still: that's one play to one site more than I had done in August.

Finally, this was good for my writer's morale, since I hadn't felt much like a playwright in some time. I'd been concentrating on the novel and the conference papers-turned-articles, and mutli-tasking as a writer is difficult, as I've learned. It's not the writing itself that is difficult, but keeping the energy of the different genres and subjects focused and moving forward, as well as finding depth in each piece when you're splitting your attention. But now I've thrown out 54 submissions into destiny's wind, and I'm waiting for the results.

Of course, it will be two to six months before I hear from most of them, and up to a year for a couple. So being ready to send more submissions as they roll across my desk (and I'll be checking every Friday and Saturday among various sites)... which they certainly will.

Goodbye, September. Hello, October!

Well, so much for good intentions! Although I enjoyed writing about my delightful meals in Savannah I got nowhere with my plan to blog about food everyday. One of my favorite topics, from any standpoint, and I still couldn't get myself on the page. What gives?

September.

Warning: whinging ahead! I am actively soliciting your feedback and suggestions on how to "get on with it."

I have been surprised by the number of challenges September brought to my life from all directions. If you've been trying to follow my blog this month, I have been more notable by my absence than my presence.

Why? September!

Work challenges! This first month of classes and administration and student interaction has been a series of uphill sprints.

T-shirt armor

Just when I thought I was done and back on level ground, uphill again... full speed!

Before I get into full-speed whinging, though, let me point out the following:

1. my first novel got bought this summer and I hope soon to have a publication date from my publisher;
2. in a recent binge, I submitted 8 short plays and 1 monologue to 54 different site for production or competition;
3. I've got my senior undergrad playwrights involved with student composers, nationally known writing mentors, and, soon, local professional directors and actors;
4. I've got my junior and senior undergrad writers involved in a Spring 2012 celebration of the 600th birthday of Joan of Arc, where their original writing will be featured in public performance;
5. I'm writing three reviews of scholarly monologues for two different journals;
6. My recent conference paper went smoothly and offers yet another possible article, with some rewriting and development;
7. I'm writing encyclopedia entries for French theatre (17th-19th centuries), due in December, by invitation and for remuneration;
8. I've been invited to help form a local short story "bookclub" with some women I really like.

This is all good stuff that's happening: improving my community, working on my creative projects, supporting my teaching, and certainly developing my career credits. And the list above all makes me happy... countering:

Challenge #1: Not becoming sucked into an All Work/All The Damn Time situation. This is a constant challenge for me, and always has been. I tend to immerse myself in my work, and this year (2011) is supposed to be about finding balance. Making work 20% of my life, instead of 95%.

This requires me taking the time to schedule time with friends, making new connections across campus, and using the 15-minutes-per-task approach to house maintenance and grading. I am certainly more conscious about getting other things into my day; I have also realized that I have to set boundaries for myself about putting time into preparing classes, grading, and my own writing.

And yet! (Devil on my shoulder, here...) I am trying to infuse new thinking into my classes, which had begun to feel "old" and boring. To break old habits of putting off grading until the "night before" and to keep the classroom lively and fresh. This requires consistent time invested daily: for my class meeting Tuesday and Thursday, for example, I am spending time on the class on Friday, Sunday, Monday, and Wednesday, beyond the in-class time or student meeting time. Too damn much!

Challenge #2: My absent colleagues. Seriously. I work in a graveyard, where the colleagues on my hallway (five men) all keep their office doors closed all the time. I see my colleagues once monthly, at our faculty meetings. I share no committees with my colleagues--because we have no committees. Seriously? In an academic department? Grant you, I don't want more meetings per se, but I am in our building four days out of every week, and I see 1-2 colleagues weekly. In a department with 17 faculty members.

Not in my hallway!

This is just... weird. We never socialize; for instance, right now we've just welcomed three new colleagues and a guest artist with... nothing. Pointing them out at faculty meetings. The guest artist is with us through October and I've yet to see him. All email, all the time. This mostly just makes me feel disconnecte
Challenge #3: Return to Drah-Ma that comes with being back in classes and the few small meetings. Email seems to heighten Drah-Ma, rather than diminish it. Moments of over-reaction, over-acting, and under-empathy. Sigh.

Challenge #4: Maintaining the good eating, sleeping, and creative habits I flourished with this summer. Keeping the fridge stocked with fresh vegetables and fruits, then remembering to eat them (ah!). The Lazy Me emerges, looking for the quick grab-and-eat stuff of the past, the extended nap, the "do it tomorrow, Scarlett" attitude I worked so hard to nix.

What I'm working on right now

Next Friday morning I'm giving a paper at a conference. I sent off the suggestion to a panel just on a whim--to a fellow academic I knew some time ago but haven't been in touch with for some time.

The title of the paper is "Women Writing Women: Herstory in American Drama."

The subject is three plays, each written by a woman, about three famous American women; the larger, more general topic is biography, gender and American drama. The plays are Alison's Room by Susan Glaspell, Alice in Bed by Susan Sontag, and Charm by Kathleen Cahill. As I said, I proposed this paper on a whim, actually just after seeing Charm here in Big D, and really with an interest to doing something in American dramatic literature again.

But funny connections have emerged as I work on these three plays, which will weave into my discussion and, hopefully, into a longer article.

Alison's Room is the Pulitzer Prize play by Susan Glaspell, possibly the first great women playwright in America. You may never have heard of her because she was a contemporary and friend of Eugene O'Neill, and his fame overshadowed hers. But they were the two playwrights first produced by the Provincetown Players, and nowadays Glaspell is often "known" for that. She was, however, also a journalist, short story writer and novelist, and in fact wrote in most genres with an impressive career. Alison's Room is her "biography" of Emily Dickinson, and takes up the subject of Dickinson's legacy as a woman, as much as a poet.

Glaspell

Dickinson

Alice in Bed by Susan Sontag is a freely imagined biography of Alice James, the sister of William and Henry, who was an invalid almost all her life, until breast cancer killed her at 43. Sontag, of course, is best known as an intellectual and writer of philosophy and critique on many topics, but this is her sole play.

James

Charm by Cahill is about Margaret Fuller, again a kind of imagined biography of the woman who wrote Woman in the Nineteenth Century, the first American document on feminism and a colleague of the New England transcendentalists like Emerson and Thoreau.

Fuller

All three women--Dickinson, James, and Fuller--lived in approximately the same period, the middle 19th century. All three playwrights--Glaspell, Sontag, and Cahill--take a less-than-documentary look at their subject matter.

But the major things I realized in starting this project are these:

• these "imagined" biographies are the only ones I could find by women about famous American women: meaning published, produced, award-winning, "known" beyond a small circle;
• all of the more famous or successfully produced biographies of American women are written by male playwrights;
• film offers more biographies--again, written almost entirely by men--and is a more successful venue.

Why? I think--and this is part of my discussion in the paper to come--because famous women are not famous for the same action-oriented, active things men are famous for. Women are neither presidents nor generals, inventors nor explorers, public speakers nor society transformers... and yes, I know that is an inaccurate as well as sweeping generality. When women are famous for the things I've mentioned, it is often in a woman-dominated sphere or for a woman-friendly topic (like birth control) that is somewhat controversial and has little "action" (i.e., violence, fighting, or car chases) associated with it.

And in considering those women who do these things, their biography is most often directed to their personal lives: as mothers, wives, daughters, sisters, or women who give up love, or lose love through their ambitions. Who sacrifice for their family, or who sacrifice their family to their ambition/art/cause.

This is not the focus of male biographies--a fact which is not new.

But I am also curious about the attitude these female playwrights take toward their subjects: Glaspell toward Dickinson, Sontag toward James, Cahill toward Fuller.

Oh, and Sontag includes an "Alice" teaparty where James has tea with Fuller and Dickinson... that's one of those weird coincidences I had forgotten about when I proposed the paper. It is a kind of Mad Hatter meeting among these three American women.

In any case, I am hoping this continues to give me insights into my work with French actresses and the men who "imagined" them.

Finally!

The week the HUGE student-oriented project I have mentioned on and off for about four months will FINALLY start!

In the next two weeks, 7 original full-length plays, written by my students, will be rehearsed for performance as staged readings between 3.1 and 3.11.

• 3 of them will be directed by popular local directors, including the artistic director/founder of a key women's theatre
• 1 will be directed by a faculty colleague
• 3 will be directed by students, including two fabulous junior women!
• guest actors including 2 faculty colleagues, 2 grad students, and 2 local actors who are former students
• 25 current students will cycle through acting roles in 7 plays, each appearing in 2 plays
• 11 night or matinee performances
• audience discussions with playwright, director, and actors after each performance
• NO BUDGET for this, beyond the stipends to be paid to guests

This is more 4 more plays than I usually produce, but in staged readings rather than productions... NEVERTHELESS! 7 plays, 7 student writers, 7 directors, 6 guest actors, 7 stage managers, 25 student actors, 11 days of performance... am I crazy?

Anyone in Big D area--want free tickets?

The Fun Parts

One of the best aspects of my job is the annual new plays festival I produce within my department. I've been doing it for a long time--loooooonnnggggg time!--and it is always fresh, exciting, challenging, and rewarding. My senior students (yes, undergraduates) write full-length plays from August to October, and, starting in November, we all start the train ride to performance. It is a ride that takes six months plus to complete.

This year, I have six students all busily writing. Three (at most) will get full productions, while the others will get two to three public staged readings with feedback sessions.

For those in full production mode, they will be working with a director, a cast, a lighting designer, and some other design help during the process. Each student will rewrite their play before and during the rehearsal process, and get a lot of mentoring in playwriting and directing areas from myself and other faculty. They will have two or three performances for audiences of about 125 spectators.

For those with staged readings, they will also get playwriting mentoring, a director, a cast, and two or three public performances of their script, complete with post-performance discussions sessions. This will help them move forward with the script.

My goal--in the end--is to familiarize the students with some form of production under guidence, so that next time it won't be so very unfamiliar and nerve-wracking. And to move them through the process from idea to performance (August to April) of writing, rewriting, and producing their own original work.

Along the way, of course, there are disappointments: three three who are produced are happy, the others with staged readings not so much... initially. Casting always produces the need for adjustment, as do staging realities. And this festival has gone from no support in the department, to too much (over-designing, over-supervision of students), to not enough again... This year we will have one designer, for lighting only. He is the best and an avid supporter of the festival (unlike his colleagues), but no extra student hands... unless I can recruit them. On the one hand: a blessing. Only people with great attitudes need apply, because it is a lot of work for little praise, recognition, or any kind of reward from above. On the other hand: will require more work from those involved. Like recruiting live music or composition or dance or film students to add texture to the shows.

In the end, this project more than any other is about process--and a little about product, too--but about the actual process of teaching something during a process. How to rewrite a play. How to direct an original play. How to work with a playwright and actors at the same time. How to produce magic with little budget, little help, and lots and lots of creative imagination and desire. Good lessons for budding playwrights, directors, actors, and designers.

I am sometimes torn between wanting more people to notice what we do--internally, like admin and colleagues--and sometimes happy few do. This is a situation in which the students do the work, whatw e're training them to do, and succeed or fail (and it is always somewhere in between, isn't it?) they LEARN.

And that's what teaching is about, from my point of view. Giving them the opportunity to learn.

Pearl