November's books (reposted)

#15, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884) and #16, Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925).

Another two-fer.

Huck Finn was another book I read in high school that whizzed past my head. Zzzzzzzp! No traces left from the passing. Later, as an adult, I reread it and discovered what Twain was all about: that sharp, funny "American" voice that speaks as if naive but in reality sees the world just fine, thanks. I cannot believe anyone reading this book thinks or thought that Twain advocated slavery or racial inequality. It is of course Huck whose world-view is undone by the discovery that Jim is a man, like any man, not an object to be owned or ordered about.

Then, as now, Twain's bluntness (in Huck's mouth) offended people. He intended to do so, and intended that people stop being racist by confronting the dirty secret of their racism and change. It is a satire, folks!

It is not a young adult novel. I wish people would stop treating it as f it were, simply because Huck is a "young adult." It is a grown-up person's book, and if we recognize that, we'll all be happier and more sensible. Personally, I dislike Tom Sawyer. He is a Ferris Beuller-sort of hero, a show-off and a bully, and I like Huck as a character much better. I know too many Toms and not enough Hucks.

Mrs. Dalloway wasn't the first Woolf novel I read, but the first one I understood. It certainly helped me figure out what Woolf was doing with space and time in her novels, which was the modernist key, I think. Or maybe I am wrong and never got it. But... this novel opened the world of Woolf's writing to me, and coupled wiht Hermoine Lee's brilliant biography, made me understand Woolf's art and voice. Better, actually, than all that talk about Woolf as a feminist and as a woman writer--how about just as a writer, like Twain or Hemingway or any other of the writers on my list.

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.

Starting tomorrow...

For May, I have some very specific goals.

1. Clear the paper clutter in my apartment
2. Add thirty minutes of daily exercise
3. Write 2K words on the novel every day
4. Initiate a Pantry Challenge for pantry, freezer, cupboards
5. Prepare my class for Oxford: lectures, readings, YouTube clips

Beyond that, I must take care of my car's bumper, initiate programs for the 2012-2013 year, dry cleaner & tailor items, finish up this year's programs and get Jack's med for flights. Odds and ends, here and there.

But getting ready for travel is uppermost, hence the exercise. Also, a ban on sugar and wheat. Apart from likker. But no more M&Ms, no more ice cream, no more frozen yogurt meals.

Weekend

Such a pleasure to spend two days at home. Cleaning, cooking, washing clothes and bedding. Not doing any work, per se. No negotiating, no chat, no BS.

Temptations: Sherlock, The Closer seasons 6 & 7, The Vampire Diaries, Dexter season 2, and the Nook.

Good news: I feel more relaxed and I am bored. Tomorrow is the last day of the old time, and May 1 I start working on my new goals. I need to get ready for my trip, and to finish cleaning and de-cluttering my house. I have to go back to daily writing in order to get back on a regular routine and complete the present manuscript so I can send it off.

Bad news: two more days of class, plus grading and evaluations. Sigh. Not bad, and not terrible, I just feel like I'm over the school year of 2011-2012. Ready to enjoy a month just about me. Hurrah.

No wonder I'm tired!

At the end of April, I find that I have accomplished the following just this month:

1. produced a festival of staged readings for six original plays by my students;
• including guest artists that I recruited and hired for the project;
• including original music compositions stemming from a collaborative class with student composers, that I initiated.
2. intiated and mentored the successful submission process resulting in $7,000 in grants and $5,000 in awards to playwriting students for community/creative projects.
3. directed the Ama Ata Aidoo reading at the international-scope African Literature conference on campus, in front of Aidoo just prior to her talk on human rights.
4. mentored the staged readings of three ten-minute plays inspired by Joan of Arc for a Medieval Studies/English/Women's & Gender Studies/Creative Writing class, a project in play for a year.
5. dramaturged an original play at one of the top local theatres.
6. completed three upperclass courses successfully.
7. found and rented an apartment in Paris for June, and made/confirmed all my travel plans to home, Paris and Oxford this summer.
8. deferred my taxes, paid my traffic ticket, joined Women in Film and completed my Search Committee assignment.

My reward?

I mean...

News from the Newly "Morrisized" Bedroom

After one night in the "new" bedroom, I can state the following:

• it is now cleaner, prettier, and more serene... which made me sleep better
• the dawn-simulator woke me as advertised with brightening light and, at the 30-minute mark, wind chime sounds--no jangling alarm.

I did realize that I cannot use the sleep mask, because that would definitely block the "dawn." I'll have to figure that one out. But the light was slightly too bright at 30 minutes (top intensity) which I easily adjusted down two notches. The chimes were just loud enough.

Not having a pile of papers, mismatched clothing, and sheets on the loveseat--just my class today--was a giant step forward.

I had also done my other morning prep work: set out the cat's food, dish, and spoon, and prepared the coffeepot to perk while I was in the shower. I put away the clean dishes on the counter and stuck the used cat dishes immediately into the cleared dishwasher. Felt great to be slightly ahead of things in the a.m.!

And by 8, I had 1K written in novel!

The New Novel

Yesterday wrote 13 pages on the new one. Playing catch-up after a week without. Felt fantastic!

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.

Conference Paper: Willliam Gillette

The paper I gave last month was on an American actor, William Gillette, who was a very popular performer during the last quarter of the 19th and into the first four decades of the 20th.

Gillette came from Connecticut, where his father was a crusader for a  number of causes--among them abolition--and his mother who was descended from Puritan leaders. And before you jump on that, it was the Puritans who brought intellectual depth to the country from England... as well as a number of other things.

Gillette began an apprenticeship as an actor at a young age, coming in contact with Mark Twain. Twain became his mentor. he was not immediately successful; it wasn't until he was 28 that a job with the Frohman brothers allowed him to incororpate skills as a playwright, actor, and director (at low pay). But his first production carrying all three roles was enough of a success that he co-authroed another with the famous novelist Frances Hodgson Burnett, author of The Secret Garden, The Little Princess, and Little Lord Fauntleroy, some of which titles ought to be familiar.

Wikipedia notes that Gillette is best known for his inventions to the world of theatre (I disagree!), but these include "realistic stage settings, and special sound and lighting effects." He also wrote about realism as a style of acting and staging, articulating for the American theatre what the European theatre already knew--which is not a bad thing. Typically, during Gillette's lifetime American theatre lagged the Europeans in staging avant-garde styles--which realism was, at that time.

Gillette came to international success as the playwright and lead actor in The Secret Service and Sherlock Holmes, in the mid- to late-1890s.

And this is where I came in. My presentation was about Gillette's "creation" of Holmes as an enduring and iconographic character. Gillette co-authored--or authored, depending on how you slice it--the first successful Sherlock Holmes performance script (mixing 7 different stories); his co-writer, perhaps, was Arthur Conan-Doyle himself. Gillette was the first actor to use/wear the deerstalker, the Inverness cape, the bent pipe, to use the words "Elementary" and "Hunt's afoot!" I researched and wrote about Gillette's creation of Holmes as a character on paper, but more importantly on stage: the start of a character image used by scores of actors and writers since, including the most recent actors Downey, Syder, and Cumberbatch.

The crux of my paper was the development of this character by Gillette, and its subsequent development by other actors, films, playwrights, TV writers, comic books, and fanzines... The immediate image of the detective has become incredibly pervasive in our culture, affecting writers like Chandler, Hammett, Grafton, Crais, and Child.

Student writers at work

This semester, I am teaching three courses at My U for playwrights/dramatic writers, with three different populations. One class is junior undergraduates/all majors, one class is senior undergraduates/all majors, and one class is non-tradition students/adults.

I am cooking up or have cooked up some nice projects for these groups.

My senior playwrights are writing a full-length play, which will become the basis of our spring playwriting festival. As a part of this, I am coupling each one with a student composer, who will write original music to go with the performance, probably in taped (rather than live) versions. I have also coupled each one with a professional mentor who will work with the student during the semester on this full-length project by Skype in four meetings.

I have also arranged an inter-disciplinary project whereby each playwright will work with our screenwriting professor to transform a 10-minute play into a ten-minute screenplay as an exercise in format and form.

For both juniors and seniors, I am organizing another inter-disciplinary event celebrating the birth of Joan of Arc. Happy 600th, Joan! For this occasion, each playwright will write a short piece (a monologue or a ten-minute play) that might be selected to be performed in a staged reading at Joan's birthday party next spring in April 2012. Alongside their work, will be readings and debates by students in a Medieval Studies course on the History/Biography/Image of Joan of Arc. All three classes will be celebrating together, and sharing the writings each class brings. We may also open it up to the Creative Writing area in general: I have a meeting about that next week, which means more poets and prose writers possibly coming on board.

Some rockin' 600th birthday for the Maid!

I am also organizing our 2012 playwriting festival: three full-lengths, as I said, but this year I want to invite the students who dropped playwriting in favor of other courses to have the one-atc plays they wrote last spring (2011) performed in our reading series, directed by students and acted by students. The full-lengths will, I hope, be directed by professionals from the area, as some of them were last year. And the casts include professional actors. This is my Next Big Project.

For my adult students, I am looking for ways to cross them with my undergraduates. No projects defined yet, but I hope to find something to show off the work they're doing so well.

This is truly exciting, because in dramatic writing, it ain't done till you perform it for an audience... and getting it to an audience is surprisingly the tricky part.  

News: Novel

So... yes, I am going to be a published author for fiction. I've already been published as a scholar, but this is new territory for me. I've written a novel, that's due to be published in 2012. I'm waiting on a specific date, because I'm just about to start the editing process with my official editor.

When I know more, I'll pass it along. I am very pleased and excited about this: it is certainly what I would term a "popular" novel, not intended to be considered great literary fare. But I wrote a compelling story with interesting characters. In my opinion.

And frankly my aspirations are not to be literary--which I consider in most senses to be pretentious--but read.

Many of my favorite authors "aspired" to the stature of popular or "low culture" status: Charles Dickens, George Sand, Edith Wharton, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Robert Crais, and J. K. Rowling, for example. And every playwright prior to the advent of the avant-garde in the late 19th century.

A wonderful gallery of colleagues.

Good Things that Happened Yesterday

1. Met a friend for dinner. Had great convo with her about her work and mine. Left 3/4 fries and 1/4 burger on my plate...
2. Finally heard from publisher: only prelim message, but finally! Fingers crossed.
3. Offered tickets for local show, which has gotten great reviews. Hope to see it this weekend, before it closes.
4. Found a movie gift card someone had given me, that I had forgotten all about. Score: free movies!
5. Sold something on Craigslist within a day of reposting it with better pictures.
6. Was the high bidder on eBay for something that I had been looking for, for a long time. At 25% or original price, including shipping.
7. Uploaded my pictures from DC.
8. Got great advice from two friends and myself about how to rethink upcoming classes and production events, which led to a flurry of ideas about fall's classes, assignments, lectures, and programs. Great feeling.

Wow!

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.

Monday...

Today is the first day of my actual summer... ok, this is a transitional week, as there are two My U events and I have one set of grades to post today.

But the main point is: onto the summer schedule!

Which basically means spending time every day writing. Four hours in the a.m., and four hours in the p.m. I am all about product, baby, not process, which will be messy and rough.

Summer is also about getting my house in order, literally -- getting completely out of the Old Apartment and donating/selling/trashing the stuff I no longer use or want and getting completely into my New Apartment, hanging pictures and arranging the several closets. I find myself already resenting the extra stuff I have and the lose of lovely open spaces of "empty" rooms. Oh, well. Once I finish, everything will be still spacious and uncluttered--or so I plan. Target date: 5.25.11.

I have a lot of books to read to get the 50 done this year--oh, what a problem! I am currently working on Rebecca Skloot's study, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, as an audiobook and Van Gogh's letters with his brother, Dear Theo, as a book-book.

I also have to take care of the details for my trip to Boston, DC, and home, visiting family and friends while giving a paper at a conference (more about the paper later: fascinating topic, just by accident!).

This week, just the start-up is enough. By next week, I hope to have hit my stride completely.

The flowers are from my time in Oxford in 2008, from the Botanical Gardens. I recommend this stop when you are in that lovely town.

Frenzy update

11 days, 31 pages... of the 30 days, 100 pages.

Time to step it up a bit.

Monday's class

Yesterday I had a completely successful afternoon with my senior writers, in a meeting with two former students who generously answered their questions about post-graduation life as writers, actors, and artists, including which Big City they should move to. It was a lovely afternoon, and today both my forearms are sunburned because (duh!) we sat outside for two hours.

Writing in April: 100 pages in 30 days

I just signed up for something called "Script Frenzy." The challenge is to write 100 pages in 30 days: so every day in April, I need to write between 3 and 5 pages, which will certainly get me on track with my current play.

This is not to say that the pages will be great, but my basic goal is to GET IT DONE! Have a completed script between 90 and 100 pages by April 30, with the summer to get it in better shape.

And I'll get a certificate!

The point is that I need to get myself back on track as a writer, now that my students' work is completed and up. I am incredibly motivated right now, and this seems a very good notion. I like routine: settling in to work at the same time, under the same conditions, with the same music playing.

Here's a sidenote: yesterday I was talking to my master class students (the senior undergraduates who just finished their reading project) and told them about this as an opportunity to start the new project they claim to want to write. They asked what was the pay-off--and hearing that simply completing 100 pages in 30 days was it, they shrugged it off as something they "could do anyway." When I asked if it would motivate them to write this new project they are all kicking at me about, they blinked at me. Ah, to be young!

I wish I had their confidence in a writer's discipline. Like, mine!

Final day, Final performance

Well, my students' "7 plays in 12 days" is coming to an end...

I am ready! Spring Break starts tomorrow, and I can enter it with the distinct satisfaction of successfully shepherding seven playwrights through the revision/performance process to completion.

Meaning: a return to my own work!

I plan to start with a return to routine writing times throughout the week, with simple daily goals.

• writing 5-6 pages daily on my novel-in-progress
• drafting 2-3 abstracts for autumn conferences
• outlining and researching the paper I am giving in May in Boston

My plans for the break seem ambitious, even to me. Since I am building in naps (lots of naps!), reading for pleasure (lots of pleasure! Lots of reading!), and exercise in the forms of walking and biking, it also seems do-able and sane.

First Night Jitters!

Last night was the "preview" night for my students' playwriting festival of staged readings.

It was a tough day for me: I got a ticket (from a policeman who looked like Anderson Cooper) which was completely justified, I got a call from another university about an interview, I missed yoga because of the last two events, and I got my teeth cleaned. Individually, not huge; as a group that all occurred before 1 pm... tremendous.

But last night was great. We had a strong audience of about 60 people (roughly 1/2 the theatre--which was about 30 more people than I thought would show up) and the talkback was successful. About 20 people stayed to talk and share. The performance was slow, but I think the audience enjoyed it anyway.

Tonight is the "opening night" and the play is one of my favorites. Actually, it's like having children: you love them all, as individuals, no matter what, with no favorites.