And I’m back!

Wow. I can’t believe it’s been almost three months since I’ve written. When I started this blog I had the best intentions of being a consistent poster, so hopefully I can get back to that. It’s been a challenging but rewarding couple of months. After being unemployed for 2 months, I got a job as a writer at a global Cosmetics company. I feel ridiculously lucky. This job is pretty amazing, because the people are so nice and the work is challenging but not overwhelming. And I get major discounts!

I also got to the interview stage at 2 schools for my MFA in Playwriting. While I didn’t make it into either, I got very close, which somehow felt pretty spectacular after last years’ radio silence. I’m still waiting to hear from two schools, so there’s still hope for this year.

And my play “Feedback” just opened at the Lyric Theater in Los Angeles. It’s open until the end of April, so you should check it out if you can.

So, it’s been a good couple of months overall. That saying “it’s always darkest before the light” feels kind of appropriate.

And for no particular reason other than I want to, here’s a list of my top three “need-to-see-right-now” plays:

4000 Miles by Amy Herzog

The Big Meal by DanLeFranc

Clybourne Park by Bruce Morris

cribs, strollers, and the end of my 20′s

So, let me be straight. It’s been over a month since I’ve written in here and it’s probably because my job ended. I won’t go into specifics, because writing about jobs and job hunting online scares the crap outta me. I imagine the Gods of HR scouring my blog for my true career aspirations or attempting to catch me in some uncomfortable admission. (This is neurotic me speaking.)

Anyhow. Since I graduated from college in 2004, I haven’t been out of work. I’m incredibly grateful for that, but when you are suddenly unemployed, the way you view your life and yourself has a funny way of morphing. I don’t feel as valuable or as part of something as I did. I thought I’d be doing more writing, but in fact, I’m doing less. My brain is rattled with anxiety and worries about how I will pay my rent or go out to a friends’ birthday dinner without it making a serious dent in my bank account.

The joblessness aside, my 30th birthday is only a few months away and I can’t help but reflect on how far I’ve come and where I’m headed. While I think a healthy amount of reflection is necessary, I think that sometimes I do my share and half of Brooklyn’s share of analyzing.

Why is it that we put so much pressure on our 30th birthday? Why does it feel like we need to have the necessary markers in place or else we feel lacking and unsuccessful? When I talk to my friends, it seems that either means a career track job with prior established success and/or a marriage or engagement on the horizon?

Playwright Katori Hall is 30 and her play “The Mountaintop” is on Broadway. I’m 30, and I’m struggling to get into development conferences. But, I know this is a tough career, one that will take persistence and a thicker skin.

I thought I wouldn’t be that person who cared about the 30th marker. And part of me still doesn’t…wait, who’s kidding who here…I do. I want to have something solid to grasp, something that says, hey, I’ve been on this planet for 30 years, and I have this!  I’m not sure what “this” would be for me either, but I think having an agent, or having sold a screenplay would act as some barometer.

But, I’ve always been the kid that rides out the last of my phases in life. My dad likes to tell me I waited to move from crib to bed until I was literally climbing up out of and back into the crib myself. Finally, my parents just had to buy me a twin bed, and say here, this is yours. Use it. Or, the fact that I used my stroller until I was five years old, and some man on 90th street and 1st avenue yelled out “Ain’t she a little big for a stroller?.” And I promptly got out, and have been walking ever since.

You could say it’s that I fear change, but I like to think of it as me savoring the final moments of a time in my life. I’ll never go back to sleeping in a crib or using my stroller, but I enjoyed that time, I waited it out till the bitter end.

And now, here I am, writing to you, unemployed and approaching thirty. I’m about to microwave some Trader Joe’s frozen meal and dive back into the job hunt (or should I just say, Craigslist?). I’m going to enjoy these final days of being able to say “I’m in my 20′s” and feel like a lot of the ambiguity I feel is understood and accepted.

So, whether this means buying dresses at Forever 21, reading YA fiction, or sitting around for a few hours on a Wednesday afternoon at Starbucks in Astoria talking silly with a friend, I’m going to savor this time. One day, the close people in my world will be juggling big, responsibility laden jobs and families with children and dogs who will need their time more than me.

Happy New Year, everyone!

this is just to say-

I love how many people find this blog from the google search “encouraging thought for the day.” That makes me happy.

And this poem by Mary Olivier makes me happy:

Love sorrow. She is yours now, and you must
take care of what has been
given. Brush her hair, help her
into her little coat, hold her hand,
especially when crossing a street. For, think,

what if you should lose her? Then you would be
sorrow yourself; her drawn face, her sleeplessness
would be yours. Take care, touch
her forehead that she feel herself not so

utterly alone. And smile, that she does not
altogether forget the world before the lesson.
Have patience in abundance. And do not
ever lie or ever leave her even for a moment

by herself, which is to say, possibly, again,
abandoned. She is strange, mute, difficult,
sometimes unmanageable but, remember, she is a child.
And amazing things can happen. And you may see,

as the two of you go
walking together in the morning light, how
little by little she relaxes; she looks about her;
she begins to grow.”
― Mary Oliver, Red Bird: Poems

People keep asking me…

Why are you applying to graduate school? Can’t you just write on your own? Trust me, I have thought about it. A lot. But I know graduate school is the right choice for me. Because eventually, I would love to teach at the collegiate level in addition to writing and producing projects. And you need an MFA to teach.

So, fingers crossed that this time around, I’ll hear some good news.

Speaking of good news, my play Feedback is heading to the Lyric Theater in Los Angeles this April. I’m so excited because the team behind it all seems amazing. The director, Craig Jessen, is an incredibly smart and insightful guy, and the head of the theater seems pretty awesome herself.

And finally and tangentially, while I was away for Thanksgiving, I dug a bit more into Mary Oliver’s beautiful poetry. The way she seems to live her life is an inspiration to me. And on those days when I feel low and dispirited, she brings me back. So I’ll share some of her goodness here.

“Ten times a day something happens to me like this – some strengthening throb of amazement – some good sweet empathic ping and swell. This is the first, the wildest and the wisest thing I know: that the soul exists and is built entirely out of attentiveness.”
― Mary Oliver

“The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”
― Mary Oliver

I have to remind myself on a daily basis of this second quote, because I believe it in all my being.

I want to truly pursue this creative force in me, and I have an obligation to it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MFA Playwriting Deadlines

So. For all concerned, it looks like many of the MFA Playwriting deadlines/fellowships have been pushed up by about a month. I noticed this when I checked into the Julliard Lila Acheson Wallace fellowship and realized I had just missed the deadline, which was now November 1st.

I started looking into other programs, and many of them had seemed to have pushed up their dates. I assume this is because they are expecting a lot more submissions than normal and the need the time to read applications. But if you are planning on applying, I definitely think you should confirm dates.

 

 

 

“take it easy. but take it.”

Yesterday marked my third month anniversary at my new job. I have been debating whether or not to write much about it, but a consistent comment I get on this blog is: “be more personal.” So, here it goes.

I left a cozy job at a film school where I felt familial vibes and a happiness that is hard to come by in a job. I stayed there for about four years. There was not really a lot of growth opportunity, and I wanted to be challenged, so I began a job hunt.

And I landed here. I’ll keep mum on the details, but the biggest concern is that I was promised healthcare, and I didn’t get it. And still haven’t gotten it. Had I known there was no healthcare up front, I wouldn’t have taken the job. They keep promising me, “it’s coming” but it’s been three months…I am beginning to lose hope.

All of this has me thinking about gratefulness. How lucky I was to work at the film school, to have people who cared about me and for whom I cared. How I worked with people who knew I was a playwright and cared about that side of my life. How I felt really at peace, especially being an only child with no extended family – to have this group of people to see everyday.

I remind myself that at least I know it exists. There are jobs out there like the one I had.

This Cary Tennis letter lifted my spirits a bit:

Here’s an excerpt:

I’m all for us. I’m all for those of us who are only completely alive when alone in a room putting words together in ways that have never been done that way before.

I’m all for those of us who are courageously fulfilling a whispered instruction to go forth and create.

I’m all for those of us who are different, those of us who believe things that might sound crazy, things we can’t explain yet believe to be true and which we continue to see in our dreams. I’m all for those of us who will no longer apologize for being beautiful and true. I’m all on the side of the strangely deranged, the misguided and quietly stubborn defenders of obscure happiness.

I’ve made my compromises too. I worked at Chevron for five years to pay the rent. It wasn’t anybody forcing me to do that. It was my big idea to make peace with The Man, my big idea to try to do everything, have a marriage, have dogs, have a job, have a house, make prose and poems, live at the beach, all this of which I complain bitterly from time to time, this was all my idea. So I make my angry peace with it. I make my peace but I salute those who protest, and I will be joining them as soon as I am able.

So how long can you go at this pace before you break something? In my experience, when you start asking how long can you go it’s time to pull over for a nap so you can keep your eyes open and don’t run into the back of a truck.

Artistic ambition should come in a bottle with a warning label: Do not exceed recommended dosage. Side effects include distorted perception, melancholia, sudden rage and smudged eye shadow.

Or, in the immortal words of Pete Seeger, “Take it easy. But take it.”

 

 

I always wish I felt a natural desire to wake up and start writing. I never do. Instead, it feels like exercising. But I always have to do it. I do not think I could not write.  I would always think of my life as lacking in some great way.

Being the neurotic, guilt ball that I often am, I feel badly for not experiencing some natural desire to sit at my laptop and create. Instead, I would often rather watch netflix and eat pizza.

While confirming that I am not alone in my impulses to be slothful, this quote from theater director Anne Bogart also made me sad in that existential angst sort of way.

“I have come to understand that the creative act is ultimately action against natural human tendencies. Left to natural devices, human energy and endeavor moves towards entropy and disintegration. Our lives lead inevitably to decay and death. In the morning we are weighted down by the burden of sleep, requiring a supreme effort to arise and join the world. The end of a gesture, when not treated with an artistic attack of acceleration, tends to die out. The artistic impulse, in contrast to the entropic direction of a life cycle, rises above the tendency towards death and negation. The artist searches for lightness and for exactitude in the face of rot and decay. Fueled by curiosity, energy and hope, we enter the darkness. We accept the darkness and in that acceptance sometimes we discover a thin vein of light.”
- Anne Bogart

It’s Grad School App Season!

Ah, pumpkins, pretty leaves, weird but awesome mini gourd on my desk…and grad school applications. It’s fall, people! This is generally my favorite season, mainly because there’s just something about the crisp air that makes me simultaneously eager to change my life and nostalgic for the past. Now though, I’ve also begun to associate the fall with graduate school applications.

Hopefully, the fact that I went through this last year will make it easier. I am still not applying to schools I’d have to pay for. But I am going to add a few schools with nebulous funding such as NYU. I have heard fantastic things about their MFA in Dramatic Writing and I have also recently heard that they offer certain students grants, etc.

That would also allow me to stay in NYC. As would Hunter and Brooklyn College, both lovely choices.

Other than those schools, all of my other school options are outside of NYC. I fluctuate wildly about how I feel about this. For the better part of the last year, that prospect has sounded so cool. Especially as a native New Yorker who only left the city for college in Baltimore. But sometimes it sounds crazy. Would I be do distracted by the distance between my loved ones and I that my writing would suffer? I’m the type of writer who needs my creature comforts to feel free to write.

I’ve discovered that I need balance in my life to be the best writer. If I’m thinking about paying off school loans, or a job I loathe going to or missing my friends, my writing suffers. I’m not sure if I’m just not trying hard enough to shut all of that noise out, but regardless, I try and keep the balance.

Anyhow, as I did last year, I’m going to cast my net in this big grad school pond…err…lake? and see what happens.

 

“Remember that writing is translation, and the opus to be translated is yourself.“

-Charles Isherwood

Jesse Eisenberg and Zoe Kazan write plays, too

As much as I fight to keep my mini-green giant at bay, he sometimes rears his ugly head. Most of the time I can be pretty zen when it comes that feeling of “ugh…how did they doooo that? why not meee?” because I know that envy feeling really only leads to bad things.

But it is human to occasionally feel pangs of jealousy. When I read the interview with the actors Jesse Eisenberg and Zoe Kazan in the NY Times today about writing plays, I felt a little uh…hmm…I felt crappy. Like somehow, connections really are everything.

It sounded like they just thought “Oh, acting’s been fun. But just for the heck of it, let me just write a play and let’s see what happens!”

Like dude, for a legitimate theater company like the MTC or Cherry Lane to put on your play takes a LONG time. You have to develop a career and relationships in the theater world. You have to take part in development workshops and have readings in your apartment with Trader Joe’s wine and friends who have to brave the G train to get there. But apparently, MTC just gave Zoe Kazan some money, and yay! She wrote a play. And now it’s being produced.

I sound horrible. I’m happy for her. Really. I’m happy that people are talking about playwrights. I’m happy they are talking about theater.

And I genuinely think Zoe Kazan and Jesse Eisenberg are great actors, and they seem like interesting, smart people.

It just seems like so many talented writers I know have been toiling away for so long trying to get their plays produced and I guess…well, I guess that article made it seem very easy – To write a play and have a major off-Broadway theater put it on. And to get money to spend time writing the play.

So, maybe it is not really jealousy after all (or maybe jealousy is a small part). I think it’s that the article made it seem so early. That if you write a play, it just goes up. Like poof!

But it’s never really poof! is it? But then again, if it were poof!, would it really feel as good when the big chance actually comes – and your play is up at a big theater?

Maybe one day I will find out.