The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald (revisited)

My brother tells a story; fifty years ago, on November 9 (also a Sunday) it was unseasonably warm, so warm that he recalls that mother took me to the beach. I was seven, this was an unremarkable occasion for me, but he was fourteen and would remember how the temperature plummeted the next day, and how soon he and the nation would be rapt by the haunting mystery of the disappearance of the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald.

Last night, we invited a small ensemble of friends to have an informal, private reading of the play Ten November by Steven Dietz, with song lyrics by Eric Peltoniemi. Commissioned by the Actors Theatre of St. Paul, the play premiered at Wisdom Bridge Theatre in Chicago in 1987. It is a fast-paced, harrowing tale of the disaster and its aftermath, and also an examination of how, as Blue Öyster Cult put it, “History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of men.”

My desire was to invite a number of friends to gather around a fire in the backyard, to spin this yarn on a cool, fall evening, but the weather turned, as weather will, and we seventeen crammed into our beloved, tiny house. An unrehearsed ensemble, reading for ourselves, to mark this historic occasion. Five of us were alive when the Fitzgerald went down. It was an education for most. Folks familiar with the Lightfoot song – and this is a common refrain, which I have heard many times before – often don’t even know it’s a true story, or even that it happened during the twentieth century – let alone the late twentieth century.

Fifty years is a long time for a human. It’s not a long time for history.

Sarah Blubaugh and Scott Hanna interpreted the lyrics, which really elevated the experience, the assembled rewarded them with snaps after each melody as I pressed forward with the stage directions. Everyone who attended was provided a speaking role, it was a marvelous and varied chorus of voices.

It is a script that weaves together a variety of tales to provide context to the mystery. The fact that it was written before we had even visited the ship at the bottom of Lake Superior, before the bell was recovered in 1995, the site designated a grave site, not to be disturbed, actually serves the work. It illustrates the confusion and the frustrating search for solutions in the aftermath of tragedy which are often not to be found.

My grandfather was a merchant marine, and before he settled down to raise children, he piloted freighters like the Fitzgerald, though none as large. One of my recent discoveries in the effects I kept from my parent’s home was the old man’s personal logbook. An illustration he drew of the Steamship Robert Fulton was on display during the reading. Twenty-nine men died in a sudden storm on the Great Lakes on an evening fifty years ago, any man of them like my grandfather.

As the assembled departed last evening, the rain had turned to snow. Not exactly the blizzard we were promised. Sometimes, nature is kind, or so we perceive her to be.

See also: The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald (song)

After Roe (reading)

The summer of 1993 was challenging. I was pretending to be an edgy, underground theater producer in downtown Cleveland, at the same time negotiating the purchase of a home in suburban Cleveland Heights.

In the shadow of the nationwide Operation Rescue protests that threatened abortion clinics here and elsewhere we staged a feminist production of The Taming of the Shrew.

I know. Anyway.

The company was about to embark on our second season of late night political short plays, which involved not only moving to a new location up the street, but also renegotiating the commitment of our company members.

A few of our original members had gone, others chose this moment to depart. One person in particular, we sat down to discuss elements of production and just exactly how we decided what pieces would be in and which would not.

This guy asked, “What if I wrote a pro-life play? Would that be voted on?”

We said no. Our company, the company we founded, would never allow a message that stands against a woman’s right to reproductive choice to be expressed on our stage.

The guy said, “That answers my question.” And we all shook hands and he left the company.

Later that year I would write a play called, RU-486? Yes, I am! about the abortifacient which would later be known as mifepristone. The national debate was whether or not such a drug may legally be administered and I wrote a monologue for a woman who was grateful that it was now available for others even as it arrived too late for her.

I created those words for a person with a uterus to read. On this subject, however, I think it is time to listen. I have written a new play, for which I have not created a single word. They were all spoken by women, and I wrote them down.

Sunday night we had a reading around a fire bowl in the backyard of that same house I bought twenty-nine years ago. Fourteen different voices (this time) shared the piece which we are currently calling After Roe.

Our discussion afterward was very promising. They liked “hearing from women who are on the periphery” and that it goes to show that every abortion is a case-by-case situation, just like everything else in life.

As I was editing the piece I “braided” the dialogue (braided, that’s my new word this semester) so that there was a flow to the piece which involved common themes and events. Most agreed they wanted more of that, for longer passages to be broken up even more, that the strongest moments were when women appeared to be responding to each other, even as the source material consists of individual interviews.

Comparisons were made to The Exonerated, Fefu & Her Friends and the Punchdrunk production of The Burnt City. When the discussion came to staging I said I’d like to see a nice living room, and that each “character” has a drink and stands (or, who knows, sits) to tell their story – which invited a comparison to the first scene of Top Girls. Extra points for a Churchill reference!

We had taken a break around the forty-five minute mark (the reading was 75 minutes) to set and light a fire. While I was getting things together, the readers were all actively talking and laughing. In spite of the relative brevity of the piece, I’m thinking having a break at that point, when things are just ramping up, might be a very effective way to spur discussion.

That’s what we call an intermission, but still.

During the second season of Guerrilla Theater, one of our members wrote a wistful piece about lost potential. It was a monologue written from the point of view of, I don’t know. A soul? A potential life which was unrealized due to an abortion.

The playwright Wendy McLeod wrote a full-length play called The Water Children that included a similar premise. A woman who had an abortion is haunted by a potential son she did not have, named Chance.

I know. Anyway.

However, MacLeod was addressing the thoughts that women do have when they choose abortion. And she is a woman. It is apparent that Chance represents feelings of doubt or regret, and not an actual spirit.

I pointed out to our playwright, who was a man, that his monologue, as thoughtfully written as it was, was a pro-life argument. It gives agency to an embryo, complex thought, self-determination. He said he hadn’t seen it that way, that he just was trying to look at the argument from a different perspective. I said I wouldn’t permit it. The piece was withdrawn from consideration.

There was a lot of active listening to After Roe Sunday night, as so many stories and details were being thrown about by the legal and medical experts, and individuals who were sharing their stories.

“At times I was confused, but also excited to be informed.”

“This information is not something we are taught.”

“We do all know this, saying it out loud is the new part.”

One very important question regarded what happens after the play has concluded. “What do we do with this?” Having a post-show talk seemed inadequate. What would be provided, in the form of contact, right there in the theater, following a potential reading? “You want to become an activist, a doula, a counselor? Here’s how.”

The piece is still rough, there were details I missed, some stories can be tightened, others need to be expanded. And there is one more interview I need to conduct, and I am looking forward to that.

I Hate This (First Reading, 2002)

Twenty years ago today, August 26, 2002, we held the first public reading of I Hate This (a play without the baby).

To recap, my wife and I suffered a stillbirth in early 2001. And I wrote about it. And wrote about it. My journal was a form of solace and understanding. We mourned, we talked, we traveled. We wanted things to stand still for a while but they kept moving forward.

My wife had a show in the New York Fringe that August and I saw a lot of shows, many of them solo performances. As I drove a van of sleeping teenagers and young adults back to Cleveland I had a lot of time to think and I realized then that I was going to write a show about this experience.

It had only been five months. I told myself to wait, not to think about it again at least until the new year. The wife had invited me to join her writers’ group which met at that coffee shop in University Circle. In 2002 I began to share pages for what would become my first solo performance.

Early that summer I met for lunch with Joyce Casey, Artistic Director of Dobama Theatre. As I had worked there for three years she was my former employer and mentor, and also a good friend. I had shared the script with her and she asked how she could help with the piece and I said I wanted to hold a reading, an invitation-only event and could I use the space. She agreed.

This was something I had never done before. I hadn’t actually written many plays. I’d never had a public-private showcase of a work I had just written. Maybe a few folks invited over to my house to read and comment. I planned to invite a wide variety of people, friends and close artistic colleagues, but also directors of other theater companies and most importantly to extend an invitation to those we had met on our journey, others who had lost children and were familiar with this grief.

I made postcards to send through the mail or to hand out. I must have sent emails, too.

Tom Cullinan was director, he would go on to direct the original staging of the play. We worked in various rooms in my house to create a shape for this performance. It was script-in-hand but there was also blocking. In the end what we created was the basis for the stage play I would eventually perform, on and off, for the next five years.

There were no slides, I read the title for each scene. There was no music or sound effects, those would come later. There were a couple music stands so I could place the script for longer passages. It was a staged reading. I wore the sweater.

The version dated June, 2002 is remarkably similar to the final version. I have edited and edited as the years have gone by, but its shape was established from the beginning. There are uninteresting details which were cut, and inaccuracies.

“I sang to it on Friday and I swear it was listening to me.”

That line may be poetic, or possibly emotion-evoking. It is not accurate. I changed that passage before the first reading. There were many, many f-bombs, and other obscenities which were unnecessary.

There is a scene where my brother and I are in the Cloisters in Upper Manhattan, observing the Annunciation Triptych. I compare myself to Joseph, the blithely ignorant father: “He has no idea what’s about to happen to him.” In the original draft I go on to describe other famous men who have lost children:

“God lost His son. Did you know the guy that writes Doonesbury, his wife had a stillbirth. And John Lennon and Yoko Ono had a number of miscarriages. And Luis Guzman. He’s that guy, you know, in 'Traffic' … yeah, you know, that guy, him, too. Read it somewhere. Really fucked him up for a while. Isn’t he great?”

That passage was struck from the August, 2002 version, the one I used for the reading. I had wanted to share what a widely-felt experience child loss is, and examples of famous men who have was one way to do that, I guess. But the scene is long and bends from topic to topic and we needed to draw a narrower focus.

Trying to describe our visit to Great Britain to see my other brother that summer, I originally read this:

“I don’t know what we wanted our trip to London to be, but it wasn’t what we wanted. I love that city, it bleeds history, and you’re surrounded by people from all over the world, rushing through its narrow streets, the places just pulses with music and art and exciting smells and noise. But it was still scary to even step outside and you know, there are newborn babies everywhere, even in England.”

Press to play.

But that wasn’t right. That’s some sexy but entirely vague explanation of how I feel when I am in any large city, and when things are entirely normal. It didn’t describe that place at that time, the way we were experiencing it. It was revised for the premiere.

The turnout was very good, all things considered. Sixty people? Maybe seventy? Following the reading I changed and sat in the back while Tom led a post-show discussion about the script.

I mean, here’s the thing. Everyone in the room knew me, most likely knew both me and my wife. They knew we’d lost a pregnancy. I knew no one was going to be very critical of the work. But I didn’t know what I’d written. Was it a play? Was this a story anyone wanted to hear? Would they say, I am glad you got that off your chest?

Well, no. No one said that, at least not yet. And there were generous questions about form and clarity. Someone suggested I cast other actors to play the characters I impersonate which was interesting and while that was not something I wanted to do you it has been done that way.

One theater colleague, a playwright (I did not yet call myself a playwright) marveled at the fact that I would even attempt something like this. She said there was this conventional wisdom that it takes ten years before someone can successfully write about tragedy, and yet I just went ahead and did it.

And Randy Rollison, Artistic Director of Cleveland Public Theatre asked if I had any plans for it. I said I had not. He asked if I would like to participate in a new works program he was planning, called Big Box. I said I would.

My wife and I were already four months pregnant with our next, and living child. They would be a month old when this new play would would premiere at CPT in February 2003. And that is how two decades can pass without your really noticing.

Scenes From a Night's Dream: First Reading

dissociation n. the disconnection or separation of something from something else or the state of being disconnected. In psychiatry: separation of normally related mental processes, resulting in one group functioning independently from the rest, leading in extreme cases to disorders such as multiple personality.

No matter the project, be it for a writers group, as a commission, or the final project for one of MFA classes, I will hold a pre-reading reading with a cadre of close friends and colleagues to hear it in a safe space. Last fall that was in my living room, a year before that via Zoom. But it always happens.

Sunday night a delightful crew of friends (not an unsurprising amount either present or former actor-teachers) gathered on our patio, in perfect weather, to read Scenes From a Night’s Dream.

Random thoughts: Given all the messed up things that happen, some people were most upset by the dead goldfish. “The party downstairs” also set some on edge. The second act is too short (my opinion) which affords the opportunity to address some confusion as to what the company - "Morpheus" - actually does.

New rules: When holding a post-reading discussion (or in fact, the talkback following the workshop of a new work) the playwright must not answer any questions. You’ll never learn anything about how your play works if you do.

We started and I immediately got one question directed to me and I said, Oh. I’m not answering any questions. What followed was something like forty-five minutes of the assembled going over everything that had just happened.

The disconnect, the dissociation, the dream.

Last fall I mentioned how Mark Ravenhill was sharing 101 tips on playwriting over Twitter. That has developed into the 37 Plays podcast sponsored by the Royal Shakespeare Company where he interviews other playwrights and they discuss their own tips on writing. 

This week, writer and director Chinonyerem Odimba brought up Ravenhill’s Tip #12: There’s something cruel about constructing a play, putting characters in situations that are everything from awkward to very painful. Don’t shy from this cruelty but use it responsibly, explore all its ramifications and don’t use it cynically or for effect. 

This is a thing. I don’t normally indulge in cruelty in my plays. Or not since The Vampyres, anyway. And yet, I failed to provide any kind of content warning as we began reading. I immediately regretted that as we started reading. Sometimes people make light of or in fact scorn or ridicule such advance warning, but those people are children.

Now, I have a page of notes and an entire week to tweak the script before we read it in class. So glad!

UPDATE: A workshop of "Scenes From a Night's Dream" will be presented as part of the 2023 NEOMFA Playwrights Festival at Convergence-Continuum, February 16, 17 & 18, 2023.

The Witches: First Reading

Upstairs at Parnell's

What’s next? As I described previously in my post on procrastination, I have been managing my deadlines not by thinking of them all at once, but only by what is next. I would not recommend this as a way to live your life in general, but I found it was the only way I could manage for the present. Only what is right in front of me. I have the skill to manage. And the meds.

And so it was, I completed the first draft of The Witches. Which is to say, I reached the end. The play is not complete, but then why should it be? The Test Flight series “offers artists the opportunity to self-produce works-in-progress.” (CPT website.) It will remain in progress until these performances close on April 11, and beyond.

Director Chennelle, most of the acting company and a few friends met at Parnell’s last week to hear it all out loud, from beginning to end. It read at an hour ten, there’s bits still missing, I will have a longer draft available when rehearsals begin next week.

So, the witches. This is a kitchen sink play, sister to The Vampyres (no, that wasn’t intentional) in that I saw a scene, I felt a mood, and I thought I had something to say. But I didn’t know what was going to happen. Unlike, for example, The Bully of Baker Street, where I had a clear agenda, and plotted a mystery with a beginning middle and end before I started to write, here I had a place, I had characters, and they told me where to go.

And yet, there’s an awful lot going on here, as the readers and listeners made evident. Because it’s not just about witches, it’s about ghosts. It’s not just about women, it’s about generations of women.

Women who should respect each other, but don’t. Those who believe "the young and brash are destroying the work." (Craig's words.) Those who see themselves as functionaries in the grand schemes of their elders. And those who keep their heads down and just keep working.

Then there’s New England, and Salem, and the old beliefs. Chennelle observed something I have always noticed about places like Salem, or New Orleans. They are like Europe, in that they are loud. Heather called it an energy. They have a loud energy. Perhaps that is only to the descendants of those who came or were brought across the ocean to be here. The weight, the loud energy of our history, which is not evident in the newer buildings and pavement of a Cleveland, but in the wood, the soil, the trees of the colonial, coastal towns and cities.

Our company wants rules. What calls the spirits, what makes them go away? Old Hamlet wandered the ramparts seeking attention, but he was also easily insulted. On the Dark Side of Twilight was all about how the rules for vampires have shifted over time. We also need to understand what those are.

Finally, the characters themselves. The four from 2020, the four (five, actually) from 1692. They each have their own history, biographies which I have created but not yet shared. Because I want to know it makes sense before I tell them why I think it makes sense. We will work together to create a common understanding of their past.

There's more, a lot more. And it's a comedy, that's also important. I want it to be stirring and chilling and funny. During our discussion someone mentioned a line from Poltergeist and I thought, well, I know exactly where that goes.

Right now I am feeling excited and grateful, grateful to work day after day with so many talented, loving people. A long, long time ago, when we were youngish, I was sitting with a playwright friend in the Arabica on Coventry, musing pretentiously about the Algonquin Round Table, and how I wished that one day we would be famous and spend our days just writing and our nights sitting around a pub or restaurant getting tight and tossing off bon mots, night after night after night.

Yes, well. I'm not famous and I neither write for a living nor do I spend every evening drinking and posing about. But there are these moments, and there quite a few of them, when we share in semi-public spaces, chatting and drinking, and reading and doing the work, and I think I got what I always wanted after all.

Parnell's Irish Pub Playhouse Square is located at 1415 Euclid Avenue in Cleveland.

And Then You Die (revisited)

James Rankin as Pengo

Monday night, a small gathering joined me at my house for an informal reading of And The You Die (How I Ran a Marathon in 26.2 Years). This is the monodrama I wrote ten years ago, took the New York Fringe, and revised for a run of performances at Cleveland Public Theatre in 2011, performed a single evening with I Hate This (a play without the baby).

Pairing the two shows together only pointed up the flaws in this newer piece. Though they share themes and feature a similar character (me) IHT is straightforward and weighty while ATYD flails all over the place, trying to decide what it wants to be. Or so it seems to me.

It was Chennelle’s suggestion that, having proposed a revision, I may want to hear the script read out loud first, and by someone else. We asked James Rankin to read the script, he has already performed in several plays I have written, including Double Heart, both of my Agatha Christie adaptations, and The Great Globe Itself.

The crowd was intimate, by design, as I limited the gathering to folks who were unfamiliar with the play, mainly folks I had only met in the past eight or nine years.

It was refreshing to listen to the play, to experience it in real-time like an audience member. The structure takes the audience all over the place, from the past to the “present,” from formative moments to the job of training for a marathon itself.

The middle section is powerful with poetic imagery, and it made members of this audience wonder why it took so long to get to that point. Of course, the early scenes give the middle scenes their strength, building the story and the character so it/he can take flight.

I also made a running list of all of the Cleveland references, and how many were helpful and which were not. It’s definitely a play which takes place in Cleveland, and nowhere else. But it does get bogged down in minutiae of interest only to a local. That’s fun and all, but takes up valuable verbal real estate.

Not an illustrator. Actually a runner.

Finally, it is a period piece, the story of a Gen X father preparing for a marathon in 2006. References to the now disgraced Lance Armstrong and now ubiquitous Alexander Hamilton ring differently than they did even eight years ago.

My audience was asked to reflect back to me what they felt the play is about, what message it attempts to convey, and some of the answers surprised me.

The effects of long-distance running on the human body, the functions of the body, its capacity and fragility.

I have created an alternate professional life for the main character, that of a visual artist and illustrator. How relevant this is was the subject of some conversation, and also how more clearly to draw these aspirations to the personal and athletic goals, errors, and achievements.

One of the New York reviews from years ago remarked on how characters arrive, never to be heard from again, which is a thing that happens during a person’s life. But the place of “father” in all of this, the original inspiration for becoming a runner was an important question for me, and I received some valuable feedback on that.

My goal is to rewrite the play entirely, leaving most of the skeleton intact and changing all the words. My writing has evolved in the last ten years, or I like to think it has, and this is a story I want to return to, to get right. Listening to it read has only strengthened that commitment, the fact that I am training for the 2019 Chicago Marathon will provide a lot of time to ruminate on the revision.

I'm taking the TEAM CHALLENGE for the Crohn's and Colitis Foundation,to raise $2,000 and run the 2019 Chicago Marathon! Will you kick in something today? Visit my TEAM CHALLENGE page and learn more about my reasons for supporting this cause. Many thanks!

How I Am Spending My Summer (2018)

last nite.

And what's it you do again?
Oh I'm a reminder
The hobbled veteran of the disk shop inquisition
Set to parry the cocksure of mem-stick filth
With my own late era middle-aged ramblings
- tonite, LCD Soundsystem

Sitting on the porch of Barnstable (or to some, “The Barnstable”) on the day after my fiftieth birthday, I am weighted with a feeling of loss. Not merely the loss of an old friend, or that sorrow that has followed our family, like a train, as we have lost fathers and heroes and our sense of hope for the future.

It does not help that I am currently reading Lincoln In The Bardo.

Topsail Island

This place is filled with memories, but also doubts. I carry with me the fear that I have failed or continue to fail in my efforts to be an active, engaged parent. As years pass and traditions fall by the wayside, or as I watch the moments tick by in which I am not actively creating or facilitating an activity, like fishing, or a game, like a treasure hunt.

Those moments in which I have intentionally passed on the opportunity to hold my children in a form of stasis, have encouraged them to grow up too soon, to make their own play and not to lean so heavily on mine. It is like a crime. I have such regret.

Seriously, I may need to set this book aside.

Each summer is marked by moments, those events we have scheduled and look forward to, signposts which I see approaching fast by the side of the road, and then catch in the rear-view as they pass at one thousand miles an hour.

With Joseph Morales (A.Ham)

Theater camp, outdoor Shakespeare, then North Carolina and Virginia. Pre-college, Hamilton, and now Maine. My birthday come, now gone, and we, too, will go, in forty-eight hours time. One million miles an hour.

The women were unavailable to attend Girl Camp this summer, and so for the first time since my son was five we have no opportunity for Boy Camp, which has always been a strange mystery. We will make up for that in other ways, at least I hope we do.

And yesterday I was gifted with tickets to see David Byrne at Jacobs Pavilion in two weeks! Another signpost. I am looking forward to that. And then, more or less, our summer will conclude. We are blessed with love and activity, but not enough time.

Everything I Never Told You (book)

Brief, solitary air travel lends me the opportunity to consume books with great speed, which can be greatly disorienting as one novel can color an entire journey. As I was preparing to travel to St. Paul for the Twin Cities Marathon, I noticed to my surprise a copy of Celeste Ng's debut novel, Everything I Never Told You sitting on my wife's bookshelf.

I was surprised because I had just been thinking of that book. I was thinking of that book because I had recently heard Ng interviewed by Dee Perry on Sound of Applause. When I heard her interview on Sound of Applause I wondered why her name was so familiar.

It didn't take long before I remembered she had written an award-winning play for Marilyn Bianchi's Kids' Playwriting Festival, and that I had directed that play.

This is why I wanted to read her book, and between flights and trying to calm my mind before the race at bedtime, completed the entire work over the weekend. It left me shaken and sad, but also gave me a great deal of clarity and focus.

"Lydia is dead. But they don't know this yet."

The first two sentences of the book filled me with a morbid, horrible curiosity. I have a niece named Lydia, but I have to be honest and state that didn't have anything to do with it. While I was in St. Paul, I told my wife about the book and that it was worming through my thoughts in advance of the race and that I was even afraid to continue and she suggested I put the book down for a while but I insisted I needed to know how it ends.

This is the thing. Perhaps you have noticed that I do not actually post private information on either this or my running blog. There is personal, and there is private. Arguments happen in my house with great shouting, and if you are standing outside you may hear them, but I won't share the details here.

It is enough to state that I have a daughter - have while she is mine - age twelve going on thirteen and while I cannot impart any intention on mine or my wife's part to impress upon our daughter the need to succeed, speaking only for myself I have presented a model for anxiety and concern for my own efforts in the public arena which may in part explain (other than impending adolescence) an overwhelming preoccupation with achievement coupled with almost absolute inability to enjoy what success she achieves. This last is certainly a fault she has acquired from both of us.

Ng's book includes layers of difficulty for its family of protagonists with which I and my family do not need to cope, external pressures to succeed in matters personal as well as professional, many of which arise from issues of race ... but also gender, and that does affect us very much.

Details in the family dynamic, between father and son and also between mother and daughter, do not (necessarily) parallel ours, though I can see clearly the judgment between the males and the yearning between the females and that is not unfamiliar. Ng's parental characters rise above the portrayal of many parents in YA novels, for example, in that we receive a complete back story in which we root for their success before receiving them as the parents who so entirely misunderstand their teenage children. Even in this, we understand them.

My wife and I do not shape our children to be what we wish them to be. We follow their lead, as best we can, with support and encouragement, and try very hard not to judge. And that is hard.

But how much of my daughter's perfection anxiety is based on her understanding that in order to move forward, to go to the places she yearns to go, to be the person she most wants to be, she must accomplish more than we have done.

For three years I managed Dobama's Night Kitchen and my final production (as artistic director) was what we called Marilyn's Festival: In The Night Kitchen.

This annual performance of award-winning, children-written plays did not include all of the winning plays, only about half of them to create a two-hour, two-act event. Most of those chosen for performance were the fanciful elementary or middle school plays. with one high school play (often fifteen minutes long) plunked into the middle of the second act, like a brooding, unhappy teenager at a six year old's bouncy house birthday party.

In honor of the 20th festival in 1998, we would produced an hour's worth of high school written plays as a separate production.

In my notes from the selection process I called Shaker High senior Celeste Ng's short play The Fishbowl "very funny and insightful" with a strong message, and gave it my highest rating.

The premise of The Fishbowl is of a man in a psychiatric hospital who insists on using certain familiar words in place of other familiar words. For example, he consistently refers to his room as a fishbowl. Two doctors debate whether he requires either medication or understanding.

In its basic debate between two doctors who have two very different ideas over treatment of a patient who may or may not be delusional it reminds me of the play Blue/Orange by Joe Penhall, only that play debuted in 2000. Ng wrote The Fishbowl two years earlier.

Kindle Paperwhite

Let us assume that when I am not updating my Centennial blog on a regular basis, it means that instead of musing about writing, I am I the process of actually writing.

This is not actually true most days of the year, but let us assume it is so.

However, most recently, certainly this year, it has been so. My New Year’s Resolution has endured, I scribble for at least a half-hour each morning. That is far from the three hours of scribbling I would be doing if my sole profession were writing, but it is a half-hour daily more than what I used to attempt.

And when I say scribbling, I mean writing exercises, short meandering stories and complete nonsense. You should try it, and by that I mean every single day. That is in addition to the writing.

In calendar year 2014 I have now written the first drafts of three new works. Yes, I have. And it’s only August. A couple days ago I filled holes in The Great Globe Itself and have scheduled a reading for Wednesday. It is a mess, but truly my own, no one would mistake for anyone else’s. Leaps in time, historic references and lots of them, music, dance and a little magic. It’s what I do.

Unfortunately (perhaps) the homestretch occurred during vacation. You can’t choose when these things are going to come together. I needed to relax, some perspective, and enough time to read, write, and not write, without feeling too much pressure. But with the deadline fast approaching, a little pressure. There has to be a little pressure.

The unfortunately is because I spent a great deal of time in front of this screen, tapping away and re-reading when I should have been kayaking, swimming, fishing, playing D&D or just plain wandering around with my wife and children. These things did happen, just not in the quantities I would have preferred.

Waah. As I have to remind my son, there are children in Afghanistan who don’t even have screens.

The great good news was that I received as a belated birthday gift a Kindle Paperwhite from my brother and his family. My son objected. “But … you can’t play games on that!” That is correct, my son. Like my iPod nano, which still works and was a gift to me eight years ago, it does one thing, and does it very well.

Perhaps it is the novelty of the thing (a light, elegant thing, a pleasure to hold, so beautiful to look at) but I downloaded two books and read each of them in roughly two days each. Because screens. Even elegant, beautiful screens. But I can’t Minecraft on it, so I just keep reading. Because mellow, handheld, glowing screen. I love screeny screen screen.

Meanwhile, the reading fed the writing, sitting, staring at the sea, discovering how point A meets point G. The book reports come later, for now I have a 46-page script … with an extensive bibliography. Wish it luck.

On The Reading of Books

 
We are coming to the end of another pleasurable Christmas weekend at my in-laws. The day did not go as planned, it was to be a finally day of writing. However, nature intervened, we got maybe five inches of snow in a couple of hours and the power went out. So instead we took the kids out to my sister-in-law's boyfriend's place out in Albany, enjoying hayrides, snowball fights, a roaring bonfire, and hot cocoa. It was a worthy exchange. We can always write, we cannot always do these things.

Melancholy accompanies the final evening before a departure. Though the power is back, the lights are on, we are in our pajamas next to a warm fire and a sleeping hound, ready to read until we choose to retire. There is the inevitable sadness that comes with returning to life as usual. New Year's Eve is ahead of us, but still. Christmas is only now coming to an end.

I am currently enjoying the first volume of Simon Callow's biography of Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu. Reading has been very difficult for me this year, as I have begun and then discarded several volumes, which I may or may not return to. Some I surely shall, others leave me doubtful.

Susan Orleans' Rin Tin Tin was a welcome gift last Christmas, which I began at that time with great interest. However, the outreach tour got in the way and it was shelved some one hundred pages in. I see it every day, it is waiting for me. Stay, old boy. I will be right back.

Trying to find something to inspire me in preparation of The Times (or as an excuse to see the movie when it is released) I tried for perhaps the fourth time to read Kerouac's On the Road. After twenty pages I decided once again that Capote was right. And you can look that up.

Finally, I waited until after the election to read Under The Banner of Heaven. I have very much enjoyed other works by Jon Krakauer, but worked mightily not to let Mitt Romney's religion affect my opposition to him as a candidate. I have found Mormonism to be no more nor less ridiculous than any other religion that exists on earth, but concentrating on the history of the most repellent people who practice it is as unfair as concentrating on those most repellent Catholics, Muslims or Jews. However, I was interested and began in interest, until the events of Newtown, CT made my taste for stories of paranoid, murderous Americans vanish, for the duration.

And so we return to biography, in particular one which was loaned to me by my father maybe a decade ago. Just as well, I had his copy of The Last Place On Earth for almost as long but finally read and thoroughly enjoyed that.