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O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend/The brightest heaven of invention!/A kingdom for a stage, princes to act/And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!

–Prologue, King Henry V, William Shakespeare

If I have a muse, she’s a bit of a strange one. She doesn’t whisper things in my ear too often or write my words for me; her favorite method is to get me reading the right books. She’s of the teach-a-man-to-fish variety, I guess, and lately, she’s been on a roll. I say to myself, Where are all the books about actors? and she tells me to read Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea, which I purchased at the used bookstore a year ago because of the kitschy 1970s cover and a previous positive experience with Murdoch’s work. Turns out, it’s about a retired actor/director/playwright. I wonder about the intricacies of rewriting a Shakespearean play as a contemporary novel, and she sends me to my bottom shelf, where Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres sat unread for goodness knows how long, thinking I’m reading it because it’s about family. About a paragraph in, I realized I’d read about this family before.

At first, I thought A Thousand Acres might only incidentally reference King Lear Read more »

When I was a senior in high school, I had to fill out a form detailing my career goals. Based on this form, I was assigned a group for career day. Each group would spend first period in a classroom with a group of adults who had succeeded in their field of interest. I knew kids who spent their mornings with engineers, doctors, and teachers, but on my form, I said I wanted to be an actor. Maybe a director. That I’d like to start my own theater company. This put me in the miscellaneous group.

The miscellaneous group contained about fifteen kids out of the eight hundred who would graduate with me that year. We got the whole performing arts center to ourselves, presumably because it seemed aesthetically appropriate and not because we needed the space. We had speakers from a variety of careers in arts and letters: a radio personality, a journalist, a novelist, and a couple others whose presentations I can’t remember because I was busy counting the empty seats in the auditorium. The radio personality was the closest to an actor the school could scrounge up. They didn’t even bring in a drama teacher for the occasion, though a small handful of us had theatrical aspirations. Maybe they were trying to tell us something.

Of the presenters we had, the novelist interested me most. He was middle-aged, portly, and had put on a plaid button-down for the occasion. At that point, I hadn’t dreamed of being a writer since about sixth grade, when I wrote what I believed to be a novel (finding it years later, it was twenty-five pages in fourteen-point font) about a cute boy who fell inexplicably in love with a girl like me. I had been immersed in the theater for several years, moving from show to show with hardly a breather, often doing my homework in class or on breaks during rehearsal. I had no time for writing. But sitting in the cavernous PAC, listening to a man who finished a mystery novel every six months or so, I remembered how much I’d loved it. I listened with fascination as this man told us how many novels he’d published (I wish I could remember his name) and how, if you filled seven legal pads with fiction, bam! You’d have a novel. Read more »

Tonight will be my first opening night in seven years. Let’s just hope it goes better than this:

Or this: Read more »

I’ve heard a lot of writers say that when they’re working on a novel, their characters are always with them. Their characters ride around on their shoulders, whispering in their ears until their stories are down on paper. It’s a good reason, they say, to make sure you’re writing characters you won’t mind living with for a few years. Even when you’re not expressly working on the book, they’ll be at the corners of your mind. I’ve often doubted this would be the case with me, I suppose because I imagined this kind of absorption as a constant longing for the pen or the keyboard, an unending flow of ideas. I’d written a “novel” before–a disastrously autobiographical string of words written by the enforcement of quotas and deadlines that is now in a box under my bed where the cat has most likely puked on it–and I never felt that way. I had to force myself to write more words, not because the story needed them, but because I was determined to write a book-length work. My characters were my family members, thinly disguised, and the only one who seemed to follow me around was, predictably, based on me.

Now that I’m a more experienced writer and committed to a novel that is 100% fictional, I understand what those writers mean. Read more »

It’s 1986. Mickey Shaw is a thirty-five-year-old female New York cop who mostly works behind a desk, answering phones and filling out paperwork, processing masses of drug dealers, prostitutes, and domestic disturbers passing through. Being a woman, she is often asked to make coffee. She usually ignores the request. She is a compulsive knuckle cracker, and every morning before work she hits the gym; her favorite workout is boxing. She is a bit of a worry wart, always thinking, never shrugging anything off unless you count her husband, Stanley, who is a paper pusher but still earns more money than she does. She and Stanley have been married for fourteen years, and he isn’t as fun as he used to be, worn down by his job, plus he spends so much time alone in his office that he’s become increasingly clingy. He calls her several times a day, both at work and at her friend Olive’s apartment, where she spends one evening a week playing Trivial Pursuit with her high school friends. She quit drinking a few years ago and so is usually the only one of them fully sober, and often finds her friends heartless in their criticisms, but that’s just the way they are, and she accepts it. After all, she’s known them longer than she’s known her husband. She’s not one to throw friendships away. She walks with her hips wide, toes pointed slightly outward, shoulders square. She carries her gun in her purse at all times, though she’s never fired it outside a shooting range. As a kid she was addicted to Gunsmoke. She moves quickly, with purpose, but doesn’t always look where she’s going. Her effort/shape (a description of how she moves through space) is sinking, widening, out, bound, quick, strong, and indirect. She leads from her hips and her toes. Read more »

As an undergraduate, I knew a girl who liked to say that fiction writers have a god complex. She would make this decree in the snottiest voice possible, even when surrounded by fiction writers, each of whom could have (but never did) kicked her butt. She loved to dismiss us as control freaks, as if writing fiction were a character flaw.

I hate to agree with this girl on any level–if she were to tell me snow is white or grass is green, I’d be inclined to argue–but I’ve recently had to admit how much I like to control my own art. It’s not, as this girl might have suggested, that I like to rewrite reality by fictionalizing it, or that I get any sick pleasure from controlling my characters when the rest of the world is uncontrollable. It’s that as a writer (and this is true of poets and nonfictioners, too, except those few who somehow write books in pairs or by focus group/committee) I am the sole author of my work. Editors might come along and tweak things at certain points, but for better or worse, I am the one who writes my stories. I make all the choices, from sentence structure to plot points. If I want to cut a line, I can act unilaterally. My work is not a group project.

I have long taken my artistic autonomy for granted.

Read more »

Strange interpretation? Awesome. Just respect the text.

Summer is a beautiful time for theater lovers, because it’s the time of year when actors migrate from their regular digs and join new companies for summer stock and theater festivals. To my delight (and the delight of the producers, since the rights are free) many of these productions are Shakespearean. I’ve seen two Shakespearean comedies so far this summer and have my eye on a third: a production of The Tempest inside an old grain silo. But in some ways, the first two productions have me scared to see the third. Mainly, I’m afraid of the continuation of an insidious trend: a lack of respect for Mr. Shakespeare’s text.

Let me explain. The first production I saw was The Taming of the Shrew, which I had planned on reviewing, but I don’t like to bash a theater that has wowed me with productions in the past. Basically, the director decided that Shrew could be mashed up with Casablanca, setting the distinctly Italian comedy in 1940s somewhere-that-must-have-been-Italy-except-without-WWII. Katharina (the shrew herself) then took on, initially, the role of the nightclub singer dressed in red, while her sister Bianca sweetly played the piano. I’ve already forgotten which song she sang when she first stepped onstage, but it was a standard, and most definitely incongruous with the Shakespearean dialogue that ensued–dialogue that the actors did not seem to fully understand. Only one actor, in my opinion, managed to marry the setting to the dialogue and fully own his words, and that was the actor playing Gremio (a major character, but not enough to make up for his faltering cast mates). On top of that, the director decided that to match the setting to the text, he would replace Shakespearean words with their 1940s substitutions, so that the characters would be tripping along in their verse only to have a phrase like “Homburg hat” clang against the rest of the verbiage. Read more »

Finally, a decent movie from Spokane–The Knights of Badassdom.

I can’t believe Tyrian Lanister (Game of Thrones) is friends with Jason Stackhouse (True Blood), Liam McPoyle (Always Sunny), River Tem (Firefly),  Abed (Community), and Steve Zahn. They summon a demon during a heated bout of live-action role-playing. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gTT59NibGw

It’s been a while since I first read Gregory Maguire’s take on the Wicked Witch of the West, back before Wicked had been turned into a musical as far as I know, which, since Wicked opened on Broadway in 2003, means it’s been eight years or so. Maybe less. Maybe I just didn’t know it had been turned into a musical until it started touring, which was in 2005.

Either way, when I went to Spokane’s INB theater in May to see the musical for the first time, I had not read the book in years. Most recently (about a year ago) I had read A Lion Among Men, and the summer before that I’d read Son of a Witch, but while those reference back to the original’s plot points, they don’t repeat a lot of information.

Or so I thought. This summer, as soon as my last class was finished and my required reading list obliterated, I picked up Wicked and began to reread, to compare it to what I saw in the play, which I knew had been greatly simplified, boiled down to a paste. I remembered Wicked being highly complex, impressive in its rendering of a social/political world within Oz. I remembered it being gritty and tough, turning the Wicked Witch of the West into a satisfyingly rounded character, while the musical simplified things to a basic outcast story, complete with predictable love triangle, clearly villainous villains, easy ties to the main characters of the The Wizard of Oz, and a happy ending. I thought, as we so often do, The book was so much better! Read more »