s u m m e r w i n d

Posted on July 5, 2011 by daysofyore

For the past year, The Days of Yore project has been bringing you weekly interviews with some of the most exciting writers, performers, directors, and visual artists in the country. We’re really happy with what we’ve done so far, and we hope you’ve enjoyed the work.
As we regroup, re-tool, and re-stock up on interviews for our project, we’re taking the month of July off.

We’ll be back in August with more, but in the meantime, please enjoy a brief compendium of some of our favorite nuggets of advice that the site has to offer. We call them nuggets because they’re succinct and taste good.

The happiest of summers to all of you. And sincere thanks for all the shares and pass-alongs and kind words! We really appreciate you checking out the site.

- Astri, Evan, and Lucas: The Days of Yore Team

ADVICE NUGGETS

“If you want to write, if you believe you’ve got something to say, if you believe you can write, then write and don’t be afraid to sit down.” -Stephen Adly Guirgis, playwright

“Find your peers.” -Will Cotton, painter

“Writing is not about having something to say. It’s about an intense relationship with the symbolic. Which means being completely immersed in literature, which means in other literature, but also in the world and all its mediations. So, maybe that would be the advice: Go and get immersed.” -Tom McCarthy, writer and conceptual artist

“School shows you exactly where the minefields are and is supposed to give you a map so you go around them. What about if stepping on a mine is part of it?” -Thomas Roma, photographer

“If there’s something you love to do more than acting, do it.” -Patrick Fischler, actor

“Don’t go to publishing parties,” – Daniel Mendelsohn, writer

“Treat the stage as a privilege. Having an audience watch you perform is an honor, even if you are in the basement of a dingy bar. And go up as many times as you can.” -Kristen Schaal, comedian

“Understand that you will always be just starting out.” – Jo Ann Beard, writer

“If it’s easy, be suspicious.” – Sylvia Waters, dancer

“Form a little theater company. Produce plays in your great-aunt’s living room. Take long walks. Drink plenty of tea. Conjure grace.”- Sarah Ruhl, playwright

“If you want to make something new or interesting, then go and really engage with what is going on now. Either mix yourself up with it and go with the flow, or react against it, but just go and work on it in that sphere of intensity for a while.” -James Franco, writer/actor/artist

“Read. I feel like it’s amazing how many people I know who want to be writers who don’t really read. I’m not convinced someone wants to be a writer if they don’t read.” -Jennifer Egan, writer

“If you’re doing it for the right reasons, then the work is its own reward.” -JK Simmons, actor

“Money is only a good reason to do writing that you don’t want to do anyway.” -Stephen Elliot, writer

“Do not wait for the right circumstances to make your best work. Make your best work with the circumstances you are in right now.” – Anne Bogart, theater director

“Don’t work in a vacuum.” -Donald Margulies, playwright

“Fail.” -John D’Agata, writer

“[A] grandmother of mine…used to say, in Yiddish, “A minute before the time is not the time.” That’s been a solace.” -Peter Friedman, actor

“You want to work 9-5, so that when the day is over it’s over and the weekends are yours.” – Gary Shteyngart, writer

“Make yourself indispensable and put yourself in a place where tons of theater artists pass through on a regular basis.” -Anne Kauffman, director

“You make your own community, and then you develop a context for the work and it automatically gets deeper. And they [the art world] will come find you.” -Tim Davis, photographer

“Charlie Parker said, ‘If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.’” – Julia Alvarez, writer

“You have to do bad stuff all the time until it gets good.” -Björn Yttling, musician

“Don’t read your reviews and don’t whistle in the dressing room” -Daniel Jenkins, actor

“Write yourself naked. In exile. And in blood.” – David Shields, writer

“It never stops being scary.” – Bianca Marroquín, Broadway performer

“I think the only defensible position is to sort of say to hell with making a living and put all your energy into making something new, that seems beautiful to you – that is, to try your best to push your work into a new/iconic place and let the chips fall where they may.” -George Saunders, writer

“Enjoy the time you have now when you are relatively unknown because no one is asking you for anything specific. There is nothing hanging over you. You are in a world right now when anything can happen. Enjoy that. Once you start publishing you really have to work to recreate that open feeling, because you immediately start getting placed. And now, you’re unplaced— unplaceable even. And that is a good thing. You don’t owe anyone anything.” – Josh Bell, poet

That’s right. You don’t owe anyone anything. But you do owe it to yourself. So, go forth. Do things! And also swim, because it’s the summer. And that’s a fun thing to do.

- DoY

illustration courtesy of Gustaf von Arbin ( rep by Art-dept )

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Daniel Mendelsohn

Posted on June 27, 2011 by daysofyore

Daniel Mendelsohn is a prolific writer of essays, criticism, and books, including the memoir The Elusive Embrace, which was a New York Times Notable Book of 1999 and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year, and the international bestseller The Lost, which won the National Books Critics Circle Award and the National Jewish Book Award, among other honors. He has also published a collection of his critical essays, entitled, How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken, and an acclaimed two-volume translation of the complete works of C.P. Cavafy. His writing has appeared in countless publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, and New York, where he was book critic and won the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award for Excellence in Reviewing. He received a BA from the University of Virginia and a PhD in Classics from Princeton and is currently a Professor of Humanities at Bard College.

Reading Mendelsohn is like being invited into the inner machinery of his mind, and while perched rather perilously there, watching him work things out. Because that is, fundamentally, what characterizes his writing: a kind of working out on the page, a willingness to reveal the scaffolding of any carefully constructed argument, to even take apart and re-build everything from the ground up before the reader’s eyes.

Mendelsohn’s own eyes are a startlingly fierce yet friendly blue.

In The Lost, you describe your grandfather as an amazing storyteller. Was listening to him what first made you interested in narrative?

I don’t think there is any question that it was listening to my grandpa’s stories that made me a story person, a narrative person. I didn’t have any clearly formulated plan as a child that I wanted to write; I didn’t articulate it to that extent. I kept a journal from the time I was, like, seven. But I always was attracted to people who told stories, of which there was no better local model than my grandfather.

What I think happens is that the appetite for stories is implanted—in my case by close proximity to a very funny, very good storyteller—and then that makes you a reader because you realize that there are a lot of good stories out there and they’re all in the library. So I think that’s what made me a reader as well.

But these ‘oral’ beginnings very much influenced the kind of stuff that I ended up writing. I would say that the rhythms of my writing, when I’m writing as a nonfiction narrative person, are very oral; they are often conversational. So many people tell me after they read [my writing], “It was like listening to someone tell a story.” And I think, “Yeah, that’s exactly what I want to do.”

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Tom McCarthy

Posted on June 20, 2011 by daysofyore

Tom McCarthy is one of the hottest contemporary writers working in the English language. His work includes Men in Space, Tintin and the Secret of Literature, Remainder and, most recently, C, which was shortlisted for the 2010 Man Booker Prize. Remainder, initially published in a small run by an art house press, became an unexpected bestseller and won the Believer Book Award in 2008. In an essay in The New York Review of Books entitled ”Two Paths for the Novel”, Zadie Smith called it “one of the great English novels of the last ten years.” He is a frequent contributor to The New York Times, The London Review of Books and Artforum.

McCarthy is also a conceptual artist and the co-founder of the “semi-fictitious” International Necronautical Society, whose work has been exhibited around the world, including at Tate Britain and the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, Moderna Museet in Stockholm and the Drawing Center in New York.

The New Statesman called McCarthy “the most galling interviewee in Britain.” I found him to be one of the most amusing (read on to learn about his terrifyingly hilarious escapades with cat food).

After you graduated from Oxford you moved to Prague. Why Prague?

Prague was really cheap at the time. I got this very small grant that you could get in those days, called the Government Enterprise Allowance Grant. The Conservative British government at the time wanted to massage the unemployment figures, to bring them down. This is a real Thatcher thing. They decided that unemployed people would now be small businesses, and you could get a grant to be a small business. You had to come up with a business idea.

What did you come up with?

For about a three-year period, they were allowing artists and writers to be on that programme. Because that would bring another 0.5% of the unemployment figure down. To writers and artists who had been on the dole writing their poems or painting their paintings, they said: “You are now going to be small businesses, marketing your art and your literature, and therefore you are not unemployed,” thereby curing unemployment. [Chuckles.]

So anyhow, I got this grant and it wasn’t much to live on in London, but in Prague I could live like a king! I had an enormous apartment. It was a fantastic time. The revolution had happened the year before and the country was being run by artists and writers. The president [Václav Havel] was an absurdist playwright who filled parliament with his friends. You know, you’d go to a gig in a bar and the drummer smoking a joint with five earrings in his ear was, like, the minister of whatever. It was a very good time.

Continue reading →

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Stephen Adly Guirgis

Posted on June 13, 2011 by daysofyore

Stephen Adly Guirgis could rightly be described as New York City’s bard of the underbelly. Over the last fifteen years, whether set in a seedy Times Square bar or in a funeral parlor in Morningside Heights, Stephen’s plays exhibit a poet’s ear and a hustler’s mind as they chronicle the not-so-quiet desperation of broken lives led in the pursuit of fleeting grace.

His latest work, The Motherf**ker With The Hat, currently running at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre, is the first of his plays to appear on Broadway and has been nominated for six Tony awards (including Stephen for Best Play), six Outer Critics Circle awards (with Elizabeth Rodriguez winning for Outstanding Featured Actress in a Play), three Drama Desk awards, and three Drama League awards. Stephen’s other plays have been produced on five continents and throughout the United States; they include Our Lady of 121st Street (10 best plays of 2003; Lucille Lortel, Drama Desk, and Outer Critics Circle Best Play nominations), Jesus Hopped The A Train (Edinburgh Festival Fringe First Award, Detroit Free Press Best Play of the Year, as well as an Olivier nomination for Best New Play), In Arabia We’d All Be Kings (10 Best of ’99, Time Out New York) as well as The Last Days of Judas Iscariot and The Little Flower of East Orange. All five of those plays were directed by Philip Seymour Hoffman and produced by LAByrinth Theater Company, where Stephen has been a Member since 1994 and a Co-Artistic Director with Mimi O’Donnell and Yul Vazquez since 2009.

Guirgis lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan with his dog, Papi.

So, where did you grow up?

I grew up on the Upper West Side. Of New York City.

Did you always want to get involved in theater, or did you have other aspirations?

I think that other than obvious boy aspirations of like: cop, rockstar, baseball player – um, yeah. My mom was really into theater and movies, and so from an early age I think she exposed me and my sister to that.

What are your favorite theater memories from growing up?

Well, in the third grade, we did Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and the nun [who directed it] was Sister Margaret Mary. We would get our parts by picking them out of a hat. I picked the Evil Queen. And she was like “Whoa, Stephen, you got to pick again, because … you’re a boy.”

Right.

But I knew the Evil Queen was a good part. So I lobbied to be able to play it. And I did.

You played the Evil Queen.

Yeah.

Well, you wanted to be an actor at first, right?

I think so, yeah.

And what about since? What plays, or experiences in a theater, shaped your theatrical knowledge?

Well, there was a movie. I saw The Sting when I was really pretty little, I think I was like eight when The Sting came out. My mother was really surprised I wanted to see the movie – I didn’t know why I wanted to see it – but I wanted to see it so bad—

It had a great poster.

Yeah. And so I saw it. And then I got her to let me go see it twice. I bought the album – that was the first album I ever bought, the Scott Joplin soundtrack – and I remember I used to, like, pretend I was a grifter.

I did plays in high school. I was really lucky, when I got to eleventh grade, there was a drama teacher that took a real active interest in me, and he cast me in the leads in a bunch of plays.

Which plays?

The Glass Menagerie, I played Tom. And then Merchant of Venice, I played Shylock. I started out in Macbeth, and I played Macduff.

I was just telling someone the other day, I went to college at SUNY, and I knew I wanted to be an actor, but I didn’t think about majoring in theater. For some reason, I didn’t think you could do that. Or that it made sense. So I tried to study other things, but I really wasn’t doing that well in school, because I wasn’t that interested.

I went home for my birthday, and my sister— who was like a teenager at the time— with her babysitting money, bought me a ticket to a play. When I saw the ticket, it was a Ticketmaster ticket, so I assumed it was for, like, a rock concert. And I was psyched. But when I saw it was for a play, I was kind of bummed out. It was a Wednesday matinee of Burn This, with John Malkovich. I went and I saw that and Malkovich’s first entrance in the play, like twenty minutes into the play, it just… it really rocked my world. I went back up to school and changed to become a theater major. And now, like twenty years later, our play, Motherf**ker [With The Hat], is in that same theater. Continue reading →

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Nick Flynn

Posted on June 6, 2011 by daysofyore

Nick Flynn has worked as a ship’s captain, an electrician, and a case-worker with homeless adults. His two most recent books, both released in 2011, are a collection of poems, The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands, and a memoir, The Ticking is the Bomb, which the Los Angeles Times calls a “disquieting masterpiece.” His previous memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (2004), won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award, was shortlisted for France’s Prix Femina, and has been translated into thirteen languages. A movie adaptation of Another Bullshit Night, starring Robert DeNiro and Paul Dano, is scheduled for release in 2012. Flynn is also the author of two prior books of poetry, Some Ether (2000), and Blind Huber (2002), and a play, Alice Invents a Little Game and Alice Always Wins (2008), for which he received fellowships from, among other organizations, The Guggenheim Foundation and The Library of Congress.

Flynn’s poems, essays and non-fiction have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, National Public Radio’s This American Life, The New York Times Book Review, and others. His film credits include artistic collaborator and field poet on the film Darwin’s Nightmare, which was nominated for an Academy Award for best feature documentary in 2006. He teaches at the University of Houston during the spring semester each year, and spends the rest of the year in Brooklyn and upstate New York.

On the day that we spoke, Flynn was boyishly animated and wearing a bright purple stocking cap.

Growing up, what were your early experiences with books?

I went to a public school, we didn’t have a whole lot of money, and there weren’t a lot of books around the house. Some of what I saw of books didn’t seem to be a life-affirming activity—it seemed to be almost like taking Valium. My brother read mountains of science fiction, which I didn’t understand could contain deeper meanings. My grandmother read murder/romances that she bought by the pound, just books to pass the time. To me, that wasn’t interesting. But my mother had a few good books around the house, some Shakespeare. Plath. ee cummings. And I liked to spend time in our local library, and to hang out at the local bookstore in town.

The first book I ever bought on my own was Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, because I was really into horror. I was maybe in second grade. I remember looking at it and being like, I can only understand half these words. I can’t read this now. But it was so thrilling to know I’d be able to read this someday. A year, maybe two years later, I went back and read the whole thing.

The stuff that moved me in a creative way didn’t happen in school. I had one English teacher in junior high who was great, and we read interesting stuff, like Something Wicked This Way Comes. But most everything that excited me happened outside of school. I would find books that I wasn’t supposed to read. Illicit books, books people had hidden someplace. Things that were somehow charged, like Henry Miller, something dirty, or that people had hidden in a little shack down by the river. Strange things, you know? But they seemed somehow important enough to hide. You weren’t supposed to read them, and that had a pull.
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Patrick Fischler

Posted on May 30, 2011 by daysofyore

Patrick FischlerPatrick Fischler is an American television, film, and stage actor. You’ve seen him in over fifty projects, including films like Mulholland Drive, Speed, Old School, and The Black Dhalia. He has an upcoming role as poet Lew Welch in Michael Polish’s Big Sur, a film about Jack Kerouac’s journey with his close friends from New York to California in the wake of all that happened in his life after publishing On The Road.

Fischler has also appeared on Mad Men, Lost, and pretty much any other show that’s been on TV for the past decade. His work has garnered him an AFI Fest Best Actor Award and the opportunity to work alongside the likes of David Lynch and Matthew Weiner. He is also a founding member of the Los Angeles based theater company, Neurotic Young Urbanites.

Fischler will tell anyone who asks that his greatest accomplishments are his daughter, Fia, and his relationship with his wife, Lauren. He loves to cook and secretly wants to be a teacher.

Okay, where did you grow up?

I grew up in Los Angeles, in the City of Angels.

And you come from a long line of actors, like many LA–

Not even remotely. My Dad wanted to be an actor. He did plays in South Africa. He was American, but he went to South Africa when he was in his thirties. So, he always had a sort of love for theater and film and he used the restaurant as his stage. That’s what everybody always said.

What’s the restaurant?

Patrick’s Roadhouse. He bought that when I was five years old and named it after me. It’s sort of an L.A. institution. It had it’s heyday, really, in the mid-eighties, so all these celebrities and political figures would come in, and my dad would stand in the front. He was very flamboyant in these crazy shorts and knee high green socks, and he would sing opera…and insult people, and that was kind of his stage. He almost performed without performing, but it was his life.

Do you think that your desire to be an actor came from your Dad? Came from being in L.A.? Where do you think it really started?

That’s a really good question, actually. I remember as a little kid, as a little little kid, always loving movies and TV. Always. And I was a latchkey kid, so I was opening that door after school and turning on that TV. But I was also into theater. I remember my first New York trip. My dad took me when I was ten. We saw this show called Barnum, a musical, with Glenn Close. This was before she was famous, or anything like that. It was about P.T. Barnum, and it was unbelievable as a kid to see a show about the circus. I was always interested, even at a young age, and my dad took me to a lot of that kind of stuff.

I always knew I wanted to be involved in the business in some way, but I think the acting thing really struck in high school when I got into drama classes after I got back from South Africa because I went to Beverly High and they had an incredible Drama Department.

So you were right on the path?

A big part of it is that I had been in school with these kids from Kindergarten to Eighth grade, same school, and then I bailed in ninth grade and then came back [from South Africa]. Those years between 13 and 16 are so huge. You become such a different person. When I came back, none of the people I was friends with were my friends anymore. At that time there was no internet, no Facebook. I’m in South Africa. There was no communication unless you wrote a letter. So, I lost touch with everyone, and when I came back everyone had changed so much. I think that drew me to finding a crowd that I could relate to. I instantly thought: drama.

I got the experience of doing theater for two years, and I couldn’t have loved it more. I really feel like Beverly High did interesting plays, too. They did The Elephant Man and Amadeus. They did smart theater, and it was incredible to be a part of it.
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Crystal Williams

Posted on May 23, 2011 by daysofyore

Crystal Williams writes poems that vibrate like tuning forks to the frequencies of contemporary social politics, personal responsibility, family, and identity. Her third and most recent collection, Troubled Tongues (Lotus Press, 2009), won the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award and shortlisted for the Idaho Prize. Her previous two collections are Kin (Michigan University Press, 2000) and Lunatic (Michigan State University Press, 2002), and she has recently completed a fourth manuscript, titled Walking The Cemetery: Detroit Poems.

Her poems have been widely anthologized and have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, 5AM, The Crab Orchard Review, The Sun, Ms. Magazine, The Indiana Review, Callaloo, and many other publications. She has also performed her poems in venues across the country, including as a member of the 1995 Nuyorican Poets Café National Poetry Slam Team.

Williams holds a B.A. from New York University and an M.F.A. from Cornell University, and has received fellowships and grants from The MacDowell Arts Colony, the Oregon Arts Commission, and the Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. She is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, and she has a deep, generous, and irresistible laugh.

You grew up in Detroit and wound up getting your start in poetry in the slam scene in New York. Can you walk me through how you got there?

I originally went to college for acting, then went up to New York City to study acting with a fairly famous acting coach. When he accepted me, he said, “You’ll be a very good character actress, or you could lose fifty pounds and be an ingénue.” I thought “character actor” sounded lame. I didn’t know that’s what you want to be, a character actor. But I had also started writing dramatic monologues at Howard, because my friend Stevie was running talent shows, and the prize was a hundred dollars.

So when I came up to New York and decided, “To hell with acting,” I kept writing dramatic monologues and got involved with spoken word. I was at the Nuyorican Poets Café from ’93 or ’94 through about ’97, and I was on the ’95 Nuyorican Slam Team. At the same time, I had started studying creative writing at NYU with poets like Ruth Danon and Karen Volkman.

Two things were gnawing at me: I was tiring of the three-minute constraint of the slam poem, and I was getting more interested in the craft of poetry as a vocation.

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Jo Ann Beard

Posted on May 16, 2011 by daysofyore

Jo Ann Beard achieved cult status among a whole generation of young writers with her essay collection The Boys of My Youth, which came out in 1999. Her avid fans had to wait a long time for the next book, In Zanesville, a novel, which was published in April, 2011. In the meantime, her essays were widely anthologized in collections like The Best American Essays and the Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: Work From 1970 to the Present (2007). Her work has also appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, The Iowa Review, and O, The Oprah Magazine.

Beard was the recipient of a 1997 Whiting Foundation Award and a 2005 Guggenheim Fellowship. She earned a BFA and an MFA from the University of Iowa and currently teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College.

Susannah Meadows for The New York Times recently wrote of Beard, she “has a knack for melding the funny and the sad, amplifying small moments into something big.”

When did you first realize you wanted to write?

I discovered writing in my early 30s, as I was finishing my undergraduate degree in art. A fiction class I took on a whim was what did it. Though recently when I was visiting an old friend, she dug into her closet and pulled out a flannel bag filled with notes and letters from me, beginning in seventh grade and ending when email was invented. Each one was like a little essay, what can I say. The bag itself had leopard spots and matched a sleeping bag my friend used to bring to sleepovers; I remembered it a lot more clearly than I remembered the person who had written all those notes in class and all those Selectric Typewriter letters from whatever office she/I was pretending to work in.

Were you a big reader early on? What did you read?

I read everything, and by that I mean: everything. Favorites were Charles Dickens, Albert Payson Terhune, and Mary O’Hara. Dogs, horses, and distressed children.

How did your family and friends feel about your decision to pursue life as a writer?

Nobody thought anything, because pursue wasn’t really the right word. There was nothing for other people to notice: I went to work every morning and after work I did other things. Writing just became one of the other things; it was like building model ships. I wrote stories and set them on my mental mantel.

Writing isn’t exactly a stable career path. Did you or do you feel pressure to do something more “practical?”

I have always been practical, though I don’t particularly believe in it. I was raised by people who cared a lot about certain things and not much about others. They cared that you got good grades in school so you could get a good job in an office. What they didn’t care for was anything that took you away from home for too long. Like a road trip, say, or college.

When you say you’ve always been practical, how did that manifest itself in your life choices?

By being practical, I mean I always had a day job, so it didn’t matter if writing paid off in a monetary way. (It doesn’t.) And I don’t make life choices, I operate more short-term than that. I never chose to be a painter or a writer; those things chose me, and then, in the case of painting, unchose me.

How did you go about becoming a “writer?” Early writings?

The first story I wrote was set in a post-apocalyptic Iowa City, about having to put your dogs to sleep because you don’t want them to be left roaming the smoking ruins after you have succumbed to radiation sickness. (It was the 80s.) It had King Tut in it, and cavemen. The second was about a very wealthy little girl who poisons her grandparents by putting pesticides in their pudding. It had lions in it.

You can understand that I didn’t publish for quite a long while.
Continue reading →

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Sarah Ruhl

Posted on May 9, 2011 by daysofyore

Sarah Ruhl is a widely acclaimed American playwright. Her plays include In the Next Room, or the vibrator play (Broadway 2009, 2010 Pulitzer Prize Finalist), The Clean House (2005 Pulitzer Prize Finalist; The Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, 2004); Passion Play, a cycle (Pen American Award, The Fourth Freedom Forum Playwriting Award from The Kennedy Center); Dead Man’s Cell Phone (Helen Hayes Award for Best New Play); Melancholy Play; Demeter in the City (9 NAACP Image Award nominations), Eurydice; Orlando; and Late: a cowboy song.

Her plays have been seen in almost every major city in America, at places like the Lincoln Center Theater, Goodman Theatre, Playwrights Horizons, Second Stage, Arena Stage, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Yale Repertory Theatre, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Cornerstone Theater, The Wilma Theater, Madison Repertory Theatre, and the Piven Theatre, among others. They have also been produced internationally, translated into Polish, Russian, Spanish, Norwegian, Korean, German, and Arabic. Originally from Chicago, Ms. Ruhl received her MFA from Brown University where she studied with Paula Vogel. In 2003, she was the recipient of the Helen Merrill Emerging Playwrights Award and the Whiting Writers’ Award. She is a member of 13P and New Dramatists and won the MacArthur Fellowship in 2006. She is a recent recipient of the PEN Center Award for a mid-career playwright.

Her newest play, Stage Kiss, is currently running at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago.

When did you realize that you wanted to be a writer?

Since before I could write I wanted to be a writer. I know that’s a little strange, but there it is.

Who were the writers you most admired when you were growing up?

When I was growing up I loved the Brontes, Jane Austen, e.e. cummings, Maud Hart Lovelace, Shakespeare, Katherine Mansfield, Iris Murdoch, Plato.

You were going to be a poet when you started college. What made you decide to switch your focus to playwriting?

I majored in creative writing with a focus on playwriting. Before I met Paula Vogel I thought I would be a poet and some kind of scholar to support my poetry habit. It was Paula’s belief in me that made it seem possible to make a life as a playwright. Paula sneaked my first play, Passion Play, into the New Plays Festival at Trinity Repertory Theater and it was that performance that turned me into a playwright. I got into a car accident on the way there, blacked out, arrived, saw Passion Play, and thought, “This is what I want to do with my life.” Perhaps it never really happened. Perhaps my whole life has been a dream since that car accident.

Was your family supportive of you pursuing a career in the arts?

Yes! I couldn’t have had a more supportive family. I can only imagine that they would have been less supportive had I gone into some responsible profession. My mom is an actress and has always supported me being a writer; my father died before I started writing plays, but always supported my grand ideas of becoming a writer. Though he cautioned me about having a solipsistic writer’s life—a professional hazard or bugbear—and wanted me to teach as well as write for that reason.

When you graduated from college, what was your first move?

I moved back to Evanston, where my family lives and I worked for Americorps in the public schools, went to writer’s colonies, and did a play with the Piven Theater Workshop.

Before you were able to support yourself wholly in the theatre, what kind of jobs did you have?

Oh, God. There were so many. I remember at tax time I would have about a million W9s. Berlitz language school was one. Reading plays for theaters was one, which I enjoyed. Teaching in the public schools was one, I loved that job, I would do it forever, working for Teachers and Writers and Young Playwrights Inc. in New York teaching poetry and playwriting to very young kids. I did research for a book on public parks for a non-for-profit. I was a “lady reader” for a very old man. I was a model for figure drawing classes. I taught a writer’s group for developmentally delayed adults in Pawtucket, a job I wish I could have had forever. I worked at a bookstore.
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James Franco

Posted on May 2, 2011 by daysofyore

James Franco is an actor, writer, director, visual artist…the list goes on. Most well known for his on-screen work, Franco has appeared in a number of major Hollywood films, including the Spider-Man trilogy, Pineapple Express, Eat Pray Love, Milk, for which he won an Independent Spirit Award for Best Supporting Actor, and 127 Hours, which earned him an Independent Spirit Award for Best Male Lead and an Academy Award Nomination for Best Actor, among many other awards and nominations. He played James Dean in the critically acclaimed TV film James Dean, for which he won a Golden Globe for Best Actor, Allen Ginsberg in the independent film Howl, and he also starred as Daniel Desario in the cult TV show Freaks and Geeks. His most recent films are Your Highness and Rise of the Planet of the Apes, which premiers on August 5, 2011. He hosted the 2011 Academy Awards with actress Anne Hathaway.

In 2010, Scribner published Franco’s short story collection Palo Alto: Stories. His paintings and installation work have been exhibited at galleries in New York, Los Angeles, and Berlin.

Franco earned a BA from UCLA, a MFA in film from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, and MFA degrees in fiction from Brooklyn College and Columbia University. He has studied poetry at Warren Wilson College and is currently enrolled in the Ph.D. program in English at Yale University.

Franco is emphatic, determined, and unwilling to let anyone think they really ‘get’ him. He does what he wants and knows why he does it, no matter how much the rest of us keep wondering.

When you were little, what did you want to be when you grew up?

I told my mom that I wanted to be a ‘worker man,’ which was a construction worker, I guess. I liked to build things. And then I wanted to be a football player. My mom tried to break it to me gently that I was probably too small to play football, professionally. But she still gave me hope, she didn’t completely shut me down.

My mother is a children’s book author, so that was around. I remember that I wrote stuff when I was pretty young, like elementary school. There was a story called “Deep Down,” it was influenced by the comic, The Far Side, but I didn’t draw it. I drew at that time, but this wasn’t a comic. I don’t even know what it was….but I was writing young.

At one point in junior high, I read Cannery Row [by John Steinbeck] and I loved that character Ed Ricketts. He was a marine zoologist, so I wanted to do that. He kind of had the coolest set-up. In Monterrey, he lived on the water and would just go into the tide pools and stuff, and that was his job. That was a pretty cush job. I don’t know how many marine zoologists actually have it that good.

But it sounded good to you.

It was pretty romanticized. But I always— ‘cause my mom was a writer and my parents met in art school, they were painters— it [writing and art] was always kind of around. I think that all that stuff was always in the back of my head, even if I wasn’t actively pursuing it. One of the reasons I didn’t pursue it when I was twelve, thirteen, fourteen, was because of fear, I guess. When I was about sixteen – that was when I started reading seriously. But, well, I read a lot when I was younger, too. I read all the Oz books, all the Tolkien books.

Were you finding them at home, or were you going and seeking them out?

I was going and seeking that out. I guess I just loved fantasy. My dad introduced me to Tolkien and after that I was sort of off and running. I found a lot of stuff on my own.

When I was a little older, I guess eighth grade, my friend introduced me to Kerouac. Then we started reading all the Beats together. And then my dad gave me As I lay Dying, and then I read a lot of Faulkner, Hemingway, all that stuff.

At that age, when you were reading that stuff, did you have the sense that you wanted to write like that? Did you have a sense of what it meant to do that?

Yeah. I remember very clearly reading Heart of Darkness, and I don’t know why I thought this, but it’s like when somebody does something well, you think: “Oh, that’s easy!” I remember reading it and thinking, “Oh yeah, I’m going to do this, I can do this. He’s telling a story, I can do that.”
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