The Show Must Go On, Part 2: The Story We Tell Ourselves
I’ve signed up to do a storytelling show, though I’m not a natural storyteller. I pitched my story because being in a show sounds like fun. Because oral storytelling is a skill that I want to learn as a writer. Because I used to be a theater kid. And because as much as being in front of an audience terrifies me, I still love to perform. Then, predictably, stage fright sets in.
An Affair
It is as if she knew what he was thinking before he thought it; electrons are fast but not that fast. He checks the timestamps. Her reply is timestamped earlier than his original message by two minutes. The only logical explanation he can think of is she is in a slightly different time at school, that his time at home is warped and school is always two minutes ahead of home…
The Show Must Go On
In about eight weeks, I’ll be in a storytelling show, down here in Tacoma. And having signed up for this show, I am now cursed (or blessed) with abundant irony. I am terrified that I don’t know how to tell a story.
Before the rhytidectomy
Assuage their vanity with tools of
rhetoric and anything
they pay to hear; sacrifice
the flesh as a halal butcher
hangs carcasses
to a commercial god.
Sonnet for Abe
My love for you continues to this day.
With our photographs and history I stay.
Writing stories of our life together
keeps me brave: Alive, and feeling better.
Bushwick Book Club Seattle watches the Watchmen
One of the marvelous things about the Seattle arts community is its literary heart. Few environments can boast of lit-driven ensembles like Book-It Reparatory Theater and the Bushwick Book Club Seattle. Beginning in 2010, Bushwick members have taken great risk in drawing musical inspiration from written works deeply entrenched in the popular consciousness, if not the personal mythology, of its audience.
Donny’s Big Break
“Why can’t the world be unfair to me? Why do I always get exactly what I deserve?”
Stuck: the Right to Atrophy
Is the pursuit of the right to atrophy a dramatically compelling one? This is the question that continues to occur to me as I reflect on playwright Jessica Hatlo’s Stuck, up now at Washington Ensemble Theatre.
Elephant Song
On evenings filled with rain the elephants
believe my open door leads to a green stretch
of forest and trundle through.
Each concocts a song or howl of her own—
a moan of bassoon, a pitch of piccolos
and even agonies of strings to tell of elephant
tragedies coated in silt.
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