Writing Archives - Page 2 of 3

New Acquisition

Since 2007, New Acquisition has distributed nearly 5,000 pamphlets at public performances, bookstores, and art galleries around New York City.

Writing and creating performances can take years. You begin writing a play or a story and months or a couple years later it starts to make its way out into the world, through readings or workshops. And then later still a production or publication comes along, if you are persistent and lucky. I started this project in order to have something immediate, short-term, fun, and collaborative. A project that defies the usual rules of the game—it’s fast, cheap, responsive, and playful. This project has allowed me to explore new forms of performance and publishing, and also to build a project specifically aimed at providing opportunities for women—a group persistently excluded from both publishing and performance establishments even in the 21st century.

Re-Examining the Soho Effect

In the summer of 2010, when New York’s Ohio Theater was set to close its doors forever, I wrote an essay for The L Magazine about the cultural history of the plot of land that the Ohio had sat upon for decades. Through this discussion I opened up questions about the ways that artist-led gentrification effects neighborhoods in urban centers and the ways that contemporary city’s try to use artists as a means to an end in stimulating economic growth.

Conversation

What if you could always get what you wanted from the other person in every conversation? What if there was a systematic approach to communicating that would never leave you feeling like you had messed up, that you hadn’t said what you wanted to say? Those are the questions that led me to first write a short essay on the topic, and then later morph the ideas of that essay into a character who develops a theory to help overcome her own problems with communicating.

Please Loiter

The Work Office, a collaborative art project led by Katarina Jerinic and Naomi Miller, was soliciting work for a new iteration of their project. I applied and was accepted to participate in the group exhibition. Inspired by the Works Progress Administration, which employed artists in US during the Great Depression, the project offers Depression-era wages to artists to generate “idea-based assignments to explore, document, or improve daily life in New York.” Each artist has only 2 weeks to produce the work, and then it is presented in an exhibition. I chose to record a sound collage and build images and text to accompany the sounds.

The Typewriter Girls

Both my aunt and my grandmother attended the same secretarial college in St. Louis, MO—Miss Hickey’s School for Secretaries. After doing a little digging I discovered that not only is this school still well known among many generations of St. Louis residents, its founder Margaret Hickey has a fascinating and rich history all her own. This play was inspired by Margaret Hickey and the many generations of women who graduated from her school.

Fiction

Over the years I’ve written a selection of fiction pieces, a handful of which have been published, primarily in the UK.

Place ReImagined

How does the place we’re in dictate our behavior? When can we reimagine our role even when we’re in a space that seems to dictate a single way of being? These are the questions that inspired me when I worked with a choreographer to develop this dance piece.

Spitting Against the Wind

Benjamin Franklin is a figure that most Americans and many non-Americans feel they know well. But the man we think we know as Ben Franklin is almost entirely a mythic figure—an incredibly persistent and omnipresent myth. Why do we want to believe that myth? What’s attractive about it to us as a culture, and what purpose does it serve? And what would it mean for Franklin to be portrayed as a human being instead of an idol?

Assistance Without Resistance

Radical politics is a serious endeavor that many people engage with for a lifetime, struggling to reach a revolutionary end point. But many people who engage with radical politics burn out quickly, or their lives change, or they can no longer sustain the lifestyle demanded by their strict beliefs. My initial relationship with this world was relatively brief, and looking back on it, I wanted to find a way to respond to it with a humorous gaze, highlighting a very small slice of the human realities of living at the fringes.

Three Choices

How do we decide whether to live a life of pleasure, honor or contemplation? And when do we decide? Or is it decided for us, before we even start to live?