ArtSake

In Three Stages, we ask Massachusetts artists to shed light on their art-making process by focusing on three stages in one work of art.

Here, Rosanna Yamagiwa Alfaro (Playwriting Fellow ’11) traces her new play Before I Leave You from its inspiration, to its challenges, to its culmination in this month’s premiere (October 14-November 13, 2011) at The Wimberly Theatre in the Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts, produced by the Huntington Theatre Company.

Inspiration

My play, Before I Leave You, began 10 years ago with an inexplicable tumble in my kitchen. I began to lift a heavy skillet from the stove and suddenly fell backwards onto the floor. For no real reason I thought this was the beginning of the end. Four of my five characters are on the cusp of old age. As one of them says, “One day you’re in good health, the next – who knows? You hear of someone having his hips replaced or his arteries reamed, and you say to yourself, ‘Well, he’s seventy.’ And then you think, in a few years I’ll be seventy.” There have been many mid-life crisis plays, many coming of age plays. I wanted to write a coming of old age play.

The four characters in my play range in age from 58 to 65, the time of life when one is alert to any sign that one’s physical and mental powers might be failing. All four are lifelong friends – they dine together regularly at the Royal East, a Chinese restaurant in Cambridge; they drop in unannounced at each other’s houses; they each try their hand at parenting the fifth character in the play, an angry boarding school dropout. I wanted to see what happens when a serious illness strikes one of the group – do they remain steadfast, or is it time to run away?

Challenge

I soon decided I wanted to set Before I Leave You in Cambridge, the place I have spent 46 years of my life. My other plays have been set as far afield as Amsterdam, Mexico City, Mount Olympus, and an imaginary dictatorship in Latin America, but I thought it was high time to write about my own city, teeming with college students, but also inhabited by vigorous elders, whose passions, both personal and professional, still run deep.

I wanted to capture the diverse community of Harvard Square: Jeremy, a professor and novelist, is the one who takes the tumble; Koji, a professor and theater director, suddenly rediscovers his Asian roots; Peter, the boarding school dropout, has found romance with the Vietnamese checkout girl at Shaw’s; and Emily, an artist, Koji’s wife and Peter’s mother, is the still point of this spinning world. My challenge was to create recognizable Harvard Square types – accomplished, neurotic, and opinionated, but each with their own unique and keenly felt problems, based as they are on people (including myself) I’ve known for a very long time.

Culmination

As I write this, the rehearsal space has just changed from a large, cold, windowless warehouse room on Huntington Avenue to the warm comfortable Wimberly Theater in the Calderwood Pavilion at the BCA. Tech rehearsals have begun. Suddenly everyone is in costume, the three sliding palettes (Jeremy’s study, Koji and Emily’s living room, and the Royal East) are taking turns at center stage in an amazing set bordered by back-lit bookshelves. It seems incredible that we are about to open for previews in three days!

I gathered notes (and scenes) for Before I Leave You for four years, then I worked on it at the PlayPen in Central Square Theatre, where it had its first public reading, and at the Huntington Playwriting Fellows program, at the end of which I was told it would be part of the 2011-2012 Huntington season. One compelling reason for being a playwright (as opposed to a novelist or a poet) is that it’s a sociable profession for at least part of the year. You spend most of the time alone with characters of your choice. You put words in their mouths. You spend hours thinking about what you should have said in conversations that never took place. Then, if you’re lucky you get to hang out with exciting directors, actors, dramaturgs, designers, all working together intensely for a short time to get the play on its feet and as perfect as humanly possible for opening night. There are few things in my life more stressful and exhilarating than that!

Before I Leave You, produced by the Huntington Theatre Company, runs at The Wimberly Theatre in the Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts, October 14-November 13, 2011. Find video, audio, images, and articles about the production.

Rosanna Yamagiwa Alfaro is a Huntington Theatre Company Playwriting Fellow whose plays have been performed at Pan Asian Repertory Theatre, Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Magic Theatre, The Boston Women on Top Festival, La MaMa ETC., and elsewhere. She is the writer and narrator of the documentary Japanese American Women: A Sense of Place. Seven of her short plays have been in the Boston Theater Marathon, and eight were finalists in the National Ten-Minute Play Contest. Her plays have been anthologized by Baker’s Plays, Heinemann, Charta Books, Smith and Kraus, and Meriwether Publishing. Ms. Alfaro is 72 years old, and has been a resident of Cambridge, MA for more than 40 years.

Images and media: Rosanna Yamagiwa Alfaro, photo by Gustavo Alfaro; Ross Bickell, Kippy Goldfarb, Glenn Kubota, and Karen MacDonald, from BEFORE I LEAVE YOU at the Huntington Theatre Co., photo by Paul Marotta; quote from BEFORE I LEAVE YOU; behind-the-scenes video about BEFORE I LEAVE YOU, by Huntington Theatre Company.

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In Three Stages, we ask Massachusetts artists to shed light on their art-making process by focusing on three stages in one work of art.

Here, Dawn Lane (Choreography Fellow ’10) traces her new dance piece “one potato, two potato” from its inspiration, to its juxtapositions, to the collaborations that have led to its premiere at Jacob’s Pillow in Becket, MA, September 2 and 3, 2011.

Inspiration

I first traveled to Ireland in the spring of 1984 and knew immediately it was a place I would return to. On my fifth trip in 2006, I found myself driving a “green” road in the Burren in County Clare. I stopped at what looked like a farming road and started walking… I soon noticed a megalithic stone, which I later learned was a pre-Christian well and children’s burial ground. On the stone was a simple and stylized carving of a child’s face. I took some photos and drew a sketch. That night as I wrote in a travel journal I felt a fascination forming… the road was the Famine Road, also know as The Burren Way.

In June 2009, I returned and shot some video, the true beginning of this project. I was moved to learn this road was built by those whose homes and crops were devastated by the potato blight in the mid 19th century in exchange for food and if they were lucky a bed in a workhouse. Between the years 1845 and 1852, over one million people died and another million left Ireland. Some died on what came to be called coffin ships… boats that went back and forth from Ireland to North America, never letting anyone off.

Juxtaposition

The juxtaposition of this calamity and the beauty of the Irish landscape coupled with the spirit and humor of the Irish people triggered me to create this work. My intentions are to draw upon this history as a metaphor, rather than to create a historical depiction. All of us are vulnerable, all of us exquisite, all of us wasteful. We all subscribe to hope and possibility. We bear responsibility for our choices yet, we sometimes have no choice in our predicaments. The piece one potato, two potato looks at the delicate balance between devastation and beauty, hardship and triumph. The choreographic challenge is to find ways to depict the balance… paying attention to take care and honor my intentions while remembering that an audience has to be engaged and not turned off by tragic subject matter. It’s about trust, really. I want to trust my choreographic instincts, so the audience will trust me and get on the ride!

Go maire sibh chomh fada is mian libh, Is ná raibh gátar oraibh chomh fada is a mhaireann sibh. (May you live as long as you want, and never want as long as you live.)

Collaboration

I want to extend my gratitude to Ella Baff, the Pillow staff, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and my colleagues at Community Access to the Arts for their support in the creation and fruition of this work. In October 2010, my dancers and I had the honor of working in the Doris Duke Theatre for one week as part of the Pillow’s Creative Development Residency Program. It was during this week that we established the basis for one potato, two potato. We are delighted and honored that the premiere is in the Doris Duke Theatre, the very space the work was nurtured.

Since October 2010, the work has grown to include much collaboration, integrating dancers with mixed abilities from CATA’s Moving Company, working to include the children of the several of the lead dancers, and collaborating with a filmmaker and photographer to create video/photographic projections which will play intermittently during the work. The assembly of all these people exemplifies true collaboration, each facet needing the other in order to create a completed work. It has been a lesson in letting each step inform the next and letting all involved bring their passions, talents, and expertise to the process.

Dawn Lane’s “one potato, two potato” will premiere at the Doris Duke Theatre at Jacob’s Pillow on September 2, 2011 (8 PM) and September 3, 2 PM and 8 PM.

Dawn Lane’s work has been performed at The Kennedy Performing Arts Center, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Boston Conservatory, and elsewhere, and has been funded by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the LEF Foundation and the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation. She is one of three nationally chosen dance educators to teach Jacob’s Pillow Curriculum in Motion™ residencies, and recently took part in a new work residency at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival. Her work was selected for the VSA International Arts Festival in Washington, DC in June 2010. In 1998 she founded The Moving Company, a mixed ability dance company for Community Access to the Arts (CATA), for which she has worked since 1995 and is currently Artistic Director.

Images: all photos courtesy of Dawn Lane.

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In Three Stages, we ask Massachusetts artists to shed light on their art-making process by focusing on three stages in one work of art.

In 2010, artist and educator Betsy Damian received a Fiction/Creative Nonfiction Finalist award for her children’s book Rèv Abnè a: Abner’s Vision. Here, she traces its creative path.

Inspiration

Over the past twelve years, I have had the privilege to be involved with the Matènwa Community Learning Center (MCLC), on the island of Lagonav, Haiti. Chris Low and Abner Sauveur, the founders of the school there, have been inspirational as both teachers and leaders. At first, I listened to their stories and looked at photographs of the local people as they began to build a culturally alive, literate, healthy and sustainable environment. Then I opened my Kindergarten classroom in Cambridge to visits from the Haitian teachers and staff. Finally, two years ago, my son Ben and I joined a small group of educators on a visit to the island. There were so many things I wanted to do: present a painting/art class, take video footage for a documentation project, and spend some time sitting quietly and painting.

Josianne was our local hostess. We helped with cooking, played dominoes, and learned about the resilience, joy, history and culture of the Haitian people. During the visit, we were able to see firsthand the beginnings of gardens, children carrying five-gallon drums of water, and donkeys laden with bulging sacks. Before we left, Ben bought a chicken at the market as a gift to Josianne for her generosity and good spirit, hopefully contributing to her well-being for a long time.

The school, which began with two classes, has grown to a full elementary school with two hundred students. Based on a strong belief in social justice, the plans and dreams never stop. Abner says it best: “Our dream is to be an agent of positive change in our community. There is a need to expand and to radiate and to serve as a model for other schools in order for the whole community, the larger community, and the country of Haiti to really feel the impact.”

Challenge

Back in Cambridge with videotape and photos, I collaborated with Joanne Cleary, a longtime colleague, to complete a film Education and Hope, and create promotional posters for MCLC.

The next fall, I began to ask myself “What do you want to say with your art?” Until that moment my painting had been focused on building skills, creating realistic landscapes, still lives, and such. I decided to bring together my strengths as a painter and a teacher with my knowledge of Matènwa to create a children’s book that would honestly represent the Haitian people in their struggle to realize their dreams.

There were many challenges. I wanted to tell a story set in the rural mountains of Haiti. My focus would be on the strengths of the people there, and their many steady steps toward changing their own lives, the lives of their children, and the characteristics of their community. As the main character, Abner would be a child of great wisdom dreaming as he walked through his neighborhood on his daily mundane route to get the water for his family. I wanted the images to be simple, beautiful, and strong enough to tell the story by themselves. There was as much editing in the illustrations as with the words. Finally, since the book would be bilingual, I had to find a respected translator. Creole has long been the native oral language of Haiti, but it is less than twenty years old as a written language. So, it is really important to be respectful of the process and take the time to get it right. All along the way people have been very generous offering help with technology: scanning, correcting and printing the manuscript, networking and offering encouragement. Finally I sat with Abner and a translator to make sure that my writing held up to his dream.

Realizing the Vision

At this point, I am looking for an agent or a publisher to work with me on bringing this book to fruition. I’ve researched the current market, and it seems that very few, if any, books are written in both English and Creole. Using Creole rather than French for the translation underlines the importance of literacy development in the mother tongue, respect for the people of Haiti, and recognition of Creole as a written language. The bilingual verse brings attention to the likenesses of all people and our ability to learn from each other. The daily necessity of water is universal, as is Abner’s need for water to see his dream emerge and grow into reality.

Although this book project has been in development for many months, the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti gave it a new sense of urgency. Presently, I am also working on illustrations for a book called I Am A Child Of The Caribbean. The verse is written by Juliette Low, the ten-year-old daughter of MCLC co-founder Chris Low, and is her reaction to the earthquake of 1/12/10.

Watercolor paintings by Betsy Damian will be on exhibit at the Harding House bed and breakfast in Cambridge. There will be an opening reception on March 24, 5-7 PM.

Betsy Damian is a Mentor Teacher at Matènwa Community Learning Center in Lagonav, Haiti and a teacher at Tobin School in Cambridge, MA.

Images: pages from REV ABNE A: ABNER’S VISION by Betsy Damian, a Creole/English picture book for emergent readers (2010); photos from Lagonav, Haiti; and a page from I AM A CHILD OF THE CARIBBEAN by Betsy Damian and Juliette Low.

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In Three Stages, we ask Massachusetts artists to shed light on their art-making process by focusing on three stages in the creative life of one work of art.

Here, Cynthia Morrison Phoel (Fiction/Creative Nonfiction Fellow ’10, ’04) discusses the personal and creative history behind her short story collection Cold Snap: Bulgaria Stories.

Listen to an excerpt from Cynthia’s novella COLD SNAP.

INSPIRATION

Inspiration, in this case, took the form of evergreen mountains hovering over a valley of crumbling cinderblock apartment buildings. A ragged road that trudged up the mountain, passing old plaster houses and wrinkly babas in knit sweater vests. Caring (sometimes too much) neighbors who brought me food, invited me into their homes, and made my business their business. And 250 students, some of whom got a kick out of the young American teacher, others who did not.

The seeds of Cold Snap: Bulgaria Stories were first planted during the mid-1990s, along with onions, garlic, tomatoes. Peace Corps years for me. Early post-Communist years for Bulgaria. These were wobbly, precarious times. The value of the Bulgarian currency had dropped precipitously, robbing people of their life savings. The country had recently emerged from a time of food shortages, and the residual distrust was palpable. If I harbored some doubt that this ramshackle bus I boarded would reach its destination without a flat tire or other mishap, this paled in comparison to the doubt Bulgarians likely felt in every aspect of their lives: that tomorrow might be a predictable continuum of today and that a stable future – let alone one that offered opportunity – was possible.

I did not go to Bulgaria with a writing agenda in mind (I did keep journals, but I have yet to harvest them). I was just there, living long, hard, wonderful days, without a computer, TV, radio, or reliable phone, but with plenty of time to watch the sheep that clustered on the main drag outside my apartment building, waiting for the shepherd to take them up the hill. Or the orange slant of the setting sun.

I did not entirely recognize the inspiration that had been sown in Bulgaria for some time. When I returned to the States, I had to find a job and start paying on student loans. My college boyfriend (now my husband), who had waited for me for two years, was ready to get married. I had to leave Bulgaria behind for a while and live in my new reality. But the seeds were there, like vague lumps beneath the soil.

CHALLENGE

Within a couple of years, I was dabbling in night courses and writing workshops, attempting to capture my Bulgarian experience in writing. I have a whole graveyard of stories about young American women living in small Bulgarian mountain villages. The stories are flat and comic and mocking. Nothing ever happens.

The big leap, for me, involved believing I could write from a Bulgarian point of view. This seemed too audacious to me: the entire time I was in Bulgaria, I knew my perspective was different, in part, because my time there was temporary. Bulgaria was not my destiny, and I didn’t dare own it as a Bulgarian might.

After a few years of floundering around, I eventually summoned some audacity. I was working on an MFA at Warren Wilson College at the time, churning out lots of material, and I found myself wondering how my friends and students back in Bulgaria were faring. What did the future have in store? When my students graduated from university, would they manage to find jobs? I wondered about the tolls that corruption and chronic unemployment would take on character. I thought about the aging population and about the load that women, in particular, carried in Bulgarian society. Women are the unsung, everyday heroes in Bulgaria – and in my book as well.

I was at Warren Wilson to learn, not necessarily to write publishable material. With learning as my intent, I finally dared to walk in Bulgarian shoes and to own characters that were fundamentally very different from myself.

The result was magical. With all that distance between me and my characters, I was finally writing fiction. I was deeply inside my characters, imagining how they would feel, what they would do, letting them take the lead. I stopped trying to poke fun, and instead started to simply see the humor that was inherent in my material. Most of all, I was respectful of my characters and generous, possibly to a fault. Being an outsider meant I had to give each character, no matter how unlikable, the fairest possible shot.

In short, I was beginning to write stories that worked.

COMPLETION

Once I made this breakthrough, the stories started coming, slowly, slowly, but without too many missteps. The stories in Cold Snap were written largely in order. At some point, some of the characters began to reappear. At some point, I realized all these stories took place in the same town. At some point, I decided I wanted to spend more time with the characters I had left behind, and I could bring them back for an encore performance. Thus, the idea for the title novella was born.

People often ask me, how true are these stories? And the answer is very. Writing as an outsider meant that I couldn’t totally make things up. I had to represent my experience truthfully. I took people I had known on some level and got to know them a whole lot better, aging them, subtracting some characteristics and adding others, introducing them to situations I had seen others experience.

I doubt many people in my wonderful mountain town in Bulgaria recognize themselves. This is fiction, after all. But Bulgarians tell me they can see, feel, and smell what I’ve written. And Americans tell me that this very foreign terrain doesn’t feel so foreign at all.

Cynthia reads from Cold Snap during the Concord Festival of Authors on Sunday, October 24, reading at 3 PM. Then, on Tuesday, October 26, 7 PM, she reads at Porter Square Books in Cambridge. On Thursday, October 28, 7 PM, she reads at Andover Bookstore (for both the Porter Square Books and Andover Bookstore events, she’ll be joined by Tracy Winn). Finally, she takes part in the Blacksmith House Reading Series: Monday, November 1, 8 PM, at Blacksmith House in Cambridge.

Cynthia Morrison Phoel holds degrees from Cornell University and the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. Her work has appeared in The Missouri Review, The Gettysburg Review, Harvard Review, and Cerise Press. She lives near Boston with her husband and three children.

All images courtesy of Cynthia Morrison Phoel; delivering the Peace Corps swearing in speech (in Bulgarian); visiting friends – and baby goats – in the village; with students Preslava and Petya; roasting peppers on her balcony in Bulgaria; Peace!; Krastavitza the dog, who is included in many of the stories in COLD SNAP.

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In Three Stages, we ask Massachusetts artists to shed light on their art-making process by focusing on three stages in the creative life of one work of art.

Here, Eric Henry Sanders (Playwriting Fellow ’09) discusses the evolution of his play Reservoir.

Listen to a scene from Reservoir, performed by Company One Theatre. Directed by Shawn LaCount, with Fedna Jacquet as Psychiatrist and Brett Marks as Hasek:

INSPIRATION

My inspiration for Reservoir grew out of the chance confluence of several sources: media coverage of the on-going wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Georg Büchner’s 1837 expressionistic masterpiece Woyzeck, and scholarly texts that fused readings of classic Greek theatre with the psychological impact of war on returning veterans, including Bob Meagher’s Herakles Gone Mad (2006) and Jonathan Shay’s Odysseus in America (2002).

Büchner’s play is the story of a soldier abused and dominated by authority figures – Captain, Doctor, Drum Major – as he strives to support Marie, the mother of his child. At its heart the plot is a classic tale of jealous love; when Woyzeck correctly suspects that Marie is having an affair, his tenuous grasp on reality severs and he drifts into murderous madness.

In its treatment of Woyzeck as a soldier, the plot bears sad and striking resemblance to several reports of veterans returning from Afghanistan. In July 2002, in four separate instances, veterans murdered their spouses at Fort Bragg. Those murders are emblematic of a rise in domestic violence by returning veterans, and as subsequent scandals over the care at Walter Reed Army Medical Center have made clear, the military is woefully unprepared to deal with the thousands of personnel returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with physical and psychological wounds. It is a tragic irony that with the latest advances in battlefield medicine a wounded US soldier has a better chance of surviving a physical injury than ever before, only to suffer a greater likelihood of psychological trauma, such as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), when returning to civilian life. Symptoms of PTSD such as hypervigilance, rage, and restlessness – which can be useful as survival adaptations – can under conditions of extreme or prolonged stress change the chemical make-up of the brain, making the adjustment to coming home unbearable.

My initial thought, then, was to write a contemporary adaptation of Woyzeck which would acknowledge these struggles by depicting the eponymous protagonist as a soldier suffering from the psychological strains of active duty in a foreign war.

CREATION

As I began to write, however, I found myself moving further and further away from a strict adaptation of the original text.

Considering Woyzeck, I was struck by the parallels in Büchner’s portrayal of his soldier protagonist with descriptions of PTSD in returning veterans. In this light, the tormenting secondary characters in the original play may be read as the malevolent and possessive manifestations of an injured mind. The carnival-mirror world which Büchner creates is, if read in these terms, starkly recognizable.

Were I a director, I would have chosen to take that idea and direct the original play as if all its actions were being viewed through the distorted lens of Woyzeck’s interior vision. But as a writer, I did not see the need to retread the same ground as Büchner.

Instead of following an experimental rendering of Woyzeck’s first-person narrative, I wanted to discover both how Woyzeck (since renamed Frank Hasek in my play) came to the condition he was in, and, by shifting to a traditional third-person point-of-view, to fully render the motivations and humanity of the secondary characters. This inclination became particularly acute as I began a correspondence with several veterans – a doctor who served in Baghdad, a young air force pilot waiting to be deployed to Afghanistan, and an infantry soldier who served in Vietnam – to get a sense of their actual wartime experiences and the difficulty they faced (where applicable) of returning home. This research, in particular, was vital to creating all the characters as fully dimensional and understandable (if not, for dramatic purposes, always sympathetic).

With this new challenge in mind, the key then was to contemplate and depict the circumstances leading to the play’s inevitable conclusion. While the broad outline of the plot is still in place, I found it necessary to rewrite and reconceptualize the entire story, giving life to the desires, motivations, and obstacles facing each of the five characters on stage. Here, Hasek is trying to get well in order to provide for Marisa and their baby, but as he struggles through the symptoms of his condition, his ability to stay focused on his work and maintain a healthy relationship is increasingly strained. In turn, Marisa’s affair is motivated by the stability and normality of the Sergeant. And the doctor, rather than being a malevolent presence bent on experimenting on Woyzeck, developed into a therapist treating Hasek for PTSD, while struggling with her own burden of having far too many patients and far too little time to treat them all properly.

In the end, I hope that the play remains engaging on a dramatic level. And though the tragedy of the story remains, I hope that by focusing on these issues I can expose the relevance of problems faced by returning veterans in today’s world, and in so doing gesture towards a hopeful future.

REALIZATION

After completing a first “final” draft of the play I decided to do something I’d never done with any of my seven previous full-length plays. Rather than sending the script out immediately, I waited several months so that I could reread it with fresh eyes, thinking that I would make changes and then it would be perfect without the need for a huge development process. So I put it aside, waited, and after three months I was delighted to see that I knew exactly what it needed. Great. Perfect. I made the changes, and then arranged a table reading with Ian Morgan at the New Group in New York.

I shouldn’t have been surprised, but after hearing it aloud for the first time, I was shocked to realize how much work the play still needed. My sympathies for the secondary characters had clouded my eyes to the necessity of keeping the drama as tense as possible. In short, there was no antagonist. Deepening the dramatic conflict formed the basis of my next revision.

Two subsequent readings – with the Astoria Performing Arts Center (NY), directed by Tom Wojtunik, and at the Drilling Company (NY), directed by Joe Clancy – and several subsequent revisions later, I was fortunate enough to work with Company One on an audio recording for the Massachusetts Cultural Council blog.

That recording – directed by Shawn LaCount (Artistic Director, Company One), starring Fedna Jacquet (Psychiatrist) and Brett Marks (Hasek), and organized by Anne Morgan (Literary Manager, Company One) – was a pleasure to work on and one of the most satisfying expressions of the play thus far. Though we were only recording one scene, it is a testament to the skill and talent of all who participated that Shawn was able to coax the abundant gifts of the two actors into characterizations that were immediately believable and nuanced.

Finally, with this draft completed and a production scheduled at the Drilling Company November 4th – 24th, 2010, I hope that I have accomplished what I set out to achieve with the script. Of course, anything can – and probably will – change in rehearsals.

Special thanks to Company One Theatre. Don’t miss Company One’s next play, GRIMM, a world premiere evening of short plays that re-imagine classic fairy tales. July 16-August 14, 2010, at the Roberts Theatre, Calderwood Pavilion, in Boston.

Images: Eric Henry Sanders; Georg Büchner; promotional image from early version of RESERVIOR (then known as WOYZECK: HOMECOMING); Company One Theatre reads RESERVOIR; Company One Artistic Director Shawn LaCount offers direction to actress Fedna Jacquet.

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In Three Stages, we ask Massachusetts artists to shed light on their art-making process by focusing on three stages in the creative life of one work of art.

Here, writer and editor Tara L. Masih takes us through the writing process that produced the upcoming story collection Where the Dog Star Never Glows (Press 53, 2010).

Tara will read from the collection at Brookline Booksmith on February 23.

INSPIRATION

Inspiration for the stories in my debut collection came from many places: snippets of conversation shared and overheard; newspaper stories; and personal experiences, especially during travel. I look for stories in landscapes, in unusual facts, in the absurd, in research. But there are those special, all-too-rare stories that find me. I wish I could control that process, that sudden, electric realization that I have a story to write, a character to listen to, and something of import to translate from nebulous stirrings into coherent language. Louisa May Alcott had a Glory Cloak that she would wear, sewn by her mother, to inspire her to finish writing her books. I don’t have props, just drive. But I love that image of the writer cloaked in “glory” as she created one of our most enduring classics.

In the end, necessity is the most important part of inspiration for me. What made each story good enough to appear in this book was a feeling that it was necessary in some way that I start writing it, finish it, polish it as best I could, and then send it out into the world.

CHALLENGE

Sylvia Plath said that the worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt. Inspiration is the fun step, the addictive step I keep looking for. The challenge, once I start writing, is to keep self-doubt from interfering. It can be depressing when the brilliant passage I wrote in my half-sleep the night before turns out to be clichéd garbage the next morning. It can be a challenge to not get distracted with life to the point where inspiration turns into heavy responsibility or duty. The goal is to keep writing and finish the story even though it does now feel like duty and the early adrenaline rush is gone. Only in a few rare occurrences has inspiration carried me all the way through an instant first draft, even in the briefer flash form. More often than not, work intervenes, child and family interrupts, and I have to look to those obligations I’d rather ignore, like food and water and sleep!

I meet the challenge when I ignore self-doubt and give birth to that first complete draft, which in some cases is within hours, in other cases, years. But the challenge continues as I rework the draft, looking for all the ways I can show that “glint of light on broken glass,” as Chekhov advises.

COMPLETION

I know when a story is complete when I simply cannot think of a way to improve it anymore, or know I’m incapable of taking it to any other place than where it ends. Feedback is crucial, because it’s hard to be objective about your own work, particularly fiction. I find trust is the final step in completion – trusting you’ve learned to separate the bad advice from the good, trusting your publisher to make insightful edits, trusting your decision to make it public, and then trusting readers with your creation. It’s not an easy thing, putting your work out there. It’s a very naked feeling, in fact. In retrospect, I suppose challenge appears at every stage. It can’t be compartmentalized into one area of the creative process. It continues, on to the next project that inspires.

Read about Where the Dog Star Never Glows in NewPages, where it is listed as a new & noteworthy fiction book.

On Feb. 23, 6:30 PM, there will be a launch party for the collection at Brookline Booksmith. This will be a party to celebrate the book’s launch and the local writers/mentors/teachers who helped it come to fruition. Come for champagne, wine, juice, chocolate-covered strawberries, and more. Reading and Q&A, with a prize for best question. 279 Harvard St., Brookline, MA.

Tara L. Masih grew up in the small harbor town of Northport, situated along the Long Island Sound. Much of her time was spent on the beaches and in the woods, and as a result her writing is often set within the framework of nature and place. Her fiction, poetry, and essays have been published in numerous literary magazines, including Confrontation, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Natural Bridge, New Millennium Writings, Red River Review, Night Train, and The Caribbean Writer, as well as in many anthologies. Several limited edition, illustrated chapbooks featuring her flash fiction have been published by The Feral Press. Awards for her work include first place in The Ledge Magazine’s fiction contest, a finalist fiction grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and Pushcart Prize, Best New American Voices, and Best of the Web nominations. Tara judges the intercultural essay prize for the annual Soul-Making Literary Contest, and is editor of the acclaimed Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction (2009). C. W. Post College presented her with the Lou P. Bunce Creative Writing Award upon graduation, and Emerson College, where she received her MA in Writing and Publishing, awarded her with a Bookbuilders of Boston Scholarship. Tara now works as a freelance book editor in Andover, Massachusetts.

Images (top to bottom): author photo, Tara L. Masih; quote from the story “The Burnings;” quote from the story “Delight;” quote from the story “The Guide, the Tourist, and the Animal Doctor;” quote from the story “Bird Man;” cover image from Tara L. Masih’s story collection WHERE THE DOG STAR NEVER GLOWS (Press 53, 2010).

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In Three Stages, we ask Massachusetts artists to shed light on their art-making process by focusing on three stages in the creative life of one work of art.

Here, 2008 Fiction/Creative Nonfiction Fellow Tracy Winn takes us through the writing process that produced the upcoming story collection Mrs. Somebody Somebody (Southern Methodist University Press 2009).

INSPIRATION

The best part of writing a story is probably the rush of thinking I’ve finished – that sizzle up the spine that comes with believing I have accomplished something. A closing sentence announces itself. I type. I see the circle of the story come around to meet itself. I hear closure in the rhythm of the final sentence slowing the pace of words, coming to a stop, coming into the station like a train, finding its long-anticipated point of rest.

For a couple of days, I’ll walk around propped up by my secret success – there is a new story written and I’m the clever one who wrote it. I marvel at the characters I’ve brought to life in the story, savor the metaphors, and affectionately retrace the connections that bind it as a whole. In re-reading it, I might strengthen a phrase or two. However, I’m not really working to improve it, just hoping to feel again the tingle of accomplishment – the congratulatory pat to the ego – that goes with re-realizing I’ve made something new.

Getting to this point of completion has challenged me deeply. My process is messy and slow and inefficient. It usually begins when I notice a quirk of reality like a blind man hitchhiking, or a small child in expensive clothes giving the finger to passersby in a park, or a solar eclipse reproduced precisely, in miniature on the sidewalk a hundred times through holes in the leaves of a sickly little tree. The wind shakes the leaves and all the tiny eclipses projected on the ground, dance, igniting in me a sense of wonder, attracting my imagination and inspiring me to begin something. I write little blocks of a story – a paragraph or a scene to each block – not knowing the story’s shape or where they will fit into the flow of the piece. I move them around to discover what their proximity provokes. Then I write in my notebook about what I see in front of me, naming the possibilities of what happens in what order, adding new blocks and discarding those that seem less vital.

My process resembles what my great grandmother did when her edema was bad. She’d take up residence in her rocker, crochet hook in hand, her ankles swelling over the tops of her lace-up heels. She’d pile completed afghan squares at her feet. Each square had its own color scheme and logic, but eventually it would need to connect to its abutters, need to be sewn in so the assemblage would make a sensible and pleasing whole. Similarly, the blocks of my story must be hooked in and smoothed until seamless. So when that ultimate sentence arrives for me, my relief and delight at having finished overwhelms my better judgment. The fox of forgetfulness steals in and pilfers all memory of other times I’ve “finished” a story.

CHALLENGE

The illusion of completion can last for quite a while, during which the story sits on my desk. Or, even worse, the story gets sent to some journal with a contest deadline approaching. You’ll notice the passive voice in the last sentence – as if I play no part in acting on the assumption that the story is finished. But written work demands an audience as fervently as the visual or performing arts. The story needs to create a reaction in someone other than its writer. So begins the second stage in the process of creation. I share the work with a trusted reader or two. They challenge my assumptions. They ask questions that reveal their misunderstanding of a key component of the story. I rewrite. Time passes. I get to know the story a little better. I collect a few rapid rejections from periodicals. Eventually, the reasons cited for rejection, the passage of time, and the questions asked by my writer friends crack the illusion that the story has arrived.

Time passing allows for a certain distance from the work. I begin to see only everything wrong with it. Before you can say “solar eclipse,” the story has become a poor limp thing, dead in the water, an embarrassment to its maker, and I wonder how I could ever have been so thoroughly deluded as to show it to anybody, never mind sending it off to garner praise and awards. If I am lucky and smart at this point, I will hear my former teacher, Tracy Daugherty saying, “You have a beautiful problem.” His words remind me that the reactions the piece has elicited from my trusted readers are not all bad. They’ve recognized something vital in there that might still be released. If I climb back into the story, sharpening images, clarifying the shape and intent – those intangibles that have begun to reveal themselves more clearly to me – I might still rescue it.

COMPLETION

I am thinking now of the title story in Mrs. Somebody Somebody, my book of linked stories to be published by SMU Press in April ’09. That story was once an eighteen-page piece called “Lucy’s Notes.” It now spans sixty pages and doesn’t include a single one of Lucy’s notes. The re-write required a concentrated time of dreaming, which was afforded by a stay at the MacDowell Colony where my characters tugged on me, even as I slept, insisting that I plunge back in and re-work. When the next version of the ultimate sentence presented itself, I suspected it was an impostor, and knew that only time would tell. I let time pass as the story sat in a drawer, doing whatever stories do in their secret lives, gestating, fermenting, aging, ripening. Whatever I call it, time seems an integral requirement to the process, as important to finishing a story as the close re-writing that results from the annealing questions from trusted readers.

I forget every time that the real ending – the final sentence that replaces all impostors – won’t make its appearance until the story has been tempered like glass or steel by readers’ reactions, by time, and by revision. Inspiration must be followed by challenge. And the story can’t really be completed until after time has passed – long enough for me to know the story so well that I can solve my “beautiful problem.”

Images (top to bottom): Tracy Winn; quote from the story “Mrs. Somebody Somebody;” quote from the story “Blue Tango;” cover image from Tracy Winn’s story collection Mrs. Somebody Somebody (Southern Methodist University Press 2009).

Tracy Winn’s short stories have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Calyx, New Orleans Review, Western Humanities Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and others.

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In Three Stages, we ask Massachusetts artists to shed light on their art-making process by focusing on three stages in the creative life of one work of art.

The first artist to take the challenge is the inventive, widely accomplished choreographer and dancer Christian Burns, who received a 2008 Artist Fellowship in Choreography. He discusses the work Beneath Your Sheltering Hand through Creation, Challenge, and Culmination.

CREATION

I create dances because I want to learn something new.

I start without any single idea directing the final outcome. It’s a mix of knowing and not-knowing. On one hand I bring clear initiation to the creative process and on the other hand I have to maintain keeping no expectations about where it will lead. Then I respond to the energy and flow of those initiations and hopefully arrive at a work that can speak to me, not only me speaking out through the work.

Within Beneath Your Sheltering Hand, I had absolutely no idea what the work would become. Initially the creation emerged because I was invited to create a new work for the West Wave Festival in San Francisco. As a former resident of San Francisco, I was lucky enough to be considered for this curation, which required me to collaborate with a California resident. Oakland based video artist Tony Discenza and I are old friends and this opportunity seemed like a great chance to make a new work together.

We started with one conceptual jumping off-point. We had an interest in exploring relationships between media and our consumer behavior and the American mythologies that drive such behavior.

From an early emailed discourse attempting to articulate this point, Tony Discenza offered, “The oppressive nature of the media and the burden of living in a constant flux of dense, highly mediated information, in such quantities, that no real sense can be made of it. The implication being that the media thinks of itself as somehow benevolent (i.e. sheltering) but really it’s more like we’re crushed beneath its force.”

Tony was working with appropriated photo and audio samples – pictures of exotic vacation destinations, SkyMall product descriptions being read by a canned computer voice and high-end real-estate promotional animations as well as other material. All perverted references to the good life – to the American dream. These elements that are supposed to be our desires, but they all are flat, empty and deceptive – ultimately reinforcing an addiction to being someplace else.

Choreographically, I knew I would create and perform a solo. The solo form is something that I have continued to return to over the years. My connection to dance and dance making still comes from my research rooted in the experience of dancing, rather than the objectification of the craft of step-based sequencing. It is the ephemeral experience of dance that I am most drawn to. And for Sheltering Hand I knew I wanted to experience the states that would emerge from physically pushing my body in this way.

I was interested in the moments when impulse becomes action. I wanted to see if I could isolate those moments, in order to subvert and redirect the course of those actions. I wanted to create a textural pallet where I would never be settled within any singular direction. I would always be caught between the moment of initiating an action and cutting off that initiation before it finished it’s following through never settling.

CHALLENGE

The ongoing challenge of creating Sheltering Hand lay in the fact that we had a limited amount of time to create it and prepare it for stage. We had about a month of long distance discussions where the conceptual elements and title were defined and then we had only about ten days in person to create the work. I was working daily on the choreographic material and we conducted about a half dozen shared rehearsals where we defined the length of the sections and ultimate shape of the piece. The experience of performing the work was an absolutely challenging event for me. It was as much of an athletic sprint as I have ever had in a dance. And as is usually the case, we weren’t going to know how the piece would read to the audience until it was performed. As was the logistic reality of the festival programming, we had only one performance for Beneath Your Sheltering Hand to see what we had.

CULMINATION

I am very pleased with how this work turned out. It felt on many levels, Beneath Your Sheltering Hand will be a much larger work needing to be fleshed out, in a future time. I was pleased with the balance that the elements found together, the projected and recorded media and the live performance. We found many unexpected layers where the two states of live and mediation overlapped and created new lines of narrative. And perhaps most pleasing of all was how well it was received by the audience. There were audible hysterics heard from the house (not just the laughs from the audio recording), genuine bursts of emotion. For Tony and me, we always hoped the satirical elements would be read loud and clear, but again, one never knows how it will play out until it is performed for a real audience.

Although we have not defined a timeline for the future, it is the intention of Tony and myself to revisit Beneath Your Sheltering Hand and rework it for future performances.

Click on the image to see an excerpt of Beneath Your Sheltering Hand

Christian Burns is a choreographer, dancer, and teacher who has worked with companies, schools and art centers around the United States, Europe and Asia. He received an MCC Artist Fellowship in Choreography in 2008.

Images: Christian Burns, care of the artist’s website; stills from Beneath Your Sheltering Hand (2007).

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