What do you write?
I am an extremely prolific
writer, not necessarily a good writer, but extremely prolific. I write all kinds of things, I’ve been
writing since the 1970’s, but what I have been doing more recently: I write
poetry, I write plays, I write short fiction and I continue to freelance as a
journalist. I follow the Virginia Woolf
rule “Room of One’s Own” approach, I get up every day at five, and that’s when
I start writing. Last year one of my
plays won second place in the Dubuque Fine Arts Players One Act Play Contest
and this spring I had a play performed by the Wauwatosa Village Players.
Why plays? What does a play let you access that poetry
or fiction doesn’t?
It gives me an element
of control over the characters, what they say what they do. It becomes a sort of exploration. It’s almost like a laboratory of human
interaction and I like that a lot.
Coincidently I did my undergraduate work in Platteville fifty years ago;
I was taking the freshman English class that I teach now. The little theatre in Doudna was the theatre
for all campus productions. I think what
has happened is that we don’t act in plays anymore, I still like theatre, I still
respect it, and its satisfying to write it and have it performed, but I don’t
need to see it performed, it’s still as satisfying to write it. I would say that theatre is far more
sophisticated than when I was hear…that’s its grown. The theatre is far more sophisticated than
the old presidium theatre, and there are far more possibilities.
So what is theatre’s
role in a world of modern media?
What I would say is
like, you can read, you have electronic devices for reading novels, but there’s
something tactile about the experience of reading a book. Reading online is okay, but there’s something
about the tactile experience of the book.
The same thing is true with live theatre. I enjoy film as much as anyone does but I
seldom have a visceral feeling of excitement when a film is about to role, that
I do when its live theatre, and the lights go down, and people walk on
stage. People that you can touch and you
know that things can go wrong, and things can be wonderfully unexpected. It is just such a live visceral feeling, and
that’s what I like about live theatre.
There’s a vulnerability knowing there’s no second take, that’s the thing
that is exciting. You can have fire
alarms in the theatre and it doesn’t affect the film unless it catches
fire. But the audience affects the
performance, and there’s a sort of relationship that’s wonderful.
What is the role of
short fiction?
I’ve written
unpublished novels, they aren’t as satisfying.
I like novels because I like a project that sustains me that pulls me
along. I feel a hedge against mortality
when you’re writing something [like a novel]…I love novels, but they’re much
more difficult to write. I find what I
like about short fiction, and the way I write short fiction is I come up with
an idea, or character or deadline…spurred by something that speaks to me, and I
run with it. I keep a cheap notebook as
a journal and I write basically stuff and ideas, and then I’ll sit down, and
put out a story in one sitting, and I will work on it later. But that’s something you cannot do with a
novel. It’s also easier to find an
audience for short fiction than for novels…and I write poetry for that reason
too.
What do you like
about poetry?
I see my poems many
times as snapshots. Like bits and pieces
of my life and my personality and experience.
I write poetry, generally for myself, and sometimes it will work for
other means but generally for me. When
writing poetry I use what I think of as the infinite number of monkeys with
infinite number of typewriters kind of thing.
I write just a boatload of stuff.
I don’t write a poem every day, but over the year, I probably write
three hundred poems. Some of them are
awful, but I don’t need to write a poem every day I get up. It’s inspired by stuff around me, and sometimes
it works well, other times not so well.
I heard a poet one time say when someone asked him “how do you know if
you’ve written a good poem?” and he replied “You don’t.”
No comments:
Post a Comment