ARTISTIC STATEMENT

I grew up in the Sonoran Desert on which I am imprinted as an outsider never to be embraced by an abundance of foliage.  The desert is spare, alien, and endlessly beautiful and fascinating.  My writing mirrors, to an extent, that aesthetic.  I am driven to write about alien topics while attempting to make them native and understandable.  The roiling of a scientific community in the drama Cold Fusion is presented as a rock musical.  In the House of Butterflies, the heavy metal lead plays a leading character.  In play, Jessie and the Architect, architectural modernism is examined by a precocious teen in a public housing high rise.  I anticipate applying this aesthetic to a wide range of other topics.  Currently in the rattling around in my psyche is a play on the First Amendment. 

HOW I WORK

I find that if I can started, particularly with made-up people, I write rapidly and have a good start.  I need to hear the people in my head, and I used to wake up at night with their voices having come to me so I could write them authentically.  With authentically real people, they are flat in their recorded materials, and I have to alter them to bring them to life.  They aren’t necessarily speaking to the way they should to the other people in the play.  My process used to be mostly driven this way, but now that I am in rewrites, I hear them as I go to bed not waking me up in the middle of the night begging to be heard.  This makes them less demanding and therefore harder to write.