![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
children's theater
Aug. 24th, 2007 12:02 pmSoon I will post about how orientation has been going fine and how the people in this program are awesome and how I'm surrounded by people who can have conversations about Beckett and Kushner and the Simpsons and The Neverending Story and comic books and Mary Gaitskill and Monty Python and Michael Chabon and so on and so on...and also how my graduate advisor once shared a cab with Mary Karr, David Foster Wallace, and Jonathon Franzen and how he didn't mind when I shrieked "You are SHITTING me?!?" after discovering this fact.
For right now I just want to mention that in addition to my intro seminar and my fiction workshop, I'm also taking playwriting for youth. I sat on the fence about this once, since I don't see myself as a kids' writer. But the more I talked to the teacher, the more excited I got about it (she has so much respect for youth, resents that people think that "youth theater" is somehow less artful than mainstream theater). And then when I talked to Hodge he pointed out that I'm always talking about children as aesthetes, that I talk nonstop about how certain books and shows and movies affected me when I myself was young. That I'm obsessed with the kind of storytelling that's both fun and smart and beautiful and engaging. So now I'm really, really excited by this prospect. He's right. How many times a week do I have the Hinson-Miyazaki-Barrie-Carroll-Leguin-Dahl-Silverstein-fill in awesome children's storyteller here-rant? How many times do I complain bitterly about the patronizing quality of a huge pile of movies and books for kids? This is an avenue I didn't anticipate exploring, but now that I've got the chance it seems like it was more or less made for me.
Of course I'm going to have to cut down on swearing and sex jokes, but I think I can still talk about murder and mayhem. After all, Lemony Snicket has paved the road ahead of me.
For right now I just want to mention that in addition to my intro seminar and my fiction workshop, I'm also taking playwriting for youth. I sat on the fence about this once, since I don't see myself as a kids' writer. But the more I talked to the teacher, the more excited I got about it (she has so much respect for youth, resents that people think that "youth theater" is somehow less artful than mainstream theater). And then when I talked to Hodge he pointed out that I'm always talking about children as aesthetes, that I talk nonstop about how certain books and shows and movies affected me when I myself was young. That I'm obsessed with the kind of storytelling that's both fun and smart and beautiful and engaging. So now I'm really, really excited by this prospect. He's right. How many times a week do I have the Hinson-Miyazaki-Barrie-Carroll-Leguin-Dahl-Silverstein-fill in awesome children's storyteller here-rant? How many times do I complain bitterly about the patronizing quality of a huge pile of movies and books for kids? This is an avenue I didn't anticipate exploring, but now that I've got the chance it seems like it was more or less made for me.
Of course I'm going to have to cut down on swearing and sex jokes, but I think I can still talk about murder and mayhem. After all, Lemony Snicket has paved the road ahead of me.
