August 11, 2011 · 11:00 pm

Climb every mountain…

I’ve been mentally singing that song all day. Today was field trip day on the Freedom Art Retreat. We drove out to Wildcat Mountain and did some zipline-ing, took a gondola up to the summit, and did some hiking. We hiked a small section of the Appalachian Trail. I forgot my phone/camera, so there will be pictures eventually but I will have to steal them from others. The zipline was awesome. I have issues with heights, so I thought I’d be terrified, but it was really fun. The slope helped me not feel the height as much. After the hiking, the three playwrights decided to take the gondola back down the mountain (rather than hike back down) and head back early for some swimming. There was some floating-on-the-lake-in-tubes time which was much appreciated.

Yesterday we had site-specific theatre day. My group found this really cool site at an intersection with some big rocks, a water shed with No Trespassing signs all over it, and a weird crutch hanging off a tree by a rope. As we explored the site more, we found broken headlight glass on the roadside and a broken Yield sign and some broken fence posts. We ended up crafting a ghost story about teenagers looking ahead to the life that could have been. It was cool… I’d never done site-specific theatre before.

I will have to write more about everything when I’m home. It’s been such an awesome week so far, and it’s hard to find time to just sit and write about it all.

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August 9, 2011 · 8:12 pm

Freedom Art, day 1

Just a quick update from the first full day of the Freedom Art retreat. The house is beautiful. It has really high wood-paneled ceilings that I love. And it’s a short walk to a private beach. We got in yesterday and a small group went grocery shopping while the rest of us settled in and got to know the surrounding area. Last night we did a “show-n-tell” session where everyone showcased about ten minutes of their work. I chose the first scene of Prayer Bargain. We also in addition to plays saw dramaturgy blogs, puppets, a swordplay piece, a song, and some fiction.

This morning we broke into groups by random draw. My group was me, Meron Langser, and Corianna Moffatt. Meron is a playwright/stage combat specialist and Corianna is a dramaturg. We started off checking out Meron’s amazing collection of swords he brought with him and then tried to pop bubbles with a katana. Somehow that led to plotting out a children’s fairytale play. It totally works. We just had dinner (grilled pizza! Ilana is awesome), and we’ll be doing another show-n-tell night in a few minutes where the groups will share what they came up with this morning/afternoon. Then tomorrow we will switch the groups up and see what else develops.

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August 6, 2011 · 1:08 pm

Like the theatre camp I never got to go to

It’s the weekend before I head out into the woods for a week on the Freedom Art Retreat! I’ll be joining a small group of playwrights, designers, and dramaturgs for a week of collaboration and creating. And also swimming. It’s like how when I was younger and I had friends who were going to theatre camp, only this time I actually get to go with them.

I got to meet everyone on Thursday night, which was really cool. I already knew Emily from school, and I’d briefly met a couple others at the Playwright Nights Out that I’ve gone to, but there were some people I hadn’t met before. It’s a really great group. I’m still nervous though. Like first-day-of-school nervous. What if they all become super-best friends and I am on the outside? haha. I didn’t have trouble making friends with my BU MFA class (unless they’re all just humoring me? ;)). But I still get nervous. The group is awesome though and I know I’ll be fine. I’m sort of half-joking about being afraid of them all going off and making friends without me. 😛 It will be fun. Want to see pictures of where we’re staying? Check out this post from the Playwrights’ Commons blog. ooh, pretty! yay!

I also got to go to the July Playwright Night Out meetup last week. It was good that I went because I missed the June one. I got to meet John Shea, another (far more established) Somerville playwright. That was pretty cool. He knew my mother’s Recreation friends, reinforcing the stereotype that everyone from Somerville somehow knows everyone else. And I met my brother’s playwriting professor from Stonehill. That was random and funny. Saw some people I recognized from the May meetup and met some new people who had been there in June who I’d missed out on meeting last time. I feel like I’ve been in super-social mode lately. It’s weird. I also got to see Matt & Ben at the Central Square Theatre last night. That was fun. Really funny. AND it technically took place in Somerville even though it’s all inside Ben’s apartment. It’s up for another week–you should all go if you haven’t! hehe. The only thing I’m sad about is that I’ll probably have to miss 1001 at Company One. This week coming up is the final week, and I’ll be away. And with all the picking up prescriptions and packing and doing laundry to do before Monday morning, I just don’t think I’ll have time. I’ve heard great things about that show and I really wanted to try to make it.

So yes, just a couple more days and then it’s off to “theatre camp.” I’m really excited about it. Hopefully I will get some really cool collaborative-y ideas and work done. I love the idea of collaborating on a project from the start. I think a lot of interesting new theatre is being created that way. Because Cooperation Makes It Happen. Why do I remember that song from almost 30 years ago? There’s something wrong with me.

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July 27, 2011 · 6:49 pm

Go see Stick Fly

Everyone in the NYC area this December should go see Stick Fly, a play by Boston-area playwright Lydia Diamond. She teaches at BU and came to visit our final playwriting class of the program. Stick Fly was at the Huntington last year, and I missed my chance to see it because it SOLD OUT, which is crazy-awesome. So now if I want to see it I’ll have to make a weekend out of it and catch it in New York. Which I may have to do.

The play is being produced by Alicia Keys, and you can see some info about it here.

Sorry for not being very updatey lately. I’m trying to feel more normal. I figured plugging someone else’s work was a good place to start.

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July 8, 2011 · 2:09 pm

Persisting

It’s been difficult to write anything lately. I’ve even been avoiding just little blog entries. My friend sent me this link from July 4’s entry in the Letters of Note blog. It’s an open letter from Pixar animator Austin Madison written to aspiring artists as part of the Animator Letters Project, which collects letters from successful animators to inspire those seeking to enter the industry. I love Pixar. I overanalyze their screenplays like a complete nerd. It’s a not-so-secret dream of mine to somehow be one of their writers even though they do all their stories from within and I have zero experience with animation and no hope of getting hired. So even though it’s geared towards animators specifically, I’ve found it helpful to think about as a writer and also just in getting through my day-to-day life.

You should definitely read the whole letter, but here’s an excerpt for you: “PERSIST on telling your story. PERSIST on reaching your audience. PERSIST on staying true to your vision.” It’s what I’ve been struggling with recently. I have revisions I need to make, I have new projects I haven’t started, and with everything going on in my life, I’ve had zero motivation to write or to do much of anything. Even going out and being with a group of more than a couple people has felt overwhelming. One month from today I’ll be heading up to Maine for the Freedom Art Retreat, and I don’t want to feel completely out of it or rusty when I go. I need to find a way to persist. To be able to know that it’s ok to feel the confusion and loss, to feel overwhelmed at times, and to still be able to carry on. First get started writing again, and then work up the strength to write through the creative droughts and keep pushing forward.

It’s just been really hard. It’s not a step-by-step process where you feel a little stronger every day. There’s good days and there’s bad days. Good hours and really horrible hours. Days where I don’t even want to get out of bed. Other days where I’m so worried about the rest of my family that I don’t let myself focus on how I am dealing with things. There’s times where I’m feeling ok and then feel guilty that I’m feeling ok. Which I know is silly, because my father wouldn’t have wanted me to feel sad, etc., but I haven’t been able to make the guilt go away yet. Nice sunny days make me feel awful because I think about how he isn’t able to be there and enjoy it. I feel bad if I feel like I’m mentally painting too polished-over a memory of him, but I also feel horrible if I remember the not-so-great times too. I know this is all part of the process of dealing with things, but being aware of that doesn’t help much at all.

So that’s where I’ve been. Persisting. Or at least attempting to. Knowing that I still have stories to tell, visions to stay true to, and (hopefully) an audience to reach. Knowing that eventually I’ll get back to a place where I can write without all of this hanging over my head. But in the meantime just trying to persist.

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June 22, 2011 · 2:57 pm

Barking cat

The best part is when he notices the camera and is like, “umm… I mean… meow! ..Nothing to see here.”

Sometimes you need things like this to get you through the day.

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June 20, 2011 · 10:09 pm

Hanging on

My father died unexpectedly a week ago. He was only 57, and it was a complete shock to my whole family. Those of you who know me pretty well know that he had ongoing health issues, mainly that he had seizures due to a brain injury from a car accident he was in a few years before he got married. They were issues that my family and I had learned to deal with. It was normal for him to have to be sent to the hospital once every few months. He also survived prostate cancer a couple years ago and a pretty serious gum and sinus infection from a polyp in his nasal cavity. We all knew he had ongoing health concerns, but they were under control as much as possible. When he suddenly had trouble breathing last Monday morning, my brother called an ambulance right away, but no one expected it was going to be as serious as it was. He had stopped breathing, and by the time they got to the hospital, there was nothing they could do. The doctors think it may have been a pulmonary embolism.

My brother called me from the hospital. I had been outside searching for my cat Oskar, who had somehow gotten outside the night before even though he hates the outdoors. I had to go into autopilot to throw my aerobed and laptop into the car and have my boyfriend drive to pick up my youngest brother and then head to the hospital. My brother was there with my mother. He had to go pick up my third brother from the train station. It was just horrible.

But when we got home from the hospital, our house was already full of people. One of my mother’s sisters was there, as were about four or five of her really close friends, with coffee and donuts. My mother’s brother had been working on my grandmother’s living room in the apartment upstairs from ours, so he was there too, and one of her other sisters was on her way over with pasta and the ingredients to make sauce. Two more of her sisters showed up later that afternoon. The day felt so long—from the hospital to the funeral home a few hours later and then the florist—but it was made bearable by the outpouring of support from everyone we knew. I felt lucky that my mother was part of such a big family (five sisters and one brother). They all lost their dad far too early too, so they understood in a special way what we were going through. My dad’s oldest brother was there at the funeral home with us, and his other brother and his family flew up from Florida and visited on Tuesday.

My friends were also the most amazing people in the world. Friends and even parents of friends came to the wake and the funeral. Coworkers stopped in, and the company sent beautiful flowers to the funeral home. My entire MFA class still living on this coast came to the wake. People have been emailing or calling daily just to check in and see how I’m doing, and my college roommate came to visit this weekend to make sure I was ok. I can’t tell you all how much it helps having such good people in our lives. After the wake Wednesday night, there was a large group of friends and family at my house cheering on the Bruins in Game 7 as they won their first Stanley Cup in almost 40 years. My dad would’ve loved it.

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June 11, 2011 · 1:19 pm

Year in retrospect

Since my previous entry was kind of depressing, I’ve been wanting to write a more upbeat post for awhile now. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about where I was just a year ago and how much that has changed. I was trying to deal with a lot of stuff that had happened pre-grad school, and last year in general had been sort of up-and-down emotionally. But I think when the playwriting workshop portion of my MFA program ended, I sort of felt this void and started to feel really sad all the time again. The structure that the workshop classes had given me was sort of pulled out from under me, and I had no idea how to handle it. I was in summer classes, but it wasn’t the same.

I hit a real emotional low around mid- to late-June last year, and my playwriting class’s planned weekend getaway at our classmate’s summer lake house was coming up at the end of the month. My outlook tanked so much in the week leading up to it that I almost didn’t go. I even went so far as to officially cancel only to be talked back into it by my awesome classmates. When I look back, I always mark that weekend as the turning point in getting my life back in order. There was great people, great food, a lake, a rope swing, a hot tub, a trampoline, and lots of wine, among other things. And also a hammock. I feel like that weekend was when I finally got myself out of mere survival mode and into moving-forward mode.

One of the biggest changes was that over the July 4 weekend, I decided to follow in the footsteps of one of my friends and put up a profile on Match. 😛 It was the first time that the thought of potentially letting someone get close to me didn’t make me feel sick. Within a week of my profile being up, this super-awesome guy named Allan emailed me, and we met up in person on July 14. Now he’s sitting right next to me on the couch in the apartment that we share. And my two kitties are running around with his chubby cat and causing trouble. It’s definitely been a really good year.

I also, because I’ve been amazingly lucky this year, had a few steps forward with my writing. I completed my degree in January, so I now have an MFA to my name that I did not have a year ago. And I got an award-of-sorts by making the semifinals of the Kennedy Center’s Ten-Minute Play award (does it count as an award if you don’t actually make the finals? haha). A group of BU alums started up a workshop group so we could continue to hear actors read our work and get feedback from each other. AND I had my first-ever production just a few weeks ago. This time last year, I was just a nervous girl who had just finished her playwriting classes and was worried that without that structure I’d never be able to see my work developed again.

This year has been awesome. It’s something I can look back on when rejections seem to be pouring in endlessly as encouragement to keep going. My playwriting classmates and I have recently started planning the second-annual weekend at the lake. I definitely won’t be almost backing out of this one.

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June 3, 2011 · 1:00 pm

Social phobias

The other day I was on the T, sitting in one of the single seats near the door. And a pregnant woman came in at the next stop, and she stood near the door because there were no seats left. I wanted to stand up and ask her if she wanted my seat, but I was completely frozen with social anxiety/shyness that I was too scared to ask her. So I sat there worrying about how I should just ask and not be so nervous until someone else offered her a seat and she smiled and said she was just fine standing but thank you so much. And then I felt horrible that I hadn’t offered first.

What is wrong with me? I have this problem all the time. The part of me that is caring towards others and wanting to be considerate wants to reach out to strangers and be a nice person, but the socially anxious side of me is too scared to approach them. I get terrified of making that first contact, of saying “Excuse me?” to get their attention. And then I get scared about the fear of being rejected. The logical side of my brain (I do have a logical side, I promise!) tells me that obviously, 99% of the time the person in question will be thankful that you offered to help whether or not they take you up on your offer. But the freaked-out side of my brain is worried that I’ll offend them somehow. That I’ll cause more problems than I’ll solve. Like, what if I saw a blind person who looked like he needed assistance, but then he was the type who liked to do everything on his own and I got him really angry and frustrated by offering to help him? Or what if the pregnant woman felt awkward about everyone making a big deal over her pregnancy and my offer of letting her sit down made her feel even more uncomfortable? I overthink simple social situations like this ALL THE TIME. And I sit there torn between wanting to reach out to others and being too scared to do so.

People who know me really well have heard this story before, but it’s one that’s stuck with me over the years. One time when I was maybe 11 or 12 in dancing, a girl in my class started to cry. I’m not sure why… but when you’re an 11- or 12-year-old girl, there are always lots of things to start crying over. I felt really bad for her, but I also felt awkward because I wasn’t one of her closer friends in the class, just a concerned classmate. Big surprise here–I was awkward and loserly in middle school. 😛 Definitely not one of the popular kids. So anyway, all the other girls in the class start to crowd over to the girl who was crying to make sure she was ok. I stood sort of near the fringe of the group before deciding that yes, I can go over and make sure she’s ok too, because why am I any worse at helping people feel better than anyone else in the room? And one of the girl’s closer friends, who I’d always been kind of socially intimidated by, looks RIGHT AT ME and mouths “GO AWAY.” At me. Not at anyone else in the class. Somehow I was not worthy of trying to comfort a sad classmate when everyone else there was.

And as you can see, I’ve never forgotten that. Normal people would write something like this off as the other girl being a bitchy cliquey 11-year-old like most 11-year-old girls are. Again, my logical-brain tells me that this is true. But then whenever I’m in a social sitation where I feel the desire to reach out to someone, it’s like I’m mentally that scared 11-year-old being told to go away again. So if you’re ever upset, or in need of assistance, or needing a seat on the T, just know that I really want to be there for you and that I’m working really hard at getting over my crazy social fears so that someday I can help you.

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May 31, 2011 · 6:19 pm

The Twitterz, and other possible updates

Today I figured out how to add a Contact page… yay! Now people can email me without my having to publish my email address and get all kinds of spam. Next on my list is to get rid of that “Colleen M. Hughes” in the top right corner, but doing so requires purchasing the Custom CSS upgrade, and I have to do things like paying rent and buying groceries first. Which is no fun.

I’m also wondering if I should maybe break down and join Twitter. I’ve never quite understood it. I don’t understand why people’s names are preceded by an @ thingie (I mean, I know it links to their username, but I don’t get why the @ needs to be visible) or why the “pound sign” is now called a “hatch tag.” And why they’re suddenly all over the place. I sound like such an old lady. I at first balked at the idea of Twitter because I can’t for the life of me be succint because I turn everything into a story. Trying to keep myself to 140 characters is pretty damn hard. But the wonderful Ilana Brownstein pointed out in her Dramaturgy class that I took that Twitter can be a great way to keep up with the local theatre scene by following everyone’s feeds and linking to them when you “tweet” about seeing a show and such. I like that idea. But I’m not sure if I would have anything much to say on my own Twitter that I wouldn’t already share on facebook or here in my blog, so I don’t know. I did read a Twitter feed for one of the first times in my life the other day… I followed the BTM’s feed during the Marathon, and it was really funny. So having a positive experience with Twitter makes me feel better about potentially using it.

And I learned today that I *could* migrate my entire livejournal over to this blog should I want to. Now I have to decide whether that is something I want to do. I kind of want to have my blog all in one place…. but a lot of the stuff on livejournal is rambling and nervous and just plain stupid. It’s not like I want to hide who I am… it’s just that most people probably don’t care about random thoughts I had or surveys I took when I was 23. 😛

Lots to consider.

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