Dear Fury, There’s a woman in my writer’s group who is constantly putting the rest of us down. She’s the only one who’s published and it’s like she thinks she’s better because of it. I mean, why join a writer’s group if you’re going to spend it disparaging the others? For example, she told me my writing style is somewhat old fashioned — I use the word “nay” sometimes to mean “no” and the word “lest” to mean, well, “lest” and was told I shouldn’t write like that if I don’t speak like that. I told her tough shit [Read more...]

Dear Fury, I know your column is for writers with writer problems, and I’m not sure my problem falls into this category, though I’m writer with a problem. Hopefully, you’ll find it worthy of your scrutiny. Here goes: I’m a writer involved with a non-writer. This is a new paradigm for me, as I’ve always been preternaturally disposed to date other writers. Something that has not served me well. For the first time, the person I’m romantically involved with supports my writing. He is not in competition with me and/or my writing. The problem is not my writer, but the [Read more...]

Dear Fury, The MFA decision date is nearing, and I’m choosing between two great programs – in many ways, a lucky predicament. The “Nearly Perfect Fit” School is close-ish to where I currently live and I’ve recently enjoyed a full-fledged visit. The “Less-perfect But Still Very Good Fit” School is farther away, and due to financial constraints, I’ve only been able to Skype and talk on the phone with faculty members. However, when I visited “NPF” School, I picked up a *vibe* from one of the older male faculty members. A “creeper” vibe. He wasn’t outright “hitting on” me, whatever [Read more...]

Immediately following President Obama’s reelection, news sources proclaimed ‘The Establishment GOP is Dead’. It was almost like they were a bit nostalgic for it, every week a more outlandishly offensive scandal than the last. But while Republican candidates kept sliding more to the right to appease a supposedly conservative base, the rest of us have been witnessing and actively abetting the collapse of the Establishment. But whom do we really mean when we say ‘The Establishment’? And what do our conceptions of the ‘old guard’ still have to show us? The image I keep returning to is that of the [Read more...]

We are the 70% (or is it 17%?) VIDA has yet to embark on an official count of the number of women playwrights whose work is staged in American theatres, but every few months a new study on gender parity reveals that approximately 17% of plays produced in the United States are written by women.  Although this percentage has increased from roughly 7% in the 1970s, the numbers have not changed much in recent years.   Last week’s announcement of the Guthrie Theatre’s 2012-13 season, a line-up written and directed almost entirely by white men (Minneapolis’ Guthrie Theatre, is a [Read more...]

From the beginning, I knew I wanted to write. While many of my school friends dreamed of futures as movie stars or sports heroes or rich housewives, I was dreaming of becoming a writer, of living in a small, well-worn apartment in some city-er city than my own. Before I ever had my own desk, I would pull a chair up to my white wicker dresser, spread out my pens and paper, and write: novels, poems, plays, whatever. But by twelve I stopped dreaming, stopped being proud of my intellect and creativity.  I made a very conscious, yet very confusing, [Read more...]