Resume of Perseverance
Hello again!
I know, I just wrote to you a couple weeks ago, but don’t worry — this one will be short and sweet. I’ve decided to participate in one of the least interesting forms that online writing can take: the end-of-the-year roundup! Not because I have toothbrushes or books to recommend to you, but because I want, if only for myself, to take a moment to frame the year that’s ending solely in terms of accomplishments. I want to do this because of how uncomfortable it makes me. I do write to you about my accomplishments here, but I prefer to couch them in all their complications and caveats, which makes them arguably less identifiable as accomplishments.
Sometimes I wonder how much of where we are in life is a result of how we tell it. I don’t know if I would describe myself as a humble person, though I also wouldn’t say hubris is my big flaw. (My roommates and I once had a years-long game involving the cardinal sins and virtues, so I’ve spent a weird amount of time thinking about this.) I think it’s more the fear of being delusional — the insistence on a personal version of the truth that is evidently untrue — that makes me shudder at the spectre of sounding like some pollyanna-ish self-promoter who thinks every little thing she does is, you know, The Best Thing Ever.
But frankly, I don’t think I’m in danger of becoming that person. And it seems clearer and clearer to me that artistic labor is a strange dichotomy of two extremes: tiny building blocks of perseverance, and sudden leaps of creative ability or outside recognition. The building blocks are what you do; the leaps either arrive or they don’t. I’m not exactly where I’d like to be in my work, but I feel pretty proud of the fact that I’m still doing this, and this year has not been without its victories.
And also — we don’t live in the future. The things we are doing now are the things we get. Maybe we’ll get more in the future, maybe we won’t. So hopefully we can recognize the things we are doing now as worth celebrating.
(If you a subscriber to but not a regular reader of this substack, this post also acts as a sort of organizer of some of essays and posts that are important to me from the last year.)
This was a year of setting up shop in Detroit, which meant saying yes to most opportunities to meet people, make things, and get the lay of the land. Those included:
Running a series of theater-informed speed dating events at Vesper (which I wrote about here). I feel really interested in building events that use theater as their core but might not look like theater; this was a first exploration of that curiosity. It was also an experiment in self-producing an event and collaborating with my bosses on using Vesper as a creative event space.
Getting hired to teach devised, ensemble youth theater programs with Michigan Stage. I like these people, I like this program. Because the kids are building their own plays, my story skills are more useful here than in a traditional youth theater program. Over the summer, I got to bring this program to a residential treatment facility for teenage girls. This fall, I managed to make a play with a group of students who ranged in age from 7 to 16. The play featured a cowboy who falls in love with an apple tree.
I had two short pieces of writing get selected to be published by the Detroit Writing Room in their annual Detroit Voices anthology. They are a poem (October in Michigan) and an essay (Two Kinds of Knowing), both originally published here.
As I wrote about here a few weeks ago, I made a short play for the Detroit Cantastoria Festival. This felt like an important return to a form of making that I haven’t done much of since I entered the post-grad-school, new-play-development grind.
I also had a few moments of recognition and opportunity outside Detroit:
I was chosen to be part of the Workshop Theater’s spring cohort, a group of playwrights who meet weekly for about three months to support each other in doing a major revision on an existing play. The Workshop Theater is based in NYC, but because their programming is virtual, they accept applications from playwrights across the country. I was able to finish a new draft of The Only Season, the full-length play I originally wrote and workshopped in 2024 with The Hearth.
I was also picked to present a short play in the Concord Theatricals Off-Off-Broadway Festival in July. I wrote/griped about that experience here, but was also grateful to have it. Concord Theatricals is one of the big play publishing houses, so even though my play was not one of the six chosen for publication, the recognition was encouraging.
This one isn’t something I was awarded, but it’s a choice I’m glad I made: I joined Agnes Borinksy’s summer playwriting group, Surfacing, and wrote 90 pages of a new play I didn’t know was coming. Agnes graduated from the Brooklyn College MFA program a couple years before I did, and the classes she has been teaching for the last few years have become a hub for many post-Brooklyn or just kindred-minded writers. This group was so needed and so inspiring for me. It helped me get writing differently and made me feel less alone and less crazy.
I got waitlisted for a residency I’ve looked at many times but never applied to. That probably won’t mean I get to go, but the news was still buoying, especially because I applied with a project that was kind of out on a limb, both in terms of work samples and project structure.
I kept my job reading plays for the Woolly Mammoth Theater’s literary department. I kept applying to things, with a regularity that would make you think molding and re-molding my credentials to different character counts was my favorite hobby. I kept writing this substack, less consistently than during its first year, but always knowing I’d get around to it. I’ve found that, two years in, this expected essay to send to your inbox is now a place — a location I’ve carved out in my brain for thinking through career questions or creative questions or having the satisfaction of saying the thing I’m thinking in all its complications.
So there it is. My resume of perseverance in 2025. As always, I hope for leaps. But if you, too, have had a middling year, a pretty alright not too bad kind of year, I hope you shout about it a little. It’s helpful.
