Give Thanks for the Talent of Others

When I was in grad school for playwriting, I was very competitive internally with the other writers. For no reason, they were nice, polite, happy writers, and I’m still friends with them. But I wanted to be the best, and I knew I wasn’t, and it was frustrating. There was one time…

Read More
Kathleen Jones
Have People to Let Down

My writer’s group, Ellipses, meets every single Friday morning 8-10 am on Zoom. It was my week. I totally forgot. I’d uploaded a rough draft of my article earlier and forgot about it, and then I totally slept through our Zoom call, and missed my own writer’s group that I started and that I lead every Friday morning, when I was my turn to go.

Read More
Kathleen Jones
THINGS A HERO WOULD SAY

I’m about to go to William Goldman’s funeral, a man who mentored hundreds of screenwriters. Some of them are Tony Kilroy, Brian Koppelman, Aaron Sorkin. I’m a twenty-eight-year old nanny who works six days a week, has a terminal illness (okay that’s a little dramatic, I have a chronic illness that will become terminal in like twenty years) and barely writes anymore. All week I’ve been imagining horror scenes of how this funeral goes. What’s funny is, this is the exact thing I’d write to Bill about.

Read More
THE CLOWNING WAY TO WRITE A PLAY

I’m participating in Love Drunk 14, an awesome event where the producers send playwrights two cool, interesting, old-timey photos and we’re to write a play about them. I’ve done this before and loved it. This time around, when it was time to get writing, I was sick as a dog with the flu staring down this deadline. I’d taken a clowning class with Theatre 68 and Pigeonholed, where the teacher, Justin Cimino, used a clowningtechnique to help actors create real, vivid characters out of thin air in like fifteen minutes. 

Read More