This site divides my writing into three areas: journalism, academic scholarship, and fiction. I resisted the urge to let them live together in one chronological heap, which is closer to the truth of how they were written. Yes, I began as a journalist, became a professor, and am now devoted to fiction, but those pursuits don’t live separately, like vegetables on the plate of an obsessive compulsive toddler.
The oldest piece of writing here is a review of Fellini’s film, Amarcord, which appears to begin my journalism period. But it was written as a short story, a first person piece in which the narrator relates meeting a woman at an outdoor party and trying to impress her by talking about foreign film. I wrote the plays while working as a critic and, later, as a professor. I wrote the novel Ben Franklin’s Time Machine while working at San José State University. I continued to write reviews now and then while working in academia. Only my scholarly research is bounded by the periods when I was chasing tenure within the confines of academic appointments. And even that work is dominated by a kind of storytelling: history. For that matter, much of my fiction writing demands historical research. The novel I’m currently working on follows that pattern: It is set in Chicago at the dawn of the 20th century. Its characters are critics on the dozen daily newspapers of the time.
The obsession that ties most of the above together is an interest in acting, theater, and the experience of audiences. The most interesting thing about theater to me is the conversations we have about it. Playwrights put words on pages, actors and other theater artists expand them, arts writers interpret them, and playgoers and readers are free to make of them what they will. We all have a part to play as ideas meander from script to tongue to ear and into myriad expressions of delight, dismay, and wonder that form our collective subconscious, the wellspring of culture.