 It's a blessing to have, you know, the Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi, and the child running from room to room. Yes, multiple rooms. I know, it's amazing, we have, this is amazing, and he's actually reading a book right now which is a blessing. I'm Susan Lori Parks and we've been doing this show for 11 years and first in the lobby of the Public Theater and then HowlRound came on board and we started live streaming from the lobby of the Public Theater and now we're live streaming from our homes. So thank you to the Public Theater and thank you to HowlRound for making this possible. This is all about you and encouraging you to do your work. If it's creative work, great, if it's writing, awesome, but if it's, you know, woodworking or you want to work on your water ballet or whatever, you know, we're here to encourage you because in my experience, and I've been a creative person for a long, long time, in my experience, the questions about how do I keep going? How do I stop? How do I encourage myself? How do I get those not-helpful voices out of my head? Those waft through all aspects of all our endeavors, creative or non-creative. And we gather together to encourage each other as it should be. So if you have, what we're going to do is we work together for 20 minutes and then we talk about your creative process. We don't have time to read, to have you read to me specific works, but we do have time to talk generally to keep everybody involved. And should you have a question about your creative process, Audrey will tell you how to get in touch. Go. Thanks, SLP. If you're inside of the Zoom, all you need to do is click on the participant button, likely at the bottom of your screen on a laptop or the top of your iPad or tablet, and there's a raise your hand button in that tab that you can click on. And if you're watching on HowlRound.tv, you can tweet at us at Watch Me Work SLP with the hashtag HowlRound, H-O-W-L-R-O-U-N-D, and if you, you can also tweet at the public theaters, Twitter, which is at public theater NY, or right to the public theaters, Instagram. And those are all the ways. Here we go. We're going to work for 20 minutes. Okay. And. Great. Anybody have that thing where you, you know, you get into your work and then you go shit. The time just flew. That's a nice feeling. So anybody have any questions? We actually have a question from social media. Oh, hi. Yeah, I'm going to read it to you right now. Here we go. This person is, their name is Kay Boy. SLP, you are saving my writing life. I create cross-genre essays mixing nonfiction, poetry, sound art, and other forms. My question is, what can I do when the writing process is haunted by memories of having work dismissed entirely on the basis of irrelevant stereotypes about me? Gender, identity, youth background, et cetera, rather than on critique of the work itself. Sorry, I'm having trouble reading. Even absurd moments like being told I should be, I should write in more typical, typical for my gender, keep resurfacing. On one level, I feel silly asking this, given how many writers and artists struggle with internalizing this kind of reductiveness, but I'm doing a bad job fielding it right now. For my last piece, I spiraled the torment into the subject. That worked, but I can't do it here because the current piece must be tightly focused on its topic, the act of translation. Do you have any suggestions about how I can protect the writing process in the face of these co-arising hauntings? Thank you. Wow. That's a great question. I would say it was written out on social media and very beautifully written also. So win-win for you, K-boy. I talk a lot about using shit for fuel. So a lot of times when people, we do our best efforts. We're working honestly and fullheartedly, fullheartedly, not fullheartedly. People shit on our efforts. I just say use it for fuel. You say that you are dovetailing it, the criticism or the negativity into your piece. I would just say, prove them wrong, keep writing. You can write about whatever you want and I have, for my entire writing career, people in telling me how not to write and what I should and shouldn't be writing about. If I'm political, they say I shouldn't be political. If I'm poetic, they say I shouldn't be poetic. If I'm angry, they say I shouldn't be angry. If I'm not angry, they say I shouldn't be, it's always something. There are people out there who make it their life's work to try to shut down the honest and beautiful efforts of other people. There are people out there and we can try to psychoanalyze them and understand them or we can just for right now say they're full of shit and keep on keeping on. Because they have, if they're giving you an honest critique about your work, perhaps this needs to be great. But if they're just trying to shut you the fuck down, fuck you, we don't got time for that anymore. You need to keep writing and you can use this community as your resource. Again, we're here to encourage you. Sometimes we take it a task and hold your feet to the fire to keep you going. But it comes from a desire to love you and encourage you and encourage you to love the creative person that is living so beautifully inside you. So keep on keeping on. Ain't nobody going to turn me around. These are the mantras of the movement in the 60s, civil rights movement, 50s and 60s. Ain't nobody, I'm doing this. Mantras are mind vaccines and whether you're an anti-vaxxer or not, I don't really care but these really work and it doesn't involve sticking something in your arm. Ain't nobody going to turn me around. That's a great one. Each one, teach one. That's another great one. Lift others as you climb. This little light of mine, I'm going to let it shine. That's a really good one too. If it worked for folks, black folks and other folks in the 60s and 50s and all through history, it will work for you today. Thank you, I saw Pee. And I'm angry at those people on your behalf. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Those guys. Fuck those guys. Right? We can say that. We can say that. Fuck that bullshit. Hi. Yeah. Thank you. All right. Kim, you are up next. Hi, Kim. Hi. Hi, Audrey. Thank you so much. You're so adorable. I just see you every day. And Susan, Laurie, moving from California to stalk you, I'm going to sit outside your house because I love you so much. I just came in 3,000 miles away. So I'm working on a piece that I've never written a television script before. So there's multi-layers, there's a lot of characters. I've been studying the scripts of The Best Wing and a lot of Aaron Sorkin's work because he's so brilliant and John Rimes with Grey's Anatomy to try to figure things out. And I noticed that they use teasers a lot. How important is the teaser? Is it essential? Is it a prelude to the rest of the show or is it just a little link in the side so the credits can roll? How important is the teaser and fuck that guy, whoever said that, and it's that. Right? Right? So my knowledge of TV writing, I mean, and this is what I know, I mean, perhaps Aaron Sorkin or Shonda Rhimes, two brilliant TV writers will say differently, but in my experience when I write a TV script, a teleplay, the teaser is the shape of things to come, you know, like Orna Colbin's album, it holds some major seeds for the rest of the episode. I mean, teaser, it's interesting. I'm thinking of, like, teaser, like something that teases, you know, like it pulls the yarn out of, you know, a little bit, you know, right? Or if he, like a golf, like a golf, right, it tees it up, like you put the, you know, a golf tee, you know what I'm talking about? Hey, thank you so much. You're so adorable. Yes. Yes. So you put the ball on the golf tee and tease it up. So you're actually the teaser, I don't know if that's a real way to look at the thing, but in my poetic mind, that's how I just thought of it just now, like, huh. So I would say it should hold the seeds of the episode, you know, out, start, you know, tickled out the major themes or story points or what you're going to unfold in your episode. Thank you very much. I really appreciate that because I'm, and yesterday helped too, because I'm very overwhelmed with the minority of the project and it continuing, it's not a play where I can go the end move on. So this is also new to me. It's an all dog learning new trick. And so yesterday was helpful too, when you were talking about, like, just a prelude to the rest of the show, where's it just a little vignette. So I can look at each scene as a little tiny vignette and spend 10 or 20 minutes just working on that and do it in part acts as opposed to feeling so overwhelmed or just sitting down and writing a whole episode of the first, you know, first shitty draft. Exactly. Exactly. The fun thing about TV shows, you know, sorry, go ahead. No, that was it. Okay. Okay. That's great. And the cool thing about also a teleplay is, you know, it's short for it's the 30 minute one or the hour one, which is only like 42, five pages, you know, so it's awesome. You know, they're fun to write. Thank you, Kim. And fun to make. Yes. Thanks, SLP. Thanks, Kim. All right. Raza, I am going to unmute you. Are you there? Hi. Can you hear me? Yes. Hi. Hi. Thank you, Audrey. Thank you, Susan. Wonderful. My question I have, I guess almost maybe eight or maybe 10 short stories that I've been working on or seems like many, many years and takes me a long time to move it from first draft to a place where I feel, you know, that I like it like the form it's in and I feel like it's, you know, something I would even hope to get published. So like this particular story I'm working on right now and it's thing I started it like almost six years ago and then I put it away and then this past year I started working on it and but almost now like maybe even today or this week I feel like, okay, I think I'm done with this story. So my question is, yeah, my process seems really, really long and I give up some time. So is there, do you have any suggestions for sort of speeding it up? I love your question, Raza. If, just so you know, if you had told me that about your process and said this is my process, say you were, we were working together in a classroom situation or whatever I go, okay, great, right, because there's nothing wrong, inherently wrong with having a process that takes a while, you know. There's nothing wrong or bad about that or unprofessional or whatever. But since you add to that, I would like to speed it up. We can talk about things you can do. Is it, do you find yourself, are you a perfectionist? Does it have to be perfect before you send it out? What do you think? I think it takes you so long, right? I know, it's a good question. I asked myself that too. I want to say that these stories seem to come from a place of drama or trauma where there's something that really I feel strongly about. And then the story comes out of that and then it's very raw and I go back to it and try and make it into a story. Maybe it's just a scene initially and I'm trying to make it build it into a short story. They're all short stories. And that process seems to take a long time. And then I'm going to be really honest here. It's not like I'm putting myself down. I feel like I have things to say, but my writing is really, you know, I read a lot and some writings are really beautiful and lyrical. And that's not my writing, which is fine. I've accepted it. But I also don't want it to be to get in the way of people wanting to read what I have to say. So, you know, like now recently I've started recording, like reading my story out loud to myself. And that's been helpful. Like I read a sentence and I'm like, oh, OK, then I change it immediately. Right. That's been helpful to get it like flow to flow better. How what is your writing practice like, Rasa, your daily writing practice? What does it look like? I am pretty erratic, I would say. I would go for a great number of weeks where I write regularly. And then I could fall off for a few months and I could take it up depending on what else is going on in my life. OK, so this is where SLP goes out on a limb and makes a guess. So my guess, my feeling, and again, this is because you do want to, you know, speed up the process a little bit. You don't have that much more time, yeah. Well, well, we have as much time as we do and it's not how much time we have but how we use it, right, how we spend it, right? So what we want to do is spend it beautifully and generously, lavishly, to accomplish the things that we want to accomplish. So I would suggest that you get yourself a daily writing practice. So do you have a relationship or a pet or do you have anything, anyone in your life like a pet or a mouse? OK, so you have a sweetheart person. Great, OK, so if you only saw your sweetheart once a month, right, they might not feel like you're really into them, right? The muse is the same way. The muse needs to be attended to, courted, engaged with, you know, right? So if we had a dog, folks, and you only walked it like once every week, once a week maybe, the dog would be a mess, right, and would be making messes. It wouldn't be, you wouldn't have that great relationship that you hoped to have. So what you might want to do, Rasa, is actively develop a better relationship with your muse, OK? Even though you are writing about things you say that come from trauma, your muse, the spirit, the great spirit that's bringing you these stories, these short stories, these beautiful short stories, they're saying, but I would deliver every day, but you're only home like once a month, right? Is it possible, Rasa, that you could develop a writing practice that is a daily writing practice of no more than 15 minutes? Is that possible? Does it sound like a lot? What do you think? Tell the truth. No, no, it doesn't sound like a lot at all. I feel like often it's, especially like now when I want to work on it and edit it and bring it to a place where I'm satisfied with it, it's better. It's almost like I don't know how to do it, you know, like I look at the same line over and over, I look at the same paragraph and I'm like, what should I do here? You know? I am confident that the muse, the spirit's going to tell you, okay? I have, I'm 57 years old, I've been writing, you know, since I was like eight, you know? The spirit never fails you, but you have to show up, which is part of this experience we're having right now. We make a commitment to show up for each other and for ourselves and for our work. And we make a commitment to listen to the spirit, to the higher power, however you want to call it, whatever it is, the energetic force field is running around, you know, whatever, right? And the spirit will show up for you. If you don't know how to rewrite and you sit with your work for 15 minutes a day, and I keep, when I say time, I keep holding up a timer. I do not hold up the crack vial, the crack pipe, right? I'm holding up the timer because all it does is tell time, all it does is count down time. These are really great to get. And if you show up every day for 15 minutes or 10 minutes a day sitting in your writing area with your work in front of you, and if you sit there for 10 minutes and say, I don't know how to rewrite this, I really don't know how, every day, answers will come to you. Okay. Because I believe you do know how. Okay. And I'm here to remind you, so if you ever need to be reminded that you actually do know how to get your work done, show up here and we will collectively remind you, and I'll nag you like this. I'm very good at this. How long more are you doing this? Let's say forever. Let's just start. Well, we're going to be here tomorrow. We're taking it one day at a time. We're going to be here tomorrow. We've been doing it for 11 years, not every day like this, but I intend to do it because again, HowlRound and the Public Theater make it easy because they do all the background infrastructure, web, online, facility stuff, and all we have to do, all of us is, you know, click the link, sign up and click the link. So okay, but again, it's not about how much time we have together, but how we're going to use that time. So hear me today, Rasa, and say, set up a writing practice for yourself 10, 15 minutes a day. Okay, show up for yourself starting today. Okay. And try doing it tomorrow. Come to watch me work tomorrow. I've been coming for several weeks. There you go. See, you got it in the bag already. You got this. Keep asking questions. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. I'm very proud of you. You sound like you're writing about really difficult stuff. So your power to you. Thank you. Welcome. Thank you. Nice to see you. All right. Heather, you are up next. Do my mouse work? No. No mouse. Did that work? There. I have unmuted me. Thank you. Okay. Sorry. Hi. Thank you so much for being here. I've been kind of lurking, watching from the HowlRound Theater Commons webpage for a while. I could go on and on about Susan Lloyd Parks's influence on my life. But this is about you. I'm shaking. This is about you. I'm shaking. This is about you. I know. I know. I heard you many times say that. It's been a while. So here's the situation with me. I'm a theater practitioner, director, teacher. I just got back from a pretty large grant opportunity working in France doing applied theater as a Fulbright scholar. And it was like an incredible opportunity. And I get back and COVID hits. And I haven't been. Thank you for the clapping. I saw so many clapping. Thank you. So I get back early February and COVID hits. And we're all in quarantine. And I haven't been in my community very much at all, like in the embodied experience. And I have thousands and thousands of notes of my Fulbright experience that I've been sitting on almost six months now. And meanwhile, I'm trying to process those experiences I had over there. And for academic publication, which I've actually never been able to do yet in my entire academic career. And that feels like a big beast project. Then there's this other beast project where I'm hearing voices that want stories to be told. And these are experiences from my own life that I've been kind of holding only in journals and diaries and in experiences that have been, they've shaped me. But it's more than that. It's like, as a theater dramatist, to a certain extent, I see everyone as kind of a character anyway. But the first call, and I don't want to really repeat what she said, but the fact that I did write something recently, I didn't name names, but people kind of figured out who I was talking about in a bit that I had published. And I got into a lot of trouble with my family about this. And to the point where I don't think I can talk to them for a while. But I feel better that I said what I said. I feel actually really, really good about what I said because it was my truth. And I pointed out some real toxic dysfunction. And, you know, I guess my real question to you is pushing past this fear. Like I'm literally writing in journals and diaries wondering, do I write what I want to write as a pseudonym? Do I make this into a play or a novel and hide it? Because I've never actually given myself the privilege to think that I'm a fiction writer of any sort. I have written plays, but they've been adaptations. And I have, of course, written tons of academic work. When I was younger, like a teenager, I was writing all the time, stories and poetry. And I've lost that. I'm in my mid-40s now. And so I guess I just don't know where to... At what point does one make a decision? This is going to be a play, or this is going to be a novel, or this is going to be a screenplay because I see it in all these forms. And I just, I feel really out of practice and scared right now. And not quite sure how to be gentle with myself in the process because of how much kind of I've been criticized by peers and colleagues and whatnot. So both in academia and as a writer wanting to speak what I believe to be my truce. Your question's really cool, Heather. It's also, there's a lot of pieces to it, which give me an indication, a sort of like a mirroring of your heart and your mind about the kinds of things you're going, they're going on right now. The first thing you started talking about was that you have many, many, many pages of notes that you have a desire to turn into a piece of writing for academic purposes. You said for which you've never done, is that right? I'm sorry, I hope not. I've never been published in an academic journal in my life. Many of my peers have. So it's very daunting to me and I can't explain that. I don't know why. But you would like to be, is that correct? Yes. So there's that project, right? I mean, sometimes it helps me when we sort of separate out things. Not to say that they're separate, but just for the purposes of, so that we can see them more clearly, right? So you have the academic project for which you have many, many pages of notes. You have the voices that are speaking to you that move you to tell some kind of story, right? Whether it's a play or a screenplay or a teleplay or a radio play or a novel or whatever. A short story, yeah. Exactly, something. That is that the last time you did that, it created a great amount of friction between you and your family members. And then there's what kind of shape will this thing I'm writing take? So those are three separate, okay. Okay. I think the best way to do this is do the last one first, not to worry about that right this second. Okay. What kind of shape will this writing take? Let's not worry about that right now. It's going to take shape, it's going to take. We'll get to that in a sec. Okay. Now the other two projects, the academic writing project and then the more personal, right? I'm just characterizing it, the more personal project. My feeling is that you should work on both. And I say this because both are daunting and I think they're connected. I have a feeling they're connected. And to work on both, you're going to need to move very mindfully. With again, I hold this up a lot. I don't get any money. If you buy them on Amazon or wherever they have, bet you go down and do Instacart and have them throw one in your car or whatever, you know, or order it straight from a store. Don't use Amazon because they're fucking evil anyway. But get a timer and create time chunks. I'll be talking to Jacob the other day creating time chunks in your day. And maybe an hour a day, you're going to work on the, let's just call it the academic project. Okay. And then an hour a day, you're going to work on the more personal project. Work on both. They're connected. I feel like energetically, I feel sort of they're kind of, they're not conjoined twins. It's interesting. They're twins. I mean, yeah, it's definitely ethnographic writing. A lot of the notes that I took in France. Okay. Okay. I don't know. Subject wise, I don't know. Yeah, energetically, they feel connected because they're both daunting. And there's a lot of pushback on both. I've never published it in an academic journal. My parents say, shut up. There's a lot of push. So we're going to push forward small increments of time, an hour on the academic stuff a day, then do other things during the day. I don't know, clean your apartment, walk the dog, go for a run, whatever, bake some bread, and then come back after a couple of hours and work for an hour on the more personal work. The form that it takes for right now, that more personal work, that is a distraction. You keep you from working on it. If you have a story, if you can tell yourself the story, using pseudonyms or however you need to get it out, I think pseudonyms are great, not to name specific people. I think braving the anger of your family in order to tell your truth is very important. And I think it sounds like that's something that you need to do because the alternative is to eat your pain. And we're over that. You know what I mean? It's 2020 folks, eating our pain, look where we are. So guess what? And I'm not saying go after it and intentionally shame and harm people. I'm saying to speak your truth in a way that does it in such a way where you're not naming names but only your family members know. It's time to speak your truth. Okay? So I would say an hour on that project a day, inch them both along, try it for a couple of weeks. Someone's texting bird by bird, sure. Annie Lamont, if you want to read a book, I would say if you want to read a book great or just fucking do the work, but if you want to say if you want to in between the projects, sure, Annie Lamont is an awesome writer and a bird by bird is a beautiful book. I want you to stay on track though. So I just really want you to do your work, you know? Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks, Heather. Keep coming back, Heather, okay? And well, thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. All right, we've got about six minutes left. Maybe really five. We're going to go to Beth. Hi. Hi. I'm really grateful to have the opportunity to ask you my question. So thank you very much. I love to write. I don't have a hard time sitting down and writing. It's just something that I do to, it's actually freeing for me. My question is that I've written so much. I have a computer filled with my writing and there's a barrier that prohibits me from submitting my writing for publication. I look at it and I reread it and reread it and I fix it and I fix it and I put it away and I look at it again. I have my daughter read it, my son read it, my friend read it, but I never have, and I get the names of publishers. I get myself ready, but I always have that excuse not to send it in because it's not really yet perfect enough. And that's the stumbling block that sits in front of me. And so when or how do you say to yourself, listen, it's never going to really be perfect, even though in my head I know this, but I think I can get it perfect enough that I'll send it to an editor. They're not going to have to make any changes. They'll be just so perfect. Or my fear that they'll look at it and say, this is so horrible, so poorly written, I can't even believe she had the gall to send us into it. I love your question. I love your question, Beth. Okay, so we've all heard God is good, right? I haven't ever heard someone say God is perfect. So the perfection thing is not something that I, I have many problems as an artist, but the perfection thing is not something I experienced, but I do experience fear and concern and anxiety and all those kinds of things. So in Brazil, right? I've never been there, but you've seen it. I can't do it. Christ the Redeemer, his arms are like this. You know, right? Bring it on. What can they do, Beth? Send it to them. And if they say, it sucks, what? You're still alive? The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Here they come. This is what it means to be an artist, to stand up there and say, this is my heart. What do you think? Does it beat like yours? Right? Artists, it's, it's, it's, you have the kind of courage that is necessary for their artistic process, which is you sit down and do the work, which takes a huge amount of courage. Some of us have difficulty with that kind of courage. There's another kind of courage, which is you sit down and rewrite the work. You have that kind of courage. Great. And there's a third kind of courage, right? You show the work, you put it out there. And this is a great opportunity to develop that kind of courage. Okay. So what, what can, what can they do but tell you? I mean, it's interesting that you started by saying they might tell them they'll love it so much that I won't have to fix it at all. I'm sorry. I've won many prizes. I've never had a work that anybody said, Oh, it's perfect. Don't change a word. You know, I'm, I'm working with, gee, famous, fabulous, wealthy Hollywood types. Every time I turn something in, they want me to change like 97, bazillion words. Do I think less of myself as an artist? No. I show them how flexible I am, how I can stay on course, right? And change words to make it more of the thing that, you know, we're working on, right? You see what I mean? Yeah. So getting notes to change something is not an indication that it sucks, but you, you got to work on that courage of sending your work out there. If you want to, you don't have to send your work out. Okay. But since you have expressed that desire, um, a lot, also a lot of things, sending it to an editor, um, a lot of, maybe we're missing a step. Maybe you need to get some kind of representation or something. Because agents are really wonderful. A lot of magazines and stuff only take submissions from agents. So it's very, it might be very helpful for you to get some kind of representation, which would be really helpful. Um, in the meantime, you can also have fun with your friends. You say you showed your son, your daughter, and a friend. You can have zoom calls where you have people read their works aloud, like writing groups. Are you part of a writing group? I'm not. That could be fun. Right. Cause everybody's kind of equal footing. Everybody's submitting a piece of work to the group and you read it and talk about it. That could be a wonderful way to get accustomed to, uh, getting feedback. Most of it positive. Sometimes not so positive, you know. So you start getting in the flow, right? Thank you. Thank you very much. Thanks. Thanks, Beth. It's six o'clock. Sorry, I was very shrill. How'd that happen? No, how'd that happen? I always try to mute myself. Anyway, how'd that happen? How'd that happen? What is it? It's Tuesday. Oh my goodness. Tomorrow's Wednesday. We'll be back here again, six p.m. Eastern. If you sign up three p.m. Eastern, I'll send you a link between three and four thirty p.m. Eastern. And that's it. We love you. We love you. Thank you. Be happy, be safe. Be happy, be safe. Keep washing your hands. Wear your masks. Wash your hands. Wash your hands. We love you. We'll see you tomorrow. Thanks, Audrey. Thanks, S.L.P.