Letter of Intent to Study Playwriting with Brighde Mullins

LETTER OF INTENT

I wish to take the MFA Playwriting class with you because—though I’m new to the field, being a crossover poet wandering in new pastures—I wish to learn something of the structure of the playwriting process: beginnings, muddles and ends interest me.

Having taken Roy Conboy’s class last year by accident—all the poetry classes were filled and as I was waiting to be advised—another student, Mary Sullivan-Rourke suggestied I take his class. I felt like Anias in the House of Words. Like my self-censorship telling me I wasn’t supposed to be there. However, I was hooked. I loved the process. It was a great semester for hearing student work and for experimentation on my own. But I realized that I lacked the understanding of structure, the necessary tools.

I understand how a poem works from the inside out; but dialogue and fiction have always been strangers. As a confessional poet in the narrative tradition, (mea maxima culpea) I tend to write about what is true. Having grown up in the oral tradition and being opinionated, I usually have something to say.

I’ve been lucky to have had an interesting life: living in Russia during the Fall, or caught in South American countries during coups and invasions were part of my writer’s palate. But lately I’ve been straying onto the prose poem genre.

But i find myself straddling genres: what I’m most interested in are neither plays nor short stories nor fiction. Certainly not poetry. Though it comes into it. Monologues. So what I’m interested in writing this semester is a series of monologues (Like the Cruz pieces in Telling Tales) of growing up in West Marin during the 50s & 60s...not quite as exotic as Las Vegas, but equally weird.

I am very interested in your idea of writing from the persona—Tennesee Williams’ characters are unforgettable because of that persona. No, make that brutally honest.

And with that changeover, there has been a language shift as well...I’m more wordy. At first I despaired. Then I succumbed to this wordiness. Stories to tell that don’t quite fit into the poetic genre were banging on the roof on my mouth.

Somewhere in the midst of all this, I applied to SFSU and was accepted as an MA candidate in poetry. Since I’ve been at SFSU, I’ve been upgraded to MFA status on the basis of that work. If I hadn’t had to take a correlative block outside my genre, I would never have considered writing plays.

As someone once said, my life experiences were like living in some Tennessee play. What I need to learn is to step outside the living play, and render my quirky observations into characters, and to grasp the the underpinnings of story: its form, its arc and structure.

I believe this class will give me a solid foundation by which to creatively explore and experiment with this genre of writing.

for Brighde Mullins MFA class

Feb. 8, 2002

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