“A STORY THAT HAPPENS: ON PLAYWRITING, CHILDHOOD & OTHER TRAUMAS” by Dan O’Brien (Dalkey Archive Press, 100 pages, $14).
Dan O’Brien, who has served on the faculty of the Sewanee Writers’ Conference for more than a decade, is an award-winning playwright and widely published poet, with a long list of honors that includes the 2018 PEN America Literary Award – Los Angeles in Drama (for “The House in Scarsdale: A Memoir for the Stage”) and the 2014 Horton Foote Prize for Outstanding New American Play (for “The Body of an American”).
2021 saw the publication of two books from O’Brien: a poetry collection, “Our Cancers,” and a book of essays, “A Story That Happens,” originally delivered as craft lectures at Sewanee. The essays weave observations on the art of playwriting with deeply personal memoir shaped, like the poems in “Our Cancers,” by the cancer diagnoses both O’Brien and his wife, actor and writer Jessica St. Clair, received six years ago. They also touch on his childhood and the experience of living and working in an era of global upheaval. O’Brien answered questions from Chapter 16 via email.
Q: Your work as a poet and playwright grows out of trauma, but I wonder if you think of writing as personally cathartic or therapeutic – or is that an idea you reject?
A: Writing saved me as a child and helps me live now. I don’t believe that anything I write can erase the effects of trauma, but the act of writing is how I strive to find form and meaning – a story – in the chaos of trauma. This personal story will change and require revision, naturally, as long as I’m around. Perhaps readers and audiences who relate to my work feel a kind of solidarity as they reflect upon the challenges in their personal stories. I was drawn to writing in early adolescence because I happened upon writers who transgressed the taboo of their traumas to create poems, stories, plays that told the truth, and did so with eloquence and insight. These writers gave me strength and made me want to do what they did. I haven’t wavered in this aspiration since I was 12 years old.