Can Politics Inspire a Creative Practice?
Emerging Form interviews with playwright, poet and lyricist Alison Luterman
Yeah, it’s a crazy time, and yet, all around us, so much beauty.
Preview: Episode 26 with Alison Luterman
When this week’s guest Alison Luterman saw The Vagina Monologues by Eve Ensler, a question struck her. “If I’m not going to speak up now, when am I going to?” She has been active in theater and literary arts since she was a teenager and now is one of the most celebrated poets in America. In this episode we talk in depth about her most recent musical, The Shyest Witch, which began in response to the 2016 election, but has considerably morphed. We talk about how, as a writer with so many genres available to her, she chose to write a musical. We also talk about collaboration, inspiration, trying new art forms and and how she responds to criticisms.
A List of Things to Do When You’re Stuck
This morning, I was teaching a fourth-grade class online, and we came up with a list of things for them to do when they got stuck. And guess what—everything on the list works for adult writers, too.
Use the word BUT (the bigger the but, the better)
Ask a question.
Repeat a line from earlier.
Read something else and look for a word that interests you.
Look out the window and incorporate what you see.
Use the word PERHAPS.
Add a color.
Daydream for a while.
Write with the other hand.
Make whatever you’re writing a letter.
Write on a rock. Or a leaf. Anything besides paper.
Some Great Opportunities Online:
· The Embodiment Conference is a worldwide event that offers classes, lectures and panels on how to meet the challenges of the world right now in a more embodied way. There are ten tracks, one of them focusing on Dance and Creativity. The conference is free and runs from October 14-25.
· I love my subscription to Master Class. So far I’ve learned about writing and performing comedy from Steve Martin, about writing and performing jazz from Herbie Hancock, about really feeling the music from Carlos Santana, and about public speaking from Neil deGrasse Tyson. It’s $15/month to learn in bite-sized bits from masters.
Braiding His Hair
Here we are each morning:
my husband on our old kitchen chair, its upholstery
mended with duct tape, his head bent forward
while I comb out his long
wheat-colored hair. Not what I thought
we’d be doing in our sixties,
me dividing the wet silk of it, still stubbornly
reddish-gold, only a little
white at the sideburns. Three thick hanks
in hand, I begin to plait: over, under, over, under.
I don’t remember when he stopped
cutting his hair and decided
to let it grow long as a girl’s —
and he was mistaken for a girl once,
a tall, stoop-shouldered man-girl,
when he stood on the sidewalk, back turned,
and a car drove by, honking and catcalling.
At him, not me. We laughed,
but I had to wonder: When did his tresses, now
halfway to his waist, first spill
over his shoulders? It must have happened while we slept,
as most things do. And how did he come to sit
before me so patiently now, head bowed while I braid,
as if he were the daughter I never had
and this my one chance
to weave my care into each over, under,
over, under?
—Alison Luterman, from In the Time of Great Fires (Catamaran, 2020)
Two Questions:
(share your answers with us here on Substack or in our FB group)
What is your favorite way to get unstuck?
How does beauty tie into your relationship with creativity?