Author: Shyla Ann Shehan

Author Q & A with Kara Davidson

December 30, 2021

This week’s Author Q&A is with Kara Davidson. Kara is an actor, playwright, and teaching artist currently pursuing her MFA in Writing for Stage and Screen at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Her script, “The Farewell Burn,” won the 2021 Honey Bee Literature Prize in script writing and was published in our 5th issue of The Good Life Review.

Kara elected to answer a number of our questions however, in order to put priority on this time-sensitive answer, we’re stepping out of the typical flow to highlight the 10-episode serial audio play she wrote that is available for free only through December 31st. It was inspired by Bram Stoker’s classic Dracula and features a beautiful original score by Kevin O’Donnell. To listen please visit https://www.thehousetheatre.com/dracula.

We asked Kara what fuels her desire to write.

Her response: What fuels my desire to write is the possibility that my work will feel familiar to someone else, and how it could help them illuminate something touching or true about their own life, their relationships, or their journey. Providing a vehicle through which someone can process previously intangible or inaccessible emotions is a very meaningful gift to be able to give someone.

We also asked Kara how she knows when a piece of writing is finished.

Her response: “I don’t ever think of my writing as “finished”. It’s more of a snapshot of who I was in a specific time/place/moment of my life. And it’s possible that I might return to a piece, again and again, to morph it into something new or different. I also feel this way because I write for the theatre, which is such a team sport. Knowing that actors will inhabit my words, a director will infuse their own experiences into shaping the piece, and designers will make my fabricated world tangible — it’s incredibly exciting to think of my piece as an unfinished part of the puzzle.”

Circling back to her winning script in the latest issue, we asked Kara to tell us some unique or surprising detail about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of that script. 

Her response: This piece was inspired by an essay written by Brian Phillips which is included in his book, Impossible Owls. I was killing time at a bookstore and made a random grab at the shelves and developed an immediate crush on his writing/reportage style. I live for these moments when art inspires art — it makes me feel like artists of all mediums are cosmically and intrinsically connected, nourished by breathing each others’ air back and forth. It’s very intimate.

And finally, as it is will all our artists, we asked what she thinks of when she hears the phrase “The Good Life?” 

She summed this up nicely by responding: “Alignment. With self, nature, and community.”

Kara has previously worked with Manual Cinema, The House Theatre of Chicago, Lookingglass Theatre, Chicago Shakespeare Theatre, ABLE Ensemble, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Nebraska Repertory Theatre, and Flatwater Shakespeare, among others. She is a co-founder and director of a monthly virtual workshop called The Lab which aids in developing new works-in-progress by artists from all across the country (www.thelab.blog).

Thanks, Kara, for being a part of our 5th issue and for participating in this Q & A!

Cheers,
~The Good Life Review Team

Author Q & A with Adam Graham

December 16, 2021

This week’s Author Q&A is with Adam Graham. Adam is a writer and artist based in Asheville, North Carolina. His work is rooted in the complexities and dynamics of relationships and explores issues of social class, identity, and the role language plays as both a force of connectivity and a force of disintegration. His flash fiction story “On Art, Authority, and Crows: A Modern Fable” appears in our latest issue of The Good Life Review.

We asked Adam to tell us some unique or surprising detail about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of his story. 

His Response: “My process of writing is very much influenced by the cut-up techniques of the Dadaist. I begin each story by randomly selecting a smattering of texts and typing them into my document in no particular order. These random texts may be a sentence from a car insurance magazine, a phrase from an old song, the small print from a medicine commercial, that sort of thing. These segments of text, and the ideas they envelop, act as a series of sequential destinations my emerging story travels through as I write from one text to the next. This process demands a very open flow, in which free association between ideas is paramount.

“At the end of the process, I extract the originating found texts, and what remains are bizarre little tinkering literary machines that buzz across a table-top for a few minutes. Because of the extraction of the originating texts, there are “gaps” in my stories, openings built into the very foundations of the stories, missing places in the boundary the delineates the story at its very core. These openings in the story allow things to drift in and out, to cross the border of the story, it opens up the circuitry of the literary machines. 

“The found texts I used for the current story, On Art, Authority, and Crows: A Modern Fable, come from the Time-Life Library of Art, a series of biographies of various artists in history. The set of twenty-eight books was published in the 1960s.”

The other question that Adam elected to answer is what he thinks of when he hears the phrase “The Good Life?” 

Adam’s Response: “To me, the “good life” consists of artistic experimentation, of having the courage to think dangerously, of making time to build new concepts in one’s own head, and then to bring these new ideas into the world via the written word, maybe in the form of a short story, or maybe a poem, or maybe even a single sentence smudged on the bathroom mirror.  I find I feel most alive when a new idea is wriggling through my mind, slowly taking form as the flotsam and jetsam of thoughts, experience, random bits of psychological association stick to the bourgeoning form crawling out of my head.”

Thanks, Adam, for being a part of our autumn issue and for participating in this Q & A!

Cheers,
~The Good Life Review Team

Author Q & A with Christi Krug

December 8, 2021

This week’s Author Q&A is with Christi Krug. Christi has been a community educator in Vancouver, Washington since 1997 and she is also and a creativity and mindfulness coach. Her piece appearing in this issue of The Good Life Review is a nonfiction essay titled “The Coats in Summer People.” 

We asked Christi to tell us some unique or surprising detail about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of her essay. 

Her Response: “I was working as a human resources temp many years ago, chatting with a co-worker about my new pursuit of hiking. She was a hiker too, but there was one situation that had given her pause. It was a hot day in July and a man in a thick down jacket came down the trail and she felt unsafe. “Anyone who wears a coat like that in summer – you just know there’s something wrong,” she said. Until she spoke those words aloud, I had never realized how awkward and embarrassed and sad I felt about the clothing choices of my mother and brother. The remark stayed in my mind until a couple of years ago when I used it for what I call “wildwriting” – writing all my thoughts fast. Leafing through my notebook earlier this year, I liked the piece and decided to revise and submit it.”

We then asked what she learned (about herself or craft or the world) through writing and revising the essay?

Her Response: “Writing this piece, I learned that the younger me, still in there somewhere, feels a lot of shame and confusion about my early years with a mentally ill family. There is also a great deal of guilt that I didn’t develop their diagnosis and a longing for their recovery. And under all those layers is my love for my biological mother, who is no longer alive, and for my sensitive, smart, older brother.”

And finally, we asked Christi if she has any exciting projects she’s working on or something she’d like to promote. She let us know that she frequently facilitates 20 minute “wildwriting” sessions via zoom audio Zoom (no screens) and participants follow intriguing prompts in order to make all kinds of discoveries on the page. She has several lined up for December and anyone interested in attending should reach out to her via her website www.christikrug.com.

In addition, in January she will be facilitating “Wildfire Writing,” which she’s been teaching for 23 years. The class shares the practice that has helped her write with confidence while processing her life stories, harvesting their beauty. It is a distance-learning class available through Clark College and anyone interested can learn more or signup here.

Christi’s poetry and prose have appeared in everything from religious magazines to horror anthologies to comic zines. Her latest stories appear in Griffel, Nightingale & Sparrow, Montana Mouthful, and Luna Station Quarterly. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and recently served as writer-in-residence at North Cascades Institute. Christi is the author of Burn Wild: A Writer’s Guide to Creative Breakthrough. If you want to get in touch www.christikrug.com

Thanks, Christi, for being a part of our 5th issue and for participating in this Q & A!

Cheers,
~The Good Life Review Team