Founded 1983: Liberal Mindset; Conservative Morality

May 28, 2026

What the Dramatist Knows About Monsters

I sold my first paid byline to a Lincoln, Nebraska, newspaper at the age of ten. That was 1975. In the fifty-one years since, I have continued to be paid to construct figures that audiences will find frightening, or sympathetic, or contemptible, or laughable, on schedule, in plays and musicals and screenplays and novels and podcast scripts and editorial work. My Dramatists Guild membership dates from 1984. My MFA is from the Oscar Hammerstein II Center for Graduate Theatre Studies at Columbia University. A publishing house I founded in the same year I sold the first byline has operated without interruption since. The inventory exists for a single reason: the labor of figure-construction is something I know from inside the work, and the working-dramatist’s perspective on that labor is the perspective from which my new book is written.

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January 21, 2014

Repressing the American Dream: Rural Villages as Retirement Communities for Young’uns

There’s a new living meme I’ve been closely watching as it achingly creeps into an everyday reality because of economic compression and the new relativism of the repression of the American Dream for a growing generation of born scavengers.

I’ve been cautiously observing the new momentum of young people moving out of big cities and into small, rural, villages — or their parent’s basement — where the rent is cheap, the food is affordable, and the quality of life is quiet and unsubstantial.

At a time when these young people should be at their maximum earning potential, they are instead in “retirement mode” and collecting welfare subsidies and banking the goodwill of the generation ahead of them. When it comes time for them to pay back the deed, they will be able to do so because they were never in the earnings game in the first place.

Continue reading → Repressing the American Dream: Rural Villages as Retirement Communities for Young’uns

February 6, 2009

Obama and the Godless

It was incredibly refreshing yesterday — during the national prayer breakfast — when President Obama made room for the Godless in the manic realm of a national, religious, fervor and reinforced the necessary separation of church and state.