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Book Cover for: A Story That Happens: On Playwriting, Childhood, & Other Traumas, Dan O'Brien

A Story That Happens: On Playwriting, Childhood, & Other Traumas

Dan O'Brien

Drawing on O'Brien's experience of cancer and of childhood abuse, and on his ongoing collaboration with a war reporter, the four essays in A Story that Happens--first written as craft lectures for the Sewanee Writers' Conference and the US Air Force Academy--offer hard-won insights into what stories are for and the reasons why, "afraid and hopeful," we begin to tell them.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
  • Publish Date: Sep 14th, 2021
  • Pages: 100
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 7.80in - 4.90in - 0.50in - 0.30lb
  • EAN: 9781628973839
  • Categories: Theater - PlaywritingEssays

About the Author

O'Brien, Dan: - Dan O'Brien is an internationally produced and published playwright and poet whose recognition includes a Guggenheim Fellowship in Drama, the Horton Foote Prize, the Edward M. Kennedy Prize, two PEN America Awards, and a shortlisting for an Evening Standard Theatre Award. His plays include The Body of an American and The House in Scarsdale: A Memoir for the Stage, among many others. He is also the author of four books of poetry: War Reporter, which received the Fenton Aldeburgh Prize, Scarsdale, New Life, and the new collection Our Cancers: A Chronicle in Poems.

Praise for this book

"A master class in surviving through art." ―Margaret Gray, The Los Angeles Times

"Subtly weaving between sometimes harrowing personal reminiscences and perceptive and astute lessons on the art of dramatic writing, the book is a quiet revelation." ―Caridad Svich, Contemporary Theatre Review

"This is a book for our times. It reminds us that theatre is 'fractured and failing yet struggling towards the mouth's translation of the heart's tongue.' Like [O'Brien], we buzz with the desire for the 'chance for more life, and for that most valued of theatrical currencies--change'." --Alice Jolly, Times Literary Supplement

"All the essays were written during the tumultuous Trump years, a period of bombastic rage, where the truth was not only clouded but disrespected . . . O'Brien does an unforgettable job accompanying the reader through the prism of his life experiences, offering more than mere lessons." --Jonas Shwartz-Owen, Broadway World