4/18/2024 0 Comments Susan reames in santa monica![]() I would wake in the middle of the night to steal the time to write a novel. But when our son Mason Summit was born, I backed away from the lit scene and her class to focus on my family as a full-time mom. Holly was crucial in instilling in me a more serious approach to my work. Soon, I began attending Holly Prado’s Tuesday night workshop. It was a whirlwind of delight and the first time I ever got paid to create. We included much of Haslam’s writing and also wrote our own scenes. Later, Chris and I got a grant from South Coast Repertory Theatre to collaborate on a six-day workshop and presentation based on the writing of Gerald Haslam for SCR’s Nexus Project. Often, the writers of these stories would be present. We took Jim Krusoe’s words and Robert Olmstead’s words and created staged readings. No one was doing this sort of thing in Los Angeles yet. We produced it at The Lost Studio, where we’d pair actors and directors and present dramatized short fiction for the stage just as it was written in a book. My then-husband, actor Christopher Allport, was fascinated by what I was doing at the Met and suggested we collaborate on a performance fiction series. That’s when I started writing short fiction and inviting actors to perform it. They had a Saturday scene study class and I convinced them they needed to include writers in the mix. ![]() The Met was run by a Board of actors and playwrights, including Amy Madigan, Ed Harris, Holly Hunter, and Beth Henley. It was directed by former movie actor Alan Vint. Shortly thereafter, a play I’d written at Padua, Tent Show, was discovered by actor Tom Bower, who brought it to the Met Theatre in Los Angeles, produced it and also starred in it with O-Lan Jones and Arliss Howard. I loved bringing writers together and finding the balance. I later produced Poetry for Padua, a fundraiser where Michael Blake (Dances With Wolves) read from his poems. poets of that era to read, like John Thomas, Philomene Long, Michael C Ford, and Laurel Ann Bogen. It was where I felt a true sense of belonging, met and made lifelong friends and found my writer’s voice.Īround that time, I got the urge to create and produce a literary event of my own, A Tribute to Raymond Carver. Eve Brandstein and Michael Lally welcomed me there on Wednesday nights. I began to read from my work nearly every week at Poetry In Motion. ![]() It’s where I came across Harry Northup, who would become my first poet friend and one day star in a staged reading of my first play, Boomerang, at the Cast Theatre in Hollywood. ![]() That’s when I encountered poets whose language pulled me in. I was depressed that night about how my fledgling acting career was at a permanent standstill, so I moved from the Theatre section to the Poetry wall, when the anthology The Streets Inside: Ten Los Angeles Poets (edited by Bill Mohr, Momentum Press) fell off the shelf and onto my lap. I’d already been writing poetry, and then a book literally fell on me while I was sitting on a bench at the Bodhi Tree Used Bookstore. As he told Richard Whittaker in Works & Conversations, “You learn the text, and value the text, and put the text first.” Padua’s founder, Murray Mednick, imparted to us the importance of text. I would later enroll in the Padua Hills Playwrights Workshop, where I studied with playwrights John Steppling, Leon Martell, and Maria Irene Fornes (to name a few). This immersion inspired me to write and perform my own scenes in class and I found writing to be an organic relief. I think I read and dissected a play a day back then! Jeff Corey, who’d been a teacher to both James Dean and Jack Nicholson, encouraged us to read as many plays as we could get our hands on and then made us identify the theme of each one before we could get on stage to perform. In acting class, I felt a sense of connection and camaraderie. There weren’t a lot of artists where I grew up, in Encino in the 1970s. That said, just being a part of a creative community was a first for me. It planted a seed that propelled me, as a young adult, to drop out of college, get a waitress job, and join Jeff Corey’s acting workshop, where I found out that I had debilitating stage fright and no talent whatsoever. And he predicted I would be a famous actress one day. He’d helped the police department try to solve the Manson Murders and the Boston Strangler case. When I was nine, I met a world-renowned psychic named Peter Hurkos. Hi Susan, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
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