Peter Elbow and Freewriting

[This is a post about writing.  Because it’s an homage to Pater Elbow (1935-2025), it’s also a post about teaching writing, which I did for several years at several schools in the 1980s and ’90s.  I also did some writing for publication, mostly about theater, many of which pieces have ended up revived here on Rick On Theater. 

I’ve also posted a number of articles on writing on ROT: ”On Reviewing” (22 March 2009), “The Art of Writing Reviews by Kirk Woodward” (4, 8, 11, and 14 November 2009) “Why Write?” (4 March 2013), “‘Draft: The Essay, An Exercise In Doubt’” by Phillip Lopate (2 November 2013), “Writing” (9 April 2010), “Words on Words” (1 February 2014), “Words and Pictures?” (25 July 2014), “How to Write a Play” by Kirk Woodward (18 February 2016), “More Words on Words” (8 June 2016), “On Criticism” (27 October 2021), and “How I Write” (25 February 2022).

[Peter Elbow, who died in Seattle on February 6 at 89, taught English teachers, was a professor of English composition and literature and a scholar of the theory, practice, and pedagogy of writing.  (Elbow’s obituary wasn’t published in the New York Times until 3 March, after being posted on the paper’s website on 27 February.)]

On 28 July 2015, I posted a tribute to writer, editor, literary critic, and teacher of writing William Zinsser (1922-2015), who, I said on this blog, “had a profound influence on me and my life” (William Zinsser on Writing: Harnessing the World We Live In).  At the time I encountered Zinsser—through his wonderful book On Writing Well (we never met in person)—I was trying to figure out how to write for my new doctoral program in the Department of Performance Studies at New York University.

I started in the department in the fall of 1983 and a required class was Resources and Methods for the Study of Performance, a course taught then by Kate Davy (retired provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs at the University of Michigan-Dearborn).  On Writing Well (1976) was a text for the course, which, while essentially covering just what the title indicates, was also partly a writing class for DPS grad students.

One of the main emphases at DPS when I was there was a clear, readable writing style.  All the faculty specifically stressed it in their classes—my instructors Michael Kirby (1931-97), Brooks McNamara (1937-2009), and Richard Schechner (b. 1934) in particular. These men all were editors or former editors of The Drama Review, one of the leading academic journals in theater and performance studies.  All our written work was expected to be of publishable quality, whether or not we intended to submit it to a journal. 

The constant emphasis on our writing by the faculty couldn’t help but make us conscious of our prose.  As the same time, I was offered a preceptorship in the undergrad Expository Writing Program.  (‘Preceptor’ was what the EWP called its teaching assistants at that time.)  Performance Studies grad students, I later learned, were considered a prime pool for prospective EWP preceptors because of the department’s emphasis on writing.

So, just when I was starting a writing-intense grad program myself, I also began teaching writing to undergrads.  NYU required all new undergraduates to take a two-semester Writing Workshop; we preceptors each taught two sections of the twice-weekly course.  Thus, undertaking the responsibility to guide and train students in a field in which I never before considered myself even a practitioner, much less an expert, made me examine and question my own writing even more critically.

I didn’t become mindful of my writing until I started to work on the thesis for my 1977 Master of Fine Arts degree in acting at Rutgers University’s School of Creative and Performing Arts (the predecessor to the Mason Gross School of the Arts).  The only writing I did between graduating from college in 1969 and writing the thesis was in the army—various kinds of reports—whose literary demands were not great.  My MFA courses demanded very little writing of any consequence as all but one were performance classes, not academic.

So, at the same time that writing was still an evolving process for me, I had to take a course in New York University’s School of Education, Health, Nursing, and Arts Professions (SEHNAP) called Practicum: Teaching Expository Writing.  The ‘practicum,’ a course designed for the preparation of teachers in a particular field that involves the practical application of theory, was taught by Gordon Pradl (1943-2020), a longtime professor of English education at NYU’s ed school who believed that the teaching of writing mattered.

The Writing Practicum was a required class for all preceptors who were teaching the Writing Workshop.  That’s where I first read Peter Elbow’s Writing Without Teachers (Oxford University Press, 1973).  It introduced me to a writing technique that has been a significant help to me in my development as a writer.  Let me now pay Elbow the proper thanks for that invaluable service.

The written thesis wasn’t the important part of the thesis work; the performance itself was.  The written document wasn’t intended to stand alone without it.  I had to write about the performance of my “thesis role” so that it would both document it and explain the process by which I arrived at it, and I had to do it not for myself, but for a committee of faculty members who would cross-question me on what I said.    

I was therefore constrained to write a readable account, if not by departmental or scholarly pressure, then by my own desire to do the best damn thesis the department had seen.  Furthermore, the thesis would be put in the university library for posterity.  I would be “on record” for anyone to read.  

(The thesis is, indeed, in the Archibald S. Alexander Library, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey: “Colonel Johann Rall: The Creation of an Historical Portrait,” call number PN.K89 1978.  I’ve also published an edited version of the paper on Rick On Theater: “Johann Rall: A Historical Portrait,” 10 and 15 December 2009.  

(Colonel Rall (1721-26 – 1776)] was the commander of the Hessian mercenaries who defended Trenton for the British against the American in the Battle of Trenton in the Revolutionary War, the assault across the Delaware River on the morning after Christmas 1776.  He was a major featured character in Devil Take the Hindmost by William Mastrosimone, whose MFA playwriting thesis it was.

(The performances were staged on 12-14 and 17-21 November 1976 at the Levin Theater at Douglass College, Rutgers University, East Brunswick, New Jersey, and on 11 February 1977 at the American College Theatre Festival IX, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York.)

The problem was, I didn’t have any idea how to go about doing this.  I didn’t know how to write the way I thought I wanted to.  I had to learn for myself how to do it. 

The fact is, I don’t remember ever having been taught anything about writing when I was in school.  We learned grammar in elementary and middle school in those days, of course, but composition courses weren’t part of the curriculum.  In high school and college lit classes we studied writers, but not writing.  If someone did, in fact, teach me to write, I certainly didn’t learn very well, so I set about (re)learning.

At the very beginning, I was terribly blocked.  I didn’t know how to start.  I lived in New York City and commuted to New Brunswick by car, and I brought my full-sized electric typewriter—plus paper and whatever else I needed—with me.  Whenever I had an hour or more, or when I could cut a class, I set myself up somewhere . . . and basically sat and stared at a blank piece of cheap yellow paper I used for typing drafts. 

This went on for days—probably a couple of weeks at least.  I was getting scared.  It wasn’t as if the paper was long.  Acting theses were usually 15 to 20 pages.  (Mine ended up at 44 pages, which was very long—but I was very detailed, and I had two separate mountings of the show: the regular university theater production in East Brunswick and then, three months later, the American College Theatre Festival regional competition in Ithaca, 220 miles to the northwest.)

I finally convinced myself that I had to get started somehow, and I decided I would just begin.  I would just start putting words on paper (no word processors yet) as swiftly as I could and worry later about whether they made sense and were grammatical.  I didn’t know it then, but what I was doing was “freewriting” about the role and my performance, a strategy I later learned is called “focused freewriting.”  Very soon, words and thoughts all just began to pour out.

Freewriting, of which focused freewriting is an application, is a prewriting exercise advocated by Peter Elbow at the very beginning of Writing Without Teachers.  Prewriting is a step in the writing process (the procedure for putting ideas and words on paper: prewriting, drafting, revising, editing, proofreading) that covers anything a writer does before putting words in sentences on paper or screen.  Prewriting techniques help me if I have trouble getting started, if I find that I’ve run out of ideas in the middle of writing, or if I feel that my ideas are not worthy of a reader’s attention.

(There are other prewriting techniques aside from freewriting and focused freewriting—brainstorming and subject-mapping, for example—but freewriting is writing in sentences and even paragraphs, while brainstorming results in lists of words and phrases and subject-mapping uses diagrams and lines.)

In Elbow’s words,

The idea [of freewriting] is simply to write for ten minutes (later on, perhaps fifteen or twenty).  Don’t stop for anything.  Go quickly without rushing.  Never stop to look back, to cross something out, to wonder how to spell something, to wonder what word or thought to use, or to think about what you are doing. If you can’t think of a word or a spelling, just use a squiggle or else write “I can’t think what to say, I can’t think what to say” as many times as you want; or repeat the last word you wrote over and over again; or anything else.  The only requirement is that you never stop.

Focused freewriting, which isn’t specifically an Elbow technique, is a tactic that I still use today.  Just as Elbow prescribes with freewriting, I write for at least ten minutes on whatever comes to mind about one topic without pausing.  (The “without pausing” can be a problem for me because I’m a compulsive ruminator, but I have no trouble with the ten-minute requirement—I suffer from literary logorrhea.)  I’m not concerned about grammar, punctuation, or spelling, so I try not to change anything I’ve written.  (That’s hard for me because I’m an inveterate self editor.)

Elbow explains the benefits of freewriting in his book, but for me, its chief benefit is, as it was at that time almost 50 years ago when I stumbled on it and it broke the logjam I feared would scuttle my MFA.  I was surprised and mighty gratified when what I come up with serendipitously, I discovered eight years later was an actual technique used by writing teachers and written up in books.

Because of scheduling, I didn’t take Pradl’s Practicum until the start of my second year at NYU.  By then, I’d already been teaching in the EWP for a year, and, what’s more, I’d had my first piece of writing published in TDR.  (The essay came out in the winter issue of 1984 [vol. 28, no, 4 – T104], but I posted a version of it on ROT as “The Group Theatre's Johnny Johnson” [18 November 2019].) 

Writing Without Teachers was the first text assigned in the class, and as privately thrilled as I was to see “my” technique emphasized so prominently by Peter Elbow, I was a little taken aback that a book about learning to write without a teacher was being spotlighted in a class for teachers of writing!

Not that I felt that there was anything amiss about people teaching themselves to write.  After all, it turned out that I had done so, myself.  But I was glad to have the backing of pros like Gordon Pradl, William Zinsser, and Peter Elbow to help me pass on what I’d learned—and was still learning—to others.

[As I said above, I taught composition at NYU in 1983-85.  I also taught it at a couple of other colleges and even ninth-grade English once (1987-88).  I learned a few things about the state of education in the United States as it was in the post-’60s decades, especially as applied to the teaching of writing—which I’ve always felt is really the teaching of thinking—after what was a more touchy-feely period of pedagogy.

[Let me preface my remarks by acknowledging that I’m an honest-to-goodness Baby Boomer—the first wave, no less, born a little over a year after World War II ended.  I grew up in the Eisenhower ’50s and spent almost my entire teen years in the first half of the ’60s.  We still learned grammar, syntax, the parts of speech, and spelling and how to parse a sentence and diagram it.

[I explained above how I ended up at the head of a college writing class.  (Why I took the preceptorship, that I can’t explain.  I was tendered a scholarship when I was accepted into the Performance Studies program, but when I was offered the preceptorship, I took that over the scholarship.  I suppose I was flattered, considering my lack of experience as a writer, much less as a teacher of writing.)

[Of course, I didn’t have any time to bone up, much less learn how to teach writing.  We had a handbook, a syllabus, and a quick orientation, and boom, we were in it!  It should have been the real-life embodiment of the Actor’s Nightmare, where an actor finds himself on stage in a play he doesn’t know, playing a character whose lines and movements he doesn’t know, with other actors he doesn’t know.  But, it wasn’t.

[I found out a few discouraging things, however.  The first was that the reason New York University had a required composition class for all undergraduates was apparently because the graduates of America’s high schools who were matriculating didn’t know how to write.  Certainly not at an acceptable college level. 

[I’d later discover that NYU wasn’t by any means the only school requiring an essentially remedial writing course; they almost all did.  My undergraduate college back in the late ’60s didn’t have such a class (though it might have been better off if it had). 

[My second revelation was that none of the students knew grammar.  Clearly, learning English grammar had been deemed old-fashioned in the decade between my high school graduation and the years my undergrads finished their secondary education.  (I gather that it was reinstated to some extent in the following years, but I’m not certain.)

[I wasn’t so much disturbed because my writing students didn’t know the grammatical conventions I’d had to learn.  I discovered, though, that I couldn’t discuss with the tyro writers what the problems they were having communicating in writing were without using the grammatical terms that were the jargon of writers and writing.  I had to start teaching grammar (sort of surreptitiously) so my students and I would have a common language when we talked about their writing.

[I also noticed something else relative to my 20-something students, something that I found somewhat disquieting.  There was a marked difference in the level of responding to the readings I assigned for their writing exercises.  The practice was to read a piece that I thought was provocative for both its content and its presentation, that is, the writing.  Then we’d discuss it in class, again both the ideas and the writing.  Then I’d give them an essay assignment in response to the reading—usually very open-ended.

[It was in the classroom discussion where I began to notice this difference.  Some students looked at the readings very directly, like a book report.  What the writer had said, where they agreed or disagreed, very conventional reactions.  This carried over into their writing as well.

[Other students went off on tangents, saw implications beyond the specific subject matter in the reading.  These students also had more questions.  Their imaginations were piqued.  A third group was even more rigid than the first, reluctant to offer much of anything other than what the writers had said.  They offered very little, even anything at all, of themselves in their responses, as if they had no opinions at all.

[As I got to know the students a little, more about their backgrounds, especially their secondary schooling, I found a troubling trend.  That second group, the ones who were freest with their own ideas and thoughts were generally from private high schools or prep schools.  The first group, the students who had responses, but they were, as I characterized them, “conventional.”  Nothing that would surprise me.  They were mostly graduates of public schools.

[The most limited responders, the ones who seemed to have nothing to offer aside from repeating what they understood the writer to have said, they turned out to be largely products of parochial schools. 

[After I’d had a couple of individual conferences with the students, I came to this general conclusion: the level at which they participated in the class discussions, and then approached their written responses, had little to do with the quality of their previous education.  It was the consequence of the way they were taught to consider their own ideas. 

[The more responsive and expansive students had learned, either in their schools, or in their homes, or on their own, that their ideas and thoughts were valid, were worthy of voicing and considering.  The most closed off students had been constrained to stay within narrow boundaries and had come to think that they didn’t have a right to have ideas outside those parameters—or, if they did, not to voice them.

[The middle group had seen that they had a little leeway to display ideas and thoughts not derived from their authorities, that is, their teachers and elders, but only so far and no farther.  It wasn’t that some students had ideas and others didn’t, it was that some were encouraged to voice their ideas and thoughts and others had been overtly or tacitly restricted.  It was now my job to unjam the works and let the students know that their responses were valid.  They were valid because they had them. 

[I was happy to see that after I began to stress this notion, that their ideas were worthy of being stated and that they weren’t going to be judged on what they think, but on how well, how clearly, they expressed those ideas in writing, some of the more reluctant student writers started breaking out of their cocoons.  One young man—who actually had come from a church school—came to my desk in the Expository Writing office to thank me for letting him know his thoughts were worth expressing.  He’d been censoring himself unwittingly.  Made my week!

[A final comment on this observation: two student groups didn’t fit into this scenario.  One were older students, including the odd grad student.  Because NYU’s policy was that all students entering the university who hadn’t had a college-level composition class had to take the Writing Workshop, there were some upperclassmen and -women enrolled.  Occasionally a grad student would be required to take the course if she or he was deemed deficient in writing skills.

[The other exception to my analysis were foreign students.  Most of them were also older, but even when they weren’t, despite whatever they lacked in language fluency, their ratiocination was usually superior.  My experience in Europe leads me to put the credit for this difference on the schools.  The German, French, or British equivalent of a high school junior or senior is already working at a college level, especially if they’re at a lycée or gymnasium.

[I saw this even in an American high school.  I had a Yugoslavian student, a recent immigrant with his family, who was assigned to my Level 2 ninth-grade English class, and even though he was just learning English, he was so far above the level of his classmates, that I recommended he be transferred to a Level 3 class.  He came to thank me for taking this step in his behalf, and later his new teacher sought me out to tell me he was absolutely flourishing at Level 3.

[In the Writing Workshop at NYU, the best student I had in two years was a French woman.  She may have been a little older, too, but aside from the occasional Gallic excess of her prose, her ideas and reasoning were always interesting and several steps beyond anything anyone else in the class had.]

A Biography of Leonardo Shapiro, Part 3

[This installment of “A Biography of Leonardo Shapiro” starts with the young directing student enrolling at NYU in its newly formed School of the Arts.  He immediately met several of the people who’d be important to his artistic development, including Jerzy Grotowski, John Arden and Margareta D’Arcy, Peter Kass, Richard Schechner, and Carl Weber. 

[Shapiro also met many others during this time who had an influence on his understanding of theater, art, and the social contract.  He also launched his first non-student production and his first piece of political theater, which evolved into his first theater troupe.  The tyro director also took his first professional directing job at this time—and had his first taste of failure.

[Finally, in a major jog in his life path, Shapiro took off for the West Coast and was diverted in Taos, New Mexico, for a two-year sojourn that turned out to be one of his most formative experiences.  He created his second company, a political guerrilla-theater troupe that traversed the Four Corners. 

[Again, I strongly recommend that readers just picking up this multi-part post to go back to Parts 1 and 2 (posted on 16 and 19 April) first.  I’ve been identifying people and explaining important ideas as they arise, and later sections of the bio will make more sense if you’ve read the foregoing parts.]

Shapiro did eventually register at the newly established School of the Arts (now the Tisch School of the Arts) at New York University in 1966, from which he obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in directing in 1969.  By his own account, however, his tenure there was precarious. 

Shapiro enrolled in the Theater Program at NYU’s School of the Arts, which had just been launched in 1965, in its first class.  He was accepted largely on the basis of his prior experiential learning, and his time at NYU was arguably Shapiro’s most practically and professionally influential educational influence, especially combined with the Windsor Mountain experience, which founded the intellectual and philosophical basis of his thinking.

Not only did Shapiro get schooling from faculty such as Peter Kass (1923-2008), his acting teacher and a protégé of several Group Theatre members; Carl Weber (1925-2016), an actor and dramaturg at the Berliner Ensemble, and assistant director to Brecht; and Richard Schechner (b. 1934), whose teaching remained influential long after Shapiro left school, but he worked with visiting theater pros John Arden (1930-2012) and Jerzy Grotowski (1933-99). 

Other influential teachers at NYU of whom Shapiro spoke were Hovey Burgess (b. 1940), former clown and juggler (with Clyde Beatty-Cole Brothers Circus) who taught circus skills, one of Shapiro’s favorite classes, and Omar Shapli (1930-2010), a director, teacher, and founder of the Chicago-based improvisational group Section 10, who taught theater games.

Many of Shapiro’s NYU schoolmates became important figures in his artistic development.  Of special note were:

·  Fred Aronow (b. 1945), a cameraman and sound recordist who was an MFA student in Film Studies who introduced Shapiro to the Taos Indians and the San Gerónimo festival in New Mexico in 1969.

·  Tom Crawley (1940-95), an actor and SOA graduate who was a participant with Shapiro in the 1967 Grotowski workshop and a cast member of the original Brother, You’re Next street performances (1967).

·  Larry Pine (b. 1945) and his wife Margaret Rachlin Pine (b. 1948), actors and both SOA graduates who were Shapiro’s closest friends in the 1960s and ’70s.  Larry was a cast member of Brother, You’re Next and a participant in the 1967 Grotowski workshop; he was an original member of André Gregory’s Manhattan Project.  Margaret, also a composer, was an original member of the Shaliko Company and the composer for the musical adaptation of Molière’s The Misanthrope produced by New York Shakespeare Festival (1977), originally under Shapiro’s direction.

·  Linda Putnam (b. 1944), an actress with Appleseed Circus in New Mexico (1970-71) and an original member of the Shaliko Company; an SOA graduate, Linda joined Shapiro in New Mexico with her husband, David, in 1970.

·  Wallace Shawn (b. 1943), a playwright and actor and the author of The Youth Hostel (1976), which Shapiro directed at the Public Theater; a schoolmate of Shapiro’s and a supporter of the Shaliko Company who brought Andrea Dunbar’s The Arbor (1983), the U.S. première of which Shapiro staged, from London.  He also conducted a seminar for Shapiro’s Trinity/La MaMa Performing Arts Program.

· Candace Tovar, (b. 1947), an actress, singer, and dancer, and SOA graduate who became Shapiro’s wife in 1970; their son, Spartacus, was born in 1971.  Candace was in New Mexico with Shapiro in 1970-71, and became a member of the original Shaliko Company; they divorced in 1973, but Candace is a central character in Shapiro’s 1994 semi-autobiographical play, Runaway Sam in the Promised Land.

In 1967, NYU hired British playwright John Arden (Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance, 1959) as a visiting lecturer in the undergraduate theater program at the brand-new SOA; he taught a course on politics and theater.  Out of this class came a remarkable performance project, War Carnival, conceived, at the behest of the students, by Arden, an artist long associated with leftist causes; his wife, actress Margaretta D’Arcy (b. 1934); and NYU theater games instructor Omar Shapli.

The students of acting, directing, and playwriting developed the project and events in New York City around the time of its conception bore on the theme of the project, presented beginning in the afternoon of Saturday, 13 May 1967 (see “War Carnival,” 13 May 2010).  One of those directing students was the young Leonardo Shapiro, already a political radical and anti-war activist.

Shapiro—whom Arden described as a “balding bearded-weirdy”—was drawn to Arden, a mix of English establishment and international bohemian.  Described as a “combination medieval passion play and modern day Play-In,” War Carnival was conceived principally by D’Arcy.  It was a 10-hour, blatantly anti-Vietnam war street fair (except that it was staged in an NYU studio space on 2nd Avenue).

In 1967, Jerzy Grotowski, who would become one of Shapiro’s two main theater models and inspirations (the other was Bertolt Brecht), conducted his first American workshop at NYU.  Grotowski and Ryszard Cieślak (1937-90), Grotowski’s principal actor, taught a four-week “methodology” series from 6 to 30 November in which Shapiro, one of only four directing students in the class, participated.  

While Shapiro was doing the Grotowski workshop, he and a band of classmates wrote and performed the guerrilla street play Brother, You’re Next, the adaptation of Brecht’s Man Is Man.  Shapiro and two of his classmates, Stephen Wangh (b. 1943) and Robert Reiser (b. 1941), wrote the script (based on improvisations by the cast) and Chris Rohmann (b. 1942), the only member of the company who wasn’t an NYU student (he’d been bought in from Ohio by Wangh), composed the music.

The young street performers were all facing the Vietnam war draft.  The ends of their student deferments were looming, and several of the students had already been called for military service.  “[T]here was lots and lots of dead people coming back and we were all scared shitless,” said Larry Pine, one of the Brother company. 

Sharing some themes and plot points with both Hair, which opened Off-Broadway the same year, and Full Metal Jacket, the 1987 film by Stanley Kubrick (1928-99), one of Shapiro’s acknowledged inspirations, Brother tells the story of a draftee at first determined to escape military service, but who eventually learns that “war is so much fun” and readily participates in it. 

The play was performed in unannounced appearances in parks and on street corners around New York City.  (The troupe did one series of performances indoors as part of an anti-Vietnam war event organized in January 1968 by the Theatre for Peace, a project of the Committee of the Professions to End the War in Vietnam.)  One of the two published reviews of the indoor shows affirmed that Brother was a commitment “to a theater of propaganda in the best sense of the word.”

In the spirit of ’60s activism, the company gave the script royalty-free to any group across the country that wanted to present it.  Shapiro remembered hearing about performances of Brother by groups in Chicago and cities in California and Minnesota and requests by other groups.

The cast of Brother, You’re Next became the kernel of the New York Free Theater, a street troupe which performed protest songs and sketches all over the five boroughs of New York City from 1968 until the mid-1970s (see my post on 4 April 2010).  

Shapiro, Wangh, Rohmann, and Reiser co-founded the NYFT, “a street and community theater of social and political involvement” which operated under the aegis of NYU’s School of the Arts.   The Free Theater eventually launched community workshops “intended to aid participants in directing neighborhood programs relating to racism, narcotics and violence,” but in 1968 and 1969 devoted itself to street performances.  (Shapiro left New York City for the West Coast in the summer of 1969.)

In New York Times listings of free events during the summer of 1969—the Free Theater was a street theater, but not a guerrilla troupe; their appearances were scheduled and publicized—the theater described itself as “street actors in ‘involvement’ theater and satire,” mounting performances in neighborhoods all over the city, on street corners, in parks, and on college campuses in Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx.   

(No appearances were announced in this list for either the borough of Staten Island or suburban areas outside the city.  One reason might have been that the New York City subway system doesn’t reach those locations, though the troupe included Staten Island in a list of its targeted areas.) 

The little band of pacifist theater artists originally launched NYFT to combat racism and racist attitudes among the diverse population of New York City.  It was a direct response to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. (b. 1929), on 4 April 1968.  (Toward the end of its existence, NYFT expanded its mandate to accommodate other social ills, but that was after Shapiro’s departure from New York.)

In late 1968, while Shapiro was still a student at NYU, and during the time that Brother, You’re Next was touring the streets of New York City, the neophyte director was hired for his first professional job.  It was not an auspicious start to his career. 

The Off-Broadway producer of Yes Yes, No No, Beverly Landau, approached director Peter Rivers to stage Ronnie Paris’s comic “fantasy picture of a cold and glittering world of women without men” at the Astor Place Theatre in the East Village.  Rivers declined but recommended Shapiro in an attempt, Shapiro believed, to teach the younger artist “that a professional takes anything and makes it work at its own level, and a professional doesn’t judge everything and just do a few great classics.” 

The lesson may not have taken: Shapiro, feeling that the play wasn’t very funny on its own merits, “took a few liberties here and there, sort of spiced it up.”  Playwright Paris (1924-1992), who was also a producer of the show, objected when she saw a rehearsal the day before previews were to begin, and “freaked out.” 

To be precise, the director had moved the setting from an ordinary home to a cave seven miles down after a nuclear holocaust; since the cast included only women, Shapiro decided that all the men had been wiped out.  The “dripping stalagmites” of the set and ragged costumes were hardly the tea-and-false-eyelashes milieu Paris had anticipated. 

One day at rehearsal, Shapiro recalled, someone on the production staff said something offensive to Candace Tovar, who was then Shapiro’s girlfriend and had merely happened by the theater on an errand for Shapiro—and Shapiro knocked the fellow to the floor.  That act abruptly ended any collaboration between Shapiro and the playwright and producers, which dissolved then and there.  

Yes Yes, No No opened under Peter Rivers’s direction on 31 December 1968 and was dismissed in the New York Times on New Year’s Day 1969 by Clive Barnes, who described it as “a vaguely realistic play, in which the symbols and stultified ritualistic dialogue offer no insights into the realism.”  He added, “No one is going to get much of a chariot race out of a horse and buggy.”  The play closed after one performance. 

It probably didn’t help the reception of the play that, after Shapiro’s departure on the night before the start of performances, the producers of Yes Yes, No No couldn’t afford (nor, probably, did they have the time) to redesign and rebuild the set with which he’d left them.  As a result, Shapiro recorded, while the producers had reset the action, recostumed the actors, and seated them on furniture to drink tea, they still did so “in the middle of this dripping cave.”

In thesummer of 1969, largely on the strength of Brother’s reception, Ecology Action West, an environmental activist group in Berkeley, invited Shapiro to start a street theater for them, and he took off for California. 

He recorded that he’d been approached by Jo Ann Schmidman (b. 1948), the socially-committed experimental director and founder in 1968 of the feminist Omaha Magic Theater, to work for her, but he declined because the contract contained what Shapiro characterized as “this ridiculous morals clause” mandated by the city. 

After finishing his last project at NYU—a production of Brecht’s In the Jungle of Cities in the spring of 1969 which he deemed his “thesis”—he left New York on a meandering route west that took him to visit SOA classmate Linda Putnam and her husband David in Boston; the Woodstock rock festival in upstate Bethel, New York (15-17 August); and Ram Dass’s retreat in Millbrook, New York.

(Ram Dass [1931-2019] the former Richard Alpert, had been a Harvard colleague of Timothy Leary [1920-1996], the advocate of psychedelic drugs, especially LSD.  Dass started the International Foundation for Internal Freedom [IFIF], a sort of proto-commune, in 1963.  Later, Dass would establish an unofficial headquarters at Lama, one of the New Mexico communes with which Shapiro would become associated.)

On his way west, Shapiro stopped in Milwaukee where Candace Tovar was performing at the Melody Top, a summer tent theater; adopted Grushenka, “a large, longhaired dog of some brownish color,” from a Milwaukee pound; picked Tovar up; and drove to Minnesota to visit his family.  Then he headed south and west through Pipestone, Minnesota; the Black Hills of South Dakota; and Denver, where Tovar left to return for her final year at NYU. 

Shapiro stopped his “old green VW bus with a red flag stenciled with Che Guevara” for lunch one day in Taos, New Mexico.  Propitiously, he’d arrived on San Gerónimo Day, a bright, sunny Tuesday, 30 September, and happened to meet Fred Aronow, whom he knew from New York University and who was the assistant cameraman and sound recordist for a documentary film on ecology and the environment which was focusing on the Taos Indians. 

San Gerónimo Day is the annual feast day for the patron saint (Saint Jerome) of Taos Pueblo—each pueblo and village in 16th-century New Spain was assigned a patron by the Conquistadors—celebrated by a two-day festival that is part religious observance and part secular carnival marking the harvest.  The Anglo town of Taos marks the day with a parallel celebration.

(I have a two-part post on “Taos & Taos Pueblo”; the first installment, subtitled “Background” and posted on 24 May 2012, gives a description of the San Gerónimo Festival, among other aspects of life at the pueblo.  The second installment, “History,” was posted on 27 May 2012.)

At the time of Shapiro’s arrival in Taos, Shelly (1928-75) and Mary Louise Grossman (b. 1930) and their collaborator, John N. Hamlet (1911-82), were in the area filming the last of Our Vanishing Wilderness, their eight-episode series of half-hour television films for National Educational Television, the predecessor of the Public Broadcasting Service.   

The film, The Water Is So Clear that a Blind Man Could See, focuses on the Pueblo Indians who, the Grossmans said, have a “reverence for land” and a “love of trees and other elements of nature,” and “inadvertently practice conservation with a willingness to sacrifice for the preservation of nature.”  The filmmakers observed, also, that the Taos Pueblos had “resisted the advance of modern civilization.”  (The series premièred on New York’s WNET on Sunday, 11 October 1970, and ran weekly until 29 November; the Taos episode aired on 22 November.)

Aronow, who’d graduated with a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Department of Film and Television of NYU’s School of the Arts in 1969—the same year that Shapiro had graduated from the undergraduate directing program—recalled that he’d been in the central plaza of Taos when he heard someone call his name.   

The plaza had been closed to traffic for a performance of “some colonial period Spanish dance music” by local singer-accordionist Jennie Vincent (1913-2016), part of the Fall Fiesta, the city’s parallel celebration to the San Gerónimo Festival at the pueblo, and Aronow was surprised to see an East Village acquaintance calling to him from the dirty, beat-up, hand-decorated bus. 

Aronow took his friend to Taos Pueblo where the film crew’d been working daily for several weeks already and been given access to areas and aspects of the pueblo and the festival that tourists seldom see.  Shapiro was stunned to encounter a living culture, unlike those of other Native American societies he’d known in Minnesota and Florida, with “a live and lively oral tradition, unbroken for thousands of years and a rich ritual and dramatic ceremonial life.” 

Shapiro didn’t go on to California; he remained in New Mexico for two years.

Taos and its surrounding countryside holds attractions for many who come whether only to visit or to stay.  Photographer William Davis (b. 1943) was drawn to its beauty—“a result,” he believed, “of a rare combination of mystical and human elements.”

As John Nichols (b. 1940; author of The Milagro Beanfield War, 1974)—who moved to Taos not long before Shapiro came there, had written extensively about the area, and recorded one of Shapiro’s largest protest events—said of Taos Mountain, which physically, emotionally, and psychologically dominates the town, the pueblo, and all the villages of the valley:  it “casts spells” to keep people from leaving and lure back those who try. 

It does seem to have cast a spell on Shapiro, who returned 20 years later “in pain, fleeing from New York, from Career, from the intractability of the American dream.”  For those who came to escape establishment America, there was a spirit conjured up by the combination of the times, the land, and the people who gravitated there that generated ideas and ways of living in reaction to America’s consumerist society. 

In Shapiro’s view, “Everybody was making up social structures, cooperatives of various kinds, a newspaper,” and Andrea Lord (b. 1946), who’d arrived in Taos from Los Angeles in the spring of 1969, saw the commune community as “a new way of being,” where “[p]eople were opening up their minds to new information . . ., new ways of relating to everything and everyone.” 

On Shapiro’s first night at The Family commune, Roger Sundell (b. 1936?), who was working on a film about the commune  (Peace, Love, 2 Hours—Taos, 1970), said to him, “Want to build a house, go ahead,” and Shapiro summed up, “[A]nybody could live there, it was like making it up as they went along, together.”   “It was a very exciting time,” Lord concluded, “full of promise and hope,” and Shapiro decreed, “It was a scene, it was sort of astonishing, out in the middle of nowhere.”

(The Family, a group-marriage commune, was one of the many hippie enclaves located near Taos in the 1960s and ’70s.  It had about 50 members who lived together a few miles from Taos in a two-bedroom adobe house and a school bus.  Though Shapiro was never fully a member of The Family, this was the group with which he appears to have been most closely allied in Taos.  His first theater piece in Taos was sponsored by The Family. 

(The Family ran a natural-food store, a free medical clinic, the Taos Community Information Center, and an alternative school, all serving the hippie community in and around Taos.  The commune also published Fountain of Light, the best-known of the counterculture newspapers of the movement, to which Shapiro contributed at least one article.)

Soon after arriving in Taos that fall, Shapiro presented The Second Coming, a music-theater piece based on William Butler Yeats’s 1921 poem exploring the polarities between the spiritual and the physical realms (see “Cheerleaders of the Revolution”). 

He was drawn to Yeats’s poem because, first, he’d developed an awareness of the poet’s work at Windsor Mountain where he worked on Yeats’s Purgatory in his senior year and, second, he responded viscerally to the sound of the verse, especially, he said, on recordings of Yeats reading it himself.  (He quoted Yeats saying, “I want all my poetry to be spoken on a stage or sung.”)

Much of the sentiment Shapiro would later put into his productions and his writings can be seen in lines of the poem which warn:

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Shapiro saw socio-political implications in these lines and others in the poem (explored in “Cheerleaders of the Revolution”), but he also just had the idea of doing something meaningful on Halloween so The Second Coming was a kind of ceremony beginning with an invocation from British occultist, Satanist, and student of magic Aleister Crowley (1875-1947; see my post, “‘The Wickedest Man In The World’: Aleister Crowley,” 28 September and 1, 4, 7, and 13 October 2019).   The core group of performers was from The Family where Shapiro was doing a workshop. 

The performance of Second Coming started at midnight on 31 October/1 November 1969, a brisk, chilly Friday/Saturday, in a canyon of the Rio Grande River Gorge about 15 miles outside of town which Shapiro dubbed “The Midnight Theater.”  

Shapiro and Lord both recalled that Second Coming was quite successful, attracting about 100 spectators or so, and the director declared he was impressed that there was an audience in the Taos area for such a spectacle.  Further, Lord believed, the performance gave “some kind of creative center and expression” to the nascent counterculture community, which was still “very untried and vulnerable.”

Not long after the performance of The Second Coming, a woman he met at The Family took Shapiro later in the fall of 1969 to the Zuni Pueblo, about 280 miles southwest of Taos, for his first time seeing the shalako ceremony (see my post, “‘May You Be Blessed With Light’: The Zuni Shalako Rite,” 22 October 2010). 

The ceremony, observed in November or December each year on or around the winter solstice, reenacts the Zuni creation story.  (The solstice was on 22 December that year; the shaliko ceremony commenced at midnight on 8 December.)

The shalakos are deities who serve as messengers from the gods to the Zuni people.  They are represented in the ceremony by dancers in 9- or 10-foot-tall masks.  Shapiro was so impressed by the event that when he started his company in New York City in 1972, he named it after these sacred figures.

In his first weeks in Taos, Shapiro lived in his VW bus, moving from commune—among them the famous Hog Farm near Taos, The Family, and Lorien north of Questa (24 miles north of Taos)—to commune “to Pizza Parlor parking lot.”  He met a young couple who sold jewelry to tourists at the pueblo and he made beadwork for them to sell, a skill Shapiro had learned way back at Camp Thunderbird in the 1950s. 

Eventually he rented a $15-a-month, four-room, adobe house in Dixon in Rio Arriba County, 20 miles southwest of Taos up in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, surrounded by national forest land—“farther away from everyone and everything than I had ever been.”  As he did when he returned a quarter of a century later, he reveled in “all the land you can walk on in a day.”

The new arrival recounted that in his first week there, he returned to the adobe house one day and “found a pile of dog shit on my bed.”  Examining it more closely, Shapiro discovered that the deposit was actually several buttons of peyote.  It turned out that some members of the Hog Farm commune had made a trip to Texas or Mexico “and come back bearing gifts, planting seeds like Johnny Appleseed . . . .”

Lonely and increasingly obsessed with the war in Southeast Asia, Shapiro conceived of the Appleseed Circus, “[a] street theater without streets,” and began inviting people to come west and join him.  The origins of the troupe were in the invitations he issued at the end of a theater column he wrote for Fountain of Light, the Family commune newsletter:

Free workshop sessions begin at the Gallery House Jan. 12, 13 and 14, two 2[‑]hour sessions a day at 2 p.m. and 7 p.m.  Improvisation, circus techniques, theatre games, basic acting and mime, everybody welcome if your [sic] a little crazy and willing to work.  Looking to produce a “play” for Washington’s Birthday, Feb. 22 [still a federal holiday until 1970].  Formal rehearsals start Feb. 1.  Contact thru Taos Community Information Center.

The notice attracted local interest and the messages he sent east brought friends from home starting early in 1970.  Candace Tovar and the Putnams all moved into the Dixon adobe, forming a mini-commune of their own—one that functioned not as a farm, but a theater.  This little “anarchist cell” began recruiting members by advertising in local newspapers—there were numerous counterculture publications circulating in the area.  People started coming.

The young director’s principal notion was a “political, tribal traveling theatre/circus of myth consciousness and social integration.”  Shapiro served as “Mr. Theorist,” he said, “writing little manifestos” inspired by the events in Czechoslovakia (“Prague Spring,” 5 January-21 August 1968) and Paris (“May 68,” 2 May-23 June 1968) the previous year and what they were reading every day in the newspapers; David Putnam, a carpenter with a Harvard degree, was the designer and builder. 

The new band of activists thought there was going to be a revolution, and the Appleseed Circus was born from that impulse.  “We were hiding out in the hills, and had no connections with anybody,” Shapiro wrote later.  “We were pretty focused, we were following through on” their activist opposition to the war in Vietnam. 

Shapiro’s initial idea was for the troupe to travel in horse-drawn wagons like a real 19th-century circus, but they soon discovered that there were too many fences across the countryside and so they were relegated to automobiles and roads.  At the start, the small band had only Shapiro’s Volkswagen bus and the Putnams’ Ford panel van, but then they built the flat-bed stage they would use for their guerrilla performances. 

The wagon was built on the frame of a pick-up truck which the troupe got from the dump.  They did the welding at the N&M Garage, a cooperative garage in Taos that let them use its equipment.  The result was a massive structure, some 11 feet high, weighing perhaps as much as two tons.  The sides folded down for transport, and then folded up to an 11-foot platform to form the stage, which was about three feet off the ground.  It ended up a cumbersome vehicle and the company had difficulty figuring out the steering. 

Within a year, the troupe began collecting vehicles and, ultimately, the Appleseed Circus traversed the countryside surrounding Taos County in two school busses, a bread van, the truck pulling a wagon, and Shapiro’s green minibus.  The nomadic troupe, numbering at its peak about 20 people, roamed in this motley assortment of vehicles like an old-fashioned circus from its base in Dixon into Colorado, Utah, and Arizona doing guerrilla theater. 

For their performances, the Circus players wore green overalls with big red felt apples on them and, Shapiro recalled, an ‘A’ created by one of the company members.  “[T]o me all these things were poetry, were theater,” he wrote.  “I lived in a very pure world.” 

On 4 July 1970, Shapiro and Candace Tovar were married in a “barefoot dawn wedding on top of Picuris Peak”; their son, Spartacus, who would return to the area with his father in 1992 and 1993 to help build Shapiro’s retirement home, was born on 18 March of the next year.

On 5 and 6 August 1970, Shapiro’s “cheerleaders of the revolution” mounted Song in the Blood (Hiroshima/Los Alamos), a two-day environmental-theater event in Los Alamos, New Mexico, and at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory in observation of the 25th anniversary of the Hiroshima atom-bomb raid.  (See my post, “Song in the Blood (Hiroshima/Los Alamos),” 5 August 2009.)

John Nichols, the novelist and essayist from Taos who attended the rally, described Shapiro’s motivation.  After outlining at length the history of LASL (now known as the Los Alamos National Laboratory), Nichols generally invoked the “few hardy boys and girls and men and women (not yet in exile or underground or on the FBI’s top ten) who wish to carry on the dialogues that might, by some wondrous miracle, prolong man’s minute upon this tortured planet.” 

The New York Times described this event as “the first large-scale demonstration at the laboratory” and noted that the demonstrators had been “escorted by the police, watched by undercover agents and filmed by 13 government cameramen.”  Shapiro, himself, recalled that he had been “warned off, threatened, bullied and shot at” during the month preceding the demonstration and shots were fired at his Dixon house “a couple times” as intimidation. 

The Appleseed Circus, as it traveled like a Gypsy caravan through small towns of the Four Corners (the only area where four states—Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, and Colorado—meet; about 260 miles west of Taos) in vehicles barely holding together, never really coalesced as a performing troupe except for the Los Alamos protest and, while he was rehearsing A Man’s a Man, Shapiro felt frustrated at the lack of professionalism. 

When the Circus went to Pennsylvania in the fall of 1970, spending the winter in David Putnam’s father’s barn, so Shapiro could recruit professional actors, not just “a propaganda thing,” the troupe began to fall apart.  Shapiro’s intention had been to enlist “eastern actors” and “build up a show and do a college tour.”  “That was a mistake,” Shapiro recalled; “it didn’t work.  It wasn’t based on that kind of an aesthetic.  When I started Shaliko, it was in order to do something that would be more professionally oriented and less political.”

The little band, which included a now-pregnant Candace Tovar, wended its way through Colorado, where, in Boulder, Shapiro sold the green VW bus in which he had arrived in New Mexico two years earlier, and Kansas, where Tovar was arrested for stealing a grapefruit in Dodge City, and Ohio, where Shapiro and Putnam shoplifted an ice cream machine to sell for cash to buy gasoline. 

Because they had painted “Kill Precedence” on the side of one of the school busses in which they were traveling—and living—and because President Nixon was in Columbus, Ohio (19 October 1970), they attracted the attention of police.  “We were literally accompanied from one end of Ohio to the other,” Shapiro recalled.  Thus, the remnants of the Appleseed Circus returned east and, eventually, to New York City at the start of 1971. 

The end of his time in New Mexico also ended what Shapiro considered his apprenticeship: being active in “the movement,” observing the Open and Living Theatres, working with John Arden and Peter Kass at NYU, working with Grotowski, studying Brecht and the Group Theatre, creating Brother, You’re Next, the abortive directorship of Yes Yes, No No, organizing the New York Free Theater and Appleseed Circus, attending the shalako ceremony, and mounting the protest at Los Alamos.

The sojourn in New Mexico, however, provided Shapiro with a number of residual influences.  First, it strengthened his abiding interest in circus performances, an attraction which had begun in Hovey Burgess’s NYU circus-arts classes.

Second, The Shaliko Company drew its name from the Zuni name for the spirits who carry messages between their world and ours.  Shapiro’d had an affinity for Native American culture since his childhood in Minnesota, and his time in New Mexico only deepened it. 

Third, Shapiro conceived the private aspiration of one day returning to New Mexico to live and write poetry when he left the theater.  He eventually bought a piece of mountain land near Taos and, with his son’s help, built a home not far from the mountain slope where he and Candace Tovar celebrated their wedding and, in 1993, Shapiro fulfilled his dream.

[As you see, Shapiro designated this whole period as his apprenticeship, and in Part 4, ROTters will begin to see where that period of learning and experimenting led him.

[The next installment of “A Biography of Leonardo Shapiro” will be published on Tuesday, 25 April.  I’ll be covering the foundation of The Shaliko Company, the East Village troupe Shapiro directed for 20 years (over three incarnations) until his retirement from New York theater and resettlement in New Mexico.  

[This is arguably the most creative period of his artistic life, separating everything else into “Before Shaliko” and “After Shaliko.”  I invite all readers to come back to Rick On Theater for Part 4 of the bio post to see where this step leads the still-developing theater artist.]

 

How I Write

 

Back in the fall of 1984, when writing was still an evolving process for me, I took a course in New York University’s School of Education, Health, Nursing, and Arts Professions (SEHNAP) called Practicum: Teaching Expository Writing.  The class—a ‘practicum’ is a course designed for the preparation of teachers in a particular field that involves the practical application of theory—was taught by Gordon Pradl (1943-2020), a longtime professor of English education at NYU’s ed school.     

I was a new Ph.D. student in the Department of Performance Studies at the time (1983-86) and I was offered a position as a preceptor in the undergrad Expository Writing Program.  (‘Preceptor’ is what the EWP called its teaching assistants.)  The Writing Practicum was a required class for all preceptors who were teaching the mandatory, two-semester Writing Workshop.  Performance Studies grad students were considered a prime pool for prospective EWP preceptors because of the department’s emphasis on writing.

(Expository writing, in the way NYU used the term, is writing that conveys factual information, as opposed to creative writing, such as fiction.  The purpose of expository writing is to explain, inform, describe, or analyze something.  While most expository writing appears in the form of an essay, it’s also the type of writing used in personal and business letters; memos; recipes; reports; news articles; press releases; term papers, theses, and dissertations; textbooks; encyclopedia entries; and almost any other kind of non-fiction written work one can imagine.)

One of the assignments for Dr. Pradl’s Writing Practicum was to describe our “writing process”—in other words, to articulate how each of us went about putting words and ideas on paper “from assignment to conclusion.” 

Because of scheduling, I didn’t take the Practicum until the start of my second year at NYU.  I’d had a year of teaching in the EWP and a year of working under the Performance Studies emphasis on writing.  All the DPS faculty specifically stressed in their classes that all our written work was expected to be of publishable quality, whether or not we intended to submit it to a journal. 

(My first published essay, “The Group Theatre’s Johnny Johnson,” written in May 1984 for a DPS course, was published in the winter 1984 issue of The Drama Review.  I went on to publish in various journals, a number of other essays that were or started as class assignments.  Two were even exam papers!)

Nevertheless, when Dr. Pradl asked that question, I was still going through a serious reevaluation of what I did when I wrote.  Not only had I simply never come to grips with the process as a process, I couldn’t be absolutely sure—or even reasonably sure—that what I thought I did is really what I was doing.  Certainly, it wasn’t likely to remain what I did for very long—I was still leaning. 

Part of the reason for this uncertainty was undoubtedly that I’d never had any instruction in writing prior to NYU.  Like my peers in the ’50s, I learned grammar and vocabulary in primary and middle school, of course, but in high school and college lit classes, we studied writers, not writing.  Composition courses weren’t part of the curriculum.

Writing in high school and undergraduate school wasn’t very demanding with respect to style or presentation; it was all about content: as long as the facts were reasonably correct, the paper was acceptable.  After college, the only writing I did that wasn’t personal, were army reports (military intelligence, the field I was in, demanded a lot of various kinds of reports!), the rhetorical standards for which weren’t very high. 

The first writing I did that made me aware of my prose was my thesis for my Master of Fine Arts degree in 1977.  The written thesis wasn’t the important part of the thesis work, the performance of my “thesis role” was (my MFA is in acting), but I was constrained to write a readable document, if not by departmental or scholarly pressure, then by my own desire to do the best thesis the department had seen. 

I used to describe my own college writing style as “pedantic,” but now I wanted to write “trippingly on the tongue.”  The problem was, I didn’t have any idea how to go about doing that.  I didn’t know how to write the way I thought I wanted to.  I had to learn for myself how to do it.

A subliminal writing influence “to acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness” might have come from the periodicals I was reading at the time, such as Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times Magazine.  They’re less formal than the kind of academic reading a student usually encounters, and they’re easy to read. 

Some of the writers I admired at that time were Times columnists Russell Baker and Anna Quindlen and essayists S. J. Perelman, E. B. White, and James Thurber.  I didn’t imitate the style of those writers, but they all wrote in a conversational tone.  (Notice how many of those writers are humorists.)  

I still hadn’t developed a “writing process,” however.  I don’t know exactly what I did while I was writing; it was all just dumb luck—or osmosis—that I got anything on paper at all.

The next step in my development of a writing process was returning to school for a doctorate.  I started at NYU’s Department of Performance Studies in the fall of 1983 and a required class was Resources and Methods for the Study of Performance.  The course, taught then by Kate Davy (now provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs at the University of Michigan-Dearborn), essentially covered just what the title indicates but it was also partly a writing class for DPS grad students. 

One of the texts for Resources was William Zinsser’s On Writing Well, which I’d characterize as the writers’ equivalent of Uta Hagen’s Respect for Acting: fundamental, practical, commonsensical, and excellent (see my profile, “William Zinsser on Writing: Harnessing the World We Live In,” posted on Rick On Theater on 28 July 2015).

The constant emphasis on our writing by the faculty, including Davy, couldn’t help but make us conscious of our prose.  My principal instructors were Michael Kirby (1931-97), Brooks McNamara (see “Remembering Brooks McNamara (1937-2009),” 3 June 2009), and Richard Schechner, who all were editors or former editors of The Drama Review, a premier theater journal published in the department. 

Alongside TDR, another publication, Women & Performance, founded in 1983, is also published by DPS.  With two scholarly journals as part of the environment of my department when I was first learning to think like a writer, the Resources and Methods course, the urgings of my professors, trying to teach the skill to others in the Expository Writing Program, and, later, taking Dr. Pradl’s Practicum, I began to conceive a process of composition.

In addition to Zinsser, by far my strongest influence in this reeducation endeavor, I read other writers on writing: Peter Elbow and William Safire (who wrote not so much about writing as language) and the old standbys Fowler’s Modern English Usage, and Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. 

It’s not surprising, I suppose, that I ended up following a pretty standard procedure for putting ideas and words on paper: prewriting, drafting, revising, editing, proofreading.  Of course, that’s a simplistic description, and even at that, the details have changed over time.  Still, tried and true works, so why not?

One thing whose effect became really clear immediately was technical.  Just before I started the Practicum, I bought myself a computer-word processor.  That first word processor changed my writing fundamentally even as I was just learning how to do it.   

The impetus for getting the computer was eminently practical.  In the fall of 1983, I wrote a column for the departmental newsletter; the subject’s irrelevant, but it was a voluntary project, not an assignment.  It was all of three pages, and I wrote it by hand, then typed the draft. 

I cut-and-pasted the first draft, re-edited it, typed it again, re-edited it again, and retyped it again.  Three drafts of a three-page piece of writing that I didn’t even have to do!  That was a lot of work for a freebie.

I was very aware that my Qualifying Exams, the DPS equivalent of “comps,” were coming up in a year.  The Performance Studies Qualifying Exams were three 10-page essays of publishable quality which we had to write in ten days.  I’m not even a touch-typist—there was no way I could research, draft, and edit three acceptable essays in 10 days if I had to get it to a typist in time to get them photocopied—I had to provide a copy for each member of the DPS faculty—and turn them in.

After that, there would be the doctoral dissertation.  My MFA thesis, for which I hired a typist, was only 44 pages long, but the Ph.D. dissertation was a whole different beast.  The only way I could see to succeed at these two vital tasks was this new technology, the word processor.  Of course, I’d need time to learn how to use it, so now was the time to get one. 

In December 1985, I got the exam essays done on time and one of my teachers told me later that though the department didn’t distinguish between levels of success, if it did, I’d have passed with distinction.  The computer allowed me to do that.

As soon as I got the word processor, I found that I wrote more avidly, and sometimes more words as well, because it was fun.  I would often find that I’d worked for hours without stopping because there wasn’t any effort required to type the words onto the screen.  I’d been using an IBM Selectric, but even the best electric machine required effort and my fingers and hands got tired.

I didn’t count drafts anymore because it all became one, flexible draft that reformed itself every time I made a change—until I decided it was finished, and sent it to the printer.  Since there was no retyping every time I wanted to edit a draft, I did far more editing and revising.  Where I’d used to give up on a change because it was too tedious to make—say, changing a small word or reversing the order of two sentences—I now pushed a couple of keys, and I’d have exactly what I wanted, instead of what I’d settle for. 

I won’t even get into the changes in doing footnotes, numbering lists, alphabetizing, keeping margins straight, and not ruining a page by typing too close to the bottom.  It wasn’t as easy then as it is now, but I could change font sizes, even typefaces, without even changing typing elements; a standard electric typewriter couldn’t even do that, of course.

So, just as I was piecing together a workable process for writing, it was changing.  I was convinced it was for the better—and I think it has proved to be. 

Actually, I don’t think the basic process changed so much as it got streamlined and condensed.  The drafting-and-revising stage is the clearest example.  Cutting-and-pasting became an electronic operation instead of a messy, time-consuming, actual scissors-and-tape job.

Another advantage the word processor provided me was the facility to start my writing wherever I wanted—where I felt most confident.  Since I could insert paragraphs wherever I needed, I could start in the middle of the piece and go back later and add a beginning.

Beginnings, it would turn out, were one of my problem areas.  I would eventually develop strategies for dealing with this problem, but back at the start of my transformation into a writer, I didn’t have any—at least not consciously.

When I started writing my master’s thesis, I was terribly blocked at first—I didn’t know how to start.  I finally convinced myself that I had to get started somehow, and I decided I would just begin.  I would simply start putting words on paper as swiftly as I could and worry later about whether they were grammatical and made sense. 

I didn’t know it then, but what I was doing was freewriting about the role and my performance, a strategy I later learned is called focused freewriting.  It’s a prewriting tactic that I still use today.  Soon, the ideas all just began to gush out. 

Here was another benefit I derived from working with a word processor.  I used to agonize over each word, each sentence, each paragraph, and I couldn’t move on until I was reasonably satisfied with the result.  I’d scribble a draft, rewrite it on the blank line above the first attempt, maybe cut-and-paste, reread it—sometimes aloud—and cross out more and rewrite again. 

With the computer, first of all, I no longer even needed to be concerned if the first version wasn’t right yet because I could go back later and revise it or even cut it—no harm, no foul.  Second, if I had an idea while I was working, I could go right back and rewrite the sentence or ’graph and go right back to work where I’d left off. 

This development went a long way to helping me resolve another writing problem I had.  You see, like a lot of people, my mind works faster than my fingers, even on a computer keyboard, let alone a typewriter.  While I was struggling over words and sentences I’d already composed, I would sometimes forget what I was thinking of saying next.  Moving along without the obsessive rewriting prevented me from forgetting many of the ideas I had.

I still have the problem, not only when I stop to revise in mid-write—which I no longer do as a rule—but whenever I stop, say for an errand or a meal or sleep, or even when I’m working on one idea and the idea for the next section just evaporates before I can get to it.  Sometimes I can retrieve the thought, but sometimes it’s just gone.

Since I know I have this tendency, now I occasionally make a note about an idea I want to get to next.  I used to write it on a slip of paper, sometimes on a Post-it which I’d stick on the draft.  Now, with the computer, I just type the note to myself in the spot where I want to add the thought. 

The basic process through which I work when I write an essay of any length developed over a couple of years, principally the years I was in residence at NYU.  (We did a lot of writing in Performance Studies; every course had at least one paper, and most had two or three short ones and one term project.) 

I continued to follow the process after I left school and wrote mainly for publication, but I condensed it a little over time.  (As I noted, the computer also streamlined the working method, but that happened organically and quickly.)  Still, the basic steps remained, just not always discretely.

prewriting.  As soon as a writer, including a student writer, decides to write, whether it’s an assigned task or something she or he’s inspired to write, prewriting begins.  This covers anything a writer does before putting words in sentences on paper or screen.

Fundamentally, prewriting starts me thinking and planning for my writing.  I start to explore my ideas about my topic and gather additional information.  I begin to organize my material.  It’s important to note, though, that all this is tentative and flexible: I can change any of it as I progress and discover or encounter new thoughts.

Prewriting might include making an outline, doing research, reading or watching related material, and making notes.  It might also involve determining what has already been published on the subject, a procedure that’s often required for proposals for theses and dissertations as well as articles submitted for publication.

I accomplish some of these prewriting tasks not only before writing begins but also as it’s beginning.  Reading pertinent material is often on-going, particularly when one piece of literature leads me to another I hadn’t known about earlier.  On big projects, I have also continued to do research while I’m writing.

One prewriting task that almost has to occur before any writing happens is idea generation.  Clearly, if I know from the outset what I want to write about, this step is less imperative, but for assigned writing, that may not always be the case. 

When I set out to write my MFA thesis, I knew my subject intimately, but I still didn’t know how to write about it.  I didn’t know about any of these procedures yet, but I instinctively applied a form of idea generation, and even hit upon a known technique for getting started.

There are many techniques for engendering ideas: freewriting, focused freewriting, brainstorming and list-making, subject-mapping.  I’m not going to discuss all of these (mostly because I don’t use them, but they’re common writing terms and readers can look them up in writing texts and on line).  I do use the first two tactics on the list.

Freewriting, unlike other prewriting techniques, is writing in sentences and even paragraphs (brainstorming results in lists of words and phrases; subject-mapping uses diagrams and lines).  I write for at least 10 minutes about whatever comes to my mind without stopping.  I try not to change anything I’ve written, though the temptation to edit is hard for me to resist.  I try not to be concerned about grammar, punctuation, or spelling.

I actually don’t use plain freewriting much, since I usually have a subject in mind.  What I did to break the writer’s block I experienced at the start of my thesis was focused freewriting, which is the tactic I use mostly to get started.  It’s a way to find out what’s generally known about the subject, what I know about it before I do any reading or research.

Concentrating only on my topic, I write down what I know, making free associations as I go along.  Ideally, I don’t censor my thoughts.  I write for about 10 minutes, then stop and underline one sentence.  For the next 10 minutes of freewriting, I focus on that idea.  I repeat this process as often as I need to until I feel I have something concrete enough to build on.

Counterintuitively, this exercise often actually generates useable writing.  It may not be the start of the essay or article, but it frequently ends up somewhere in the composition—cleaned up grammatically and rhetorically, but the ideas remain.  Not always, though.

drafting.  Using the ideas and plans he or she developed during the prewriting phase, the writer begins composing.  He or she refines the organization first devised in the outline, if the writer made one.  In the drafting phase of the composing process, the writer should consider only the content and ignore grammar, punctuation, and spelling to create a first draft of the composition.

This step is an exercise in discovery.  Writing the first draft of the composition is when the writer assembles most of the information he or she will use in the finished piece.  This is an exploration.

This is the step in which I get the ideas on paper or screen, composed in sentences and paragraphs.  I organize the ideas into coherent groups.  Inevitably, I pay attention to style while I’m writing the first draft, even though I know I shouldn’t, but the real concentration on this comes as I’m revising.  I’m mostly concerned that what I say can be read and understood by anyone with a general familiarity of the topic. 

As I noted, I try to consider only the content of my work at this stage, not the grammar, punctuation, or spelling—though both the word processor’s review applications and my own proclivity make it problematical that I’ll completely ignore mechanics.

I also try to keep pressing ahead and not stall over vocabulary or mechanics (my old habit) so I can focus on getting the ideas down.  As I write, I allow new ideas to develop and, if they’re pertinent to the section on which I’m currently working, I insert them as they occur.  If they apply to earlier or later sections of the paper, I make a note in my outline (or even right on the draft, since I can delete it later when I’ve taken care of the addition).  

The first draft is a “discovery draft” in which I find out not only new ideas about the topic of which I hadn’t thought at the start, but also how I feel about the subject and new ways of looking at it.  In my play reports on Rick On Theater, I frequently comment that I don’t know exactly how I feel about the play or the performance I saw, but that in writing about it, I figure that out.

While I’m working on the draft, I refine my organization occasionally for unity (keeping related ideas and points together) and coherence (keeping the writing logical and rhetorically consistent).

revising.  After completing the draft, the writer reads it over and decides what ideas need to be improved, expanded, or eliminated.  Many writers feel that this is the step in the writing process when they truly learn to write. 

It’s often a good idea to read the draft aloud to get a sense of how the prose flows (or doesn’t).  Readers read with their ears as well as their eyes and brain; they hear what’s been written, like reading poetry or song lyrics.

After reading through the draft, the writer adds new points and more specific details.  Specifics make the writing concrete rather than vague and airy.  Some ideas must be dropped either because they don’t really fit the point or the argument, or they don’t advance the thesis, the essay’s main idea about which the writer’s trying to inform the reader.

The writer then reorganizes the material for a better, more logical arrangement.  The criteria are still unity and coherence.

At this point, the writer creates a second draft—and revises that.  This time, she or he revises for style: better diction (choice of words); smoother, more flowing phrasing; eliminating clichés and redundancies (saying the same thing over and over again); adding detail and specifics; correcting the grammar; straightening out the sentence structure; and so on.

Depending on how long or complex the essay is, the writer will create further drafts and revise them as well.  There’s no limit to the number of drafts and revisions the writer will make before she or he’s satisfied.

When I revise, I focus first on content and organization.  Does each paragraph contain a single, clear thought?  Have I focused on a single main idea?  Do I have an effective opening or “lead” (sometimes spelled lede in journalistic jargon)?

Are there specific facts, examples, incidents, definitions, and other details?  Have I cut out material that is not on the topic or that repeats points I’ve already made?  Have I arranged the material in a logical order?  Have I ended with an effective conclusion?

I’ve acknowledged that leads, that is, getting started, are one of my most pervasive difficulties.  I’ve gotten better at it over time, but it can still hang me up.  One piece of advice that Kate Davy passed along in Resources and Methods has helped immensely: “Leads are more a ‘manipulation’ than an introduction.”  The opening gambit is meant to “hook” the readers, get them interested in what you’re going to say.

She provided some suggestions that have worked quite well for me, among them: relate an anecdote, present a provocative (and relevant) quotation, and issue a challenge.

My second most difficult writing problem, though, is endings or conclusions.  Even now, some of my pieces don’t actually end at all.  They just stop.  Again, Davy came to the rescue, explaining, “A conclusion is not a summary.”

(Does anybody remember the recommended essay structure from high school and maybe also college: “Tell the readers what you’re going to say, say it, then tell them what you said”?  Wrong!)

A conclusion “should have a feeling of winding down.”  Davy again gave us some practical suggestions: a quotation (but this one shouldn’t lead on to anything), a rhetorical question, a speculation. 

Next, I concentrate on style: Have I used necessary transitions and connections?  Have I used key words to help create unity?  Have I avoided short, choppy sentences?  Or (more likely in my case), long, windy ones?  Have I avoided unnecessarily repeating words or phrases?  Have I used clichés and hackneyed or over-used expressions?

I look carefully for words I can cut out (clutter) and language I can make less stiff and simpler.  Have I avoided informal language, slang, and jargon?  (When writing for ROT, though, I use more informal diction, including slang, than I would for an academic paper or an article for publication.  I want the posts to sound more conversational.)

Finally, I look for grammar, punctuation, and spelling errors—including typos (because I’m still not a touch typist!).  Now, in the era of spell- and grammar-checkers, I take special care to spot errors where I type actual words, but the wrong ones—I’m always typing but for by and and for an—because spell-checkers won’t flag those (though grammar-checkers will sometimes).

Have I eliminated sentence fragments, run-on sentences, and comma splices?  (These aren’t errors I often make—though I will occasionally write fragments deliberately.)  Do the verbs agree with their subjects?  Have I used the correct pronouns?  Have I used capital letters correctly?

As I’ve said, this is the step in my writing method that was most affected by my switch from handwriting and typing to the computer.  Though I noted above that drafting and revising is a repeated process—remember my little three-page newsletter article that took three full drafts?—once I started using a word processor, drafting and revising, rather than being a series of repeated but separate steps, became one process that just went on as long as I needed it to.

editing.  In this penultimate step in the writing process, the writer checks over his or her grammar, punctuation, and spelling thoroughly one more time. 

Even with the grammar and spelling guides embedded in all word processors now, it’s still useful to keep a grammar reference and dictionary handy.  The reason is that computer spell-checkers, as I pointed out, can’t distinguish between homonyms or words that are anagrams for one another (lemon and melon; listen and silent).

Grammar guides with the word processor follow a set of rules that don’t vary from instance to instance.  Grammar isn’t a matter of inflexible rules or laws; it’s based on convention, the way which things are usually done by common agreement.  The writer may have good reason to ignore convention and disregard the grammar-checker’s advice or “correction.” 

The computer guidance can also be plain wrong because the machine can’t analyze the syntax in its programming and a similar syntax the writer intended; it will flag correct punctuation or word form simply because it doesn’t understand.

When I do my final edit, I read through the essay for readability.  I may read it aloud because if I trip over my own prose, a reader certainly will, too.  (If I have time, I put the paper aside for a few days so I can reread with fresh eyes.) 

I put myself in the place of a reader, reading my composition objectively, as though I hadn’t written the paper.  I try to read as though I’d never seen the paper before.  I ask myself questions I imagine the reader will ask; if the answers aren’t in the paper, I look for places to put them in. 

I pay attention to whether my writing reads smoothly and proceeds from one point to the next logically and fluently.  Have I made the point that I wanted to make?  Is the essay going to be comprehendible for its likely audience?

Beginnings and, to a lesser degree, endings, which I’ve identified as problem areas for me, often have to be worked on, smoothed out and polished, but my most consistent problem is writing too much—I tend to run off at the mouth—so cutting during the editing step has become the most important revising technique in my process. 

In the final stage of editing, I give my grammar a last look for correctness.  I’m pretty good with grammar, but there are always questionable instances that need reconsideration—not to forget those pesky typos.

I’m less confident in my spelling, though I’ve gotten better over the years.  (I have certain spelling problems about which I’ve long known—ie/ei words and -ede/-eed words, for example—and I always check those specifically.) 

I also always check and recheck the spelling of personal names (Richard Rodgers has a d in his last name; Eugene O’Neill has two l’s in his; Barbra Streisand had only two a’s in her first name, not three); titles of books, movies, and plays; the names of companies and businesses (especially theaters and theater companies—which ones use theatre in their names, like most Broadway houses, and which ones use theater, as New York City’s Public Theater does).

I check the paper to be sure I’ve correctly used all punctuation marks.  I especially check quotation marks and parentheses to be sure I included the closing marks (because I still sometimes forget).  I also check that I’ve used capital letters correctly, as well as italics, abbreviations, and numerals. 

If I’ve used quotations, I double-check them to be sure I’ve transcribed them right.  If I’ve edited the quotation, I make sure I’ve marked those changes properly (brackets for insertions, ellipses for deletions).  If the paper uses source-documentation notes, I check that mine are accurate and correctly formatted for the publication or the professor.

proofreading.  This is the last step in the writing process, and the writer rereads her or his last draft to be sure there are no errors remaining—particularly those resistant typos.  (There’s a psychological phenomenon known as “closure” that causes us to read what we think should be on the paper, but isn’t.  It makes us insert missing words or correct misspellings in our minds, and we can read the same sentence over and over and not see the mistake unless we focus very closely.)

Proofing is reading strictly for errors, and it’s a good idea for the writer to reread several times, once for each kind if writing problem: once just for spelling and typos, say, once for punctuation problems, once for subject-verb agreement or verb-tense consistency, and so on, as necessary.

After working on several papers, the developing writer should begin to identify the kinds of mistakes that are habitual in her or his work.  Many, the writer will learn to avoid in the first draft stage, but others may persist, and proofreading specifically for those is wise.

I don’t proofread for content.  I will have taken care of those issues when I edited, if not while I was drafting and revising.  As I said above, I know certain words are hard for me, and I make some punctuation errors consistently as well.  I check for those first.

I read slowly to take in each letter of each word and each punctuation mark.  I read line by line, sometimes using the cursor to guide my eye to individual words, syllables, or even letters.  If I have to, I’ll pronounce each word aloud.

I won’t try to proof more than a line at a time, often only a sentence or even a phrase, no more than my eye can take in at one glance.  I take in punctuation and grammar as I proofread, looking up anything of which I’m not certain.

When I’m finished proofing the piece, I’ll read it through once more, perhaps out loud again.  This is my last chance to make any changes or corrections before the final stage of the writing process: submitting or publishing.  Anyone who’s written an article for publication will know that once the publisher accepts the submission, the writer no longer owns the piece; the publisher does.  The writer can no longer make changes (unless the publisher or the editor requests them).  Until I send the paper off, it’s still mine.

In Poor Richard’s Almanac (1738), Benjamin Franklin wrote: “If you would not be forgotten . . . , either write things worth reading, or do things worth the writing.”  Whether or not I’ve accomplished the latter achievement, I’m afraid, will be up to someone else.  I hope I’ve occasionally accomplished Franklin’s first criterion for a measure of repute.  If so, it’s largely down to the method I’ve tried to describe here.  I will add one other pertinent quotation, from 1682’s “Essay on Poetry” by poet and politician John Sheffield, Duke of Buckingham and Normandy:

Of all those arts in which the wise excel,
  Nature’s chief masterpiece is writing well.

[I’ve published quite a few posts on writers and writing on Rick On Theater.  I won’t list them all, but I will reference the ones I wrote myself, especially the ones covering my own writing.  My profile of William Zinsser (28 July 2015) is already mentioned above; in addition to that, I wrote “Writing” (9 April 2010) and “Why Write” (4 March 2013).]