A Story that Happens: On playwriting, childhood, & other traumas (CB Editions)

Originally written as a series of craft lectures delivered at the annual Sewanee  Writers’ Conference in 2017-2020, A Story That Happens offers practical  reflections on techniques of storytelling in the theatre that are also relevant to  other disciplines, and to creativity in general. This book is simultaneously a  deeply personal memoir, as O’Brien relates his craft to his and his wife’s  cancer experience, and to his childhood abuse. Despite their subject matter,  these essays are entertaining and inspiring as they offer hard-won insights into  what stories are for and the reasons why, “afraid and hopeful,” we begin to tell  them. This book is a love letter to the theatre from a dedicated and impassioned practitioner, lyrically articulating the need to write boldly in times  of personal and political trauma.

In 2015 on the anniversary of 9/11 — an event that may have contributed to  their cancers, as their downtown apartment had been suffused with the World  Trade Center’s carcinogenic dust — O’Brien’s wife, TV and film actor Jessica St. Clair, discovered a lump in her breast and was subsequently treated with  surgery and chemotherapy. On the day of her final infusion, O’Brien himself  learned that he had colon cancer and would undergo his own  intensive treatment over the next nine months.

A Story That Happens was written in the wake of this trauma, and during a  period of societal trauma. As O’Brien explains in his preface: “In the January of  the new president’s inauguration, I was timidly venturing forth from the cave of  my convalescence when I felt an overriding urge to reexamine and challenge  who I was as a writer, just as the country’s identity would be reexamined and  challenged in the years ahead…. Above all my goal in writing these essays is  to articulate why the theatre and writing for it matters. To elucidate how the  endeavor of serious theatre-making is not frivolous or ornamental, but an  existential struggle to justify, comprehend, and even alter who we are.” The  book concludes with a chapter written during the ongoing pandemic that sounds a note of hope for survivors: “And when it is all over…we may have  forgotten who we were. Who we are. We will have to find out. And the theatre  as always will show us.”

Dan O’Brien is a playwright and poet whose recognition includes a  Guggenheim Fellowship in Drama, the Horton Foote Prize, the Edward M.  Kennedy Prize, the L. Arnold Weissberger Award, and two PEN America  Awards. His play The Body of an American was produced off-Broadway by  Primary Stages and Hartford Stage (New York Times Critic’s Pick), directed by  Jo Bonney, in London at the Gate Theatre (shortlisted for an Evening Standard  Drama Award), directed by James Dacre, and at theaters across the US. His  work has been produced by Second Stage, Ensemble Studio Theatre, the  Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theatre of Louisville, Page  73 Productions, and many other theaters. He has taught playwriting at  Princeton University, Brown University, and for nearly a decade at the  Sewanee Writers’ Conference. O’Brien’s fellowships and residencies include  the National Playwrights Conference, Yaddo, and the Rockefeller Foundation’s  Bellagio Center. O’Brien’s three poetry collections, published in the US by  Hanging Loose Press and in the UK by CB Editions, are War Reporter (Fenton  Aldeburgh Prize; Forward Prize shortlisted), New Life, and Scarsdale. His  fourth poetry collection, Our Cancers, is forthcoming in 2021 from Acre Books  (University of Cincinnati Press). His personal essays have appeared recently in  The New York Times, The Times Literary Supplement, and American Scholar.

Neel Keller is a director, dramaturg and producer who spends most of his time on the development of new work. As Center Theatre Group’s Associate Artistic Director/Literary Director, he has collaborated on the development and production of a wide range of plays and musicals. As a director, his recent productions include the world premieres of Julia Cho’s Office Hour, Eliza Clark’s Quack, Jennifer Haley’s The Nether, Kimber Lee’s different words for the same thing, and Dael Orlandersmith’s Until The Flood. His productions have been mounted at many theaters, including, The Public Theater, New York Theater Workshop, La Jolla Playhouse, Mark Taper Forum, Kirk Douglas Theater, and internationally, at Ireland’s Abbey Theater, the Galway International Arts Festival, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and London’s Arcola Theatre. Neel is an Honors Graduate of Oberlin College and a member of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society and the Directors Guild of America.

Lisa Ampleman is the author of two books of poetry, most recently Romances (LSU Press, 2020), and a chapbook. She lives in Cincinnati, where she is the managing editor of The Cincinnati Review and poetry series editor at Acre Books.

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

Skylit: A Story That Happens and Our Cancers by Dan O'Brien with Neel Keller & Lisa Ampleman