WhatsApp and Hand-Tats: My Brief History with Writing Groups

I gave the following talk as part of the 18th Annual Pacific Authors Celebration on 13 April 2017. It was hosted by the Pacific University Libraries and presented alongside an exhibit in the Forest Grove Library Gallery.


Thank you all for coming today. I want to share some brief words with you about WhatsApp, hand tattoos, and how my writing has been positively affected by collaborating with others. This will be in three parts.

Shakespeare, the Rubber Stamp

Collaboration is not necessarily the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the name, “Shakespeare”—the proverbial rubber stamp for “high art” and “literary genius.” I guess that makes me not a very good Shakespearean. My scholarship is interested in the collaborative work of theatre-makers in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England—the period when typecasting was a good thing because it meant that, as an actor, you could hold twenty variations of the same kind of character in your head at a time, and, as a playwright, you specialized in writing kinds of scenes rather than whole plays alone. Based on the evidence of three staged readings in the late 1500s, I really hope this all happened at a bar.

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