Tag: Eudora Welty New Plays Festival

Hurricane Baby The Play

Well. That was a surprise. I got the news last night that the Mississippi Repertory Theatre, a professional theatre in north Mississippi, wants to put on the stage version of Hurricane Baby next May! How it came about: I saw an advertisement for this company’s production of Barefoot in the Park by Neil Simon. I read up on them and noticed that one of my fellow MFA graduates was promoting the event, so I asked her if she could get my play in front of the play selection people–and about a week or so later, they let me know they wanted it but adapted more for a stage. I said, “Great!”

So next thing I know they have a whole poster of graphics showing an entire eight-play season, and my play is scheduled for May! So that is very exciting, and I am really looking forward to a full-on production. I think it will be very powerful on stage and make a big impression on audiences. It certainly did at the other professional theatre, New Stage, when it won third place at the Eudora Welty New Plays Festival in 2010.

I am hoping to finish the last chapter of the novel today and get it ready to send off to my final reader before I edit one last time and start sending it out. I’m going to make this last chapter as good as I can beforehand and eagerly await her critique. I think I will settle back in to doing MCIR work until I get it back. I will send off the beginning of September.

I am looking forward to having accomplished this first round of edits. Yay me!

Writing The Story

Long story short–these characters have been alive in my mind for quite some time. The story has undergone many, many permutations since I completed that first story draft. In 2010, in anticipation of the Hurricane Katrina fifth anniversary. I took the story and adapted it to a stage play, which is when the title went from “Still Waters” to “Hurricane Baby”. That stage play won third place in the Eudora Welty New Plays Festival at New Stage Theatre in Jackson, Mississippi, where a stage reading was performed on May 1, 2010.

I kept working at it and revising on it until I wondered if I had taken it as far as I could. I finally gave up on fiction almost entirely and started concentrating on blogging, setting up a blog about my life with bipolar disorder in 2014. In 2015, I enrolled in a low-residency MFA program at the Mississippi University for Women, concentrating on nonfiction. But even with that as my concentration, I kept flirting with fiction stories.

I took two semesters to write in fiction classes under Mary Miller, an up-and-coming short story and novel writer from Oxford, and Diana Spechler, a writer based in Mexico City. I wrote new fiction in their classes and experimented a great deal with flash fiction, discovering a had a knack for compressing a story down to its bare bones.