Since I was a very young woman, I have heard voices in my head. Not the kind that might lead one to the nearest mental health institution for a psychological inventory, but rather the voices I heard were most often conversations between people, who I learned later were called characters. These voices or conversations could be initiated by some external events, activities, interactions or even external conversations going on around me. My internal conversations might extend those that I had heard externally or might set up a back-story for those external events or just might take them farther into the future than that present moment. These internal conversations were fleeting and I shared them with very few people as I thought perhaps I would be considered a bit weird. However, when I became an English major and studied dramatic writings, I discovered that my internal dialogues had some connection to my major. When I taught English to undergraduate college students, I even realized that some of my internal dialogues were just as good, in my opinion, as the dialogues in a number of plays we read. Still I never tried my hand at writing for theatre. Even though I was a decent poet, writing dramatically just didn’t seem to fit in with my work as teaching and mothering. I had never taken a dramatic writing class so I didn’t have a clue as to how to start. When I turned 50 years of age, however, I was invited by a theatre friend to write a play for a local theatre festival competition; to this day I don’t know why she asked me, of all people. But this invitation was the turning point in my writing career. I wrote what I thought was a very bad draft, but someone saw potential and I won an opportunity to have the play workshopped. That week-long workshop experience was absolutely the best experience of my entire professional life. I thoroughly enjoyed (and benefited) from the artistic critiques from professionals in the field—actors, director (who has since become VERY well known in the Black theatre community) , dramaturg (I had never even heard that word). What evolved was a play that since that time has been performed in several theatres in the US and in Bermuda and Jamaica; the play was Hairpeace.

Since then, I think I have found my own voice and have come to realize that those voices and conversations I heard in my head could be filtered, transferred to the page and, with some focused work, could ultimately become pretty darn good plays. From that point on, writing dramatic pieces became as important as water to me. I also realized that I wanted to give voice to people who had been voiceless or whose stories had not been told or told to any significant degree. My aim became to foreground stories about African Americans, primarily from southern environments; hence, Atlanta and Georgia have become primary settings for my plays, and themes, both historical and contemporary, that emanate from Black southern life, have come to guide these plays.

Of course, I am still insecure because I do not have an MFA with a focus in theatre and because I started this writing so late in life—after almost an entire career in college teaching. Seemingly the most popular and successful contemporary playwrights have the formal background and the connections associated with it. Breaking into a fairly saturated field with virtually no formal training has been daunting, but I have continued to write and I have taken workshops and read a myriad books on dramatic writing. I consider myself a kind of “hard scrabble” writer. Nevertheless, I have written some plays that have met with production successes. Unfortunately, heretofore, I have not written and simultaneously pitched my plays to theatres; the end goal for me has generally been to complete the play. But in 2019, my New Year’s resolution, I committed to doing the work of researching theatres and submitting plays appropriate to the missions of particular theatres. As a fairly recent retiree, doing this work has now become a primary job. My goal is to have more plays on the stages of regional, national and international theatres. Of course, I will continue to focus on the quality of my writing, primarily on character development, character tensions and dialogue. Look for my work in the future at a theatre near you.