As a writer, my sense of self has emerged with purpose and resilience through practice and miracles. In an effort to be personal and transparent, my sense of both life and death have always stayed close, making it impossible not to write from a place of gratitude and urgency. An experimental transplant saved my life when I was 16 months-old; and I drowned in a boating accident when I was 19 years-old — and came back to life. Living through the surreal and cruel early days of AIDS while living in New York in the 1980s and ‘90s, doing volunteer and activist work with the Gay Men’s Health Crisis and the first clinic in NYC for women and children with HIV — those years haunt and motivate me. A thin layer of fog — or maybe nothing at all — separates these profound markers from my desire to make something beautiful out of it all, still, now. And beauty, by the way, isn't always simple and obvious. Beauty is almost always the unexpected. Why do I get up in the morning? What makes me want to work, want to lead, want to listen, want to learn? I’m on the lookout for ignition… curiosity, terror. Vivid empathy. And especially the peculiar need to write. It’s a singular moment — the recognition that it’s time to begin — again. Pursuit. Living as a verb. One way I know my work has evolved is in my understanding that the difference between hearing and listening — is attention. With more stories living inside me than I’ll ever have time to write, I find myself in search of love stories. I’m not only talking about plays that are love stories, but also love stories between the writer and the story itself. Crushes are easy. And fun. But they don’t last, they lose energy, they drift… a love story demands attention and commitment and by the time I’m writing the play, I’m in love. But I don’t write to fall in love, I write to fight for that love — a love of process, of not knowing, of invention. Something happens, something is tested, something deepens and goes deeper, fast. I’m in it and with it and determined to fight for it; giddiness and mystery jumping off a cliff together hand-in-hand. Almost always, the play willfully dreams itself into an undeniable force that is both emotional and physical and simply becomes too present for me to escape. I have dreams about the play and then dreams about the dreams — everything is the play letting me know it’s close, tapping its ghost-like foot, reminding me it won’t wait around forever. And neither will I.