Plays, I’d Like to Write All Day

First flush of words, in high school and college I wrote poetry; maudlin love poems, nature’s joy, philosophical musings, or love’s epitaphs. Reading and writing poetry made me feel centered. Poetry and I went steady in my teens and 20s.

Then, in my twenties and thirties, I wrote short stories and fiction. I penned a novel named Spoke featuring a Vietnam Veteran whose heart found its way home as he cycled the Hill Country of Texas. One writer’s conference, an agent was interested, but her boss nixed it. I wrote a second novel about a young food critic in Minneapolis who falls in love with a chef from India.

In my forties, I worked on a memoir about studying abroad in Spain the fall of my junior semester. That trip was the pivot point of my life. I was changed irrevocably after four months talking with Latin American and Spanish students every day. My world became larger than the Twin Cities, larger than the state of Minnesota. I was now an American in the true sense of the word, someone from the continent of the Americas, along with my new friends from Mexico, Peru, Chile, Colombia, and Argentina.

Most recently, last week in fact, I wrote my first play. We were planning entertainment for our child’s school family night on Zoom. I had this idea for a mystery…