Hyder Ali and the American Revolution

Uff, the efforts I made along with my colleague, playwright Vijay Padaki, to create a university student-involved creative project around the topic over the past few years but, alas, we got zero interest from students. Maybe it was us. Maybe we did a poor job of pitching it.

I then pitched it as an America 250 article to Smithsonian Magazine and got no response.

Now this fascinating history is in a terrific New Yorker story by Ishaan Tharoor. As a writer, you win some, you lose some. I’m just glad to see more Americans made aware of India’s connection to the American Revolution.

Screenwriters: There’s No Such Thing as the 3-Act Structure

Who invented this thing called the 3-act structure used in movies around the world? Neither Aristotle, Hollywood studios, Robert McKee nor Syd Field (contrary to New Yorker magazine) had anything to do with it. I thoroughly explain the structure in a way that will be of practical use to new screenwriters while simultaneously debunking its existence.

I was happy to be able to share a little more of my Fulbright India research in exploring this topic. I promise you will learn something new.

Original music by Ano Malee.

The Changing Light at Sandover

Awesome timing from this week’s New Yorker, a review of a new biography of James Merrill by Langdon Hammer. Merrill’s a major influence to the point that I’ve often made mention of him in my Boneyards and Beautiful Zion playbills and many times here on my blog in reference to those shows. I got a good look at his homemade Ouija board when I was a Copeland Fellow at Amherst College back in 2001 (it’s in the college library’s archive) and I urge all poetry fans or supernatural fans to settle into his epic poem The Changing Light at Sandover sometime.

James Merrill’s Supernatural Epic

A trust fund, a Ouija board, and an unprecedented poem

by Dan Chiasson

“…And Ouija boards: Merrill made the most ambitious American poem of the past fifty years, seventeen thousand lines long, in consultation with one. The result, “The Changing Light at Sandover,” was a homemade cosmology as dense as Blake’s…” FULL ARTICLE HERE