Play On Words has a proud history of producing Gary Singh’s funny, absurd, language-rich poems in bars, parks and restaurants around San Jose. If you read the Metro, you know Gary. If you’ve been to an Earthquakes soccer game, you know Gary. If you’ve been to any interesting festival, performance, show or cultural event in Silicon Valley, chances are you’ve met Gary. We’re delighted to perform “Indra’s Low Sodium-Oxide Streetlights” at New Year Nouveau, January 6 at San Jose’s Cafe Stritch. We hope you can join us.
Gary Singh
Gary is an award-winning travel journalist with a music degree who publishes poetry, paints and exhibits photographs. As a scribe, he’s published nearly 1000 works including newspaper columns, travel essays, art and music criticism, profiles, business journalism, lifestyle articles, poetry and short fiction. His poems have been published in The Pedestal Magazine, Dirty Chai, Maudlin House and more. For 540 straight weeks, his newspaper columns have appeared in Metro, the alternative weekly paper of San Jose and Silicon Valley. Currently, he is the author of The San Jose Earthquakes: A Seismic Soccer Legacy (2015, The History Press). The poem we are producing in January was previously published at Three and a half point 9.
As a reminder, our January 6 show will be collecting $5 donations at the door. We also will be live-streaming this show with South Bay Pulse–stay tuned to learn more!
San Jose writers likely already know the lovely Lita Kurth, local writer, teacher and co-creator of the fabulous Flash Fiction Forum. We were delighted to produce her work last summer at Cafe Stritch (if you haven’t seen it yet, you need to watch Melinda Marks’ reading of “Bride”), and are excited to perform her comic piece, “Compassion: The Essence of Nursing,” January 6 at New Year Nouveau.
Lita Kurth
Lita (MFA Pacific Lutheran University) has had work published in Fjords Review, Brain,Child, Main Street Rag, Tikkun, NewVerseNews, Blast Furnace, ellipsis…literature and art, Compose, Redux, Raven Chronicles, Tattoo Highway, Composite Arts, Verbatim Poetry, the Santa Clara Review, Gyroscope Review, Vermont Literary Review, DNA, and others.
Her CNF, “Pivot,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her CNF “This is the Way We Wash the Clothes,” presented at the Working Class Studies conference, 2012, won the 2014 Diana Woods Memorial Award (summer-fall 2014) and appeared in Lunchticket 2014. She contributes to Tikkun.org/tikkundaily, TheReviewReview.net, and classism.org.
In 2013, she co-founded the Flash Fiction Forum, a reading series in San Jose. Learn more about her in this recent profile in the San Jose Metro.
Upcoming projects:
Upcoming on January 13th is another Flash Fiction Forum, 7 PM Works Gallery in wonderful downtown San Jose!
I also teach private multi-genre workshops and online four-week flash fiction courses–learn more at Lita Kurth Writing Workshops.
What inspired you to participate in Play On Words?
I loved the idea as soon as I heard about it. Such fun to see another creative person bring a piece to life that I’ve written.
Which writers or performers inspire you?
Bruuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuce. Just kidding, sort of. My inspirations are too numerous to list but a sampling includes the Rachel Field poetry of childhood, Robert Louis Stevenson, Tolstory, Flaubert, Irish writer Jamie O’Neill, E. Annie Proulx, and Zadie Smith.
This January we are delighted to bring back Bay Area playwright Christine Keating, author of “Girl in Pink,” which we’ll be showcasing January 6 at San Jose’s Cafe Stritch. Play On Words fans might remember Christine’s biting play, “Misery Olympics,” from our Spring Fling show in 2014.
Christine Keating. Photo by Grace Kinder
Christine is a playwright and director living in San Francisco. Her directing work includes productions with Those Women Productions and Santa Clara University, and readings with Magic Theatre, SF Playground, Custom Made Theatre, and TheatreWorks’ YPP. Writing credits include SF Olympians, Pint-Sized Plays, Theater Pub, Shotz, and Magic Theatre. She is the Director of New Works (The Forge) at Quantum Dragon Theatre. Look at her face and read things from her brain at www.KeatingMarie.com.
What inspired you to participate in Play On Words?
The awesome mix of material, both in form and content. You never know what you’re going to get, it opens up my mind a little more every time I see the show!
Name a book or performance that fundamentally affected you.
As a reminder, our January 6 show will be collecting $5 donations at the door. We also will be live-streaming this show with South Bay Pulse–stay tuned to learn more!
So, Sarah Lyn Rogers might have moved to Bhutan, but in our minds, she will always be a San Jose writer. You might recognize her work from previous POW shows–and you’ll be lucky to catch an excerpt of her essay, “Land of the Thunder Dragon: Expectations vs. Reality,” at New Year Nouveau on January 6 at Cafe Stritch.
Sarah Lyn Rogers
Sarah is a writer from the San Francisco Bay Area and currently lives in Thimphu, Bhutan. Over the past months, Sarah has grown accustomed to walking with cattle, meeting royalty, and writing poems about spells, rituals, and magical objects. Her first chapbook will be published by Sad Spell Press this spring. She is stoked. When she’s not writing, Sarah is the fiction editor for The Rumpus. For more of Sarah’s writing, doodles, and life stuff, visit sarahlynrogers.com.
Recent Publications:
Five of my On the Road erasure poems were published semi-recently in Potluck Mag for their spooky Halloween week. They are viewable here.
Upcoming projects:
One of my poems, “Drones,” will be published in the next issue of DMQ Review. A few of my illustrations and microblogs of Bhutan life will be in the premiere issue of galley, a new zine for which there is not yet a link. Mostly I’m stoked about my chapbook which will be released by Sad Spell Press, an imprint of Witch Craft Magazine.
What inspired you to participate in Play On Words?
I’ve said this one before in a different way, but my Bay Area friends are a crisscrossing community of writers and performers. How could I not get tangled up in this?
Which writers or performers inspire you?
I know I’m like five years behind here, but I recently discovered Tavi Gevinson, a nineteen-year-old powerhouse who shot to internet fame for her fashion blog at the tender age of twelve and is now a successful actress, model, and editor-in-chief of Rookie Mag. I like that she’s unapologetic about being girly and legitimizes the real questions and frustrations of being a teenage girl in her magazine by and for teenage girls.
Working in writing and publishing, for me, has made me think twice about how feminine I’m “allowed” to be in my work and public persona, and how much I’m “allowed” to write about feelings. I liked having my perspective smacked around a little by discovering someone who is successful because of—not in spite of—her femininity.
Name a book or performance that fundamentally affected you.
Madness, Rack, and Honey is an amazing book by poet Mary Ruefle. It’s a collection of essays, ostensibly about poetry, that’s really a curio cabinet of strange facts, quotations, and observations—food for writing-thought. I was delighted enough by the just intro to push my face into the spine and press the pages against my cheeks.
At Play On Words, we love meeting fellow Bay Area writers, so we were delighted to receive a wonderful submission by Allison Landa. Join us January 6 at Cafe Stritch to see an excerpt of “Not the Madonna” performed live!
Allison Landa
Allison is a Berkeley-based writer of fiction and memoir. A graduate of St. Mary’s College’s MFA program in creative writing, Landa’s work has been featured in Salon Magazine, You and Me Magazine, Word Riot, Toasted Cheese and Defenestration, among other venues. She has taken the stage at events including Flash Fiction Forum, Why There Are Words, Lip Service West, Quiet Lightning and Porchlight SF. She is represented by Miriam Altshuler of DeFiore and Company and is currently revising her memoir into a young adult novel. She shares her home with her husband, son and two manic Labrador-Australian Shepherd mixes. Stalk her at allisonlanda.com.
What inspired you to participate in Play On Words?
It’s an exciting opportunity to see my work interpreted in a new and fresh way. Also, I dig San Jose.
Which writers or performers inspire you?
In no particular order: Stephen King, Jackie Collins, Michel Houellebecq, T.C. Boyle, Spaulding Gray, Ann Packer, Persimmon Blackbridge, and likely you.
Name a book or performance that fundamentally affected you.
Gone with the Wind, both as a book and as a movie. Scarlett O’Hara rocks my world and has ever since I first read the book at 6 – yes, 6! – years old. I was kind of a weird kid. Not much has changed.
As a reminder, our January 6 show will be collecting $5 donations at the door. We also will be live-streaming this show with South Bay Pulse–stay tuned to learn more!
Sad that Christmas is over? Don’t worry; you’ve got one more event to add to your holiday calendar: our January 6 show at Cafe Stritch. This week we’ll be teasing you with previews of next Wednesday’s lineup, which will feature the work of a few of our favorite local writers, as well as a number of new voices from around the world. First up: playwright Roy Proctor. We can’t wait to produce his hilarious short play, “Fabulous Water Sports.”
Roy Proctor wrote his first play in 2012 after retiring from a 30-year career as the staff theater and art critic on the two daily newspapers in Richmond, Va. Since then, he has completed four full-length plays and 43 short plays in addition to audio adaptations of a number of those plays. They have been either fully produced or presented as staged readings in London, Cambridge, Bristol, Bath, Cardiff and Sheffieldin the United Kingdom as well as in New York City, Washington, Richmond, Raleigh, New Orleans, Seattle, Los Angeles, San Diego, Pittsburgh, Huntington (W. Va.), Charleston (S.C.), South Bend (Ind.) and Edinboro (Pa.). Two have been published. Four are being produced for broadcast and/or podcast by radio theaters in New York City and San Francisco. Three of his many Chekhov short story adaptations, collectively titled “Russian Roulette: Shots for Chekhov!,” were part of England’s Bath Fringe Festival in 2015. Proctor grew up in Thomasville, N.C., and graduated in 1962 with a BA in English (Creative Writing) at the University of Iowa, where he wrote fiction under Philip Roth in the Iowa Writers Workshop. He lives in Richmond and is a member of the Dramatists Guild of America.
Roy Proctor
Honors and Awards:
Richmond Folio Award (first annual award “for outstanding contribution to Richmond theatre community”), a crystal trophy presented by the merging Richmond Shakespeare and Henley Street Theatre at their first annual Bootleg Ball, Virginia Holocaust Museum, May 11, 2013.
Upcoming projects:
Right now, I’m especially proud of the podcast of one of my Chekhov story adaptations, “Settling the Score,” that was created by Amy’s Horse in Vermont. It stars Broadway luminary James Naughton (best-actor Tonys for “City of Angels” and “Chicago”) and veteran Broadway character actor John Christopher Jones, was released on Dec. 22, 2015, and can be heard free at www.amyshorse.com.
What inspired you to participate in Play On Words?
I saw your call for submissions on Facebook and said, “Why not?” I’ll jump on any vehicle that will carry me as a playwright. I don’t think a play is complete until it has connected with audiences. I’m delighted to be able to connect with folks in San Jose.
Which writers or performers inspire you?
As a theater critic, I reviewed all 37 plays in the Shakespeare canon, and I never tired of good productions of his incomparable work. As a Southerner, I also have a soft spot in my heart for Tennessee Williams.
Name a book or performance that fundamentally affected you.
Innumerable books and performances have shaped my vision, and I can’t cite some to the exclusion of the rest.
As a reminder, our January 6 show will be collecting $5 donations at the door. We also will be live-streaming this show with South Bay Pulse–stay tuned to learn more!
Check out our beautiful new show poster, designed by the one and only Grant Parfitt. Hope you can join us on January 6! There will be a $5 suggested donation at the door.
Join us this Sunday for San Jose’s first ever Literary Pub Crawl, organized by Tania Martin and Lita Kurth, the masterminds behind SJ’s Flash Fiction Forum, as well as past participants in POW shows.
There are four main stages of the event, all located in San Jose’s SOFA district:
We get it–the holidays are approaching. In San Jose, we are welcoming this newfangled thing called “weather.” The desire to stay inside and nurse a mug of hot cocoa is very hard to resist. Why not, while you’re cozy inside, polish up that draft you’ve been working on and send it along to us at Play On Words? Our next show is quickly approaching–January 6 at Cafe Stritch–and we need producible work by December 1. In case you’re still on the fence, here are five reasons you should submit to us:
Because you’ll get to hear your own words read back to you. As a writer at any stage of your career, there are few things more valuable than hearing your own characters, your own dialogue, your own descriptions, interpreted through the lens of an actor. You might hear laughs in the crowd where you weren’t expecting them–or moments of thoughtful reflection as the audience takes in your work. It can be a very gratifying experience.
Submit to our January show at Cafe Stritch!
You’ll learn something about the way you write. When a writer reads his or her own work aloud, there is an implicit relationship with the words. You know what you were trying to say when you wrote the words, so when you read it aloud, you invoke that meaning. However, when you hear someone else read it, you might find hidden meaning. You might realize that while you thought your story was about one thing, it’s actually about something else entirely–something worth exploring.
You’ll be exposed to the work of a community of writers and artists. When we produce shows, we work really hard to curate a lineup that creates its own narrative. We like to intersperse poetry with short stories, plays and monologues, to give the evening the feeling of its own theatrical mix tape. When you participate in a Play On Words show, you get to hear what your work sounds like as part of an entire evening’s performance, book-ended with the work of your neighbors, friends and colleagues.
You’ll make great friends and meet potential collaborators. One of the very best outcomes of a Play On Words show is introducing talented artists to each other–friends who can introduce each other to their favorite writers, artists, musicians and poets.
Great food, great drinks, great company, great work. What else do you need?
We hope to read your work soon. We’re accepting submissions of fiction and nonfiction under 2000 words, poems, and short plays through December 1. Submissions can be emailed to us at playonwordssj@gmail.com. Thanks for taking a chance on us–you won’t regret it.
Play On Words 