Autobiography is always the grounding point or the point of departure in the writing process. I believe the best fiction comes through the truth of autobiography. There is no question in my mind that Toni Morrison personally drew from her own emotional experience of being the "free slave" in the twentieth century in order to write the nineteenth-century slave narrative of Beloved. We are that grand as artists. I always teach through autobiography first, whether the genre of the course is playwriting, fiction, poetry, whatever. If we cultivate a relationship with autobiography, there is nothing to be afraid of in our writing and we can allow for whole stories that we've never experienced to enter our psyches, without censor, in the same way we are gifted in our dreams. Because we've opened ourselves up enough to receive those collectively unconscious messages.
Read the whole interview (about teatro, acting, indigeneity) at Bomb Magazine here.
