My MFA program was hit or miss in terms of instructors, but I got stuck with a hard miss on several occasions. This one professor taught all but one of my playwriting workshops, and had a field day throughout my two years there teasing me about only writing female characters. He'd rib me about only wanting to torture men onstage, rib me about writing yet another script that had mostly if not entirely female casts. "You know what I want you to do next quarter?" he said to me once. "I want you to write a good, kind, likable male protagonist…”
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On Teaching and Generosity
I taught my first solo class this quarter at UCR-- Introduction to Playwriting and Screenwriting. Though there were some minor guidelines, I got to build the class essentially from the ground up, picking reading materials, mapping out the schedule, amending the required writing assignments to my liking. I was thrilled to get to do this. I don't know when it struck me that I wanted to teach, but over the course of the last two years of my MFA, it's become painfully apparent that the classroom (undergrad level or higher, I ain't tryna fuck with <18) is where I want to be, and also where I thrive. Relatedly, I spent a good handful of my MFA workshops quietly co-teaching classes, sometimes with the appreciative recognition of the leading professor, under the nose of others…
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