When I created a play about my own immigrant family called Looking for Louie in 2000, people asked me to help them work on their own stories. I soon realized that working privately with these artists was not particularly useful, in terms of the bigger, deeper picture. They needed more than just my response, in order to make their own choices into the story they wanted to tell.

In 2001, I created the workshop as a group process, so you get a wide spectrum of response, not just mine. The group mirrors back to you what you’ve written; you choose what’s useful and what’s not.

I help, of course, once I get a sense of what’s really going on.

Our focus: digging for the raw material; crafting from that raw material dramatic, eventful content, bringing your story to full life, in relationship with an audience, or reader.

From the beginning, artists in the group wanted to bring in all kinds of work —not just solo work — and the workshop quickly expanded to include writers and performers working for the page, the stage, and the screen. What unifies us is our inquiry into the use of personal (not necessarily autobiographical) story in service of larger stories, larger meanings.

What I am proudest of is the collective that has created itself around this work, the willingness of individual artists to contribute to one another’s process with generosity, empathy and respect. It is an extraordinary group of dedicated artists and diggers.

If What’s the Story? sounds like something you’d be interested in, please drop me a line or give me a call. These are extraordinary times for all of us, with extraordinary challenges and extraordinary opportunities. Many of us —individually, as a nation, as a world — are rethinking who we are and how we want to be.

I believe our work can make a difference.