The Plot: Conversations on Writing

For this episode of The Plot I am joined by my friend Adam Segal. Adam is active with social justice work in Portland; his background is in creative writing, but he is also a cook and food distributor, and he currently facilitates small groups of fellow white people working to address white supremacy on behalf of Portland's chapter of Showing Up for Racial Justice. Most relevant to this episode, however, is that he is also the founder of New Masculinities Group, a four-year-old project to engage men and people of all genders in difficult, yet necessary conversations about masculinity, gender, and sexuality, work he has begun to do professionally as a men’s accountability consultant.

In our discussion today, Adam examines how cultural narratives shape our understanding of gender—often without us even being aware of it—and the dangerous ways they can impact our concept of masculinity or expectations of what men are and how they should act. We’ll look at several examples from pop culture, from The Sandlot to Star Wars, to analyze their messages about boyhood and manhood. Then we’ll turn to how notions of masculinity intersect with social and political issues, like consent, food, and even prison abolition. These can be heavy subjects, but Adam expertly breaks them down in words that are clear, approachable, and encouraging. While we’ll acknowledge a variety of dangerous stereotypes, this is not a show about criticizing men, but rather a much more positive message, as Adam invites us to ask who we would be if there were no one telling us who to be. And while we’ll focus on the ways men confront that question, it’s also a question all of us, whether we are men or another gender, can learn to ask ourselves.

To Learn more about New Masculinities Group, you can follow it on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NewMasculinitiesGroupPDX

You can also follow this podcast on Twitter at @_SeanDouglass_ and @ThePlotPodcast

For more on the issues raised in this podcast, Adam has also provided a reading list:

"Books for men who want to get started in working against patriarchal masculinity:
The Will to Change, by bell hooks
I Don't Want to Talk About It, by Terrence Real
Women, Race, and Class by Angela Davis
Men Explain Things to Me, by Rebecca Solnit
Amateur by Thomas Page McBee

Articles and Resources for a Healthier Conversation about Consent and Sexual Communication:
From #MeToo to #WeConsented, and The Pleasure Dome: Use Your Words by Adrienne Maree Brown
https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/the-pleasure-dome/me-too-reclaiming-consent

https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/the-pleasure-dome/use-your-words

Sex Toys Will Never Be Able to Do the Hardest Work For You, by Fancy Feast
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/fancyfeast/sex-toys-education-consent-positivity-gender

In The No, by Radiolab and Kaitlyn Prest
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/projects/no

Articles for learning about Abolition Feminism:
Against Carceral Feminism by Victoria Law
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/10/against-carceral-feminism/

Aching for Abolition by Camonghne Felix
https://www.thecut.com/2020/10/aching-for-abolition.html

Who Wins When We Incarcerate Brock Turner? by Erika Lynn and Lily Zheng
https://stanfordpolitics.org/2016/06/10/who-wins-when-we-incarcerate-brock-turner/?fbclid=IwAR0X9NkQiTaRr3a7oCd4L3jYDnwJQV9NSYBqbgjzr-6Uy6Go9X7GQp7FzEw

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Brian James Polak is a playwright, teacher, and host of American Theatre Magazine's podcast The Subtext. I've known Brian on social media for several years, but I'd never sat down for a conversation with him in person (or at least in this case, over the phone). So as one podcaster to another, in this episode I interview him about, well, interviewing, and how he creates his signature show. We also discuss what success means to him, how an ill-fated major in Philosophy led him to theater, and how to navigate the tension between wanting to promote other artists while still developing one's own career. Like many playwrights, Brian also had a production, Welcome to Keene, NH, cancelled due to COVID-19, so he gives us an update on that (hopefully still upcoming!) play and what else he's been working on during the pandemic.

As an homage to Brian's monologues at the start of each episode of The Subtext, this episode also begins with some reflections from me on success, and the interview starts at 11:00.

To read (or maybe produce) Brian's work, find his plays at https://newplayexchange.org/users/724/brian-james-polak
Listen to The Subtext on major podcast platforms, or at www.americantheatre.org/category/audio/the-subtext/

Follow Us--
Brian James Polak @bejaypea
The Subtext @SubtextPodcast

Sean Douglass @_SeanDouglass_
The Plot @ThePlotPodcast

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In this episode I'm joined by journalist Alex Mohajer, and we’ll be talking about how art should represent and engage with the Trump Administration. How do we feel about the film and TV that has been produced in response to the last four years? And what should be the best approaches going forward to document this uniquely turbulent and corrupt White House across future comedies, dramas, and other genres of art? In particular we’re going to look at The Comey Rule, Showtime’s new miniseries about former FBI Director James Comey’s impact on the 2016 election. The show, written and directed by Billy Ray and starring Jeff Daniels as Comey, is, we both felt, very good, and we’ll look at how its strategies for dramatizing recent current events could serve as a guide for future work looking to retell the myriad stories and controversies of Trump’s presidency.

For those not familiar with Mohajer’s work, he is a political writer, commentator, and activist whose coverage of the 2016 election and its aftermath made him one of the most shared contributors at HuffPost. He has been interviewed for or featured on The Fox News Channel, PolitiFact, Washington Post, LA and NY Times, Yahoo News, New York Public Radio, and many other outlets, and in 2018 he received the Excellence in Journalism Award for Excellence in Feature Writing from the National Association of LGBTQ Journalists. He is currently the Public and Media Relations Director of the Stonewall Democratic Club, and he hosts the livestreaming news show The AM Report for Happs. He’s been on the frontlines of covering the events depicted in the The Comey Rule, so after watching it for myself, I knew I wanted to hear his take, too. In addition to that show we’ll also discuss what other Trump-era film and TV has resonated with us, what other events we want to see get dramatized, and how comedies can approach an administration that often seems beyond parody.

Watch The AM Report and follow Alex at:
Happs.tv/@alexmohajer

Twitter.com/alexmohajer

https://www.stonewalldems.org/rbg

And follow this show:
@ThePlotPodcast
@_SeanDouglass_
www.seandouglass.com

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Welcome to season 2! Today we’re talking about international film and television, and how the pandemic could be permanently changing peoples’ streaming habits in a way that benefits foreign artists. I’m joined once again by my good friend Lauren McCrimmon, a frequent co-producer on this show, and in particular we wanted to talk about The Prey, the first Cambodian film to receive distribution on Netflix.

The Prey, which has been described as Cambodia’s first action blockbuster, is directed by Jimmy Henderson, an Italian-born filmmaker formerly based in London. Henderson’s other work includes RUN!, Hanuman, The Forest Whisperers, and the award-winning Jailbreak, films that helped develop the action, horror, and martial arts genres for Cambodia’s growing film industry. While we don’t officially “review” The Prey with our conversation, and as a pulpy action film there’s not too much to analyze in the plot itself, we’ll still share our thoughts on it, and consider what Netflix’s promotion of it means for the future U.S. presence of films from lesser-known global markets. We’ll also look back on our country’s history of both embracing and ignoring foreign films, other international content we’ve been enjoying lately, and how anime may have been responsible for a generational shift in people’s willingness to watch subtitled content from other countries. This isn’t the heaviest episode we’ve ever done, but it was a fun one, and I hope it offers a look at how our new pandemic lifestyles may be influencing film and television in a way you hadn’t considered.

Movies and TV mentioned in this episode:
The Prey
Shutter
#Alive
Would I Lie to You?

Follow the Show--
@ThePlotPodcast
@_SeanDouglass_
www.seandouglass.com

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For this final episode of season one, I am joined by playwright Christopher Shinn for a conversation on how writers can use Patreon. Shinn has a long list of plays and accomplishments, including a Pulitzer nomination, an Obie Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and some of plays include Dying City, Where Do We Live, Now or Later, Teddy Ferrara, Against, and an adaptation of Hedda Gabler that appeared on Broadway in 2009. 

While Shinn used to be on Twitter, he became frustrated with the platform and has since instead begun putting his personal reflections on Patreon, the subscription-based crowdfunding site. I was curious how this experiment was going; there are, of course, other blogging subscription services out there, like Substack, and I don’t normally think of Patreon as a blogging platform. But could this be the answer to an issue many writers have? The desire to put their writing online, but in a way that can still be monetized, away from the free Wild West of social media? 

I was also curious about his thoughts on social media more generally. Shinn has written about how he feels these platforms are drawing us into a less loving and intimate society, and while I feel social media has both benefits and harms, I do wonder, too, how it is affecting our personal relationships and our national discourse. Why is it these sites, that on one hand offer such a convenient way for us to keep in touch with one another, are also yet incapable of fulfilling our most seemingly basic expectations, like suppressing toxic and hateful speech or protecting their users’ data. And what impact does this constant interconnectivity have on our attention spans, mental health, and capacity for introspection? While we don’t reach any clear conclusions, I think the questions Shinn raises here are essential for anyone who uses social media, and I hope they will inspire you to think critically about your own online habits.

Follow Us:
Christopher Shinn's Patreon
www.christophershinn.co

This Show--
@ThePlotPodcast
@_SeanDouglass_
www.seandouglass.com

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Today I am joined by medievalist Kelly Williams for a conversation on medieval literature. Kelly is a PhD candidate in Medieval English Literature at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and she’s also a close friend whom I’ve known for many years. So when I thought about doing a show on medieval lit, I knew she’d be the perfect person to go to.

One thing that has been a goal of this show since the beginning has been to talk about writing and art in a way that takes people beyond the most dominant or readily accessible popular culture. Or, at other times, to find connections between popular culture and less mainstream work. With medieval lit, we can do both of those things. While I’m sure my audience knows the legends of King Arthur or The Canterbury Tales, how well do you know The Vinland Sagas or Irish epic The Tain? And since “medieval” can be a vague and often Eurocentric term, what about what the rest of the world was writing in that very long period that loosely spans the middle of the first millennium to the middle of the second? To help us all expand our awareness of the world’s great epics, romances, poetry, and more, Kelly is here with a huge list of recommendations, and whether you’re used to reading older writing or not, chances are you’ll hear something that piques your interest. 

We also spend a little time discussing some of the current issues in the medieval studies world, one of which is the work to make it more inclusive. For example, one of the largest scholarly associations in the field, the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists, recently voted to change its name in an effort to thwart internal racism and sexism. (For more information on that, you can listen to this episode of Remixing the Humanities.) This conversation also comes at a time when white supremacists are increasingly adopting symbols from the Middle Ages as signs of a supposed (and historically-inaccurate) "white" heritage. In this kind of climate, what is the role of a medieval scholar when it comes to helping the public stay informed and combating those who try to twist history to promote narratives of hate and violence? We didn’t get a chance to go in depth on this subject, but it’s worth noting that part of the reason reading older texts is so important is for how they keep us culturally literate and undo both stereotypes and more malicious rewritings of the past. 

Oh, and we also talk about Spider-Man and his connection to medieval stories, too. How so? Well, you’ll have to listen to find out, but be warned that there are some spoilers for the film Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse when we get to that point.

---And here's a list of all the texts recommended in this episode:

Juliana
Andreas
Vis and Ramin
The Mabinogian
The Tain
The Vinland Sagas
Ibn Fadlan and the Land of Darkness
The Travels of Marco Polo
Shahnameh
The Mirror of My Heart: A Thousand Years of Persian Poetry by Women
The Arabian Nights
Sunjata

Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time: Art, Culture, and Exchange across Medieval Saharan African

Poems of the Masters
The Tale of Genji
The Confessions of Lady Nijo
Popol Vuh
The Secret of Kells

Follow:
Kelly Williams
@MediaevalMuse
The Vault of Culture
Blog: Shield Maidens

The Plot
@ThePlotPodcast
@_SeanDouglass_

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Today I am joined by playwright Eleanor Burgess for a conversation on her hit play The Niceties. The Niceties is everywhere this season—I just saw it last week in Milwaukee, but you can also find it in other major cities across the US and in London—and it is chock full of things to discuss. 

For anyone new to Burgess and her work, she grew up in Brookline, Massachusetts, studied history at Yale College, and has her M.F.A in Dramatic Writing from NYU. Her other plays include Chill, Start Down, These Dying Generations, and Mocha, and she is also writing for HBO’s upcoming Perry Mason. But today we’ll be talking about The Niceties, and if you don’t know the play, that’s okay. We won’t really be talking about the play itself (which is better left unspoiled anyway), but about the subjects it covers, like race, history, and American progress—as well as the tremendous uncertainty that exists in any conversation on deep moral subjects like these. 

The Niceties tells a story about a white history professor meeting with an African American student at an unnamed prestigious university. As the professor challenges the conclusions of a paper the student has written, the women are soon swept up in an intense debate rooted in their vastly different perspectives on American history. I won’t give away more about it than that, but I will say that it is such an accessible, yet excitingly intellectual play that I actually found it a bit trickier than usual to form interview questions on it. It’s not that doesn’t invite questions, but rather, it poses so many, and digs so directly into them, it was hard to know to begin without simply summarizing much of the play in the process. What we ended up with was a discussion focused on questions more than answers, and the importance of humility and understanding in a culture that so often prioritizes the loudest, most uncompromising voices. If you’re feeling the fatigue of living in a country with a very polarized and often combative political climate, I think Burgess’s openness and hope for more understanding will resonate with you. Is incremental progress something to celebrate or reject? Is the story of America one of great achievements or great injustices? And for a new parent like Burgess, how do you raise a child in such a morally complex world? We don’t have all the answers, but Burgess serves as an excellent guide through these conundrums of American life.

Follow Us:
Eleanor Burgess
eleanorburgess.com
@eleanorjburgess

The Plot
seandouglass.com
@_seandouglass_
@ThePlotPodcast

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For this episode I am joined again by my friend Lauren McCrimmon for part two of our conversation on the literary canon. If you haven’t heard part one yet, I would encourage you to listen to that first, as this show picks up where that one left off. But just to recap, we are looking at the list of the most-assigned literary texts in colleges, as documented by opensyllabus.org, to ask: how do we decide what gets to be included in the literary canon, and what major texts do we feel get over or underrepresented by our education system? In the last episode we discussed many of the most-read books from the list, like Frankenstein, The Canterbury Tales, or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and so for part two we’re going to focus more on what changes we would make to how the caught in taught. What books or works do we want to see receive more attention, and how would we make room for them? We also consider how the canon could be more generous in its inclusion of other genres, like science fiction or fantasy, and how to bring more writers from other countries into our classrooms. 

This episode is a bit on the shorter side, and serves as more of a coda to part one, but there’s still plenty to discuss on James Baldwin, Haruki Murakami, and even the role journalism can play on course syllabi. Where we last left off in part one, we had just been starting to look at what we’d want to see taught more often. I had suggested replacing some of Shakespeare’s massive presence across syllabi with more Chekhov, and the ball is in Lauren’s court. So let’s pick up from there, starting with her thoughts. 

Follow us:
Sean Douglass
@_SeanDouglass_

The Plot
@ThePlotPodcast

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In this episode I'm joined by my friend and cohost Lauren McCrimmon for part one of what will be a two-part series on the literary canon. The literary canon, of course, refers to those books or texts that are considered to have particular historical or social importance. In the vast scope of all that has been written, the canon is the texts we hold up as being key to understanding certain themes or time periods—the classics that educated people are expected to be familiar with. But the notion of a literary canon, or canons for a particular time or place, carries with it a lot of questions. What gets to be canon and what doesn’t? Who gets to decide? And how do we update the canon to better reflect women, people of color, and other minorities who tend to be heavily underrepresented on these kinds of lists?

To frame this conversation, we’ll be using the Open Syllabus Project at opensyllabus.org, which aggregates millions of college syllabi from around the world and has lists of the most commonly taught books. We had a lot of fun looking through their list on what was taught in English classes, and so during this episode we’ll be working our way through that list, sharing our thoughts on the selections. You’ll hear our takes on what works we would want to see taught more or less often, what writers we felt were overrepresented or excluded, and what books we had to read over and over and over again when we were in school. (I don’t know that anyone has ever been required to read a single book more often than Lauren has had to read Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried.) And since I’m sure listeners will have some thoughts on these books (and our takes on them) as well, we want to hear from you, too!

In the next episode we’ll go deeper into our more specific suggestions on what we’d add to the canon, and we’ll want to include reader picks as well. So when you’re done listening, share your thoughts with me at [email protected] or tweet us @ThePlotPodcast or @_SeanDouglass_ and we may read your comment on our next episode.

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For this episode we’ll be looking back on the legacy of Toni Morrison with Nambi E. Kelley. Kelley is an actor, playwright, and screenwriter. As an actor she’s appeared in numerous onstage roles with leading regional theaters, as well as in TV shows like Search Party, Madame Secretary, Elementary, and The Beast opposite Patrick Swayze. Her writing career has included plays like Xtigone, For Her as a Piano, and, perhaps most prominently, an acclaimed adaptation of Richard Wright’s novel Native Son, which has been widely produced and is currently running Off-Broadway in a production by The Acting Company. Her latest play, however, is an adaptation of Toni Morrison’s novel Jazz, written at Morrison’s request. Given Morrison’s recent passing, this seemed like a perfect opportunity to reflect on her literary impact, as well as to catch up with Kelley on her busy artistic life—which now also includes writing for the third season of Showtime’s series The Chi. 

If you’re a fan of either of these writers’ work, I think you’re going to enjoy this conversation on what it was like for Kelley to spend the last few years delving into Morrison’s writing, including the unexpected phrase she found that, to quote her, “blew her mind.” But in addition to discussing her adaptation of Jazz, she also shares an inside look at how she got her new job in television, and somehow this interview even ends with her father’s advice on relationships. So if you wanted some TV and dating tips thrown in with your coverage of the late Toni Morrison’s Nobel Prize-winning legacy, this show has you covered. 

Follow us:
Nambi E. Kelley--
Website: http://www.nambikelley.com/
Twitter: @NambiKelley

This show--
The Plot: @ThePlotPodcast
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