Colleen Hughes '04

I mentioned at the end of my last entry that I wanted to give a full entry to talking about the travel fellowship I just applied for. So, BU’s Creative Writing Program recently received a donation that allows them to award travel fellowships to their students. Last year, the first year the fellowships were offered, they sent about 20% of the class abroad, but this year they are hoping to send up to 50% of my class (across all three genres of fiction, poetry, and playwriting). It’s such an amazing award because you can choose to go anywhere in the world for up to three months and do basically anything you want in order to enhance your writing. To apply, we had to write a short proposal about where we wanted to go and what we’d do there.

I never applied to study abroad in college, and I have sometimes looked back and wished I had. I did get to do the May Term in Luxembourg immediately following my sophomore year though (for any current students thinking about applying to this program—do it. It’s so much fun, and it is a way to get a small taste of the study abroad experience if you aren’t able to fit an entire year abroad into your schedule). Other than that month though, I have never spent time outside of the country, not even in Canada. So I knew I definitely had to apply for one of these fellowships.

When I first thought about where I wanted to go, one place that immediately crossed my mind was Bali. Any HC theatre major will know why. I took four semesters of Balinese dance at Holy Cross, and I thought about what it might be like to live there and study their dance and culture on a more in-depth basis. But there was one thought I just could never get out of my head… that I have always, always wanted to go to Ireland. And if I could spend three months in another country, that was the one place that I could see myself being the happiest and learning the most. I want to stay in one of the small Gaeltacht regions (areas where the Irish language is still the predominant everyday language) in County Cork and learn the language. I also want to be able to take classes in Irish dance and learn about Celtic folklore and poetry and music, and then use all of my experiences to eventually create a play that would interweave dance and music with the folklore and incorporate some of the native language into it.

It will be tough getting a fellowship because they are going to give preference to students traveling someplace where English isn’t spoken. And even with my desire to go to a Gaeltacht, I know that it’s going to be harder to convince the committee than if I were going someplace where most of the population doesn’t know English. But I had to write the proposal that would make me the happiest, so I had to go with Ireland. In my research into the Múscraí Gaeltacht in County Cork, I discovered so much about the region that I am determined to go there someday with or without a fellowship. I’ll make sure to keep everyone updated when I find out one way or the other.

In unrelated but very frightening news, my theater today updated its website to include an ad for the Ground Floor Reading Series, a.k.a. “the readings of the playwriting students’ MFA thesis plays.” The readings are in April, and it’s terrifying to see them mentioned on the website already. This program goes by so fast!

Monday was a holiday, but honestly by Friday I had completely forgotten that I’d had a short week. It was just THAT busy.

My first Tuesday class of the semester met this week. It’s basically a continuation of last semester’s short-plays workshop, just like Thursday’s class is a continuation of the full-length workshop. This semester though the class feels a lot more structured, with an actual syllabus and assigned readings. Last semester the format was much looser, and we pretty much brought in ten-minute plays whenever we had them ready. The structure will most likely be a good thing for me and force me to keep writing regularly, but it will be challenging. We have an assignment for the next class—we’re supposed to overhear a conversation someplace in public, write it down verbatim, and then use it as a jumping-off point to create a scene. The problem is I haven’t heard any interesting conversations yet. And I’m afraid if I start eavesdropping on the T that any conversation I write down will very quickly devolve into “Who is that weird girl writing down everything I say???” We also have a small mountain of ten-minute plays to read for next week.

I met with my professor on Wednesday to talk about my full-length play. I was supposed to set up a time to meet with her at school, but I told her that my work schedule is crazy and that I work ten-hour days on non-class days, and she was really nice and offered to meet me closer to my house during my lunch break (since I work from home and it takes an hour on the T into BU). So I met up with her in Davis Square in Somerville and had a really great discussion about my play and where it’s going and how to get it finished. I’m shooting for having the first draft done and ready to be workshopped in class on February 11. I’m not quite sure yet just how that is going to happen, but it will. There will likely be lots of coffee involved.

Friday we had a special “skills lab” with BU’s undergrad actors and graduate directors at the College of Fine Arts. We do a couple of these every semester, and they’re always fun. I had to take a half vacation day from work to be able to make it though since it met during the day. We all bring in a scene or two, and each of us gets a group of actors and a director to work with. The actors read through the scene and then we all talk about it, and the director talks about how he/she sees the scene working, and then we usually try to go through it once more with the actors moving around or trying different things. It’s helpful for everyone because the actors get a chance to see what it’s like working with brand-new plays still in development, the directors get to experience working with new material and interacting with playwrights, and the playwrights get some really helpful feedback and a chance to work with a director. Which is important since theater by nature is such a collaborative process. After the skills lab was over, six of us from class went out to grab dinner. I love when I actually have time to be able to see my classmates outside of the theater instead of having to rush home and work.

I have so much to get done for this week. I need to get working on my full-length if I want it done by the 11^th, and I have that conversation assignment due on Tuesday. I also have to write a one-page proposal for a travel fellowship, but I will talk more about that next time because it deserves its own entry. Now it is time to get started on the aforementioned small mountain of ten-minute plays I need to read.

Yesterday was my first day of class for the spring semester. It was also, as I mentioned in a previous entry, my birthday. Most of the other students in the class are in their mid- to late-twenties, but we also have two women who are a little older and have school-aged children. When these two women learned that my birthday coincided with the first day of class, they each brought in a cake and arranged for the class to sing Happy Birthday as we walked into the theatre. It was really sweet of them (and it worked out perfectly because I didn’t have time to eat before I left, and class runs from 12–3 right during lunchtime, so I was starving). One of the cakes was doubling as a “New Year’s cake,” and there were little Monopoly pieces baked into it. One of the woman’s children had written up fortunes that corresponded to each piece, so if you found a piece in your slice of cake you received a fortune for the upcoming year. My slice had the Monopoly thimble hiding in it—the corresponding fortune said that I was going to save money. I found it funny that I am allegedly going to save money during the year that I am a poor graduate student.

Class itself was fun too. This class is a continuation of last semester’s workshop on full-length plays, only with a new professor taking over. Our professor had emailed us over the break and asked us to bring in 5–10 pages of something brand new that was part of “the play you’ve been avoiding writing.” It was a tough assignment. I’ve been throwing around the idea for months of writing sort of a dance/music/text fusion piece, but I had no clue where to begin or how to approach something like that. This assignment forced me to at least imagine what the opening minutes of such a show might look like. What I brought into class was pretty bizarre and will probably change entirely when the piece is developed, but it was fun to just get something completely new and different out there. The current full-length I’m working on (the Somerville family play) is very realism based and does a lot of playing around with dialogue and language, so I wanted to try something as far away from that as possible, where I couldn’t rely on dialogue to carry the piece. I do want to finish the family play first though and work on the dance play on the side when I need a break.

I went out for lunch with three other classmates after class ended, which was fun. On normal Thursdays, I’ll have to rush back home after class and put in another couple hours of work at my job, but I took a vacation day yesterday so that I’d have the afternoon free. Two of the girls are from the Bay Area, so there was lots of talk about their breaks in California and how coming back to freezing temperatures and snow on the ground was not a good time. And the three of them are all in a dramaturgy class (fulfilling one of their non-workshop electives), which meets on Fridays from eight in the morning until noon. I can’t imagine being functional that early in the day for four hours (I know, I know, my science major friends who had marathon labs are rolling their eyes at me right now, but I’m just not a morning person). And I don’t have the space in my schedule to take more than the two required writing classes per semester—I’d never be able to fit in my work hours if I took more than two classes.

Speaking of my work hours, I’ll restart my crazy schedule on Monday. Classes will be on Tuesdays and Thursdays, so I’ll work half-days on those days (from 7:30–11:30 in the morning Tuesdays and from 8–10:30 in the morning and then again after class from 4–5:30 in the afternoon on Thursdays). I’ll have to make up the hours I miss on those half-days, so I’ll be working from 8–6 on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. It’s similar to what I did in the fall. It was so nice to have a normal 9–5 work schedule again during the semester break, but I’m also happy to be back in class despite the craziness it wreaks upon my schedule. It was harder to keep myself motivated to write when I knew I didn’t have class twice a week and there were holidays all over the place. I believe Holy Cross is also starting up classes again this coming week, so good luck to any current students who may be reading this!

It’s Monday. My spring semester officially begins on Thursday, which is also coincidentally my 28^th birthday. I figured I should share some of the highlights of my first semester with you before jumping into the second one. Most MFA programs accept less than five students, but we have a big class at BU this year—there are eight of us, which is twice the size of their usual Playwriting classes. It’s been fun having a bigger group because we all have our own personal style and unique background, so you get feedback from a wide variety of perspectives.

We had to take two workshops this fall—one class focused on writing full-length plays, the other devoted to writing shorter pieces, ten-minute and one-act plays. Both classes were workshop format, meaning that on a given day, a few students bring in work that they’ve written, and the work is read aloud in class and given critique and feedback. In our short-plays class, we serve as each other’s readers, which is fun because I get to do a little acting. In our full-length class, however, the program hires local actors to come in and read for us, which is really cool. It’s also terrifying. Sometimes I ask myself why I went into playwriting when hearing my work out loud makes me want to block my ears and run into the nearest dark corner to hide. I’ve always been introverted and shy, and I thought that hearing my unpolished first drafts read out loud would send me into a weekly panic. I’ve been ok though. Everyone in the class is supportive and wonderful. It’s really great to hear them laugh at lines that you’re not quite sure were funny, and the feedback is always insightful. I’ve learned how vital it really is to hear works in progress read out loud. It’s completely beyond helpful for the revision process.

In one of the scariest moments of the semester, our short-plays class did a brief lesson on writing song lyrics for musicals, and each of us had to write lyrics for prerecorded musical tracks of a ballad and an uptempo piece. The scary part? We then had to sing the songs we’d written in front of the class. I am not a singer. During my Holy Cross years, I appeared in a couple Fenwick shows and an ACT straight show, but I could never get cast in a musical because my throat closes up and I panic whenever I have to sing by myself (unless it’s for Rock Band, which I love). Most of the class was just as nervous as I was about singing. But to ease our collective nerves, we all met up as a class beforehand to go out to lunch at a pub across the street from the theatre. We had a great time, and I was so much less nervous when it was my turn to perform in front of them. I felt like I’d come a long way from the girl who broke down in tears during Voice in Acting class on more than one occasion.

I also had a really key moment in one of my full-length classes. I’m originally from Somerville, MA, and I’m living there again while I attend grad school. The full-length play I’ve been working on is about a Somerville family, and I have it staged on a big open set where the audience would be able to see every room in the house at once and action could take place in and across multiple rooms. The actors were reading through one of my scenes, and the professor stopped them midway through and asked me come up to the stage and position the actors where they would roughly be if we were staging an actual production. So instead of six actors lined up across the stage, I had a few far right, one far left, and two that had to climb a ladder that happened to be on stage to simulate being on the second floor. The actors then read the scene over again, this time shouting across “rooms” of the house and crossing in and out of “rooms” where the stage directions indicated. It was amazing how much more effective my scene was seeing it with even the most minimal level of blocking applied to it. It was one of those moments where it clicked with me that “wow, I’m really doing this. I’m really in this program and writing a play and it’s actually coming together.” It is a moment that I look back on for encouragement on days where I’m struggling to move forward with the script.

I guess that about brings us back to the present. I’m currently enjoying the last few days of my semester break. I’ve been away from class since December 7, and in that time I’ve gotten to attend a party at my theatre, my office’s annual holiday party, and several family events. I have a really big extended family—my mother is the oldest of seven, and I am the oldest of 21 grandchildren on that side. Every year one of my aunts hosts a big giant Christmas party for the entire family, and then there’s a second party on Christmas Eve for anyone who is available to make it. This year we also had a special New Year’s Day party where we all gathered to watch the Bruins play at Fenway in the Winter Classic. One of my brothers decided that our immediate family all needed to wear ugly Christmas sweaters to the big family party. Below is picture of said ugly sweaters and another of all 21 grandchildren, together in one photo for the first time (I am bravely posting both of these even though I have glasses-glare in one and redeye in another).

Hi everyone! Welcome to my first blog entry. My name’s Colleen, and I’m a member of the class of 2004. I’m just about to enter my second semester of an MFA program in Playwriting at Boston University, and I wanted to share my progress with all of you. An MFA isn’t a very common degree to pursue (when asked what I’m going to school for, I’ve gotten the comment “a what in what???” when I reply that I’m getting an MFA in playwriting), so I thought it might make for an interesting story. I also noticed that I’m not the only one of my friends who recently went back or made plans to go back to school after spending a few “gap years” in the workplace. I thought that others going through this process or young alums thinking about going to grad school someday might be able to relate.

Some of you are probably thinking “why playwriting?” and I don’t blame you. It’s not exactly the most lucrative of careers. But I love it, even if that took me awhile to discover. I was a double-major in English and Theatre during my years at Holy Cross, and I was also in the Creative Writing program in poetry. I never had a class in playwriting, but for my honors thesis senior year, I decided to try my hand in writing a play in verse, as a way of combining all of my interests into one big final project. One of my advisors, Professor Ed Isser from Theatre, suggested that after graduation I should consider submitting my play to MFA programs. It was something I had never even thought of. I never thought that my writing would be strong enough for graduate programs.

I graduated, got a job as a copyeditor, and settled into my life in the “real world,” but I never forgot about graduate school, and the idea would haunt me every now and then. Finally, on the day of my 25^th birthday, it hit me that I had to stop putting off grad school out of fear and intimidation and just go for it. I knew that if I continued to push the idea out of my head that someday I would regret never trying. I contacted a few Holy Cross professors, who were more than willing to give me advice even though I had been out of school for over three years. I finally applied, which was one of the most daunting processes ever, and I started at BU this past September.

And because I’m insane, I also decided to keep my copyediting job while going to school. My company has been great and allows me to work from home with flexible hours so that I can attend my classes. I took two playwriting workshops this past fall, and I am in two more this spring. I’m hoping to take two electives in the first summer session and one more in the second summer session. If I can make that schedule work, and then transfer in the literature course I took last year at UMass Amherst, I should be done with my degree by September 2010. It’s such an intense program, and I’m looking forward to sharing the rest of my progress with all of you. I can guarantee that there will be weeks when I am stressed out of my mind, but at least it should make for some good stories to share.