This summer, award-winning playwright Caity-Shea Violette, an alum of our Stories We Tell testimonial writing workshop for survivors of gender-based violence, and novelist R. Clifton Spargo the co-creator of that program and a lecturer in creative writing at Yale University, came together for a discussion focused on creativity, craft, and writing for page, stage, and screen.
For Caity-Shea, who took part in a 2012 Stories We Tell writing workshop, her time with us was transformative. “Writing about anything too close to my lived experience felt risky… but this organization immersed me in a community of writers who believed my story as a point of entry, so I could get feedback about the actual storytelling devices without the pressure of proving that story was real.” In the years since, Caity-Shea — who most recently won the Kennedy Center ACTF Harold & Mimi Steinberg Playwriting Award — has experienced great success.
As featured guest in Clifton’s creative writing class for Yale Summer Session, Caity-Shea fielded questions from students about her plays, her craft for stage and screen, and various facets of her career. With regard to her visit and her gifts as a playwright, Clifton said afterward, “Caity-Shea is able to honor her activist’s conscience and deeply feminist sensibility in drama that is simply great storytelling, drama which draws us close to flawed, aspiring, diverse characters, so that we feel their pain, their triumphs, their failings as so very like our own.”
