Validating Scripts Outside the Big Three: Ian Finley
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CHARLOTTE—On Saturday night of the North Carolina Writers' Network 2018 Fall Conference, Ian Finley will present an abbreviated staging of his new play Native, which explores the relationship and developing tensions between Paul Green and Richard Wright as they try to adapt Wright’s classic novel Native Son for the stage.
Ian also will lead the session "Dramatic Structure, or The Story of My Tattoo."
Fall Conference runs November 2-4, at the Hilton Charlotte University Place. Registration is now open.
Ian Finley holds an MFA in Dramatic Writing from the Tisch School at New York University. He served as Resident Playwright for Burning Coal Theatre Company, a small, professional theatre in Raleigh, from 2004 through 2012. In 2012, he was named the Piedmont Laureate in the field of Playwriting and Screenwriting by the arts councils of central North Carolina. He is the author of The Nature of the Nautilus (winner of the Kennedy Center’s Jean Kennedy Smith Award), And There Was War in Heaven (finalist for the O’Neill National Playwrights Conference), Native, The Greeks, 1960, Jude the Obscure, Suspense, A Perfect Negroni, 11:50, and the Our Histories cycle of site-specific plays for Burning Coal.
This year, NCWN has been celebrating publishers based in North Carolina, so we asked Ian to answer the following prompt:
"Congratulations! You've inherited a large fortune, on the condition that you use it to start your own publishing house. What kind of books are you going to publish?"
Here's what Ian said:
"Because there are a limited number of publishing houses focused on scripts, it's a big challenge for emerging playwrights to get published. They may have well received productions in major cities, but if those cities aren't Chicago, Seattle or New York, getting the validation and boost of a published script is a big challenge. I would love to start Curtain Up Press, a publisher specifically focused on (and actively searching out) writers who have had productions in cities outside of The Big Three and getting them in print. There is incredible theatre from DC to Atlanta (including in North Carolina!); wouldn't it be great to see that in our bookstores too?"
In his session, which is part of an effort by NCWN to expand offerings for writers of stage and screen, Ian will discuss how above all, drama requires conflict. More than in any other form of writing, forces in opposition to each other are the engine of your script (and the way to hold the audience’s interest). Understanding dramatic structure is the key to turning up the conflict, holding your story together, and ultimately developing theme. Useful at every stage of the writing and revising process, dramatic structure is the most valuable tool a writer can wield.
The special performance of Native will be followed by a panel discussion on the play’s themes, and how writers today still grapple with its questions, featuring Paul Green scholar Margaret Bauer, playwright Ian Finley, NC Poet Laureate Jaki Shelton Green, and Native cast members.
Fall Conference attracts hundreds of writers from around the country and provides a weekend full of activities that include lunch and dinner banquets with readings, keynotes, tracks in several genres, open mic sessions, and the opportunity for one-on-one manuscript critiques with editors or agents. Master Classes will be led by Judy Goldman (Creative Nonfiction), Maureen Ryan Griffin (Poetry), Randall Kenan (Fiction), who, as a 2018 inductee into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame, also will give the Keynote Address.
The nonprofit North Carolina Writers’ Network is the state’s oldest and largest literary arts services organization devoted to all writers, in all genres, at all stages of development. For additional information, visit www.ncwriters.org.
New Inductees to Be Honored October 7
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SOUTHERN PINES—On Sunday, October 7, at 2:00 pm at the Weymouth Center for the Arts & Humanities in Southern Pines, the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame will welcome five new inductees.
James W. Clark, Jr., Randall Kenan, Jill McCorkle, Penelope Niven, and Marsha White Warren will join the sixty inductees currently enshrined.
The North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame celebrates and promotes the state’s rich literary heritage by commemorating its leading authors and encouraging the continued flourishing of great literature. Inductions are held every other year. A list of inductees, as well as samples of their work and video clips of past inductions, can be found online at www.nclhof.org.
The afternoon will include readings of the inductees' work by Lynn Duval Clark, Sharon P. Holland, and Jill McCorkle; remarks by Talmadge Ragan of Weymouth and Ed Southern of the North Carolina Writers' Network; and the annual presentation of the Artist's Award, this year to Madison Geer, a woodworker from Charlotte. J. Peder Zane will serve as the Master of Ceremonies. Light refreshments will be served following the ceremony.
This event is free and open to the public.
Dr. James W. Clark, Jr., is Professor Emeritus of English at North Carolina State University. A native of Vaughan in Warren County, Clark holds degrees from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University, and focused his academic career primarily on the cultural geography and literary history of North Carolina, his native state. He has served as president of The Thomas Wolfe Society, The NC Literary and Historical Association, and won the R. Hunt Parker Award for his contributions. In 2017, he completed a decade as president of The Paul Green Foundation, and still serves as president of The North Caroliniana Society.
Randall Kenan, a native of Duplin County, is the author of a novel, A Visitation of Spirits; two works of nonfiction, Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century and The Fire This Time; and an award-winning collection of stories, Let the Dead Bury Their Dead. He edited and wrote the introductions for The Cross of Redemption: The Uncollected Writings of James Baldwin and The Carolina Table: North Carolina Writers on Food. Among his awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship, The Whiting Writers’ Award, the North Carolina Award, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Rome Prize. He is professor of English and Comparative Literature at UNC-Chapel Hill.
Jill McCorkle has the distinction of having her first two novels published on the same day in 1984. Since then she has published four other novels and four collections of short stories. Five of her books have been named New York Times notable books, while three of her stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories anthologies. McCorkle has received the New England Booksellers Award, the John Dos Passos Prize for Excellence in Literature, and the North Carolina Award for Literature. She is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. McCorkle has taught at UNC-Chapel Hill, Tufts, and Brandeis where she was the Fannie Hurst Visiting Writer. She was a Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Fiction at Harvard for five years where she also chaired Creative Writing. She currently teaches creative writing in the MFA Program at NC State University and is a core faculty member of the Bennington College Writing Seminars. A native of Lumberton, she lives with her husband, photographer Tom Rankin, in Hillsborough.
Penelope Niven was the critically acclaimed author of Carl Sandburg: A Biography; Steichen: A Biography, and Thornton Wilder: A Life. She was also co-author, with the actor James Earl Jones, of Voices and Silences. Carl Sandburg: Adventures of a Poet, a biography for children, received a 2004 International Reading Association Prize “for exceptionally distinguished literature for children.” Her memoir Swimming Lessons was published in 2004. Niven received the North Carolina Award for Literature, the state’s highest civilian honor, for her work as a writer and a teacher. She founded and directed the national Carl Sandburg Oral History Project, and was three times a recipient of National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships. She lectured across the United States and in Switzerland, Canada, and Great Britain, and was principal consultant for the PBS film biography Carl Sandburg—Echoes and Silences. She also served as a consultant for television films on Sandburg, Jones, Steichen, and Wilder. At the time of her death in 2014, she lived in Winston-Salem, where she spent twelve years as Writer-in-Residence at Salem College. A native of Waxhaw, she also held two honorary doctorates, among other honors and awards.
Marsha White Warren was an elementary school teacher, poet, and children’s book author when she became Executive Director of the North Carolina Writers’ Network in 1987, only two years after its founding. She would serve in that role until 1996. During those years she helped Sam Ragan develop and open the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame, as well as serving on numerous state and national literary boards and as a consultant to literary centers in Tennessee, Massachusetts, and Idaho. In 1991, she also became director of the Paul Green Foundation and is still with the Foundation after twenty-seven years. In that position, she has overseen $575,000 in grants to nonprofits that support the arts and human rights. Her awards include the John Tyler Caldwell Award for the Humanities, R. Hunt Parker Memorial Award for Lifetime Contributions to Literature, Sam Ragan Award for Contributions to the Fine Arts, and an Honorary Doctor of Letters from St. Andrews College. She lives in Chapel Hill.
The North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame was founded in 1996, under the leadership of poet laureate Sam Ragan, and is a program of the North Carolina Writers’ Network. Since 2008, the Network and the Weymouth Center collaborate with the North Carolina Center for the Book, the North Carolina Humanities Council, and the North Carolina Collection of the Wilson Library at UNC-Chapel Hill to produce the induction ceremony and to promote the NCLHOF and North Carolina’s literary heritage.
For more information, visit the NC Literary Hall of Fame at www.nclhof.org or the North Carolina Writers’ Network at www.ncwriters.org.
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