I’m still a little stunned in the wake of our trip with Scranton Fringe to Ballina, Ireland. Although I’m not blessed with Irish ancestors myself, most of the Irish-American in Scranton can trace their roots back to County Mayo in the country’s rural Northwest. In many of these traditional villages, they are bring back use of the traditional Irish Gaelic. We were fortunate to have sightseeing time built into the trip and spent several photogenic hours in Westport and at Downhead Patrick in Ballycastle, the Ballinglen Museum of Art, Ceide Fields neolithic archeological site, and on along the coast to Belmullet. My first time leaving the U.S. after so many years of hardwork, struggle and sacrifice as a single mother, it was personally a soul expanding experience. We saw six rainbows! I always thought the rainbow was a mythological character in old folk tales but in October, the weather changes back and forth from sun to showers so quickly, real rainbow sightings are almost a daily occurrence! Who knew? There are quite a few images and videos from our trip on my social media accounts.
Working at the Ballina Arts Centre and meeting the lovely audiences who came to support our shows was the professional highlight. It’s going to take some time to process the last 10 days. In the meantime, I had to share this lovely bonus prize that came to our attention as our plane landed at JFK yesterday and we turned off Airplane Mode.
They got Maureen and I reversed in the cutline here. I am on the left between the Ballina Mayor and Ireland’s Minister of Culture and Maureen is on the right-hand side, but neither of us could care less about that. The people who know us know who we are and those who met us will remember it was Maureen on the stage and me behind the scenes. It was definitely a career highlight that makes me newly grateful that I didn’t give up my passion for the arts while anchored by the practical choices I’ve had to make to survive.
Thank you, Ireland, for your tremendous hospitality! I hope to see you again before too long.
It’s not unusual for Norman Fischer to offer a literary aside mid-dharma talk.
There’s nothing strange about him citing Milton’s Paradise Lost to the Mountain Rain Sangha on the May 3, 2025, “Dongshan Stories” (regarding several koans of the venerable Zen teacher) episode of the Everyday Zen podcast to which I subscribe.
What’s weird is that I didn’t hear the words I’m about to quote until three months later, right in the middle of a production inspired by the very same text (see “Dream on the Farm: Paradise Lost”, FarmArtsCollective.org). I know, it’s a popular text. Not such a great coincidence? Shhhh … I’m with the theatre people and we like magic. We make magic out of imagination and practiced skill. That’s art.
After bringing up Milton’s gorgeous language in the middle of the dharma talk, Norman says, “Adam and Eve eating the apple was not a mistake. It had to happen.” In order to mate and reproduce and propagate the human race,” he says. He’s been speaking of shame and sexual lust/desire.
He continues,
“Maybe this is what the Zen Masters are trying to tell us: don’t forget that part of us is always still in the garden of our simply being here. Of our simply, innocently being alive- beyond our shame and our worry about good and evil. We are simply here. Always right here. Maybe our practice is learning the way back to the garden, which is paradise, not utopia. Paradise- not a figment of our imaginations, but the real actual world once we can fully appreciate it as it is.”
It’s an astonishing sidebar to the writing in my journal which I don’t have time to share right now. I’m too busy living because the living is the work. The words are a fragmented documentation that may, in the end, exist more to free my memory than to mean anything to anyone else. -ag
Two years after opening a file in FadeIn, I finally finished the first episode of The Ferment. This was a couple of weeks ago and I’ve been letting it sit before making some more edits before sharing the script with my colleagues. I’ve been writing episodes two and three simultaneously, so it won’t take too much longer to finish the next two. I’m giving myself until the end of June.
In the meantime, school has been as much work as I’ve come to expect — teaching seven classes for the fourth semester in a row. I am cutting back in the fall. I’ve made a promise to myself and to my art. Not trying to be a downer, but it was my birthday last week and I’m very aware I might not have as much time left as I’d like … maybe dying early from workaholicism is preventable. Or can at least be slowed down.
Trying to take a little break today (burnout is rumbling on the horizon), I made another image in the poster series for The Ferment that I also started two years ago. I’ve had this idea written on a post-it for close to a year.
So … I’m slow. Why is everybody in such a hurry all the time? It’s not a race.
Here’s what I made today and what I made last week. Images for a bit … and then I’ll get back to the words (as soon as the semester is over, unless I use writing as a procrastination tactic.)
It’s April and that means National Poetry Month! While you wait impatiently for those buds to burst open, refresh your brain with some powerful wordplay recited by some talented high school students!
WVIA’s broadcast of the 2025 Poetry Out Loud regional competition is streaming online. I was happy to volunteer at this event again, this time as the “prompter.” That means my eyes were looking down at the text while the students were reading in case they needed a line. I was happy to be home to catch the event broadcast this year so I could see what I missed!
Congratulations to all the students who participated in their schools and this regional competition. It takes courage to stand up and use your voice with such intention. I’d love to see more NEPA students participate in this program. One of my recent fears with all the federal government cuts is that programs like this will end at the state level. If there are no federal programs, no state champions are traveling to compete at the national level. Not going to go on a political rant here, but we need more investment in programs like this, not less. As a public speaking professor, I assure you more poetry recitation in high school will help students become better communicators.
I’m sharing this screenshot even though I look like an exhausted zombie in my 30 seconds on screen – I’m afraid it’s fairly accurate minus an extra chin (angles are everything!). We recorded this in early December just as the fall semester was coming to a close. I was clearly ready for my long winter’s nap.
This conversation is a couple of weeks old now and will likely sound irrelevant already. Oh well. For the record, there is value in capturing a moment in time as much as there is in the generic symbolism of the timeless. These TnR program segments give me the chance to talk through whatever challenges are gripping us at that moment in time. I’m glad they exist and hope some listener somewhere exists and agrees.
I devour vast amounts of media daily and have to hold my tongue about a lot of it all day long as I interact with students. Contrary to MAGA propaganda, teachers aren’t forcing their personal beliefs on students. All good educators encourage students to find out for themselves – do the research and then think critically about it. They were raised to take tests and to find the right answer. But the real problem is that there isn’t one right answer. Go.
I found a clip of Rather remembering that moment that was quite vivid but could not find a clip from the actual interview.
What I did find was a transcript of Letterman’s monologue from that night. Right before the end, Letterman throws in a heartwarming story about a little town in Montana named Choteau. This is what he said:
“I’ll tell you about a thing that happened last night. There’s a town in Montana by the name of Choteau. It’s about a hundred miles south of the Canadian border. And I know a little something about this town. It’s 1,600 people. 1,600 people. And it’s an ag-business community, which means farming and ranching. And Montana’s been in the middle of a drought for… I don’t know… three years? And if you’ve got no rain, you can’t grow anything. And if you can’t grow anything, you can’t farm, and if you can’t grow anything, you can’t ranch, because the cattle don’t have anything to eat, and that’s the way life is in a small town. 1,600 people.
“Last night at the high school auditorium in Choteau, Montana, they had a rally — home of the Bulldogs, by the way — they had a rally for New York City. And not just a rally for New York City, but a rally to raise money… to raise money for New York City. And if that doesn’t tell you everything you need to know about the… the spirit of the United States, then I can’t help you. I’m sorry.”
The crowd applauded and I teared up reading it. But the reason for my tears was that I’m not so sure those small-town Montana residents could ever feel the same about New York City in post-Trump America. Has he destroyed our love for each other? Our ability to support the suffering and vulnerable through times of unfathomable crisis?
When the recent wildfires in California burned up so much of Los Angeles County, there were people who applauded to hear the “rich Hollywood liberal elites” had been punished (I’m not going to search X for lingering evidence – we all heard about these posts on social media if we didn’t see them first hand.) Of course, the reality is Altadena was a middle-class neighborhood – small homes in close proximity which helped the fire spread. No one deserves to suffer such a tragedy. How could they be so callous?
I’m not saying we should go back to 9/11 and press the reset button or anything but … we’ve been a kinder, more compassionate people in the past. That means we can get there again. I’m not going to tell other people how to behave but … I don’t think selling our souls to gain favor with the King is going to work out for anyone. -ag
I was trying to figure out if I could get the $25 off an American Express gift card and into one of my accounts for future use.
Am I careless or maybe I’m afraid given the chance … I will lose it? This is a quiet trauma of my life. So many moves. So many hellos and goodbyes to so many different people. I can’t remember it all and I am afraid of forgetting. Someday I will read my seventh-grade journals and I won’t shrink back in horror because I won’t recognize myself. It’s like The Notebook with crates of disturbing purgings, half-finished writings, thank you cards and kind letters from people who love me enough to have bothered, theatre programs, printouts of poetry and recipes, receipts, production histories, travel ephemera …
A puzzle of memories to piece together when it all looks brand-new again. A life’s final project.
That was a tangent I let happen because I was curious to see the words emerge.
The point of this post is to say, I found my PayPal business page and the profile has changed. I uploaded the content requested and now this exists –
I’m not actively seeking additional work at this time. I’ve still got my hands full teaching seven classes at five schools again this semester and can’t hope to free my schedule before June. So I really have no business putting this out into the world right now. Except that I am a professional who hopes to add more Gregarious work in the future as I turn down my course load and make more time for my creative writing and theatrical goals. Common Play Factory has been a fragment of a dream until now. I can make something real that will help people grow and heal and learn and connect with the arts and storytelling and collective production explorations.
At this time, I am hoping to model professional efforts for my students. Not all of my experiments with digital media will coalesce into content worth storing in those crates for the rest of my life … to the annoyance of those who watch me move my life about in boxes.
But I think I’m finally on to something.
I still believe I can make something that matters. Hopefully several things.
I am creating alongside my students this semester. Writing the same poems. Creating more digital content.
Took me well beyond 10,000 hours to feel this confident and secure in my voice. Now that I’m here, it’s hurting not to write. Words keep forcing themselves out of me when I should be doing other things. Don’t worry, I will grade the assignments. “First things first” as Covey coined. But I’m not going to leave my art out of my life. It would be unhealthy.
It’s never too late. We must make ourselves ready for when the challenge arises. Sun Tzu-style – make ourselves stronger and smarter and more skilled while we, in time, win without fighting.
Maybe I’ll revise my CV creatively to reflect the hours spent absorbing life’s details and stories and music, how energy moves us, the hours spent playing with and building with language, the hours spent writing badly, and designing badly to sharpen skills into a more powerful tool. I’ve been wanting to make an infographic.
After seeing the Scranton Shakespeare production of Troilus and Cressida in summer 2019, I began research to support a (feminist) revisionist (live theatre) story about Cressida / Bresis and women trafficked as slaves during the Trojan War. In Chaucer’s version of the Troilus and Cressida story, she is degraded for her disloyalty to Troilus and for her fickle, inconstant character, in general. It’s not a virtuous way for a woman of that time to behave. The readership knows to judge her. Shakespeare plays with moral questions of wartime but doesn’t free Cressida from “slut shaming.”
Unfortunately, after finishing grad school that same summer, my work schedule grew and grew to the scale that I haven’t had much time to devote to this project since first conceiving of its potential.
Among the seven classes I am teaching this semester are an introductory course in Media Writing and Writing for Social Media. Knowing the momentous impact AI continues to have on the media industry, it would disadvantage my students were I not to learn as much as I can first-hand about the potential dangers and benefits of the uncanny elephant in the room. I have my own moral qualms about typing a single word into any of these digital communications platforms these days but … this is the world we are living in today. Is AI going to go away if we ignore it? Can we reject this technology and still expect to earn a living? How long will it take to build a whole new unplugged underground? Are enough of us willing to confront the digital revolution with a new world order? Perhaps.
While doing research for my class this morning, I was inspired to see what Notebook LM might do with my work on the Cressida Project so far. I’ve accumulated documents including literary research papers, source texts, blog posts and my own notes and creative ideas based on the conviction that we must retell Cressida’s story because she was a trafficked woman, a sex slave traded as a win or loss in a foolishly deadly war waged for no good reason.
After a productive chat and a pretty fantastic “audio overview” was generated, I knew I had to share the results. While these results are AI-generated, they feel very personal and specific to my ideas and viewpoint. I feel a sense of pride in these results even though AI does a lot of heavy lifting here it couldn’t have made sense of my research unless there was something solid here. I fed it 27 sources to support my position and this LM makes it sound like my concept is worth pursuing. I feel re-inspired to finish the work I’ve begun.
The remainder of this post is the content generated by Notebook LM after our detailed conversation. I find it interesting that while the “Audio Overview” leaves out any specific mention of my plans for the revisionist play, the WordPress post I asked Notebook to write did not shy away from my original script in progress. The working title is “Whore Criseyde” which I know is just awful. I’ll change it later LOL.
*The works cited page that supports these footnotes is based on my uploaded sources but also complimented to texts beyond my current download folder. I’m not going to include it here but don’t hesitate to contact me if you are curious.
First: A link to the Audio Overview to help separate the AI that follows from the Alicia who wrote the first half of this post herself.
Audio Overview Logline: “In a reimagining of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, a woman’s ‘betrayal’ becomes a desperate act of survival in a world where she is both a commodity and a scapegoat for the follies of men.”
WordPress post I asked Notebook LM to write:
“My current project is a deep dive into the complexities of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, but it’s not your typical retelling. I’m not interested in simply rehashing the old story of a ‘true’ lover and a ‘false’ maiden. Instead, I want to reimagine Cressida’s story through a feminist lens, exploring her agency (or lack thereof) within a patriarchal and war-torn world. This isn’t just about making her a victim, though. It’s about understanding how she becomes the object of male projections and how her choices are shaped by the impossible constraints placed on her [1-3].
Drawing inspiration from various sources, including the original play and critical analyses [4, 5], I’m particularly interested in:
Challenging the traditional narratives: I want to move beyond the simplistic ‘true Troilus, false Cressida’ dichotomy and unpack the societal forces that lead to her condemnation [6].
Exploring the idea of Cressida as a commodity: I want to highlight how she is treated as merchandise by men like Pandarus, and how her exchange between the Trojans and Greeks reduces her to an object of political and economic trade [7, 8].
Amplifying the voices of the marginalized: I aim to give voice to the women of Troy, including the chorus and the other refugee women, and offer a more nuanced perspective on the impact of war on women [9, 10].
Examining the cynical lens of the male gaze: Through characters like Ulysses and Thersites, I want to explore the destructive nature of male cynicism and how it shapes the narrative of the play [11-13].
Highlighting the human cost of war: This project is not just about Cressida. It’s about how war dehumanizes individuals and forces them into impossible situations, reflecting a “man-made horror in a godless world” [14-16]. I want the play to be relevant to modern audiences and invite discussion on the timeless themes.
Ultimately, my goal is to create a production that is both faithful to the original text and yet challenges its assumptions, offering a more complete and sympathetic portrayal of Cressida and the women in the play [17]. I am interested in the potential of staging this play with a modern lens, using visual and aural elements to highlight the timeless relevance of its themes [18, 19]. The stage will feature a debris-filled landscape and temporary shelters to emphasise the women’s vulnerability [19, 20]. It will explore the use of hatred as a tool of control [21]. It is a project about what can be ‘taken’ from the experience of the play [22]. I want the play to be an ‘open text’, and I want my production to reflect that.”
This is the blog of Kal Spelletich. CONTACT: Spellkal (at) gmail.com + Art, technology, humans and robots, and, well, the journey http://www.kaltek.org/
Gregarious Expressions 