Sophfronia Scott's Blog: Sophfronia Scott, Author, page 23
September 24, 2018
American Theater Group Stages Reading of Unforgivable Love Adaptation
This week a cast assembled by American Theater Group, a regional program based in South Orange, New Jersey, presented a staged reading of The Affairs of Midnight by Sophfronia Scott. An enthusiastic audience of nearly 100 attended and remained for a talk back with the the playwright, director, and cast and provided strongly positive feedback. Affairs is earlier work by Scott that she later developed into the 2017 novel Unforgivable Love. The piece is set in Harlem, 1947 and tells of a nightclub owner who sets his sights on a society lady in a tale of romance, intrigue, and betrayal. It’s based on the classic story Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Leslie Lewis and ATG’s James Vagias produced the reading in the Loft at the South Orange Performing Arts Center. Marshall Jones III, artistic director of Crossroads Theatre Company, directed the reading with the following cast:
MAE: Antu Yacob
VAL: Jordan Russell
ELIZABETH: Kianne Muschett
CECILY: Nia Robinson
GLADYS: Nikkole Salter
SAM: Michael Gene Jacobs
ROSE: Petronia Paley
REV. STILES/SEBASTIAN: Eddie Murphy
MAID/LOUISE: Cassandra Ogbozor
STAGE DIRECTIONS: Sienna L. Jones
September 18, 2018
Finding Your Writing Community
Today’s video: Having a writing community helps ease the solitary nature of this creative path we’ve chosen. Here are a few suggestions for finding your own community easily and without having to go too far from home. Let me know in the comments some of the ways you’ve sought out other writers.
Your Morning Walk with Sophfronia, September 18, 2018
September 16, 2018
Prioritizing Your Writing
A new video: What do you need to do/change/arrange in your schedule so you can prioritize your writing and have, in the words of playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, “both eyes on the work”? Your Morning Walk with Sophfronia, September 16.
New Video Series: Your Morning Walk with Sophfronia
I’ve wanted to do a video series for a long time now. Last year my friend Debbie Phillips made a video for our Women on Fire group every day for a year! Dr. Frank A. Thomas, another dear friend, goes live on Periscope every Monday morning at 8 a.m. to talk about sermon writing, his specialty. But I hesitated because I thought it would take too much time to record and upload videos. And, honestly, I wasn’t sure if I would have something to say!
Recently, while attending the Hobart Festival of Women Writers in Hobart, NY, a small community located in the Catskills, it occurred to me that I wanted to show where I was and share something of what was happening at the festival that day. A video seemed to be the best way to do that. I also thought about these two items:
I like taking walks in the mornings.
I like to talk about writing and the writing life.
Why not combine the two? Hence was born “Your Morning Walk with Sophfronia.” I was surprised how easy it was to record a simple video on my phone and get it uploaded and shared. So I’ll keep going! The videos will always be short, about three minutes. I aim to post 2-3 videos a week, but we’ll see how that goes. You can check out the first four here. I’ll post today’s video, the fifth, in a separate blog post and will continue to give each video its own post here from now on. You can subscribe to my YouTube channel to get immediate notification whenever I post a new video.
I hope this will be the start of a great conversation or, at the very least, give you a few things to think about to help your writing. If you’re not a writer I hope you’ll enjoy the locations and seeing a little bit of my world.
Take care, and thanks for watching!
In this first video I talk about letting go when something is not turning out well with a project.
On this walk, I talk about the sense of place when conjuring a location in your writing
Let’s talk about routine and why a broken one can be a good thing.
An ode to the mentors you can find on your bookshelf! Big shout out to Bill Roorbach and his wonderful book THE REMEDY FOR LOVE.
Friends Journal Reviews This Child of Faith
Friends Journal, a publication whose mission is to communicate Quaker experience in order to connect and deepen spiritual lives, recently published a review of This Child of Faith: Raising a Spiritual Child in a Secular World. The reviewer, Claire J. Salkowski, writes:
“Many parents grapple with similar issues of faith and personal belief, wondering how best to impart such values and provide meaning to their children. Although the author does not claim to have all the answers, she deftly models a way that may serve as a guide for others.”
August 23, 2018
Why I Don’t Mind Being on the Road
What’s the deal with travel? Why do we love it in some forms, but not others? August is a big travel month and many people are on the move, squeezing the last days out of summer vacation. I’ve seen Facebook photos of friends in Mexico, Florida, Scotland, Amsterdam, Iceland, Hawaii, and more. They are on cruises, on planes, and on trains. The comments from our mutual friends express admiration, even jealousy, and reiterations of bucket list destinations. Wanderlust seems rampant.
The Loft Literary Center Store in the Minneapolis airport.
For over a year now I’ve been traveling. I travel to teach (Denver this winter, for example, for Regis University’s Mile-High MFA program or Ohio this summer for the Antioch Writers’ Workshop), to speak, and to read from my published books. When I hit the road I too post photos from the road and check in from various locations. But when I see friends in person often someone will comment about my travel as though it’s a hard thing: “You’ve been on the road a lot. Glad to be home for awhile?” I understand where they’re coming from. Travel can be wearing on the body and soul, especially if you log tens of thousands of miles a year. But it’s not like that for me. I don’t mind being on the road.
This is my life. I’ve been working for years to get to this point where I get asked to board a plane and come to people. Also, remember, I work from home. Taking a trip breaks my routine and fills my creative reservoir with new people and sights and sounds. The words on the wall at the Loft Literary Center store are, to me, my marching orders as an artist. I must read, write, create, and explore. The trips I take are my best opportunities to explore and I’m grateful for every mile. Will I feel the same after unpacking for the umpteenth time? I don’t know. For now I want to enjoy this. I’ve invested in new luggage including a suitcase with a battery charger for my phone and wheels so smooth I feel like I’m gliding through the airport. I received my TSA pre-check number and even decided on a “travel uniform” so I won’t have to think about what to wear every time I head out. (By the way, my luggage is from Away. I have the Bigger Carry-On and the Everywhere Bag. I highly recommend it. This link will give you a $20 discount if you want to check it out.)
Lawrence Public Library Poster
And I revel in the little things. I love the Biscoff cookies some airlines give out for snacks, fountains that can fill a tall water bottle, rocking chairs overlooking airport tarmacs, and a window seat providing spectacular views. I’m traveling a lot this autumn, through early November, starting with a trip to Lawrence, Kansas on September 4 for a reading at the public library there. I’m also bound for the Catskills, Phoenix, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Missouri. My full schedule is available on my Events page here. Yes, sometimes I don’t know how I’ll meet deadlines and I worry about getting sidetracked from writing my next novel, but it’s okay. My writing will always be better for it.
I believe travel can transform. And just to show you I know the difference between traveling for work and traveling for those Facebook-worthy WOW moments, I do have a plan to combine the two. I’m teaching a very special writers retreat, the Write of Your Life Retreat, in Italy next year (September 8-15, 2019).
Birds’ eye view of Villa Margherita
This is a small group adventure–we’re taking just 20 writers. We’ll stay at the Villa Margherita, Country House Hotel located on the River Brenta, 20 minutes from Venice. The peace and tranquility of the Veneto countryside has for years inspired writers including Lord Byron, Robert Browning, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Mann and Daphne du Maurier.
I believe we all have a reservoir of creativity within us. It is filled with the inspiration we take in during the course of our lives, everything from a beautiful painting in a museum to a beloved song on the radio to the fascinating sight of a hummingbird feeding on flowers. For writers, this reservoir fuels our work and encourages us to soar on the page.
However these days the whole “butt in the chair” mentality is stressed to the point where writers spend much of their time alone in a room mining for words. On one level that’s great—it’s how our work gets done! But on another level it drains our resources. Eventually the reservoir runs dry and all manner of difficulties ensue, including the dreaded writers’ block.
What’s the remedy? Filling the reservoir at regular intervals, in ways large and small. You may already do this little by little (reading, talking walks, seeing a good movie). It’s why I enjoy the travel I’ve been doing. But this trip is about going big.
My dear friend the brilliant Janet Simmonds of Educated-Traveller has partnered with me to design and arrange this dreamy voyage. Here’s the flyer where you can read all the details: WOYL_Flyer_digital. I’ve wanted to go to Italy ever since I saw the film “A Room with a View.” I can’t wait to go. If you have an adventurous spirit and a desire to inject renewed energy into your writing life, consider this my personal invitation. I hope you’ll join us. And I hope you enjoy every trip that takes you to new and enlightening destinations.
July 9, 2018
Wide-Open Country and Romantic Dreams: An Interview with Sophfronia Scott
At Fiction Writers Review:
“We tend to think of being an artist in terms of inspiration, but we also need to know how to work”: Author Kali VanBaale chats with Sophfronia Scott about misbehaving characters, what writers can learn from Bruce Springsteen, writing across genres, and Sophfronia’s new novel, Unforgivable Love, published from William Morrow.
Go here to read the full interview.
Kali VanBaale is the author of the novels The Good Divide and The Space Between. She is the recipient of an Eric Hoffer Book Award, American Book Award, an Independent Publisher’s silver medal for fiction, and a State of Iowa major artist grant. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Midwestern Gothic, Numéro Cinq, Nowhere Magazine, The Milo Review,Northwind Literary, Poets & Writers, The Writer, and several anthologies. Kali holds an MFA in creative writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts and is a faculty member of the Lindenwood University MFA Creative Writing Program. She lives outside Des Moines with her family.
July 3, 2018
What Happened On June 21, 2018
What happened on June 21, 2018? A lot! And you’ll get to know so much of it thanks to a fascinating project launched by Essay Daily. The editors of the website devoted to a particular form of creative nonfiction, the essay, asked writers from all over to write about their day on a single day, June 21st. “It’s the solstice, so in theory it has more day than any other day this year, which is why we picked it,” they said. The website is publishing the results daily through the coming weeks. Already there’s been remarkable reading from Sonya Huber, Melissa Matthewson, John Proctor, Dinty W Moore, and many, many more. The range of experiences is amazing to see at once. You can read more about the project at this link. Once you start reading the missives you won’t be able to stop!
My entry ran this week. June 21 for me turned out to be a mini-odyssey of returning to Connecticut after being away for several days teaching and speaking at the Publishing in Color Conference in New Jersey at the New Brunswick Seminary. “…the rose campion flowers have bloomed in my absence. Their winking pink faces welcome me home.” Check it out by going here. I hope you’ll enjoy it and think about how many things large and small can happen on these long summer days.
June 30, 2018
‘The Write of Your Life’ Sept, 2019
via ‘The Write of Your Life’ Sept, 2019
The cat is officially out of the bag: I’m teaching a very special writers retreat in Italy next year! If you have an adventurous spirit and a desire to inject renewed energy into your writing life, consider this my personal invitation. I hope you’ll join us! All the details are here. #Grateful to my dear friend Janet Simmonds of Educated-Traveller for helping me design and arrange this dreamy voyage.
For details use the link above to access our write up at Educated-Traveller.
June 14, 2018
Discovering the Amazing Pauli Murray
For the “learn something new every day” files…
My friend, Yale lecturer Stuart Semmel
This week I connected with a college classmate, Stuart Semmel, who lives on the campus of Yale University. His wife, Professor Tina Lu, is Head of College of Pauli Murray College and he’s Associate Head as well as a senior lecturer in history and the humanities. When he first mentioned this information I had to ask, “What’s Pauli Murray College?” He replied that its one of the two new residential colleges at Yale (the other is Benjamin Franklin College) and that he’d be happy to give me a tour. By the way, a residential college is akin to the houses at Hogwarts—it’s a student’s home base for all four years of their Yale experience.
I didn’t ask, “Who’s Pauli Murray?” I should have because I didn’t know, but at that point I was distracted by thoughts of what sort of modern concrete and glass behemoth had been plopped down amid Yale’s beautiful Georgian and Gothic structures. I assumed that’s what usually happens with new construction on historic campuses.
During my visit with my classmate I was delighted to make these two discoveries:
1.) Pauli Murray College is a gorgeous gothic style stone and brick construction. Robert A.M. Stern Architects designed it. I marveled over the old world touches, especially the intricate stone work which, Stuart pointed out, features a variety of symbols and quotes meaningful to Yale and to Pauli Murray.
“I thought they didn’t build like this anymore,” I said in wonder.
Stuart explained that stonemasons had actually been brought out of retirement to help with the construction by training a new generation of builders. I was thrilled to learn this brand of magic won’t disappear from existence.
2.) I did ask, at last, “Who’s Pauli Murray?” and learned, with even more amazement, that this residential college at Yale had been named for an African American woman and a fierce one at that. But I’d never heard of her.
What I’ve learned about Pauli Murray so far is absolutely fascinating. A Salon article by Brittney Cooper refers to Murray as “the most important legal scholar you’ve likely never heard of.” That’s a compact way of describing an impressive list of Murray’s trailblazing accomplishments. Here’s how NPR.org laid them out in a 2015 story:
She was arrested in 1940 for refusing to move to the back of a bus, protesting a Virginia law requiring segregation on public transportation — 15 years before Rosa Parks’ similar protest sparked a bus boycott in Montgomery, Ala.
In 1944, Murray graduated at the top of her class from the Howard University School of Law, where she encountered gender discrimination from faculty and fellow students. It was there that she coined the term “Jane Crow” to refer to sex discrimination — the sister of Jim Crow.
Mademoiselle magazine named her “Woman of the Year” in 1947.
The NAACP, then led by Thurgood Marshall, used arguments from a law school seminar paper by Murray as part of the organization’s legal strategy in Brown v. Board of Education. He later called her book States’ Laws on Race and Color“the Bible for civil rights lawyers.”
She was appointed to President John F. Kennedy’s Commission on the Status of Women.
In 1965, Murray became the first African-American to receive a J.S.D. degree from Yale Law School. She wrote scholarly works such as “Jane Crow and the Law: Sex Discrimination and Title VII” and “Roots of the Racial Crisis: Prologue to Policy,” both of which provided incredible insight into the pressing civil rights issues of the time. Following law school, she served as council for civil rights cases, working to challenge discrimination via the court system. [This information comes from Yale’s website.]
She co-founded the National Organization for Women in 1966.
She was the first African-American woman to be ordained a priest in the Protestant Episcopal Church in 1977.
She received an honorary degree from the Yale Divinity School in 1979. [This information comes from Yale’s website.]
In 2012 she was welcomed into Episcopal sainthood, more than 25 years after her death.
The article adds, “A black feminist lesbian who ‘favored a masculine-of-center gender performance during her 20s and 30s,’ she dedicated her work to challenging preconceived notions of race, gender, sexuality and religion.”
You can see symbols reflecting this aspect of Murray in this Yale stonework (right) that also features an incredibly true and beautiful line from one of her poems: “Hope is a song in a weary throat.”
I say this is what I’ve know so far because I plan to keep reading about Murray and I hope you’ll want to do so too. Here are a few links. Enjoy and keep learning!
Articles
An American Credo, an essay by Pauli Murray.
The Many Lives of Pauli Murray, by Kathryn Schulz, published in The New Yorker.
Books
Song in a Weary Throat: Memoir of an American Pilgrimage by Pauli Murray (Liveright).
Jane Crow: The Life of Pauli Murray by Rosalind Rosenberg (Oxford).
