Another Story

Forces beyond my control

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Following a few quiet months, I have multiple events this spring. First up, I’ll be in conversation at Ohio University on Wednesday, March 4, 2026 at 3:00 PM in Ellis Hall Room 109 in Athens, Ohio, as part of the Popcats Culture Series. Free and open to the public.

The other morning after dropping off my son at school, “Les Fleurs” by Minnie Riperton came on the car stereo. I had the volume up, and something about the bumps in the road and the stops and the turns matched the music. It made the scenery of gray snow mountains, the white haze of sky, the clapboard houses and the long line of cars and school buses feel like it meant something else, meant more.

It also returned a memory to me. When I was 17 or so, I was brought to NYC by Stephen Sondheim’s Young Playwrights Inc. (I was a teenage playwright and that was an incredible program). We were staying in the NYU dorms, kept ourselves up late talking, and my new friend Adam learned I had never heard The Three Penny Opera before.

The next morning, our first early morning walk to the rehearsal space in Hell’s Kitchen, Adam said: Here. He put headphones on my ears—those 1990s thin-banded, foam on ear headphones—and played The Three Penny Opera on his Discman. Loud.

I remember spinning around, seeing the brick buildings, the garage doors, the awnings, the puddles on the sidewalk, the fog of high humid summer, the water towers all differently as the music swelled. Like everything was part of a larger play, like it all—including us kids—had other, deeper meaning.

He held my hand so I wouldn’t wander into the street. It was that transporting. It was another story.

I can’t believe I forgot that memory. It was such a happy part of my history. Adam became a theater critic, I think. I stopped writing plays and musicals because you need a crew to produce them, and novels I could just do by myself. I regret that. I regret a lot. But it’s hard to do everything. As a single mother, it’s often hard to do anything at all.

Since AI vomited its way into our lives, I have worried a lot about my future as a storyteller. The truth is, I don’t know. Very recently, it panicked me. I don’t have an agent at the moment. I have two novels under contract, but beyond that I. Do. Not. Know.

Humans seem hell bent on getting stupider by the second, outsourcing thinking while destroying the only planet we have. Some of my most talented friends have been out of work for over six months while the most thoughtless person you know is using AI to generate a simple text message.

But that’s not all humans. That’s not me or my son. It’s not my friends. And writing novels, as much as I love it and have made my career in it, is not the only way to tell a story.

Music is a way to tell a story. That’s the thought I had when Riperton’s song came to an end. A way I can do but have neglected for too long.

Sewing is a way to tell a story. A few weekends ago, friends and I sat in a snowy field station with mugs of coffee, surrounded by birdsong and scraps of fabric, and learned three new stitches. I carefully repaired a hole in my favorite pair of red mittens. They’re missing a pom-pom. I don’t remember the story, but I think my cat ate it.

What you pay attention to is a story. What you tend to vs. what you neglect. Being alive is a story. The body is a story. Mine is a story for another time.

The fact is, as long as we have memories and experiences we’ll have stories, and just because I might have to tell them in new or different forms due to forces out of my control doesn’t mean I’m going to stop. I’m never going to stop.

Hiking with a new friend last weekend I told her living without trees in Denver made me feel lonely. I had never been able to characterize the feeling, to understand it, until I found myself saying it aloud to a near-stranger, finding its narrative home. The name for living without trees. Lonely. That was it.

That too is a story, and as long as I live, my stories live in me and have the potential to be born in different ways. The only constant, as is always the case with art, is that they’re going to change.