In any form, there are many different people making work, and there are an infinite number of ways to go about doing it. What matters, it seems, is having a method, identifying it, and making it work for you. For me, that’s often: moving between projects, delay, dreamy delay, a burst of writing, discouragement, the drawer, delay, pulling it out, then consistent effort and repeating many of the steps above. The unbearably easy part (again, for me) is that the breakthroughs with any piece seem to come not only after consistent, hard work or consecutive hours, but from walking away and having another experience altogether. In a museum, in a conversation or another book (find friends who recommend relevant books), watching a movie, going to the theater, even just going outside I might come across something that suddenly reorganizes the structure of the unfinished material in my head in a way that reveals a path forward. And then I have to note that or remember it, or rush home and start writing. For Exit Theater, these moments came over the course of four years in a handful of places I kept returning to: a few theaters in Brooklyn, one room at the Met, and a gallery in a museum in Houston.
—Mike Lala, author of Exit Theater (Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University, 2016)
Photo credit: Kate Enman