Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Darrah Cloud. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Darrah, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. How did you learn to do what you do? Knowing what you know now, what could you have done to speed up your learning process? What skills do you think were most essential? What obstacles stood in the way of learning more?

Writing well has a life-long learning curve. That’s what it’s all about. Teaching creative writing is a part of that, because it exposes us to points-of-view that are very different than ours, and so are expressed differently as well. Therein lies an enormous gift for anyone who writes: multiple points-of-view lead more closely than anything else to the ultimate truth of a subject. They break the world open to new insight. They feed our understanding of the world in new ways.

Perhaps the best example I have of this is not my own story, but a student’s. She is a recovering addict, and now counsels female recovering addicts at a center in the mission in San Francisco. Every day she passes by people on the streets, many of whom are addicts who have not gotten help. She was assigned to come up with what we call a “teaching practicum”–to invent a class in creative writing, with free rein. She decided to teach her students how to write letters. But not just any letters–letters to addicts. The people she passed every day. And so together we devised a way she might do this based on the tenets of writing well, of showing not telling, of seeing clearly without one’s ego involved to muck things up with judgments. Her students learned to write clear, simple letters (many of them read at a 5th grade level) with rules such as “no use of religious advice” in them; they studied the letters of famous writers; they decorated their letters; and on the last day, they went out to the streets and delivered their letters to addicts they knew. Many were passed-out. Each got a letter tucked into their hand which tried to give them hope and told them people were thinking of them and that they were not alone. We are now trying to create a “movement” to do this type of thing in cities across the country–and maybe the world. Dear Addict is a movement now, perhaps a door to healing addicts, but it is also a way for writers to see their work “published” by being read by someone they don’t necessarily know. This is what writing is all about.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I am, most of all, a playwright. I wrote poetry as a child, stories as a teenager, and went back to poetry in college. I studied poetry in graduate school at the Iowa Writers Workshop and remain very proud that I got in there. But writing poetry is a very isolated task, and I wanted more. So I began turning poetry into plays. In 1981, a play of mine was slated for production at Ensemble Studio Theatre in New York. And so, I moved to New York. There, in between coat-checking and being a personal secretary for an eccentric multi-millionairess, I wrote and wrote and wrote. Eventually, my play The Stick Wife–about the wife of the Birmingham Bomber, and all she did to try and stop him–was produced in LA and thus began a career in writing television movies. The Stick Wife has been produced all over the country and in England and Ireland. Every one of my plays is something I am proud of. My most visible work has been the first adaptation for the stage of a Willa Cather novel, O Pioneers! That musical theater piece has been produced all over the country as well. I loved working on Turning, a commission from Centenary Stage, which is all about the 1936 women’s olympic gymnastics team–but also about racism, as it takes place on the SS Manhattan as the entire team, including Jesse Owens, crossed the Atlantic during Jim Crow. It is all about teamwork. Writing the character of Jesse Owens was a privilege, as is writing the character of Dolores Price right now, as I adapt Wally Lamb’s novel, She’s Come Undone for the stage. I am also working on a new play called The Imaginary Life of Alexander McQueen, which is all about the designer and his wildly incredible way of seeing. These projects are a privilege to work on and require me to step into the shoes of their characters. I love living this way.

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

This answer encompasses a few of the questions you asked. Because I quickly saw as a young writer that there were few good roles for women being written. Women were objects, or side characters, never the main subject, and so many older female actors were sitting around with little of interest to do. I made the decision to write plays in which women’s lives mattered first. To tell these tales, however–to make women the heroes–required my own coming to terms with being a female artist. Who was I? What was my “voice”? Did I have one as a playwright whose task is to capture many voices? But most of all I needed to understand what was truly excellent and meaningful about being a woman myself. That was really hard. I had grown up reading the points-of-view of men for the most part, and I had been trained by them in how to see women. I had rarely seen myself in their work–or rather, I did see myself, as I wanted to be: important to society, listened to, a hero, a meaningful person. Just not female. The women in so many of their stories were in the background. Bringing the way women see the world and accomplish great things in it became my life’s goal and still is.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can provide some insight – you never know who might benefit from the enlightenment.

I think everyone is creative. For that reason, I also detest the label “creatives”. I see creativity in business models every day. I see it in farming, and governing, and how people relate to each other. I see it in people who have to pivot mid-career and find new ways to use their skills. (When the television movie business dried up in the mid-2000s, I had to “pivot” to teaching writing to make a living. When I was elected to be Town Supervisor of Pine Plains, NY, I had to pivot again and learn completely new ways of handling things, speaking to people, and running meetings where disparate and angry voices needed to come together, a skill I had to learn on my feet, the hard way). We are all always trying to come up with new ideas, relevant ideas, better ways to do things. And we are all dealing with feelings that we can’t identify, or explain or handle any other way than by going to the movies and recognizing ourselves, or to a gallery and feeling something familiar, or reading a book that brings memories back we hadn’t processed in our lives. These acts of being, of living, these are all creative. No one is not creative.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: instragram.com/Darrah Cloud
• Facebook: facebook.com/Darrah Cloud
• Twitter: THREADS: Darcy Dorfer and cloud-formation

Image Credits
All images taken by Darrah Cloud. Darrah Cloud’s photo taken by Paula Siwek.