We caught up with the brilliant and insightful James Magruder a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

James, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to go back in time and hear the story of how you came up with the name of your brand?

My company is called Jack & Toby Productions, after I wrote two plays some twenty years ago featuring Jack (me) and Toby (my husband Steve). Jack is impatient, judgemental, and choleric. Toby is a fountain of calm and balance. When I incorporated my writing business, I wanted to honor Steve’s contributions to my health, well-being, and ability to strike out on my own as a freelance playwright and fiction writer.

James, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

After forty years as a playwright, novelist, translator, librettist, dramaturg, editor, college professor, and arts consultant, I think it’s safe to say that my greatest skills set is an eye and a nose and an ear for STORY. I create my on own, solo or collaboratively in the theater, and I can help unlock and shape the stories of others as an editor and coach.

I have published three novels (SUGARLESS, LOVE SLAVES OF HELEN HADLEY HALL, and VAMP UNTIL READY), a book of linked stories (LET ME SEE IT), a book of play translations (THREE FRENCH COMEDIES), and had two musicals produced on Broadway (TRIUMPH OF LOVE and the more recent HEAD OVER HEELS, a blank verse mashup of Sir Philip SIdney’s ARCADIA and the song catalog of the Go-Go’s). I have taught dramatic literature, dramaturgy, playwriting, fiction writing, and translation and adaptation at Yale School of Drama, Princeton University, Swarthmore College, the University of Baltimore, and the Maisha Film Lab in Kampala, Uganda.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

Writing short fiction for the literary market is a frustrating prospect given the odds of placing a story in a print journal. I receive at least five rejections every week. One of my best stories, “Matthew Aiken’s Vie Boheme,” was rejected by 64 (!) different journals before New England Review, a very prestigious outfit, accepted the story. I worked on another story, published as “Vainglory” by the Hopkins Review in 2019, for 14 years. The lesson here is don’t give up. A more personal lesson is don’t be afraid to revise and edit your work. I tend to rush my work to market before it is really ready.

Does your business have multiple or supplementary revenue streams (like a ATM machine at a barbershop, etc)?

My earnings, such as they are, come from royalty payments–some from projects I completed almost thirty years ago–to editing fees, to commissions for new work for the theater. I call the checks “mailbox money” since I never know what I’m going to get when I open the envelope.

Image Credits
Miriam Barkley