We were lucky to catch up with Nick Jonczak recently and have shared our conversation below.
Nick, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear the backstory behind a risk you’ve taken – whether big or small, walk us through what it was like and how it ultimately turned out.
A year ago I moved from full time to part time at my well-paying tech job. I’ve worked with this organized for seven years, devoted my life to them for seven years, put my artistic career on hold in many ways for seven years, and after a series of events that made me feel really undervalued at my job, I decided it was time to change. I stepped down from leading a department of six people that I started and took a much less demanding (and less well-paying) role. It was a big financial risk for me to take -when I asked to move to part time, I was sure they would just fire me right then; I was prepared to find a job somewhere else- but I needed to start treating my artistic work as a career and a job. For a year now, I “clock in” at my desk every morning to write for about three hours, before switching over to my money job. I know eventually writing will earn me enough to live, but for now, I’m proud that I’ve made the space in my life to devote a portion of each day to the work that I love.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
I’m a cofounder of the Cannonball Festival, a nonprofit arts organization that pools and redistributes resources to independent performing artists to help them produce new work, and I’m incredibly proud of the work we do. We’re guided by five values: Wild, Loose, Experimental, Delicious, and Pack It In. That last one is our way of saying that we’d rather give a smaller opportunity to a larger number of artists, rather than a larger opportunity to a smaller number of artists, and that approach seems to really resonate with Philadelphia artists. From our founding in 2021 to our third festival in 2023 we grew more than six times in size, from 150 performances of 25 different shows in 2021 to 587 performances of a 154 different shows in 2023. Cannonball is known for presenting edgy, risk-taking performances at low cost to audiences (we offer Pay What You Can tickets starting as low as $5) and for presenting some of Philadelphia’s most innovative, award-winning artists.
In my personal practice as a playwright, I love writing impossible plays. I love writing wondrous images and unstageable stage directions that encourage directors, actors, and designers to play, especially if it costs little to no money. I tend to think in images and I think this comes from my background in physical theatre –anything to delight an audience and give them a sense of “how did they do that???”
I love writing about queerness, gayness, sex, and like what even is masculinity anyway? I love using magic, violence, and horror to explore what it means to be masculine or queer, and I love the interplay between sex and power between characters.
I love building rich new worlds with fully realized characters and spaces, but I also love to pop that bubble and remind the audience that we’re all sitting in the same room together.
Are there any books, videos, essays or other resources that have significantly impacted your management and entrepreneurial thinking and philosophy?
The Desire Map by Danielle LaPorte. I rave about this book to anyone who will listen to me for five minutes. In the book, LaPorte talks about how the reason your goal-setting sucks is that you don’t consider how you want to FEEL when you’re in pursuit of a goal or how you want to FEEL when you’ve achieved it. The book is mostly a pep talk then a work book designed to help you figure out your Core Desired Feelings, the three to five feelings you want to feel in pursuit of your life goals. The feelings might change over time, that’s OK and that’s expected, but they often guide you for months or years at a time. I read this book for the first time about 10 years ago and it was absolutely life changing. It completely upended how I thought about success in my life and helped me to see that I already had many of the things I already wanted in my life. It helped me practice more gratitude AND it helped me get MORE of what I was looking for out of my life. What used to be difficult choices between this or that for some career advancement became much easier when I was like, nah, that won’t get me the feelings I’m looking for. Truly life changing; go look it up.
For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?
As a creative I live a million lives. Whether it’s creating characters on a page who get to say and do things I would never let myself say or do, or helping present an artist’s show at Cannonball for a fresh audience, I get to live out wild, fantastic, heroic, meaningful stories in all of my work. In a way, I get to live forever AND other artists live forever in me as I continue to think about, talk about, and live out their works in my life.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.nickjonczak.com
- Instagram: @nicholajo
