Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Pamela Hobart Carter. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Hi Pamela Hobart, thanks for joining us today. Can you share a story about the kindest thing someone has done for you and why it mattered so much or was so meaningful to you?
My school-head aunt saw me.
Granted, she may have been motivated, at first, with pity on her niece, at loose ends on a very quiet summer day, but she asked 11-year-old me to help sort her teacher schedules for the next academic year. Performing the useful task with her gratified my desire to be a full citizen, contributing to society. Our reading of the grids, recognizing any double-booking of classrooms or instructional time, and straightening them out pleased me. I reveled in the organizational aspects. Plus, I got to hang out with Aunt Bee. In those days I was obsessed with being the shortest family member in four generations (my great-grandfather appeared as an elderly man, before my birth, on the chart in the corner of Aunt Bee’s room). My siblings, my mother and her siblings, and my cousins were all taller at my age. I had been feeling small, but in one swoop, as with a wave of a wand, Aunt Bee’s vision decked me out—virtually—with stilts, and the balance to run on them, when my body would not grow fast enough. (One residual: at the school where I last taught, everyone knew my attachment to sorting schedules. Annually, the calendars for common spaces and specialists landed in my queue.)
Weekly I call my 91-year-old aunt. Last week I asked her about her motivations. I wasn’t wrong; she’d thought I could use a worthwhile project. She’d also determined that I would benefit from an interactive task that rendered reading communal. With my mediocre binocular vision, following lines of text challenged me enough that I was not a bookworm. (A possible residual: I like working socially, as in timed-writing groups or with a partner on a play or book.)
Another summer, Aunt Bee gave me a teach-yourself guide to italics. For two hours, daily, I practiced. In high school and college, before everyone had computers–much less, the ability to print various fonts for themselves whenever they needed a flyer, etc.–I made my first non-babysitting money calligraphing posters, wedding invitations, and murals of the meanings of names for an obstetrics waiting room. (Another residual: a marketable skill.)
I revise my first response: Aunt Bee sees me. I am so lucky.
Pamela Hobart, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
Mortality motivates me. Today is the time I have to make things before I die. Now. If I don’t make the things I imagine, no one else will. I make a variety of things. Depending on who asks, and where, I name myself a playwright, poet, novelist, scenic designer, artist, teacher, or geologist–despite having earned living wages only from teaching and a stint as a lab tech.
Young me told people she wanted to be an artist when she grew up. She drew lots of pictures. Drawing gave her satisfaction. She even won a national art contest at age seven and loved the sense that others endorsed this thing she liked doing. Then she fell in love with the strange mix of other disciplines–all of which stuck.
The disciplines inform each other. I commonly treat a classroom like a lab. Many of my plays and poems revolve around science and nature topics. (Some poems are very specifically about rocks and sediment!) Many of my abstract acrylics depict shapes derived from landforms, flora, and fauna. My approach to what I write often resembles a scientific inquiry. (In the same way a scientist designs an experiment or organizes field work in a logical progression, I adhere to reliable processes in my writing. For example, to generate material, I meet for a couple of timed writing sessions weekly or jot a few pages on waking before outside-of-me happenings merge with my day.) Within each discipline, however, I like to tailor the work to its medium–to write plays that can only be plays, poems that can only be poems. This doesn’t mean that one of my whale barnacle characters in a short two-hander might not be a poet, nor that my poem might not incorporate stage directions.
In high school, I wrote plays with my classmates that our drama club performed. About thirty years later, I returned to writing theater. Since then, I’ve written six full-length scripts and dozens of one-acts and ten-minuters. Forty of these have received readings or productions. Playwriting appeals as much for the quiet time scripting at my desk as for the lively collaborative hours of rehearsal and performance. This morning, a script, “Log Boom … or Bust!,” for As If’s Kenmore Quickies, landed in the hands of its actors. I’m eager to hear how the director casts the play. While writing, I had no etched images of which person might be a specific character. This time, all my characters are humans of present day. In my last production, “Loyal,” with Infinity Box Theatre Project, two were human and one was a dog, all of the near-future. Who plays a role influences the flavor of the final meal. A play can taste different each time it arrives at the table. I’m in this dreamy limbo, wondering what we’re cooking up.
Poetry seems like it would be a much lonelier, or at least solitary, preoccupation, and it largely is, but I punctuate my poetic efforts with readings–as audience and reader, a monthly critique session, and a lot of dialogue and group challenges on social media. In April, for instance, I took part in The Poeming’s project—a daily erasure from a banned book. I chose “Charlotte’s Web.” And in June, I managed the Poetry Half-Marathon, writing a poem an hour for 12 hours. I’ve written hundreds of poems, about 200 of which are in print in anthologies, literary journals, and my three–soon to be four–chapbooks: “Her Imaginary Museum” (Kelsay Books), “Held Together with Tape and Glue” (Finishing Line Press), and “Behind the Scenes at the Eternal Everyday” and “Only Connect,” (both from Yavanika Press). “Only Connect” features the photographs of Londoner Robert M L Raynard. I e-met Robert through an art history group on Facebook. The pandemic pushed his photography out from the museum onto the streets of his city. He took wonderful pictures. I wrote poems about them. Now we have a book. This morning, we What’s App-ed plans for a Zoom launch party/presentation. Poetry comes out of its private corner.
When my ESL professor friend Arleen Williams said she needed a kind of book that didn’t exist, a story for adults in easy English, I said, “I’ll write one for you!” The Old House on South 16th Street led us to write, in easy English, 11 other short books for adult English language learners and to form No Talking Dogs Press. We each penned six but walked through the manuscripts together for all revision and editing. Arleen and I first met at an open timed writing group. Although we love the practice for generating work, both of us longed for a similar synergistic camaraderie for the rest of the steps of writing, and so we met weekly for several hours to give each other that extra oomph that comes from committing to another.
I tend to say yes when someone tells me of a creative challenge. A childhood friend told me a couple of years ago about #oneweek100people, and I scurried around with a pad and pen sketching strangers on the bus and at poetry readings and in cafés for that spell, posted my 100 drawings just under the wire, and reveled in the postings by other artists from all over the world—an instant community. A new local theater asked for 10-minute scripts to read at their monthly shows. I submitted. Since that first time, Drunken Owl Theatre has read or produced 17 of my plays, and I’ve read my poetry there multiple times as well. When the artistic director found out I painted, he requested scenic flats for the first production. I designed and painted with another writer-artist, then for all the subsequent productions. Never having written a play, a novelist and poet friend approached me to be a teammate to submit a short one-act. The resulting work could not have come from me by myself, nor from him, by himself. The process was a kick. The play was really okay. We went for it again last month (and just learned that our submission was selected). This year, we took on roles of our characters, and conversed as if in our setting, ignorant of how the story might unfold. We surprised each other. We laughed ourselves a little giddy, and then he uttered a particular line. I said, “That’s it. That’s how this closes.”
Weekly I meet with an accountability partner too. We tell our writing news, map our weeks, and encourage.
I lean into these partnerships. For meetings with fellow creatives, I prepare. I bring the work. Partners introduce to my products rogue elements, weirdness, the unpredictable, the vast galaxies of their imaginations; and to my processes, the anchoring of their friendships, frameworks, and wisdom. So many of the things I’ve made would not exist without their suggestions, requests, collaboration, assessments, instruction, and inspiration.
I also relish my time alone. I cherish autonomy. I sustain my individual passions. When a teenager, it was calligraphy. In college, it was portraiture. Currently, it is the German expressionist, ground-breaking artist Paula Modersohn-Becker. She has inspired a full-length script and a half-dozen poems. With a retrospective of her work in the U.S. right now, an entirely solo mission is to pursue the fantasy of a reading or production of Paula 101 in association with her work.
This morning, I did not touch my novel in progress nor add paint to the any-side-up abstract acrylic waiting on the corner of my desk for the next brushstrokes. I taught absolutely nothing to anyone. I did talk geology over breakfast with my spouse who is passionate about the subject in which I earned two degrees. (His are in architecture.) I did think about the scenic flats for September’s Drunken Owl Theatre production because the DOT newsletter arrived in my inbox. (A few impressions flitted across an inner screen.)
Not every day. Not every month. Not every year, nor even decade, do I manifest, to the exterior world, that inside me, all at the same moment, in every moment, I am a playwright, poet, novelist, scenic designer, artist, teacher, and geologist.
A writer friend asked me just a few days ago which discipline was my favorite. Some wandering silliness came out of my mouth. What I should have told her was, none of them and all of them. My favorite is the one I am doing now. This one.
For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?
I love moving through the realm of imagination, where all is possible. Where I get to turn thought into tangibles I can share. Where I dream, focus, and problem-solve. Where the processes of creating–envisioning, crafting, collaboration, and polishing–result in the production of a new thing–a poem, a painting, or a play–and tell me I am living. There’s something new in my world when I’m done.
Are there any books, videos, essays or other resources that have significantly impacted your management and entrepreneurial thinking and philosophy?
In “Minding the Muse,” Priscilla Long profers a fat roster of useful practices for creatives. The Works List, a catalog of the things one makes, with notes about whether these have been submitted or published, produced, shown, etc., may be the book’s most unusual suggestion. Long’s account of Georgia O’Keeffe’s breakthrough convinced me to keep a Works List. Only after arranging all her paintings chronologically in one space, did O’Keeffe understand how much she had been responding to the influences of mentors. She broke from “following” and began painting in her own style.
Keeping a Works List allows me to see patterns and sequences of events. To be analytical. It is a data set. My data set.
A decade ago, I winowed down certain activities and because of the Works List I can say definitively that of my 40 plays, read or produced, 30 I wrote since then. (Yes, most are ten-minuters.) I also can see how attending the Poets on the Coast retreat prompted a breakthrough in the way I viewed my poetry. Before going, I’d never assembled a poetry chapbook, but now I have three in publication, and a fourth coming out in August 2024. Likewise, I’d never assembled a full-length poetry collection. Last week I had one place in a contest and receive an offer of publication in 2025.
The Works List brings me to awareness–the winowing a decade ago looks as if it was good for the volume of my creative production. Attending retreats likely inspires fruitful practices otherwise unfamiliar to me.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://playwrightpam.wordpress.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pamela.hobart.carter/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pamela.hobart.carter/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pamela-hobart-carter-a1606a41/
- Twitter: https://x.com/Pamhobartcarter
Image Credits
Roy Hirshkowitz-photo of PHC