Author Archives: Jonathan King
This Is the End
You mean it’s over? This Sunday, we leave Northern Ireland and return to the States. It’s as if I’m returning to another life in a parallel universe; everything here feels familiar and yet noticeably different. When I go home, coins will be disused, debit cards will work more often, I’ll be able to drive, and […]
Unprompted: How to Out-Meta a Warman, or The Height of Absurdity
(Please note, the following has nothing to do with Northern Ireland, playwriting, or anything for which this class exists. It is purely silliness for silliness’s sake and both a jibe at and a tribute to a good friend. Abandon all deep thought, ye who enter here.) So how does one out-meta Chris Warman? This is […]
Laughter at Last
We did it. We performed today. We gathered with an audience of about fifty people in a little box of a theatre (thank God it was one of the only air-conditioned rooms in Armagh) and sat all in a row, staring back at the risers where our compatriots and our critics perched. Our scripts were […]
More Philosophical Ramblings (If You’re Still Keeping Up, Congratulations)
Day Two of Hewitt Festival was a good deal better than Day One for two reasons. First, while my crime fiction workshop has still to teach me anything new about writing (I’m now convinced that the best and only way to learn about writing is just to do it), it has revealed a great deal […]
Enjoying the Festival?
So we’ve just been through Day One of the John Hewitt Festival. What are my first impressions? It was okay. I mean, the opening ceremony was interesting. I didn’t know there were any Indian people living in Ireland, so the Indian speaker was a bit of an eye-opener for me. The lunchtime reader had some […]
Unprompted: The Flies of Vinegar Hill
They say you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar So why are there so many flies on Vinegar Hill? Black-bodied, red-eyed sons of Satan Buzzing, droning across the stones Tasting them with their feet Do they taste death still? Are these the children of 1798 Whose fathers crawled across rosy flesh grown pale […]
Home Is Where the City Is?
“So where are yiz from?” asks the girl behind the counter at the gas station as she rings up the total for my chocolate. I smile as I step back and turn to my friends. By this point, I have this explanation down pat. “I’m from South Carolina, those two are from Baltimore, she’s from […]
A Question of Audience
A writer of books once asked, “Teacher, what must I do to sell my work?” “What do the self-help books say?” the Teacher asked. “How do you interpret them?” “Thou shalt love what you write with heart and soul, and thou shalt keep thy audience in mind as you write,” he answered. “You have spoken […]
Here It Comes…
We’re in rehearsals here in Armagh, and my ten-minute play is finally being put into action. So how does that make me feel? A bit like what I imagine a new father feels like when the hospital staff is handling his baby. A little frightened that someone’s going to drop the kid on his head. […]
One of These Plays Is Not Like the Other
As part of our ieiMedia curriculum, we the playwriting students have had to read five plays by Irish authors: Shadow of a Gunman by Sean O’Casey (and for some reason whenever I hear that name my mental jukebox starts playing “Smooth Criminal”) The Playboy of the Western World by J. M. Synge (and no, that […]
