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Issue #5 - Writing Creative MFA
WRITING CREATIVE MFA
At the apex of creative experimentation, CalArts’ dynamic and innovative MFA Creative Writing program is designed for writers to explore a range of forms and styles. Rather than limit students’ courses of study towards a single genre, students have the freedom to explore fiction, poetry, and nonfiction through an exciting mix of workshops, seminars, and labs intended to inspire the generation of new methods, fresh forms, and expanded practices.
Weaving a path through the Institute’s course offerings, the program’s four concentrations, Writing + Its Publics, Documentary Strategies, Image + Text, and Writing + Performativity, foster interdisciplinary techniques and approaches as students cultivate their writing alongside the other arts.
CalArts MFA writers are encouraged to situate their creative practice in a critical context—to engage with the aesthetic and cultural movements, theory and politics of contemporary writing, and to think hard about what, why, and how they write. Through the Writing Now Visiting Writers series and myriad opportunities for professional development, the program offers graduate students the chance to further develop both their practice and their knowledge base in conversation with the people, projects, and ideas particularly relevant to the world of writing and publishing today.
* “Why,” said the Queen, “sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”—Lewis Carroll
six impossible things before breakfast *
By Patrick L. Kennedy
Erstwhile Lookingglass Theater Company director, Joy Gregory, is busy: She writes for Madam Secretary, her musical The Shaggs is being adapted for cinema, and a new idea for a TV show—based on the life of an indie rock songwriter—is taking shape.
White House headed by a mature, even-keeled, presidential-acting civil servant. Imagine that. Joy Gregory (Critical Studies MFA 99) does. What’s more, she imagines in the same White House a thoughtful, female secretary of state who brings to the office 20 years’ experience in the CIA, an independent streak, and a willingness to respectfully disagree with her boss. As writer and coexecutive producer of the CBS drama Madam Secretary, Gregory scripts, or otherwise breathes life into, scenarios based in just such a political world, nearly every week from October to May. In a little more than four seasons on the job, Gregory has twice been nominated for a Humanitas Prize, which honors film and television writing that inspires compassion and affirms human dignity. Moreover, Gregory is a playwright whose work (with Gunnar Madsen), The Shaggs: The Philosophy of the World, won an Ovation Award in 2004. The musical tells the bizarre, true tale of obscure 1960s rock group The Shaggs. A film adaptation is currently in production.
Gregory is a musician herself, a quondam indie rocker whose Chicago band, Tart, once headlined over Superdrag. She’s also a former actress and publicist who still helps run Lookingglass, the theater company she cofounded in the late 1980s with David Schwimmer (of Friends fame). As well, she’s a wife, mother, committed Catholic, and fervent feminist. And she’s an alumna of CalArts’s School of Critical Studies. “I could feel my brain growing,” she recalls of her dizzying years in Santa Clarita. “To this day, as I examine the culture we live in, I continue to apply the ideas received in classes at CalArts.”
ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND
Growing up in Cleveland, Gregory had no notion of one day writing for television. In fact, she and her blue-collar family mocked the boob tube for its lack of realism—until Roseanne debuted. Even then, it wasn’t TV but film that most inspired Gregory. “I deeply admired Meryl Streep’s performances in the ’80s,” she says. “They lit a fire in me to want to be an actress.” Gregory attended the Cleveland School of the Arts and went on to Northwestern University in Illinois to major in acting. There, she met Schwimmer, who showed Gregory and some of their classmates a book of photographs chronicling the Manhattan Theater Project’s production of Through the Looking Glass. “We were so captivated by the images of these sweaty, hairy hippies in the ’70s creating a forest with umbrellas and performing Humpty Dumpty’s fall by sitting on top of a pile of chairs and smashing an egg,” says Gregory. The group of friends launched the Lookingglass Theater Company in their senior year. (The company celebrated its 30th anniversary last year.) Its debut production was, of course, Through the Looking Glass—and Gregory starred as Alice. She also played Hester Prynne in the company’s production of The Scarlet Letter. Erelong, though, Gregory realized she was uncomfortable in the spotlight. “I’m a Midwestern girl,” she says with a laugh. But it was in Lookingglass that Gregory pivoted toward her future vocation. “All members could participate in any aspect of theater production,” she says. “I did publicity, I designed the program … but, I also wanted to try writing and directing.” Her first play, All Souls Day, centered on the fantastic legends of early Christian saints Catherine of Siena and Therese of Lisieux. “I wanted to explore these amazing, almost superhero, hagiographic tales about these women who did supernatural things—at a time when women were utterly oppressed.” Two more plays followed.
Joe Sikora and J. Nicole Brooks in Lookingglass’s 2003 production of Race: How Blacks & Whites Think & Feel About the American Obsession by Studs Terkel, co-adapted by Joy Gregory and David Schwimmer.
Joy, left, playing with her band, Tart, in Chicago.
THE QUEEN OF TART
Meanwhile, Gregory was also drawn into the local indie music scene. Perusing a Chicago Reader article about the riot grrrl movement, with photos of rockers Bratmobile and PJ Harvey, convinced Gregory to try to participate rather than just listen. “Once again, published photos played a part!” she says. Gregory and fellow theater-company member Laura Eason had been “serially dating unreliable musicians,” Gregory says, “and we decided, ‘Enough. We want to be musicians. We’ll start our own band.’ We got together and exchanged songs, and found we harmonized well together.” With Eason on bass and Gregory on guitar, their band, Tart, played with a rotating cast of drummers and lead guitarists. Future NPR journalist, Rick Karr, cemented the lineup when he joined on lead guitar. The band gigged at storied rock venues across Chicago, such as the Metro, the Empty Bottle, and Lounge Ax. And, by day, Gregory was teaching first and second grade as a teacher’s aide at the University of Chicago Laboratory. “I was super exhausted,” she recalls, “and super poor.”
THE BEST OF EDUCATIONS
As her 20s waned, Gregory had a revelation. In living out the starving-artist ideal, she and her friends had, in a way, unwittingly bought into the calculus of the Republican administrations under which they had come of age—a federal regime “that wanted to slash arts funding, that didn’t see the value in monetary terms of investing in art,” she recalls. “We internalized that message, but I believed that I was ready to be paid for my work. I was tired of walking past the mainstream culture of the city that I lived in, walking past restaurants in which people were eating out, and feeling excluded from that, simply because I’d chosen to create theater that I hoped would enrich the cultural life of the city. … So, it was not entirely rational,” Gregory adds with a laugh, “that my response was: Well, then, I’m going to pursue an MFA in Critical Studies! But it was a way to shake up the snow globe.” She picked writing as the one endeavor she wanted to move forward with—to hone her skills in grad school. After researching programs, Gregory chose CalArts. “Its program in Creative Writing didn’t make me choose among writing poetry, critical essays, novels, or plays. CalArts encouraged me to do any or all of that, and whatever else I wanted.” She was not disappointed. “I loved it so much,” Gregory says of her experience at the Institute. “Not only was it everything I wanted it to be, it was a bunch of things I didn’t know I was ready for. “I had somewhat blindly chosen a program called Critical Studies,” she continues, “because I thought it was a writing program under another name. No, this was a critical studies program! It was a philosophy degree.” She studied semiotics, postmodernism, structuralism, and
Graduation, CalArts, with fellow MFA alum John Dyer, 1999.
Téa Leoni stars as Elizabeth McCord in Madame Secretary.
the writings of critic-philosophers Roland Barthes and Walter Benjamin. Gregory says it felt like her brain was “a balloon being inflated.” She cites, especially, Jon Wagner’s classes on film and TV theory. “He modeled for me a method of talking about pop culture in a way that didn’t diminish its value both culturally and intellectually, and taught that the most ephemeral, seemingly low form could connect to the biggest ideas shaping our world.”
A CAREER OF HER OWN INVENTION
After graduation, Gregory stayed in Los Angeles and joined a women’s writing group. She and a fellow member collaborated on a spec script for an episode of The West Wing that led them to staff positions on Felicity, the teen series on the WB network. Having landed in “the heart of soft, mainstream, noncritical culture,” Gregory recalls, she tried to inject some of her recent intellectual growth into the show. Inspired by a CalArts classmate’s thesis project, Gregory pitched an episode in which Felicity runs out of money for school and enters a beauty contest. Repulsed by the contest’s objectification of women, she “rallies a group of women who are awoken to the bullshit of this,” Gregory relates, “and they start an alternative pageant.” The response? “I was quietly informed that I’d no longer be writing for Felicity.” Happily, Gregory next hooked up with writer/producer Barbara Hall on the series Joan of Arcadia. “She’s the reason I’m still a TV writer,” Gregory says of Hall. “She guided me toward never dumbing myself down, never interrupting my critical brain, but finding a way to reach a mass audience with it.” In Joan, God (in various guises) appears to the titular protagonist and discusses “determinism; how physics reflects metaphysics—it was a teen drama in which I got to engage with these big ideas,” says Gregory.
Since 2015, Gregory has been working with Hall on Madam Secretary, applying those big ideas to the ethical dilemmas faced by fictional US Secretary of State Elizabeth McCord (Téa Leoni), as well as her husband, Henry (Tim Daly), a theology professor (one who’s not afraid to risk his life saving a crowded mall from a truck bomb, when necessary), and their teenage children. Gregory’s Humanitas Prize nominations hint at the value that viewers find in the show. By depicting a functioning administration, the show offers “42 minutes of respite on Sunday nights,” says Gregory. And yet, the storylines are ripped from the real world’s headlines. For example, the two-parter, “Family Separation,” covered the tearing apart of asylum-seeking Mexican families; the villain was a fictional governor of Arizona. A person of faith hailing from the social-justice wing of the flock, Gregory believes the true national emergency today is not at the border, but in the Oval Office. However, she says, the show’s writing staff “prides itself on being a broad-based CBS drama that appeals to a multi–political party audience of viewers.” The fictional President Dalton’s party affiliation is never stated. Still, certain episodes have riled factions across the spectrum. In one, Dalton (Keith Carradine) took a stand, admitting that climate change was real. “We were only acknowledging a reality that the [real-life] Department of Defense acknowledges,” says Gregory. “But that was the most controversial episode for a certain stripe of our viewers.” Other audience members objected when the show raised the importance of child vaccinations. “Some viewers didn’t like it being pointed out to them that their skepticism [of vaccination] may be another version of climate change denial.” But Gregory is more interested in provoking thought than in preaching. “[She] makes it a point to understand all perspectives,” Hall said of her protégé in an interview with the National Catholic Reporter. “She’s also a great humanitarian and her commitment to social justice is something she practices assiduously.” Gregory particularly relishes the opportunity to depict a female character who is strong, smart—and flawed. When she joined the show three-quarters of the way into the first season, “One of the first things I asked was: ‘Can she not be right in my episode? Can she screw up and the hostage dies?’” Gregory got the green light to “kill my hostage,” she says. “I feel like it liberates all of us to see women as admirable and just as flawed as men can be, because guess what? Heroes are human beings.”
CURIOUSER AND CURIOUSER
If all goes well, this year will see Gregory’s musical, The Shaggs, brought to the big screen. It’s the strange, and strangely true, story of a trio of sisters driven by their near-mad father to record a rock album in 1960s New Hampshire, despite no evidence of musical talent. The band’s recording engineer absconded with much of their funds, their record sold few copies, and The Shaggs drifted into music history’s dustbin until Frank Zappa mentioned them on the Dr. Demento radio show in the 1970s, prompting a rediscovery among crate-diggers. The band’s unschooled sound is unlistenable to some, fascinating to others. Gregory thinks of it as the musical version of the made-up language spoken by Nell, the mountain hermit in the Jodie Foster film of that name. “I’m not a fan of their music,” Gregory says. “I’m more touched by their story.” Music—of the relatively more conventional variety— continues to generate story ideas for Gregory. She is working on a TV show exploring the phenomenon of the professional songwriter (as in one who works behind the scenes with pop stars), but combined with elements of her own indie rock days. And, Gregory continues to draw upon her CalArts education. Not just in her work; she finds she can’t turn it off at home. “My husband and I were talking about luxury brands, and I said, ‘Walter Benjamin would say that in the absence of religion in our mainstream society, luxury has taken its place as an article of faith. He’d say it’s infused with aura, and the way we pay tribute is to pay thousands of dollars for it,’” she relates. “My husband said, ‘Walter Benjamin didn’t say that. I think you put that together.’ “And I said, ‘Wow. I guess CalArts continues to pay dividends!’”
