'A Full-Circle Moment' - Playwright Mallory Weiss '11 returns to Hotchkiss to inspire student writers

Inspire Student Writers

BY DARRYL GANGLOFF

MALLORY WEISS ’11 WROTE her first play at Hotchkiss and her debut theatrical production—about a pizza place where she had worked over the summer— was held in the Student Center. More than a decade later, she returned to that same room as an award-winning playwright to share her writing advice with students. “It’s a full-circle moment,” she said. “Hotchkiss is where I learned to write. The English Department helped me become a professional writer.”

Weiss was thrilled to spend time on campus in January as part of the Nalen Writing Program, which was established by Skip Nalen ’48, P’79, G’13,’15 to enrich and inspire students and instructors in the art and practice of writing. She visited classrooms and discussed topics such as “how to bring your own voice to things, how to translate everyday speech into something a character would say, and how to be a professional artist in the world.”

She also hosted a lecture on Jan. 12 for a large audience of lower mids in the Student Center where her passion for writing began. She read aloud an excerpt from a play she is currently working on that is loosely based on Hotchkiss and boarding schools. “I wrote about Hotchkiss when I was here, and I’m still writing about it,” she said with a smile.

Mallory kept all of her Daily Theme essays from her time as a Bearcat. This writing practice requires all lower mids to complete up to 20 short pieces, and she revisited her entire collection in anticipation of her talk. She shared titles like Feeling Like I Don’t Have the Capacity as a Writer to Talk About Death and Grief, The New York Times Crossword Puzzle, and How I Almost Left Hotchkiss in My First Semester but Instead

Christy Cooper Saved the Day

Weiss’s Top 10 Writing Tips for Daily Themes

1 Have a naming convention and filing system.

2 Daily Themes are your homework. Just do them.

3 This is an opportunity to capture who you are and what you care about and submerge it in amber.

4 Don’t be precious, but do be honest.

5 There is always something to write about.

6 Be willing to be vulnerable.

7 Keep a list of things you might want to write about.

8 Write by hand, especially when you don’t know what to write.

9 You are a writer. (Head of the English Department Charlie Frankenbach “wrote that one single sentence on the back of a paper that I wrote and it changed my life.”)

10 Relish being a writer.

“I really wanted to be a writer when I was here. I wanted to find big, important themes inside of small everyday moments,” she told the crowd. She joked that her Daily Themes were slightly embarrassing to read as an adult but emphasized they were “earnest, unapologetic, and revolved around ideas and feelings that I still write about.”

Eager students asked Weiss dozens of questions about her writing process. “I very rarely know the ending of my plays when I start them. I don’t draft in order,” she said. “I will put scenes on index cards and lay them out on the floor and move them around and see what happens.”

She told students that there is always something to write about. “When I need to come up with a new TV pilot, I turn to a matrix that I made with columns for genres, locations, themes, and twists. I roll dice. It’s a sci-fi show at a petting zoo about sibling rivalry—oh, and they’ve been dead the whole time!” she said with a laugh. Weiss fills the notes application on her phone with story ideas to help her create those “weird worlds.” She also writes as often as possible. “The best thing that Hotchkiss gave me for my writing was asking me to do a lot of it.”

For the final question of the evening, a student asked, “Is there a piece of work that you found to be transformative or holds profound meaning for you?” Weiss reminisced about watching a “mindblowing” Hotchkiss Dramatic Association production of Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice. She then took a road trip during her senior spring break to Philadelphia, where she saw Ruhl’s In the Next Room. “This feels important. I came back and switched my Teagle topic to write about this play. Fast forward to my last year of grad school, where I was able to ask a playwright to be my mentor. I got to work with Sarah Ruhl on one of my plays,” she said as the audience gasped. “It was a real full-circle moment. Her style set me on the path I am now. It changed my life here at Hotchkiss.” H

Mallory Weiss’s full-length plays include Big Black Sunhats, LIGHTS OUT AND AWAY WE GO, The Page Turners, Pony Up, Howl From Up High, and Losing You, Which Is Enough. Learn more at MalloryJaneWeiss.com