SYCORAX, opera:
I created the libretto for a new opera, Sycorax, with music composed by Georg Friedrich Haas. This opera had its world premiere at Buehnen Bern Theater, in Bern, Switzerland, in 2022. Inspired by Shakespeare’s last play The Tempest, and offering a transformative vision of this beautiful and problematic work, this opera has five characters: Sycorax (played in Bern by Mollena Williams-Haas), Prospero, Caliban, Ariel and Miranda. The chorus is composed of thirty singers, who represent the spirits of the island.
The conductor for Sycorax, Bas Wiegers, offers two illuminating podcasts about this opera: (1) Sycorax 1, about the compositions of Georg Friedrich Haas, including Sycorax, and (2) “A Chat with Mollena,” in which Bas talks with Mollena Williams-Haas about how she has crafted her character of Sycorax, and about the opening up of opera spaces and the creation of new stories filled with diversity and joyful vision.
MY LAI, operatic monodrama:
Click here! to see a 7-minute Vimeo of My Lai, from an early performance, 2015,
This one-singer operatic piece, composed by Jonathan Berger, with my libretto, was commissioned by Kronos Performing Arts Association in 2015, and performed by Kronos Quartet, Rinde Eckert, and Van-Anh Vo at Stanford University and the Harris Theater in Chicago, before being folded into Kronos’s 2017-18 season.
Chicago Tribune review, Jan. 30, 2016: “Gripping monodrama MY LAI evokes dark moment of Vietnam War”
OTHER MUSIC:
“Death by Drowning,” a musical piece with my text, music by Jonathan Berger, was performed on October 26, 2017, at Stanford University, for the Daniel Pearl World Music Days Concert
SHORT STORIES:
“Halliday’s Treasures,” short story in CATAMARAN, April 2016
ESSAYS:
“LETTING MY WRITING LIE FALLOW” – guest post on AnaMcCracken.com
“Walking Through the Hedge” – an essay on Meg Waite Clayton’s site, 1st Books: Stories about How Writers Get Started.
“Saved by Ida-Ida,” in The Book that Changed My Life: 71 Remarkable Writers Celebrate the Books That Matter Most to Them
“Mary Cassatt and the Maternal Body,” in American Iconology (Yale University Press, edited by David C. Miller, 1995)
CHILDREN’S STORIES:
“Isabel and the Shy Giant,” in Spider (January 2001)
“The All Day and All Night Trip,” in Ladybug (June 1998)
OTHER BOOKS:
The Public Is Invited to Dance: Representation, the Body, and Dialogue in Gertrude Stein (a book of playful scholarship about Gertrude Stein) (Stanford University Press, 1989)
Gertrude Stein, Writings, Vol. 1 and 2, , The Library of America. I co-edited these two Stein volumes with the inimitable Catharine R. Stimpson.
A rich review of these Stein volumes by Richard Howard, “There Is a Lot of Here Here” (The New York Times, May 3, 1998). “Surely these beautifully printed new volumes are the grandest (and the gravest) in the long parade of revivals and resuscitations that have made Stein the master and mascot of any literary enterprise bound and determined to be ”experimental.'”