@dramatistsguild @schlueter_j

Thomas M. Atkinson might be “the best author you’ve never read.” Catherine Ryan Hyde, a New York Times bestselling author makes that claim in her blurb for Atkinson’s first novel, Strobe Life (out now in Kindle edition). I sat down with the Anderson Township, OH writer to learn more about his work as a writer of fiction and plays.

Jennifer Schlueter: Your plays have been developed throughout Ohio – Clear Liquor and Coal Black Nights at Playhouse in the Park, for example, and Copperheads at Ensemble Theatre Cincinnati. What’s it like being a playwright in Ohio?

Thomas M. Atkinson:  Talent and luck, not necessarily in that order. The Ohio Arts Council has always been very supportive of my writing, and that brought me to the attention of Worth Gardner at Playhouse in the Park. Lynn Myers was working at the Playhouse when they did Clear Liquor and Coal Black Nights, and when she took the helm at Ensemble Theatre of Cincinnati, she was very supportive of my work there as well. That gave me the bona fides to wander further afield, like NYC, Chicago, LA, Massachusetts, Florida, and New Mexico.

JS:  Your short play, Dancing Turtle, is set in the Appalachians. Your short story Grimace in the Burnt Black Hills is about a man fleeing Ohio and ending up in South Dakota. I’ve seen your work referred to in print as “hillbilly gothic,” and you make your home in southwest Ohio. How important is place to your work?

TMA:  Hell, I’ll take “hillbilly gothic” all day long! Place is everything. Place determines the people that surround you. Place determines how you are brought up. Place is your center. My collection of linked short stories, Standing Deadwood, is set in the Appalachian foothills of southeast Ohio. The characters are all related by blood or circumstance, and while their stories all stand alone, they are also intertwined, like life. You are the center of your own story, but you are also a secondary character in a bunch of stories you happen to be a part of. Harry Crews’ A Childhood: The Biography of a Place is essential reading for any aspiring writer and explains the importance of place far better than I can.

JS:  You work across genres. In addition to being a published playwright, you have had your fiction published in the prestigious North American Review, The Sun, and The Madison Review among other places, and you’ve been a finalist for Pushcart Prizes and for the Danahy Fiction Prize. How, for you, does writing fiction differ from writing plays?

TMA:  I don’t think they are that different. It just means I get to be frustrated in two genres! I just want to tell a good story, and sometimes that story is told better on stage and sometimes that story is told better on the page. And sometimes, like with Dancing Turtle, it works remarkably well in both genres. As a short story, it is this polished little gem of voice since it is entirely internal, from the point-of-view of an almost inarticulate fourteen-year old girl with cerebral palsy. Finding a way to adapt that for the stage was quite a challenge, but the solution (allowing her idealized version of her “self” to be on stage with her and say what she can’t) was elegant and beautiful and heartbreaking. I love them both. Don’t make me choose, Jennifer! Just don’t.

Next up for Thomas Atkinson: his solo play Cuttings has been selected as one of six finalists for the Fall Festival (September 2015) at Artemisa Theatre (Chicago). Artemesia’s audience votes for their favorite of the six, which then goes on to full Equity production the following season. Vote early and often!

jschlueter@dramatistsguild.com

Thomas Atkinson