What I have found in books has always shaped my life.

So if it hadn't been enough that, by the age of 7, I saw myself as a tiny Lesley Ann Warren, singing and dancing my way out of the trailer park (thanks to a babysitter who had season theater tickets and a player piano), in the fifth grade I found Helen Hayes's memoir A Gift of Joy.

Because of this book, I knew I would be an actress long before I'd ever set foot in an actual theater. I shared Hayes's (mis)understanding of language:

"In the beginning was the Word,
And the Word was with God,
And the Word was God.

I have been misinterpreting those lines from St. John with great satisfaction ever since I first heard them in my childhood. At the start I really did misunderstand them… It pleased me that St. John thought enough of words to deify them. For I am a lover of words."

I am also a lover of words, so I interpreted finding Hayes's book at a yard sale as providence and I became an actress. Well, a "regional" actress. And not for long.

The truth is, I can't shut my mouth and take direction.

The painful truth is that I can't sing and dance like Lesley Ann Warren.

I quit acting and dropped out of my final year of BFA studies to work with baboons at a research facility. Lots of drama, but I missed words and I went back to school to study playwrighting and poetry. 

Like Mallarmé, I believe literature has to be performed: when we are extraordinarily lucky, it is theater.