Just back from Hedgebrook's Women Playwrights Festival (East Coast edition) @ NYU Tisch School of the Arts. After listening to a symposium of women discuss the highs and lows of the industry -- a mere 17% of all plays produced in the U.S. are written by women -- watched a staged reading of Danai Gurira's Eclipsed, about the Liberian civil war.

Though I never made it down to Yale Rep to see the full production, the reading was breathtaking in its own right. The stories of child soldiers and women and sexual abuse all wrapped into something slightly palatable for an audience. Keep an eye out for actors Uzo Aduba, Pascale Armand and Lupita Nyong'o; for playwrights Danai Gurira, Amy Evans, and Lenelle Moise; for director Liesl Tommy. Those women will inherit the world. We gave the show a standing ovation at the end, but I could have also used a talk-back to decompress all the emotions it stirred in me.

I mourned a little on the subway ride home. First for my creative buzz that was killed by the thirty-minute wait for the damned train; then all the failed expectations, not unlike timely transportation, that categorize my life here in New York; and remembering my little cottage in the woods, the wood-burning stove, owl that cooed at midnight and my long walks on the beach at dawn; and lastly, mourning how I had not found such peace before or since.

Wondering when I will find a room of my own. Altogether joyful to have found a circle of writing sisters to call on whenever I need the inspiration. --AL.