Member Spotlight: Alexis Greene

Why is writing important to you and why do you think it’s an important medium for the world? Writing opens me and also makes me feel whole. For the world at large, writing writing draws people into feelings and experiences and thoughts that perhaps they never knew or contemplated before.

What are your tried and tested remedies to cure writer’s block? Reading sometimes cures my writer’s block. Sitting with a pad of paper and writing long-hand often helps. But ultimately getting so close to the edge that the only way to dissolve panic is to write.

What is your favorite time to write? Mid-mornings.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received and would like to impart to other writers? I was once told that I had certain writing “tics,” such as using semi-colons too much, using the word “indeed” too much. Many writers, I imagine, have “tics,” and it helps to learn what they are and scan your work for them.

What excites you most about being a writer in today’s age? What I found exciting about writing my most recent book, which is about an extraordinary theater artist, is that I could write openly about a woman’s life–her loves, her downfalls, a sexual assault–as well as about the richness, and sometimes the failure, of her work.

Alexis Greene’s Emily Mann: Rebel Artist of the American Theater is out now with Applause Books.