With My Feet in the Air and My Head on the Ground

I’ve been feeling peculiar. Walking around my house and across campus feeling weird, awkward. Like maybe my legs are on backwards or my arms are too long and my elbows don’t work. I couldn’t put a finger on the feeling, wasn’t sure what was happening each day I woke up feeling particularly queer. I thought perhaps it was a stage of exhaustion miles past tired, levels beyond stinging eyes and...

Time Flies… When You’re Working with Teens

I promised myself that I would find time to write during the seven weeks that I was Stage Manager for a group of 20 teenagers. I swore to myself I would get at least two more chapters of my novel written. The closest I got was rewriting work, and rereading work, that I had previously written. Or maybe I can count those fleeting moments between shows where I’d think about something one of my characters might...

Getting ‘Meta’ about the Graphic Novel

It’s time for me to take a ‘meta’ approach with the Laying Lincoln Down graphic novel. One of the requirements of having received a Weisman grant from Columbia College is to prepare a display related to the project. I’ve had several conversations with my adviser, Rob Funderburk, visual artist and Creative Industry Liaison with Columbia’s Portfolio Center, about what would not simply be...

What Now? What Next?

Noelle Aleksandra Hufnagel Five years. Five years of long commutes from the North Side of Chicago. Five years of working full-time in the West Suburbs. Five years of late night grad classes in the South Loop. Five years of loner weeknights and loser weekends in front of my computer. Five years of life. Five years of finding time, scraping together minutes, barely finishing. Five years of going, going, going. Five...

I Think I Was a Lot Smarter When I Was Unhappy.

                  Recently, a friend from my writer’s group called me out for not producing work with the regularity he’d come to expect from me.    “I think I was a lot smarter when I was unhappy,” I told him.   “Well in that case,” he responded, “I must be a genius.”                 We’re all familiar with the cliché of the tortured artist.  We admire the...