Rachael Carnes & Sarah Abrevaya Stein talk growing up in Eugene, OR and the down and dirty of writing creatively
Sarah Stein: Rachael, so good to be in conversation with you! We both grew up in Eugene, OR back in the day. I remember it as a bit of a hairy free-for-all, not far from the Rajneeshpuram (Wasco Country, OR), or the temporary home of the religious, milinerium, UFO cult Heaven’s Gate (Waldport, OR), and also the place where–if memory serves–more people on the FBI’s Most Wanted List were found living under adopted aliases (and, no doubt, buying feta in bulk from Kiva Market) than any other location in the country. (The numbers were thrown off by the preponderance of Weathermen, but the point remains). We both grew up in bookish families, went to public schools in a city that had no private school options, spent a lot of time outdoors, and moved ourselves around by bike, quite freely. All told, I think this made Eugene a powerful nursery for original thinking and creative thinkers. How do you understand the relationship between the place you grew up (and still live in today), and the playwright you’ve become?
Rachael Carnes: Locality is such an interesting question. Growing up in Eugene, I wanted to leave for college and beyond, skipping first to Portland, then onto Seattle, then taking the plunge and packing all our earthly belongings (and a border collie, and two cats) into a moving truck, and moving to NYC, with no jobs and no prospects. It’s good to do that kind of thing when you can.
Still, when our daughter was smallish – almost two? – the city became a little less charming and a lot more expensive. We loved our friends there, and our work, but the dulcet life of Eugene won out, and we moved back home. It’s bonkers that we’ve been here long enough that now our daughter is a High School senior who cannot wait to leave Eugene, preferably to head back to NYC for college! Haha. Between her, and our 8th-grade son, this has been, and I quote, “A great place to raise a family.” — And it is. But even though we’ve lived here for 15 years now, there’s a part of me that wishes for something bigger, more art, more culture, more museums, theatre, dance, more stuff to do. I don’t like sports, and this is a sports town. So, the writing scratches that itch, because through the research, the writing, the revisions, I am fully-involved in a brand-new world. It’s 1000-percent more engaging than reading a novel, or any of the transporting activities I enjoyed before playwriting. When I’m working creatively, I feel better. And when a play gains traction, a production in a new city, that equates to a new relationship that I can foster and develop. That’s fun – Through writing, I’ve met and worked with people, literally, all over the world. In terms of our shared experiences, your description of a childhood here is perfect, I don’t know that what we grew up with quite exists anymore. This community feels a little more split, like the hippie culture is fading, replaced by nicer malls and better restaurants. I like that change, but it’s also a little sad. Eugene used to feel weirder, for sure. Still, when I think about my upbringing here, I do think back to the many adults just doing their own weird thing: Music, visual art, dance, improv, writing novels, making art. I probably took it for granted, but everyone was dancing to their own drummer. So, I guess, now I am, too.
Why do you think certain communities tend to encourage creative thinking? And can it be encouraged anywhere? What kills it?
SS: Interesting questions. I think the creative spirit can grow anywhere, but I also think certain communities foster it–and others seek to tamp it down. There’s a Happiness Index: maybe there should be a Soul Killing Index too, so people can strategically avoid places that breed conformism.
One of the things I think Eugene offered me, and perhaps still does offers kids today despite the gentrification, is the freedom to chart one’s own path. Granted, everyone always (always!) thought I was FROM somewhere else growing up (read: New York Jew, though you’re more New York than me!) but the wild wooliness of 1970s and 1980s Eugene impacted itself deep within me.
You write “When I’m working creatively, I feel better.” I share that sentiment entirely. Creative work energizes me, makes me want to return to my desk day after day. (Though needless to say, not all work days are good work days.) Sometimes folks have a sense that historians like me are laboring to tell the truth (ugh!) but of course it’s entirely a creative enterprise; all about telling effective stories, even if stories rooted in historical realities.
I’m curious why you are drawn, in work after work, to historically informed stories. How do you understand your characters’ relationship to the past and to historical legacies?
RC: I share your interest in storytelling. I get obsessed with our current moment, by looking to the past, and that focus can take me all over the map, from Georgian England (My play “The Perfect Wife”) to Oregon’s exclusionary laws and Klan presence in the 1920’s (“Yoncalla”) to the institutionalization of mothering (“Practice House”) to 8th-century Vikings with Smartphones (“Fumblewinter”) — I just enjoy crawling into a new era and looking around. Did you know that Vikings invented meetings? That’s just a fun-fact that led me to explore our precarious environmental situation through the lens of the absurd. That was one of my first plays, and it got me to the Inge Festival, in 2018. I kept looking around, thinking, “How can I be here?”
To your question about characters, and their connection to their time and place, people are pretty transparent, with only about four basic emotions: Fear, anger, sadness, fatigue. I guess people love, too, but really, love is just living with someone else’s foibles. The fun of playwriting is plunking people down in these settings: A mountain cabin, a spaceship bound for Mars, the early universe, the future, and letting them walk around and cope with wherever they are.
I have always enjoyed history, beetling away on whatever trivial layers that interest me. Playwriting is a great space to play with world-building: The textures and colors, the sights and sounds that bring wherever it is that we’re going into the present tense.
Playwrights, and their buddies the dramaturgs, will talk about “the rules of the play” – And defining and adhering to these rules can be simple, or crushingly complex. I’m working on a full-length right now, set in a mountain cabin in the Cascade mountains. It’s summer, and the play only spans a day and a night. Pretty easy to define. That play is about relationships, the conflict that arises among the characters – classic “What I want is opposed to what you want” yadda-yadda.
But another play that I’m working on has brittle, complicated rules, because it’s a future dystopia, that feels like it’s taking place 100 years ago. That one is cerebral and a giant pain in the butt. Holding fast to the rules — In a disorienting, weird play — Will bake your noodle.
Tell me about how you define your own path in your work?
SS: I’m a peripatetic writer in that I’m always interested in a new place, time, sets of dynamics, and historical characters–I wouldn’t be content stirring and re-stirring the same pot through various projects, as some historians do. This is incredibly challenging because each time a project begins, you are a student all over again, albeit one with ever more experience.
I’ve gone from pondering the meaning of corset ads in the late nineteenth century Yiddish press in the Russian Empire (Making Jews Modern, my first book) to learning more about ostrich farming in southern Africa than I ever thought possible (Plumes), and from there to the complex social and legal complex of the French colonial Algerian Sahara (Saharan Jews). I spent some years trying to understand how legal papers mattered to everyday Ottoman women and men as the world of empires was giving way to the modern passport regime and people were moving across borders and continents–carrying, losing, and sometimes falsifying legal documents as they found their way (Extraterritorial Dreams). My recent book, Family Papers, has me tracing the history of a single family over a century, through six generations, and across the globe, seeking to understand world history from the perspective of individuals and their private lives. In short, I’m always on the move, and therefore always obliged to be learning more (more meticulous historical details, more broadly arching stories, more about human nature) in order to spin a compelling yarn. I seem to exist well in this dizzying, ever-shifting reality, though it certainly wouldn’t suit everyone.
I love your insight that “people are pretty transparent, with only about four basic emotions: Fear, anger, sadness, fatigue. I guess people love, too, but really, love is just living with someone else’s foibles.” If I had to add a fifth, it would be yearning. I find that so many of the private histories I’ve uncovered during my archival dives are propelled by desire–for a better life for oneself or one’s children, for emotional connection or power or money or survival, or by that yen to create artistically or otherwise. They yearn for options, however defined.
The final thing I’d add is that my path in my work is defined by a mixture of meticulousness and instinct. I’m a voracious researcher, but it’s not enough simply to gather materials. You have to know when you’ve found something interesting–and you have to be able to tell a story in compelling fashion. Without those skills, you just end up with a bunch of historical stuff. And all of us already have a lot more stuff than we need.
We converge in our beetling, and in our embrace of imagination; perhaps the divergence is in the extent to which we’re comfortable residing in narrative potentiality. I won’t put words in a character’s mouth that were not their own, for example, though I will try to get inside their head and heart through as many creative directions I can possibly imagine.
Can I lob a closing question? You came to playwriting after first pursuing a lot of other creative avenues, at an age when most folks aren’t taking that many chances. What impact does that have on your writing or vision?
RC: I want to read all your books!
The place where history and playwriting meet is in dramaturgy, and I try to be correct, if/when a piece demands accuracy. For example, I wrote a piece on Sally Hemings, and collaborated with historians at Monticello, to ensure that the play reflected current research. It was the first play that their team had read on the subject, that’s for sure.
And yes, yearning. That’s a great word. And it’s apropos to the energy I have to be a novice,
being “a student all over again,” as you say. I spent so many years encouraging people to tap into their creativity through arts education, and I was always fascinated by the creative process, and spent many years writing journalistic features about performing and visual artists and arts organizations, highlighting the wondrous work they were doing, and the often bumpy paths to get there. Then one day – I had an “Aha!” moment.
Today’s dark December morning I’m writing this reminds me that my dad’s death, Dec 27, 2016, marks a kind of transition from a life where I helped other people find the arts, to where I became an artist myself. Losing my dad, physically, was an intense parting, because his mental illness, a lifetime of profound schizophrenia, had kept him from being able to be the loving, present father he probably had wanted to be. I was ten, when he was first institutionalized, and for 35 years, I thought about him and my responsibilities for him, pretty much every day.
In his last few years, he lived in a small, locked group home, in Eugene. It was a safe environment, clean, cozy, a regular house in a regular neighborhood, with a friendly kitchen and as much dignity as could be afforded to residents. Those visits were hard. My dad didn’t have much language left, and we had hardly any shared memories. But I’d bring photos of my kids to look at, art that they’d made. We’d drink coffee. We’d look out at the birds.
My dad was creative, when I was a kid. He had a lot of imagination – Probably too much. He had a spark, though, a creativity and drive. When I was a kid, he seemed fearless.
When my dad died, I felt like I could set down the need to worry. And I started writing. Not about other people, and their hopes and dreams, but plays. Comedies, dramas, histories — Exploring new genres, trying to figure out form, trying to get better at the craft. I’m still doing that. I’ll keep doing that, probably forever. Every play I write gets a little less shitty.
But being willing to be brand-new at something has given me new energy and opened up the world. I have friends and colleagues everywhere — That’s absolutely the most exciting and rewarding aspect of being a playwright. I care deeply about my community.
And when I open up a new document and start writing dialogue, jumping into a moment —
I feel alive.
Thanks for chatting, Sarah!
Happy New Year. xo
SS: Yay! The last answer you offer is the very best of the whole conversation. Beautiful, painful, raw. Thanks for this opportunity!
xoxS
Sarah Abrevaya Stein is a historian, writer and educator whose work has reshaped our understanding of Jewish history. Her commitment to research is matched by her love of teaching. At UCLA, she is Professor of History, the Director of the Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies, as well as the Maurice Amado Chair in Sephardic Studies. She is the author or editor of nine books, including Family Papers: a Sephardic Journey Through the Twentieth Century and Plumes: Ostrich Feathers, Jews, and a Lost World of Global Commerce.
Sarah has received many awards including the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, two National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Jewish Book Awards and the UCLA award for distinguished teaching.
She and her family live in Santa Monica.