I’ll be taking my solo show, A Cynic Tells Love Stories, to the Rogue Festival in Fresno and the Edmonton Fringe. I’m also #1 on the wait list for Vancouver Fringe and Ottawa Fringe, and the Winnipeg lottery is coming up soon. Plus I’ve applied for both Cincinnati Fringe and the first annual Chicago Fringe. More details to come…

If you click on “other works,” instead of an “under construction” message, you will now see links to my short stories, performance pieces and other creative works.

Highlights include my 2001 prize-winning short story “The Diary Thief,” audio recordings of my performances, and of course, Pony Wars.

I also added a paypal link, in case anyone wants to give me money to support my less well-paying endeavors.

Once again a story of mine is on Minnesota Public Radio’s In the Loop.

I performed at Saturday’s story slam, recorded at the Minnesota State Fair. The theme was “Taking Sides” and the episode is available for download at In the Loop’s website.

My story deals with a day that politics sneakily invaded the level two ESL class I was teaching… I’ll post an mp3 and transcript of my piece later, but for now, check out the entire show, which includes many other fabulous performers as well. Look for the episode called “Taking Sides.”

The Minnesota Fringe Festival is over and I’m in San Francisco getting ready to do it all over again, West Coast style.

As I mentioned earlier, I was originally near the end of the waitlist for Minnesota Fringe, but I got a slot literally a week before the festival opened because another company had to drop out.

It was a crazy week of constant writing and rehearsing, little sleep, and slightly excessive amounts of both coffee and alcohol (followed of course by the Fringe itself, which was the same only with a less writing and more alcohol).

I averaged a little under 30 people at each performance, and the response was incredibly positive.

All in all, I’d say No Stranger Than Home had a successful run in Minnesota – especially since I had so little time for publicity. Though let’s see if we can’t bring out bigger crowds for San Francisco…

The first review of my show is up on the Fringe website:

This show amazed me with what can be done through simple storytelling! With minimal props, the artist brought us with her around the world– we looked over her shoulder as she flirted with a girl in East Africa, or had her foot brutally readjusted (with success!) by Nicaraguan witch doctors. I appreciated her humor, poetry, and honesty in presenting these tales… each building upon the next, until by the end, I truly felt like I’d gone someplace and back with her.

The review comes from Malia Burkhart, who is also doing a one-woman show, The Survival Pages. I haven’t seen it and I’m not familiar with her work, but anyone with such good taste is probably worth seeing.

Midwesterners can now see No Stranger Than Home without traveling all the way to San Francisco.

Two companies dropped out of the Minnesota Fringe Festival at the last minute, and I stepped in and took one of the slots.

It’ll be great for me to have a first run in my home city, where I have a lot more contacts and can get feedback and make last minute adjustments before I head out west, where I’m a complete unknown.

But it’s going to be a stressful week – I haven’t actually finished writing the show yet, and it opens one week from today.

I say: bring it on…

I performed a five-minute excerpt from my show last night at the Minneapolis “Anything Goes” poetry slam. It seemed to go over well; I won the slam and came home with this trophy, which is just under four inches tall and made of plastic.

Because it was the “Anything Goes” slam (a fundraiser to send the local team to nationals), none of the regular slam rules applied – you could use props, you could go over three minutes, and the regular judging system didn’t apply. Instead of individual judges ranking the poems on a scale of one to ten, the emcee asked the audience to clap or boo after each piece to show how much they liked it, and then she picked a random number that she felt reflected the audience’s judgment. My score was 8,000-something.

But all wackiness and unscientific judging aside, I got some incredibly positive feedback from the audience, along with promises that they would tell all of their friends in the Bay Area to see the show. All in all, it was a good debut.

Minnesota Public Radio has been producing a series of “Story Slams” – audience members get up and perform short stories on a specific topic, usually announced one or two weeks beforehand. MPR records the entire show and then cuts it down to an hour-long broadcast for its “In the Loop” series.

The theme for the February show was “payback.” I did a story about a sixth-grade revenge plot involving cookies.

This story was kind of a landmark for me in that I created and performed it entirely in the oral tradition – no paper, no written text. All in my head. I’ve never done that before.

The story is available for download on the In the Loop website – look for the one entitled “Payback.”

UPDATE (8/25/08):
The show is now archived here or hear just my piece here.