Today’s guest on the show is Dan O’Brien, poet, playwright, and essayist, whose newest book is a pamphlet (what Americans would call a chapbook) from Poetry London Editions titled Flying on Easter and Other Poems. This is part of a new venture from the magazine, which is an exciting development. The poems are drawn from a larger full-length collection, Survivor’s Notebook, recently published by Acre Books.
When I talked to Dan, we’d had to delay our meeting twice due to my dead iMac—and then I got COVID—which is why there’s been a longer gap than usual between episodes, but it was worth the wait. We had a great conversation, which ranged beyond the recording, as we both recently spent time in Ireland, just missing each other on our trips, and talked a good bit about our time there. Dan had gone overseas to the UK as well to support the new pamphlet, reading at a launch event in London.
These new poems are a record of the year Dan spent being treated and recovering from cancer, the diagnosis of which came on the heels of his wife’s own cancer surgery and recovery. Dan wrote about that in his previous book, Our Cancers, in a very different mode, highly lyrical, short verse poems arranged in a sequence, as opposed to the prose mix of narrative and lyricism in the Survivor’s Notebook. As I say to him on the show, one of the things I find so effective about this new book is its mix of both story and lyric, as well as contemporary happenings and memories of his past, which to me encapsulates a greater sense of the way a person lives life.
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Dan O’Brien is a playwright, poet, nonfiction writer, and librettist. In 2023 he published three books: a memoir entitled From Scarsdale: A Childhood (Dalkey Archive Press); a collection of plays entitled True Story: A Trilogy (Dalkey Archive Press); and a collection of prose poems and photographs entitled Survivor's Notebook (Acre Books). In 2024 his play Newtown premiered at Geva Theatre, directed by Elizabeth Williamson.
O’Brien’s play The House in Scarsdale: A Memoir for the Stage, winner of a PEN America Award in Drama, received a critically acclaimed world premiere at Boston Court Pasadena, and was nominated for six Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle prizes including Best Play. O’Brien’s The Body of an American received an off-Broadway premiere at the Cherry Lane Theatre and was the winner of the Horton Foote Prize for Outstanding New American Play, the inaugural Edward M. Kennedy Prize for Drama, the PEN Center USA Award for Drama, the L. Arnold Weissberger Award, and was shortlisted for the Evening Standard’s Charles Wintour Award for Most Promising Playwright. O’Brien was a 2015-16 Guggenheim Fellow in Drama & Performance Art. Dan O'Brien: Plays One is published by Oberon (Methuen / Bloomsbury). A collection of his essays entitled A Story That Happens: On Playwriting, Childhood, & Other Traumas was published in 2021 by CB Editions in the UK and by Dalkey Archive Press in the US.
O’Brien’s fourth poetry collection, Our Cancers, was published by Acre Books (University of Cincinnati Press) in 2021. His third collection, New Life, was published by CB Editions in London in 2015, and by Hanging Loose Press in Brooklyn in 2016. His second collection, Scarsdale, was published by CB Editions in 2014, and in the US by Measure Press in 2015. His debut collection, War Reporter, published by CB Editions in London and by Hanging Loose Press in Brooklyn, received the 2013 Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and was shortlisted for the 2013 Forward Foundation’s Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection, both in the UK. In 2014 O’Brien was the winner of the Troubadour International Poetry Prize.
O’Brien has taught playwriting at colleges and universities including Princeton University, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, The University of the South (Sewanee), University of Wisconsin-Madison, SUNY Purchase, Grinnell College, Occidental College, the Goddard College MFA Program, and in his private workshop in New York City. He holds a BA in English & Theatre from Middlebury College and an MFA in Playwriting & Fiction from Brown University. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, actor, writer, and producer Jessica St. Clair, and their daughter Isobel.
Pick up a copy of Flying on Easter here and Survivor’s Notebook here.
Read more about Dan O’Brien.
Coming soon on the podcast:
Next is a Sidebar episode featuring poet Barbara Jordan! Yes, I’d said before it was coming out earlier, but the dead computer nixed those plans. And rather than push this show with Dan O’Brien later, I figured I’d switch the release and who would mind? You don’t, do you? But I am excited about the Barbara Jordan show. She’s really good, and so little known.
And new interview episodes with Christian Collier and more!
Some notes:
I was able to mention my favorite high school English teacher, Karen (Bald) Mapes, who taught me in 10th and 12th grade. She passed away too young to cancer. The poem of Rainier Maria Rilke’s she gave me was this one:
Love-Song
How shall I hold my soul, that it may not
be touching yours? How shall I lift it then
above you to where other things are waiting?
Ah, gladly would I lodge it, all-forgot,
with some lost thing the dark is isolating
on some remote and silent spot that, when
your depths vibrate, is not itself vibrating.
You and me—all that lights upon us, though,
brings us together like a fiddle-bow
drawing one voice from two strings it glides along.
Across what instrument have we been spanned?
And what violinist holds us in his hand?
O sweetest song.
(trans. JB Leishman. From Possibility of Being: A Selection of Poems. NY: New Directions, 1977.)
Karen Bald also taught my fellow Downingtown Senior High alum K.A. Hays, author of the wonderful, Anthropocene Lullaby.
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Dan O’Brien is married to the terrific actress and comedian Jessica St. Clair, who co-hosts with June Diane Raphael a funny podcast of her own: The Deep Dive.
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About your host: Jason Gray is the author of the poetry books Radiation King (Idaho Prize for Poetry) and Photographing Eden (Hollis Summers Prize), and his poems and reviews have appeared in Poetry, Kenyon Review, Southern Review, American Poetry Review, and Image. His career in publishing has brought him to the university presses of Ohio State and Wisconsin, and Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions.
A note on the podcast title. I am an unabashed fan of The Simpsons, and in Season 8, Episode 9 “El Viaje Misterioso de Nuestro Jomer (The Mysterious Voyage of Homer),” Marge attempts to stop Homer from going to the local chili cook-off, because, as she says, every time he does, he “get[s] drunk as a poet on payday.” And that has made me laugh for decades now.
I in no way endorse getting oneself overserved and behaving like a jackass, poetic or otherwise. And if you or anyone you know is struggling with alcohol, there are resources for you: Alcoholics Anonymous Al-Anon