The Path to Playwright: Discovering my literary hero in an unlikely place

The Path to PlaywrightDiscovering my literary hero in an unlikely place Sonya Kelly (bio) I always loved putting words together. One of my earliest memories is of lying in bed in the dark, landing on sounds that made a similar shape in my ear. Sound…found. Sound… found. I kicked them around in my head and made up a rhyming story about an earthworm I'd seen earlier that day, inching its way across the paving stones in our backyard to the protective safety of the garden grass, as a mischief of magpies circled above it: Going through the garden,I listen for a sound.Bad bad birdies will eat me on the ground. End Page 83 The poem purled itself to life in the oyster of my tiny mind almost unbidden, then slid past my lips and into the darkness of my bedroom. It was electric. To this day I can still recall the feeling of my heart thumping in my chest as if a jolly giant were hammering the rhythm of the words on the inside of my rib cage. It was my first experience of a creative high. I was so elated, I had to share it with the public immediately; I got out of bed and went downstairs to the TV room to perform it for my parents. "Go-ing through the gar-den, blah di blah di blah…" Out the pretty little triplet came, replete with heroes, villains, and life-threatening circumstances to stoke the dramatic tension. They thought I was sleepwalking. Tired from the day and not overjoyed to see me up and about after the laborious task of putting me to bed, they managed to pitter patter a limp applause, then sent me back to bed so they could return their attention to the evening news. This was my first lesson in the perils of sharing work too soon, of chasing that intoxicating high of affirmation instead of seeking out the stomach-plunging discomfort that comes with constructive criticism. Still, I didn't let their blearily performed parental enthusiasm deter me. As far as I was concerned, I had found my calling. From that moment I compulsively wrote poems about anything and everything, from the flowers in the garden to the dry goods in the kitchen cupboards: The snowdrops are sad.They never look glad.I don't know why.Maybe they're shy. Spaghetti is straight.Before you put it on your plate.You have to make it hot,Inside a boiling pot. End Page 84 I was hooked. Sonically symmetrical words, I realized, had the power to deepen the gradient of human expression. Syllables were magical Lego bricks that, when clicked together in the right order, had the infinitely pleasant capability of building worlds inside your mind. This obsession with DIY nursery rhyming took me to places no doll ever could. I graduated from single-syllable words ending in -ate—late, mate, gate—to two-syllable words such as cleaning, leaning, meaning. Then polysyllabic words such as information, congregation, constipation. My appetite for this elegant delivery system of language gave meaning to my days. Poems grew into stories, and stories grew into plays, which came with extensive casting processes that my dolls and teddies had to wait in line to audition for. I must have been the single most annoying child on the entire planet. Having a sense of true vocation in life is half the battle of good living won. Of course being Irish, I assumed it would be a simple hop and a skip from childhood nursery rhyme expert to grown-up playwright. After all, Ireland is a nation that takes great pride in its playwriting heritage and exporting that identity to the world. Samuel Beckett, Brendan Behan, W. B. Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, and James Joyce—a battalion of pale-faced men with unruly eyebrows and tousled forelocks posing enigmatically in sepia. When I was growing up, they were the centerfolds of the great Irish literary tradition. Their pictures hung on the walls of bookshops, libraries, school classrooms, and airports, glamorizing an Ireland that could be snapped up in gift shops in the same...