Last summer, I got a writer's fellowship through the Gaea Foundation and the Fine Arts Work Center.  The Foundation put me up in one of those incredible 1800s cottages in the West End.  Every morning, I'd take my coffee and my two year old son and sit at the water's edge and start my day.  I came to Provincetown to finish writing my first screenplay.  At the beginning of the month, people would ask me what I was doing and I could barely choke it out -- I couldn't take myself seriously as a writer of screenplays.  But by the end of the fellowship, I was offering it:  "Oh, yeah, I'm a screenwriter."

This June, the Fine Arts Work Center is producing a stage reading of my screenplay, an adaptation of my sister's wonderful novel, The Passion of Alice.  The advice I've gotten my whole life as a writer:  write what you know.  I've known this story and these complex, troubled characters for almost ten years.  It has been sheer pleasure to translate them for the screen. 

I've been coming to the Cape since I was a child.  In my teens, I'd sit out on the back steps of my parent's house in Falmouth and write poetry.  My mother was forever flinging the door open, saying, What are you doing back here?  What are you writing about?  This year, my son and I are in Provincetown for the whole summer.   He is constantly picking up treasures at low tide -- fragments of shells, crab carcasses, seaweed.  Then he races home and gets out the Elmer's glue, makes mad trails of it all over posterboard and then methodically places the day's catch.  He ignores me completely -- I think maybe he's in the same zone I used find on those little back steps in Falmouth.  Here's hoping.

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If I can say "I am Provincetown" so can YOU :)

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