A 1998 award

1st ncwa1998 winners:

"1st New Century Writer Awards 1998 WINNERS !"

An award I'm proud of is my 6th place finish in the first (1998) New Century Writer awards. All forms of writing were eligible, a real strange contest, and my play Famililly was the highest ranking stage play in the competition, behind 4 screenplays and a short story. Very satisfying award as a result. However, I received not a single concrete benefit from this. Not even a nice blurb in the local paper. It came and went and that was that, but it's one of those minor "honors" that has worn well over the years. I've received more tangible awards that aren't as personally satisfying.

This play did win two other competitions, including an international one, and was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. However, no one in Portland has ever expressed the slightest interest in it, and therefore it remains unproduced here. It's likely my best play, though not my personal favorite (which is The Half-life Conspiracy). It's certainly done better in competitions than any other play. It's failure to arouse interest here was a major contribution to my "dropping out" of the local theater scene. If it had no more use for me, I had no more use for it. My tenure here ended, in fact, when Peter Fornara's Cubiculo Theatre, where I was resident playwright, went under. After that I only had one new play done here, which came from a critically acclaimed production in Ireland to a big bomb here. And that was the nail in the local coffin, the end of any attempt to get my work done here. I feel like Portland's Ghost Playwright. Fortunately (at least for my mental health ha ha) I moved on to other things, writing novels, making digital films, and now working on an animated chamber opera. And I feel blessed to have been active in theater here in the 1980s, Portland's Golden Age. So it all came out fine despite my occasional tantrums of ego ha ha.