Pat Perrin's Blog

I see this meme pop up from time to time. And yes, I too feel a certain pang about the Library of Alexandria. Even so, I can’t help but wonder if our grief might be a tad misplaced. For one thing, just which of the four fabled destructions of the Library of Alexandria is supposed to […]

Reaching my 90th birthday seems to be important, but in another sense, this is just another day in a life full of a lot to think about and usually too much to do. There’s an unfinished fiber piece hanging on the wall that I haven’t gotten back to in months. There are art supplies ordered […]

It’s been almost five years since I posted some thoughts about Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and how it relates to our times. Revisiting those thoughts today, those thoughts seem even more sadly apt than they were back then. A Connecticut Yankee is mysterious and disturbing book, so unlike its reputation […]

Just as an individual, subjected to certain inner pressures beyond his endurance, will suddenly go mad and destroy himself or those around him, so too, apparently, can a segment of society take leave of its senses and deliver itself to the forces of destruction. —Stanley Loomis, Paris in the Terror These words written about the […]

Wim’s new play Wiser than the Night is a witty and sweeping drama of ideas that asks a trenchant question about democracy: “What went wrong?” Set in 1981 in the wake of Ronald Reagan’s election, Wiser than the Night brings together events of the Bolshevik Revolution, Stalinist tyranny, Russian folklore, and American history and politics. It […]

Here is the prologue to my full-length play The Mad Scene, which has been aptly described as “an Our Town about the French Reign of Terror.” It was developed during 2020-21 as part of the Theatre at St. John’s Cyber Salon, hosted by Mark Erson. The parts were read by Everett Quinton, Jenne Vath, Sally […]

The great Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai once proposed that all poetry is political: This is because real poems deal with a human response to reality, and politics is part of reality, history in the making. Even if a poet writes about sitting in a glass house drinking tea, it reflects politics. We would like to […]

This is the moment of the Big Bangno need to look back for it This will be a short-lived universea few seconds at most and the space it takes up is only and fullya metaphor What happened a micro-fraction of a nanosecond agois one of the great mysteries of physics and what happens next isthe […]

“Who are you writing for?” A respected friend of mine asked me that after reading my new play, Wiser than the Night. As it happened, Pat and I were discussing that very question that over breakfast that very morning. It’s a good question, I suppose. Maybe even the only question. I’ve always believed that writers […]

A few years ago, Pat and I wrote a series of history-based “classroom plays” for Red Chair Press—short plays meant to read by middle school students at their desks in the classroom. One of these was a retelling of the familiar Mexican legend of “La Llorona” (“The Weeping Woman”). La Llorona is said to be […]