Playwright. Storyteller. Everything else.

I’ve spent my short professional career gradually getting more and more insane. I first noticed this about myself while writing Proust-esque fanfiction about all the people I saw in the lobby of the Athletic Association hotel during the summer after college graduation. Normal people do not do that shit.

Then, I got my fist full-time job in an office and I became so much worse. I used to dream about the office. That’s like, an eight-hour unpaid shift in my sleep.

I got crazier when I quit work and started applying for grants full-time. I got crazier when I ran off to North Dakota to slowly realize I was employed by a white supremacist cult theater (I escaped, of course, after the realization). I got crazier when I called OSHA on a shoe store I briefly worked at for grocery money. I got crazier when I tried (& failed) to unionize a downtown theater’s front of house staff. I got crazier when I ran away to New Mexico for a winter of writing and isolation.

—Not entire isolation. I met lots of other thoroughly insane artists. One of them turned 70 years old while we were there. I was 24. Her name was Marcy.

I told Marcy, “When I’m 70, I’m going to be so much more insane.” And she said “why don’t you just do it now?”

So I let myself maximize the crazy. I let myself type endless pages of psychosexual nonsense. I allowed myself to read and watch and think and feel anything, regardless of the supposed merit. And I came to the conclusion:

I’m not a playwright. I’m a shoestore-worker-failed-unionizor-cult-avoider-writer-writer-writer. I write poems and plays and stories and a draft of a raunchy romance novel. I play video games and cook and read erotica books online. And I realized all of these bits of me are equally relevant parts of the writing machine.

I’d been floating around between writer worlds, capitalist nightmare worlds, and the magazines, gay clubs, and train trips between. And in each moment, whether I was losing my mind at work or watching Too Hot to Handle or ignoring the train wallowers, my brain was working on the art.

My brain also worked on Artistic Theories and Perspectives (oh no!). So here’s what we’ve been pondering:

One: the least respected genres are actually the most necessary. Romance tells us that we don’t need to ambition to live a fulfilling life, we just need to be vulnerable with others. Horror tells us that regardless of who we are or what we do, we are going to suffer and we can survive it. Action movies tell us that we don’t need to be ashamed of our violent and tumultuous feelings. Pop genres teach us to live without shame or fear of who we are. We can still live good lives, no matter what.

Two: unfortunately, I fear that content and form are in perpetual conversation. Some stories can’t be plays. Some movies really shouldn’t be movies, though they almost always end up as movies anyways. Live performance is an urgent, ephemeral, and verbal medium. I really shouldn’t write two live hours of someone’s internal pondering; that belongs in a book instead. And I don’t think it serves anybody to pretend that writers can only be poets or playwrights or novelists or screenwriters. It is our job to transmute a story into its correct form. It is our responsibility to become skilled in all forms so that we can communicate everything we feel called to communicate.

Three: everything ends. I thought for a long time that live performance is the most temporary medium. But maybe when I die I’ll leave everything to a relative on paper copies, then their house will burn down. Maybe the satellites in charge of my Google Drive will be struck down by meteors. This is a good thing. It means even the oldest, dustiest works of grandpa literature can be urgent. We will lose all our art and culture and memories and lives, so we have to make art for right now.

So what the hell does Morris write about? I write about the profoundly ridiculous world I live in. People on trains meeting and falling in love. Scatterbrained witch cults of Chicago. Seasonal workers praying for a union. Transgender lawyers rolling on molly. You know— regular people.

When I say I’ve gotten crazier, what I mean is I’ve learned more about the nature of my reality. We do stupid meaningless things, we work awful dehumanizing jobs, we hurt people on accident. And we tell each other beautiful stories, and we fall in love completely randomly, and we go on grand adventures, and we eat delicious foods.

I want to tell stories that make audiences feel that within the grand and horrible absurdity of the world, we can take care of each other and be okay in the end. Because we will be okay. We’re going to live silly short lives and then die. And it’s going to be wonderful.