SRS Bonus Content - Joe Meno

Joe Meno is a born and bred fiction writer and playwright. He has worked with Redmoon and The House, among others, and has published four novels. He is our first playwright in our Summer Reading Series and I asked him a bunch of questions, thinking I would post one or two on our blog—but I like his answers so much, I’m posting them all!

Come see our reading of Joe's play People Who Don't Don't next Monday, July 16th at 7:30pm at Swim Cafe on Chicago Ave!

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Tell us about your play in one sentence...

People Who Don't Don't is about Danny, a kook in his twenties living on the southside of Chicago, who meets Ronnie, an odd single mother-to-be who gives Danny some kind of purpose.

Is this play like much of your other plays/writing? In what ways?

In a lot of ways, this play is similar to other plays and books that I've written: it's set on the southside of Chicago, the neighborhood I grew up in, and which I wrote about in Hairstyles of the Damned. It has a kind of magic, with stories about the lives of saints and ghosts and love, which appear in almost everything I write.

What was the impetuous for you to write this play?

At the time I had started writing the play, I was working on a show for Redmoon, the first all-ages thing I had ever written, and so I began writing People Who Don't Don't because I felt I wanted to do something that was the complete opposite of a fairy tale or a children's show: the characters, their language, the conflicts of the play are based on people who are close to me, the people I actually know, and it deals with complexities of adult life, especially in your mid-twenties.

Who is a bigger influence on your life as a writer, Papa Smurf or Thomas Jefferson?

As a kid in the 80's, the Smurfs were always very upsetting to me: I don't know if it was the fear of Soviet missiles or what, but I always kind of considered the Smurfs, and their little mushroom town, to be vaguely communist. Thomas Jefferson, on the other hand, isn't someone I really know all that much about, either. I guess they're both part of a kind of American pop mythology, which is definitely something that interests me. I would have to say neither.

What was the worst play you've ever written and how has it effected your life as a writer?

I once wrote a play called The Invisible World of Evildoers, set in the fifties, about a young writer who goes to Hollywood to write films that are going to be very important artistically, morally profound, that sort of thing. Instead of letting the play be about the actual characters, it was more about the ideas I had, and so the characters themselves were not as developed or as interesting as they could have been. After that I realized, it's always better for me to start with an interesting character than an interesting theme.

Who/what are your biggest pop culture influences?

For me, it's always music. Almost everything I write is in someway connected to a song, or some musical artist, not in the lyrics or contents of the song so much, but in the tone or mood. This play is definitely influenced by a few bands I really like, Pit-Er-Pat and Wolf Parade and the Ponys.

Collision likes to say that our work is a bold collision of the physical, visual, and aural realms. How do you see these realms alive in your writing?

For me, everything I write, script or prose fiction, revolves around the characters in scenes with one another. I'm not a very intellectual kind of writer; I don't write long internal monologues. My stories depend on the physical interaction of characters in space. My writing is also very image-driven, a lot of scenes will start out with an image, and I'll have to figure out what the image means. Lastly, music, sound, is incredibly important to me: the way the language sounds coming from the actor's mouth, the sound of actor's voices themselves, which is the most profound and basic storytelling device, and the music which has been the source of inspiration, are all parts of what I do as a writer.