deanne stillman

(Photo by Cat Gwynn) Deanne Stillman is a widely published, critically acclaimed writer and playwright. Her books of literary nonfiction include Twentynine Palms, which Hunter Thompson called 'A strange and brilliant story by an important American writer'; Mustang, an LA Times 'best book of the year," now in audio with Frances Fisher, Anjelica Huston, and Wendie Malick; Desert Reckoning, based on a Rolling Stone piece, a Southwest Book of the Year, and winner of the Spur Award; Blood Brothers which received a starred review in Kirkus, and her latest, American Confidential, which was cited in Air Mail Weekly for its 'dazzling and evocative prose.' Her short film, "Marilyn Monroe Flees Her Crypt When Hugh Hefner Is Buried Next Door, has been winning prizes on the indy circuit, including Best Experimental Short at the Dec 2022 Indie X Festival. It's adapted from her play, "On Such a Winter's Day," which also includes other monologues for women that have been produced in festivals around the country, from Brooklyn to Topanga Canyon. Her play, "Reflections in a D'Back's Eye, was produced at Highways in Santa Monica in a short run, directed by Darrell Larson, just before the pandemic. A monologue from it appears in Best Men's Stage Monologues (2021, Smith and Kraus). It was a 2019 semi-finalist for the Blues Ink Playwriting Award from American Blues Theater. Her play, "Billy the Kid and Lee Harvey Oswald Praise Citizenship in the American Dreamtime," also produced by Highways and directed by Darrell Larson, is now streaming in vimeo. Her essays have appeared in publications such as lithub, Crime Reads, Journal of the Plague Years, the UK Independent, LA Review of Books (former columnist), and the NY Times. and she's a founding professor of the UC Riverside-Palm Desert MFA Low Residency Creative Writing Program, where she taught for 13 years.

WEBSITE AND SOCIAL MEDIA
Website: http://deannestillman.com/
FB: Deanne Stillman
TW: @deannestillman2
IG: @realdeannestillman

MORE ABOUT ME
As I often tell friends, "I brake for the sand." That means the desert or the beach - places where I set much of my work, especially the desert. This is not really a choice but something I'm drawn to. To me, the personal is not just political; it's geographic and spiritual as well. Place is a character in my work and sometimes a driver of story, and this applies to my plays and nonfiction. So this brings me to my most gratifying moment in theatre; it involved my play, where the abovementioned "Reflections in a D'Back's Eye" is set. In this play, the Grand Canyon and baseball converge, with a baseball diamond etched onto the canyon floor, and the little girl in the play (based on a real character), who was on her local Little League team at the time of the shooting and dreamed of playing professionally when she grew up, hits the ball outta the canyon (ballpark). A baseball stadium and the Grand Canyon are two of my favorite places, for real and metaphorically, and it was most satisfying to see that this staging worked and how imaginative and magical it could be, providing what I call "grace in the carnage" for this very unsettling story. Plus the characters, from the 9-year-old little girl to a 70-year-old Wal-Mart greeter to the oldest tree in Tucson - a mesquite that sings a duet with its caretaker - really conveyed what I was hoping they conveyed: a longing for connection, and I'm not talking about networking. The play is one of the things I'm most proud of ever writing, and I based it on a prose poem of mine which you can read here. Thanks in advance for taking a look, and if you ever have a chance to get to the Grand Canyon, take it! https://gwarlingo.com/2012/on-the-anniversary-of-the-tucson-shooting-a-new-work-by-deanne-stillman/

WHAT I'M WORKING ON
A book about the last mountain lions of Los Angeles, called Ghost Cats. By the way, in my abovementioned short film about Marilyn Monroe fleeing her crypt, she runs away with mountain lions - free at last. Also, she's heard that there are cameras on the trail, and she's longing to hear that click and have one more photo taken. Can you imagine what the scientists will think, she wonders, when they see her in their recorded images?

KEYWORDS
​Culture, Nature, Animals, Land/Place, Historical, cast-aways, war/peace, Bill of Rights/personal rights, Wild West/America, myth, wild horses/burros, rock, jazz, blues, opera