We’re thrilled to announce the next fellows for our Writer’s Residency in Downtown Las Vegas. We welcome our fellows Meredith Hambrock, A. Rey Pamatmat, and Sterling HolyWhiteMountain.
Fellows will spend a month in the vibrant heart of downtown Las Vegas, engaging with and becoming a part of the city’s thriving arts scene. The fellowship is designed to give talented writers and other creatives the space, time, and freedom to work on their longform projects, and the bibliophilic joy of living in a fully furnished apartment next to Las Vegas’ literary hub, The Writer’s Block bookstore.
Our apartment is in The Lucy, which also houses the Writer's Block. The Lucy is Beverly Rogers’ multi-use artist residency and complex, dedicated to fostering a creative community in Las Vegas.
Special thanks again to Nevada Humanities, UNLV, and private donors for helping bring these fellowships to life.
Meredith Hambrock - July 2023
Meredith Hambrock has worked in writing rooms on over 100 episodes of TV Comedy. She most recently served as Executive Story Editor on the sitcom “Corner Gas Animated” where she wrote for many hilarious Canadians. In 2022, her episode “A Lot to Be Desired” was nominated for a Leo Award. Her debut mystery novel, “Other People’s Secrets”, was published in September by Crooked Lane Books and was called “audacious” and “fabulous” by the New York Times Book Review, was one of The Rapsheet Mags Best Reads of 2022, was a Whodunit Mystery Bookstore Book of the Year Finalist, and was nominated for a Lefty Award in the Best Debut Mystery Category.
About her project: The project I'll be working on is a literary mystery/eco thriller called "Woman Found Floating" about the staff on a yacht crossing the Pacific Ocean and all that unfolds after they rescue a mysterious woman they find floating on a life raft in the middle of nowhere who claims her own sailboat was lost in a fire. As they get to know her, things are not as they appear and soon begin to suspect they were meant to find her.
a. Rey Pamatmat - August 2023
A. Rey Pamatmat’s plays include Edith Can Shoot Things and Hit Them (Actors Theatre of Louisville), after all the terrible things I do (Milwaukee Rep), House Rules (Ma-Yi), Thunder Above, Deeps Below (Second Generation), A Spare Me (Waterwell), and DEVIANT. His newest play, Safe, Three Queer Plays, follows the seismic changes in Queer America through a gay man of color’s life. Rey also recently contributed to a collaborative libretto for Desert In, which premiered on the Boston Lyric Opera’s operabox.tv. His work has been translated into Spanish and Russian, performed in Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Russia, and published by Concord Theatricals, Playscripts, Cambria Press, and Vintage. Rey is the former co-director of the Ma-Yi Writers Lab, and was a PoNY, Hodder, and Princess Grace Fellow.
About his project: Several things frustrated me about the American Theater pre-pandemic, and that frustration was amplified mid-pandemic, and then continued to make it difficult to write new work now that we’re post-(or-whenever-the-eff-we-are-now-)pandemic. One of the biggies, though? TRAUMA PORN. Not the thing in and of itself, but its relationship to our white supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist (and beloved) American theater.
There’s a trend toward the production of work that requires BIPOC, women, queer, underprivileged, and otherwise disenfranchised playwrights to plumb the depths of their most personal injuries and put them on display. An audience — still predominantly wealthy, white, and seeking entertainment — watches these plays and delights over traumas so alien to them that they experience more pity than terror. They then depart the theater believing they’ve performed some great act of social justice in the refilling of their empathy gauge. However, all they’ve really done is had a nice, probably expensive, night out. Meanwhile, the joyful plays we’ve written, or plays we’ve written to our community for our community, get passed up for the next tale of woe. Dramatic Action as Intercourse + Catharsis as Orgasm + Self-aggrandizing Sympathy as Afterglow = Trauma Porn in the contemporary American theater! But then, with complete disregard for my annoyance at this exploitative structure, my dad went and died. My incarcerated dad, from whom I’ve been estranged for more than a decade, during a global pandemic, DIED. And now I can’t possibly write about anything else — how would I even begin? So it’s either write nothing at all or write about the depth of personal injury I suffered as his son.
Of course, I’ve written about my dad my entire life. Whether explicitly through absent, misguided, and downright villainous parents or implicitly through themes of thoughtless authority, of the necessity of found families, or of the attempt to connect despite irreconcilable difference, I’ve rarely not written about him. But now I am actually writing about my actual dad, without the safe distance mimesis and metaphor typically provide. What can I do, then, except write a play about my difficult relationships with both my dad and trauma porn?
I am not intent on taking anyone down in this exploration — neither my father nor the American Theater (or, for that matter, my family, exhibitionist playwrights, the empowered’s obsession with the disenfranchised’s pain, or even those sad social media messages about taking mental health breaks that simultaneously seek to avoid attention while seeking attention). Mostly, in the 15-ish pages I’ve already written, I’ve been confused and asking questions: who was my dad? Why couldn’t we get along? Do I pity him his imprisonment even though it was for a crime he DID commit? Why do people want to watch me figure this out? Why can’t I write something else? Do I want to write this and show it to people? Do I want to not want to write this? Who the hell am I if I do want to write it? Who the hell am I if I don’t want to write it, but I do anyway? And why do I turn to narrative to make sense of messy relationships and theatrical trends that I know do not make sense?
sterling holywhitemountain - september 2023
Sterling HolyWhiteMountain grew up on the Blackfeet Reservation. He holds a BA in English creative writing from the University of Montana and an MFA in fiction from the University of Iowa. He was also a James C. McCreight Fiction Fellow at the University of Wisconsin and more recently a Stegner fellow at Stanford University. His work has appeared in volumes 1 and 2 of Off the Path: An Anthology of 21st Century American Indian and Indigenous Writers, Montana Quarterly, ESPN.com., The Yellow Medicine Review, and The Atlantic. He's currently at work on a novel. He is an unrecognized citizen of the Blackfeet Nation.
About his project: A novel about blood quantum laws and the way they play out on the ground in Indian Country, between people from the same community.