Blog
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Maddox Pennington: LA Edition
On my favorite TV shows they sometimes leap forward weeks or months. Or even a year. In that time perhaps the main character has changed their hair or fallen out of touch with an ex or left town or returned to town. In this leap I just made, I produced and directed my own play—Love
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Embers Borne West
One thing you do a lot as an aspiring anything is apply to stuff. Residencies, fellowships, workshops. Most ask you for a script, a draft, a proposal, a body of work. Some concentrate their energy on a hyperproductive week or two, others have a longer timeline intended to give you space to breathe and stall
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Zero to Playwright
I’ve always wanted to write for TV; aside from one pop culture trivia show I contributed some scripts to in 2010, it has always been miles away. I still wrote scripts, though. Especially once I built up my stand-up chops. But when quiet and chaos descended around the world, TV writing was like staring into
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The Things You Learn About Pain
When I was 3, I split my chin open jumping on a coffee table made from the trunk of a tree, sawed expertly in half by my grandfather. I got stitches, and then ice cream. Sometime later, but not too long, I cut a gash in the front of my ankle. My mother was afraid
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T as in Transformer
I went back to my care provider in early December, and all my labs were normal, so she wrote me a diagnosis of gender dysphoria and a prescription for testosterone patches (gel being unreliable and needles being incompatible with my Big Baby status). I was….awed by the ease with which it all happened. Within two
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Care Provided
It was 2:30; my appointment was in an hour, so I needed to get moving. But first, I pulled open my Box ‘o Notebooks familiar to every scribbler. One I started in 2012 in grad school for recording my fellowship to-dos (35 pages filled). One I started in 2013 for my screenprinting class (14 pages).
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Writing While Trans
Transitioning complicates the simplest of questions. “Have I seen you here before?” You have, and you haven’t. When I was here before, I was someone else—though of course she’s still here, and also, I was already there. It’s a wonder more trans and genderqueer people aren’t just walking around like Lewis Carroll characters, smiling enigmatically
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Updates
You probably knew this already but in 2017, I was a married writer and managing editor in New York. In 2017, I flipped my whole life over and started again. I left my day job, left my marriage, moved back in with my parents, got my first full time teaching job, and my first book
Maddox K. Pennington 