J Barbara Alvord

l have had two short stage plays produced, one in Iowa, "Due Time" and one in California, "The Waving Man". I have written since I was a child and for years I concerned myself with poetry and short stories. I was an English teaching major at UNI and attended summer Writers' Workshops at Iowa State University. Then I joined The Iowa Scriptwriters Alliance (ISA) to get help on a true story that I thought could be interesting converted to a stage play. "Treesitters" concerns a young man who took part in one of the endurance contests of the Great Depression. He took to the tree tops in Iowa's scalding summer heat of 1930, and actually stayed up the longest. The newspapers of the day dubbed himThe World's Champion Treesitter. It was quite a learning experience for me as a writer, but I have never marketed the play because it needs some rewriting and shortening (per the staged reading - very helpful). At one point I took twelve years out to research, write and publish a lengthy creative biography, "Through Different Eyes" about my maternal grandmother's journey from Europe to Iowa in 1903, and her painful adjustment to the culture of a foreign land. But at this time I am back writing and focusing on marketing. I plan to have a staged reading of one of my social drama screen plays," Sam Street" this summer, with the help once more of the ISA. I certainly am looking forward to Stage 32 and its many possibilities to have better luck marketing some of the work I already have written. But I will keep writing and I will try to improve my results, as we all do.