If you can impress me in just six words, even better.

I have written at some length about how much I value the short literary form in playwriting but I could just as easily go on about my love of the short story. I recently read through a volume of Shirley Jackson’s best work and was taken aback at how gorgeous and bone-chilling her stories could be. Beautiful words, assembled into little collages of pain and regret. Run out and grab a collection if you can, if you love reading or writing or simply get off on hearing about misfortune in regard to other people. You will be thankful that the collective fates of her protagonists have not fallen on your slender shoulders, believe you me (and I don’t mean just the particularly gruesome one that befalls poor Mrs. Hutchinson in “The Lottery,” probably the most well-known of Ms. Jackson’s work).

The volume that you now have in front of you is a strange little beast. It contains two short plays and the short story that inspired those two dramatic works. My editor and I thought that by bringing these three literary forms together (prose, monologue, and playlet), one might get a clearer picture of their individual and collective creation and get some small glimpse into how an idea can grow and shift and turn back on itself as it is birthed by a writer.

“With Hair of Hand-Spun Gold” was a commissioned work for a collection of new fairy tales; I got involved thanks to the wonderful writer Kate Bernheimer and my offering to My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me (great title) was a modern re-telling of “Rumplestiltskin.” Ever the outsider, I told the story from the perspective of the troublesome Mr. Rumplestiltskin and in a first-person form. To my knowledge it’s never been performed as a monologue but it certainly could be. In it, a young man talks about his relationship with a teacher and the kinds of joy and misery that come from this cursed and calculated union. By the time I decided to write a one-woman show loosely based on the myth of Phaedra, I doubled back and used the same ideas that had led me to my fairy tale, but this time from the perspective of the teacher in question.

All The Ways To Say I Love You is a full-on monologue that gives us the story of an older woman and a younger man completely from the side of the woman. She recounts their history (and the history of her life with her husband) as she finishes up her day at high school. She is also a counselor to these students and we see her putting away their files and writing notes to herself while explaining to us how she began and ended an illicit affair with a young man and to what purpose (and that purpose may be even darker than you think).

Because there’s always a purpose to things.