When I fear what may come, I cry without sound. Mouth an O. O for olives. And the agony of the olive tree like my body twisted and scarred but enduring, soul-inhabited. Like the bugs in that tree. We raced over the hill at sunset with only moments left to see. Reverently the tourists pressed against the fences that surrounded the wood.
Dan O’Brien is a playwright, poet, librettist, and a recent Guggenheim Fellow in Drama & Performance Art. His debut poetry collection, War Reporter, published in the US and the UK and praised in the Guardian as “a masterpiece of truthfulness and feeling,” received the UK’s Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize, and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for a First Collection. His other collections, also published in the UK and the US, are Scarsdale and New Life. O’Brien’s latest play, The House in Scarsdale: A Memoir for the Stage, received the 2018 PEN America Award for Drama. His play about the Battle of Mogadishu and the haunting of war reporter Paul Watson, entitled The Body of an American, was produced in recent years off-Broadway (NY Times Critic’s Pick), in London and Northampton, England (Gate Theatre / Royal & Derngate), and around the US. The Body of an American received the PEN Center USA Award for Drama, the inaugural Edward M. Kennedy Prize for Drama Inspired by American History, the Horton Foote Prize for Best New American Play, the L. Arnold Weissberger Award, and was shortlisted for the UK’s Evening Standard Prize for Most Promising Playwright. O’Brien is the recipient of numerous fellowships and residencies including the Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center residency in Italy. Dan O’Brien: Plays One was published in 2018, and The House in Scarsdale: A Memoir for the Stage was published in 2019, by Oberon Books in the US and the UK. His poetry, drama, and prose have been published in New England Review, North American Review, Poetry Ireland, Poetry Review, The Paris Review (online), Sewanee Review, The Sunday Times (London), Times Literary Supplement, Yale Review, The White Review, and many other magazines and literary journals. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, actor, writer and producer Jessica St. Clair, and their daughter Isobel. Find him on Twitter and Instagram.