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JO CARSON Jo Carson (b. 1946) is a well-known writer and performer from Johnson City, Tennessee , who explores a wide range ofliterary genres, including poems, essays, plays, short stories, children's work, reviews, advertising, and speeches. She is the author of numerous award-winning plays: Daytrips (1989; KesselringAward), Preacher with a Horse to Ride (Roger L. Stevens Award from the Fund for New American Plays, 1993), and The Bear Facts (NEA Playwright's Fellowship, 1993-94). A new play, Whispering to Horses, had its premiere performance at Seven Stages in Atlanta during the 1996-97 season and won a 1996 AT&T Onstage: New Plays for the 90s Award. A series of monologues and dialogues,Stories1Ain't ToldNobody Yet (1989), made Editor's Choice on Booklist and the American Library Association's recommended list in 1990, and was brought out in paperback by Theatre Communications Group in 1991. This series has served as performance material for Carson for several years in a variety of venues here and abroad. She also has published picture books for children-Pulling My Leg(1990), You HoldMeand I'll Hold You (1992), and The GreatShaking(1994)as well as a short story collection called The Last ofthe "Waltz Across Texas" and Other Stories (1993). She has created performance pieces out of oral histories of specific communities, performed by and for those communities, including Colquitt, Georgia, and Jonesboro, Tennessee, and she is fiction editor for Southern Exposure magazine. Carson, who was honored at the Sixteenth Annual Literary Festival at Emory & Henry College in the fall of 1997, is also a companion to a medium-sized dog, a source of apples for a couple of horses, a successful grower of peppers for garlic pickles, and the black peg half of a cribbage tournament that has gone on for several years. * * * Good Questions In 1994, I was one of thirty playwrights in the country invited to apply for a major award. I did not win the award. It went to a man who was dying ofAIDS, and it allowed him the wherewithal to die at home. The award was for a body of work, a sort of achievement award, as opposed to being project-specific as most grants are. Most grants ask that you describe the project you want funded, submit a budget for it, and at the end, assuming you get the money, write a final report. This one offered a substantial check to the winner with no strings attached. The application asked some really hard questions about how I see myselfand my work and then gave a very limited space (mostly one-half of a standard page, singlespaced ) in which to answer them. Limited space means you don't get to spend much time or language getting to what you have to say. In movie parlance, you have to cut to the chase. It took about rwo weeks' work to write and cut my verbiage sufficiently to be in the chase. I am glad I answered the questions even if! didn't win the money. I found the exercise more useful than I imagined it might be when I first started filling in the blanks, because it made me think about what I've done and what I want and what I am trying to do. So, when the request for this essay came in 1995, I thought I'd pass the good questions along. I'd much rather pass along just the questions, especially since I didn't win the award, but the essay doesn't make much sense that way, so I'm including my answers and some comments on them. Just to say it, lots of backup stuff like a biography and work samples were included in the application that are not included here. So, the good questions: 1. Give a brief description ofYOut work. Comment: I am a writer/performer with more than rwenty years' work behind me, and I am all over the map ofliterary genres-poems, essays, plays, short stories, children's work, reviews, advertising, speeches-just about everything but novels, and I'm thinking of trying that next. So I wanted to find some way to speak ofsome of the range of things I do without just sounding scattered. Answer: All my work fits in my mouth. By that I mean it is written to be spoken aloud, even the essays and short stories and poems. I have a gut feeling that if work doesn't fit in my mouth, it...

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