Foreword
by Afsana Ahmed
October 27, 2023
Marc Palmieri is a professor, a writer, an actor, and even a baseball coach having once played for the Toronto Blue Jays. His plays, such as Waiting for the Host, Poor Fellas, and NY Times’ “Critic’s Pick” Levittown have been performed not only in New York City but around the country. His script for Telling You was produced by Miramax and stars Jennifer Love Hewitt.
I first met Marc my freshman year when I took his screenwriting class. He had unlimited patience and responded to every draft. He wouldn’t tell me what to do; he just helped me find what my characters were really trying to say, digging deeper into their motives. Marc never missed a class and was never late, except for the one day he had canceled on short notice, explaining that he had a family emergency. His daughter was ill.
I never quite understood the details or how my usually even-tempered, fun professor was suddenly grim. I read She Danced With Lightning in a day. The book gave me a rare glimpse into the life of parents who care for a child with severe epilepsy and introduced me to Anna, a girl with a ton of spunk who refused to give up her dancing despite countless seizures and hospitalizations. She Danced with Lightning follows Marc as he struggles to succeed in the world of playwriting and theater while he fights to save his daughter’s life.
On November 28, 2022, Marc Palmieri took time to sit down with Sonja Killibrew and I in the FICTION office at City College. He had once again just taught his regular graduate screenwriting class and came with an inspired student in tow.
Marc Palmeiri
An Interview
with Sonja Killebrew and Afsana Ahmed
at the FICTION office
November 28, 2022
Marc Palmieri’s memoir, She Danced With Lightning, is now available on Amazon.
Sonja Killebrew: We're so excited to talk to you about your latest book. What inspired you to write She Danced with Lightning?
Marc Palmieri: Well, my daughter suffered from a pretty rough epilepsy for about ten years and things came to a crisis. It was a survivable version of the disorder. She had her seizures at night, but during the day she was able to function pretty normally. I had done no writing about epilepsy for those ten years. I'm a playwright, I’ve written short prose before screenwriting, but I hadn't tackled epilepsy as a writer. What changed was that I realized that I did have a story to tell when Anna faced her spiraling health condition with incredible courage and that I learned so much about myself in those weeks leading up to her life-saving brain surgery in 2018. There were things that went on in the period between the condition worsening and the surgery that I felt had the makings of a story worth telling, and when I see that I tend to look to write about it. Anything I've ever written has come from a moment where I realized I've learned something, and if that happened—that a character can change, a character has changed, has realized something—there's a valuable story in it.
So that's what inspired me to tell the story of Anna and living with this thing. I thought there was a need for that. There are not a whole lot of mainstream books, films, stories in general about epilepsy, but it was really how she faced what may have been her, you know, final days that inspired me to do something with it as a writer.
Afsana Ahmed: Your book made me cry a lot, but it was really, really funny. There is one scene where you take an edible that was gifted to you from the people you bought CBD from for your daughter because you were trying whatever you can to help Anna and in the middle of all this chaos and the stress you're in, you accidentally take five servings of this edible. You're an actor, so I wanted to ask you: would you ever do a PSA commercial about weed serving sizes?
Marc: [laughs] Sure. Yes, I'm an actor, and I'm available for anything like that. Just see my website. My agent's number’s on there. Anytime I would. That's funny.
So yeah, it's true. We were there for the news that the extract from marijuana, the CBD THC oil, was having an impact on certain patients' epilepsy, and at that time it was very hard to get. It was really only legal in Colorado at first and then just a few other states as a medicine. And so you needed a doctor to prescribe it. You needed to live where it was legal to get. It's expensive and all of that, but you really needed to even qualify for that doctor's prescription. There wasn't that much of it, and so there were a lot of questions about how we would get to try this thing that may or may not help.
A lovely friend of mine named Nicole Treska, another City College instructor and graduate—wonderful writer—she just one day offered to help me out. Helped me get some from her hometown of Colorado of Denver, and long story short, I end up adding to my resume drug smuggler because I needed to get this stuff into New York.
So the dispensary owner in Denver began to send boxes of this low THC high CBD recreational chew, which is the best we can do. Similar molecular makeup as the oil that people were seeing success with for epilepsy patients. The kind gentleman who packed the box threw in a little baggie of the real stuff, the THC stuff, the high-making chews, with a little note for the parents, and I've never—I'm not a, I just, I don't have the guts for drugs, you know? I have a weak, weak, weak constitution. I've tried to smoke marijuana twice, didn't go well both times. I wonder why anyone would do that. It just makes you feel sick and dirty, so that's my approach. I know that's not everyone's experience.
So, one day I was just feeling good, and I decided things were kinda going well. It seemed maybe these chews were helping Ana, and I just opened that bag and said, “Why not? I'll just—I'm not going anywhere. Just take one and relax a little bit.” But I didn't know.
You see in the book, a lot happens after that. I realized that, yes, I took an entire bar and not just one edible. They had markings on them like butter sticks, and I should have paid attention to that, but I popped the whole thing into my mouth and paid for it.
But thank you, I'm glad that's in the book. There were many funny things that happened over the years and sometimes in excess of sorrow, there's laughter, right? And we were sort of in that zone for a long time, so I wanted to represent that in the book. This was not just a dreary stretch of time. We were enjoying our lives, and there was a lot to report on about some of the clumsy, desperate things we were trying to do to deal with this.
Afsana: Thank you for adding all the funny stories because that's what made me emotionally attached to the book so much. It really felt like I was watching this family in the middle of my living room.
One thing that really stuck out to me in your book was when you mentioned that when you spoke to friends who didn't have children or relatives with epilepsy, you would try to end the conversation on a positive note or bring up some research you heard about how these things are cured because you didn't want to bring them down. But when you spoke to your friends who had children with epilepsy, you would be really honest, and you would tell them how difficult it was, and you could both like laugh it off and be real with each other.
I had a class with you once where you had to cancel because your daughter had a seizure, and you didn't tell us too much about it. I had no idea it was that difficult. I didn't know that all these things happened that day.
Was it hard for you to write the truth in this book, knowing that everyone would read this?
Marc: Great question. Thank you. Maybe I didn't know how bad it was at the time. Now that we're here, now that the book's been out 3–4 months the endeavor feels like it's finished. This was the last phase of the work, the really privileged part of the work, where it got out there, and I could just kind of push it and be doing things like this, like this wonderful conversation.
I think what's left for me is really kind of thinking, “What’d I learn writing it?” I think that part of the benefit—it doesn’t sound pleasant, but it is—is to realize how hard it indeed was because while you're going through it, you can't dwell on that, and there were instinctive responses [from] people, "Hey, how are things? How's Anna? She doing okay?" The last thing I would want to do is say, "Oh, actually you know it's, it’s… no." If I were always honest there were going to be times where I was going to have to scare someone or depress someone, and no one wants to do that. I think that's part of why epilepsy is under-engaged and hidden in a lot of ways.
One of the unique elements of epilepsy is it can kind of be invisible. It can come and go. You might have a decent week. You might have a stretch where things aren’t as bad as say, an emergency where I had to cancel class, and I had to say why. Other times, maybe it’s not so bad. Maybe it was only a few seizures that week and why bring it up if you don’t have to? It doesn’t mean we’re not suffering incredible fear and psychological torture about our future and just so sad for her and uncertain as to what’s going to happen next. But that’s our every minute, so when we are functioning out there socially or if I’m in the classroom or wherever else—the theater—I think the last thing I wanted to dwell on was what I have to dwell on when it’s in my face at home. It had to do with both me not wanting to upset or depress other people, not wanting to remind myself how bad the reality really was.
Anna hasn’t had a seizure now in three and a half years since the surgery. It was a success, so I knew I had that [when I wrote the book]. I knew I was moving toward a happier place. I tried to say pretty early in the book, that she survived this surgery, survived that spiral and that we’re in the process of moving on, or at least having the faith that this is done—which we never know—but I think that helped me then really be raw and honest about all that it was, dealing with this.
Not only did I do that for my own sake, but with the hope of giving some consolation to those [who], like I was, are living with this thing every day. It's not better, they didn't have this miraculous medical intervention that worked, and to bring some fellowship to them, to say at least I know, here's a book that's about [epilepsy], written by someone that knows how bad it is. I just remember how much of a comfort that was. Didn't make anything better, but it had us feeling less alone. If you heard someone telling a story about epilepsy, just mentioning epilepsy, anything, you didn't feel as alone. My hope was that people that were living with this—and I know how many there are, there's fifty million people with this thing—that they would be consoled to some level that I know, at least as a writer, here's what I went through, and I know it's like what you're going through. That's what I hoped for, but I had the benefit of being a solid year out of that nightmare—she's doing really well [now]—to start saying I see the story.
There was all that stuff about what epilepsy is and how hard it was, but it’s also what she did that was so courageous—so different than what I was doing, which wasn't—and that was the story I wanted to share too. I thought that what she pulled off by performing during that time and getting up off the couch and off her feet every day, even as she was dying (essentially), to do what she loved was just something that I needed to tell people about, and to explain how much it changed me and help me learn about me.
Sonja: When you mentioned how what you wrote was able to connect with people so that they feel less alone, that's how I felt when I watched Waiting for the Host. During the pandemic, when we were all stuck at home, I told all my friends to watch it; it was hilarious!
Can you tell us how you wrote it?
Marc: So this theater is shut down. It was like mid-March 2020, the show is closed, the schools closed—or at least we're going to go online—houses of worship closed, this thing was happening. I had a show—not that I wrote but that I was the dramaturge—that was just in previews. The New York Times was coming to review it Friday night. They shut it Thursday, so my involvement professionally in that season was aborted. All the shows were out. The shows that hadn't opened yet were not going to open. The shows that had opened were closed and, within a matter of a week, the theaters that had sold tickets that [were] going to try to survive how long this going to take—this could have been the end of so many of those organizations—immediately started to get busy figuring out what they could put on the Internet for their viewership, for their subscribers, for their audiences. They started to do play readings. They figured out, "Well, that's something we can stream. We can just do love letters and sit and read the play to actors that were going to be in the play or something.”
I work with a publisher called Dramatists Play Service. There are others: Sam French, TRW. These are the major representatives of the published plays, and they were being asked to supply scripts and rights to do this so that theaters could offer something in their season. It was really desperate. It was in Playbills, and on the news that they had put out a waiver to all the authors asking us to sign this waiver that would allow theaters to buy the rights to just streaming readings. This was an all-new frontier in the theater cause it's not really theater. Is it really film? What is it? The Union, Screen Actors Guild, Actors' Equity… they didn't know what to do with these things. What should the actors be paid? Should the tickets be sold? All of this got very complicated very quickly.
But I was one of the first—I signed. You know, why wouldn't I? I signed the waiver and hoped that some theater would use one of my plays for a reading during the pandemic. Why not? Almost simultaneously, I was asked by a local church to read the role of—I thought it was Judas; I was really psyched about that—but it turned out to be Jesus. To read the role of the Messiah in what would now be their streamed Palm Sunday passion play, which they did on-site every year for a hundred years. But this year no because everything's going to be streamed out of the priest and his son's room or something. So they said they were going to get the vestry together and grab some other people to do this reading of the script. I got on this thing, and it was one of my first Zoom meetings ever. I didn't use Zoom, I barely used whatever else there was Skype—and I have to be [a] quasi-savvy person. I'm a professor. I use Blackboard all the time, and all that, but I was with this cast of six or seven that was going to read this play. They don't even know how to check e-mail, a lot of these people, so by the time we got to actually reading the script on this Zoom rehearsal, it was an hour of just dark comedy. People drinking, people in despair, people throwing things at their screen, and these are, of course, major figures from the Bible. It was very, very funny.
Then we ended up reading the script. The Rector's son recorded it, and he was going to edit it, and we all said, “Good night,” and I said to myself during all of this closing and all of this darkness, “[Wow], I was just at a play rehearsal. That was pretty cool.” If an audience was just watching that rehearsal, that would have been [a] really funny show, so I said I'm going to write a play that will simulate a Zoom screen on stage, and I'm going to try to remember what just happened and write a comedy. Then as I was writing it, I started realizing, well, this isn't going to go up anytime soon, and actually maybe I'll write it to be a live Zoom show that audiences can attend and the cast can be scattered—
It turned out that was the first one, and by a series of accidents it ended up at Penn State Centre Stage. It had a professional production out of their theater. After a week of rehearsal, we opened on the last night of Passover, which was very apropos, it being a story of a plague ending. A thousand people hit the website to watch it. Then my publisher published it, and it was produced more than any play that I've ever produced all over the world: as far as Singapore, Hawaii, all over America. Some really fancy folks got into it—Hunter Foster, [who’s a] Tony-winning director—and it really just got out there. Then there were other Zoom plays—now everyone’s sick of Zoom plays—but it was just like that accidental thing that came of this funny experience, that I just immediately wrote about (it took me ten years with epilepsy) but I just thought it was a really unique opportunity and sometimes you get lucky. Someone was trying to get the rights to a play that the BBC wouldn't let them do because of airing rights, and he said, “Well what else you got?” and the publisher was like, "Well, we got this weird thing one of our writers sent me. I didn't even read it, you can read it.” And they ended up doing it so. And then you saw it and you wrote one!
Sonja: Oh my God, [Waiting for the Host] was hilarious.
Marc: Well, thank you. I was so proud, and you got yours read and produced! That was so awesome.
Sonja: You inspired me, thank you.
Marc: Wow, that means a lot.
Sonja: And I found out through our amazing intern, Brittany Lugo, that there is a sequel to Waiting for the Host [called] Still Waiting.
Marc: Well, the initial title was Streaming Passion, and that was act one. I thought that was it, I thought it was done. Then when Hunter Foster did it out of his theater at Syracuse he said, "I think there's act two in this. There's another act, but first you gotta change the title. Streaming Passion sounds like something pornographic." And I said, "No, it's streaming the passion. Get it?" He said, "Yeah, we get it, but my subscribers won’t get it up here." We kicked around a bunch of titles, and he came up with Waiting for the Host, which of course sounds just like Waiting For Godot, but Waiting for the Host is right out of Zoom, and I was like, "That's why you're Hunter Foster and I'm not.” Then he commissioned act two and produced them all together. Most of the production did do both, some just did the first part. You can do the first part—works by itself—but I do have an act two. Dramatists Play Service: they have it. They made a book of it.
Sonja: I'm a huge baseball fan. I grew up watching baseball with my mom was so excited when I learned that you were transferred to the Toronto Blue Jays.
Marc Palmieri as a pitcher for the Wake Forest Demon Deacons. Photo courtesy marcpalmieri.com.
Marc: I was once, yes, at a high school. I was eighteen, and I had accepted a baseball scholarship to Wake Forest University in North Carolina, and at the end of the high school season, my name was picked [pretty late] in the Major League draft. It wasn't something I would turn down a four-year scholarship to take. I think the salary was $850 a month, and the team was in Alberta, Canada at a place called Medicine Hat, which looked freezing even in August. It was like the bottom-ranked, the rookie league, the first level, you know, but it was a great thrill. It's a huge honor, and it's stuck with me all my life. Here I am many years later, and it's been brought up, but I still coach and do all that.
Sonja: That's so cool, yes?
Afsana: In your book, you mentioned how when you were in high school you were a jock—
Marc: Oh, sure.
Afsana: When did the Jock turn into a sensitive playwright? When did that happen?
Marc: When I got down South and threw my fastball—which I thought was really good—and I found out how guys down South hit fastballs, I became very sensitive very quickly. Well, no, I played at a great level. You know, you learn a lot. You learn how to actually pitch.
But seriously, I got to see a play when I was an undergrad. It was a small liberal arts college, and we had to take courses that we wouldn't necessarily choose because I was there thinking, maybe I would get into business. I didn't know what I was doing. I was majoring in baseball and because of an Intro to Theatre course I had to see a play on campus. I saw Tennessee Williams’ Night of the Iguana, and I was blown away. It changed me. I was just so carried away by, of course, the writing, the play, just the art of Tennessee Williams, but also this amazing group of magicians that were doing this, that were transporting us into this reality and enunciating this beautiful language. I was just proud for them, I wanted to be one of them. I wanted to have something to do with this someday, and I don't know what that would mean . . . if it would just be taking tickets at the door, I didn't know. I just knew this is a part of campus I want to be part of, and I think I wanted to change. I wanted to just not be only an intimidating, competitive, funny jock type—an identity that got me through my life. Suddenly, I demanded more of myself, and that was the beginning.
Sonja: Did you write films first and then write theater?
Marc: Yes, that's an element I wish your research didn't bring you to. I am responsible for a very bad movie from 1997 or 99. Miramax Films did distribute the movie, so it was, in that sense, a good credit. It certainly opened some doors, but yeah, my first attempt at writing was screenwriting and television writing. I had been cast as an actor in [an independent] movie called Too Much Sleep, and I was the lead in it. I was just in New York and had done this play, and the director saw me and offered it to me. I lived with this full-length screenplay, [rehearsing] for a good three weeks, and then another three weeks shooting, and I just got to know the form like that. (I hadn't read a lot of screenplays before.) Then I watched this independent filmmaker—this was in 1995 or something—and at that point, they were making real 35mm independent films. It took a lot of money, and there was no digital filmmaking yet. The independent film scene was much smaller. There were very few festivals, and I didn't really understand that people were making movies on a much smaller budget, that it wasn't always Hollywood.
The movie ended up somehow getting into a major festival, South by Southwest. Then it got distribution, and we opened in like sixteen cities. That's a real fantasy story for an independent film, even back then. I was really inspired by that it looked like, “Oh! That’s how it works. You write a script, you get people to give you some money, you make it, and then it's in the movie theaters. I'll do that.”
So, I wrote a romantic comedy based loosely on The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and I finished the screenplay. By series of accidents, it got made in L.A.—I sold the script; I didn't have anything to do with it—and then it was in Blockbuster Video all over the country. It was in a festival, it opened a little bit, but it had that like 1990s TV, 90210 crew and, you know, those potboilers. I didn't love the process, a lot was changed, the original script was changed a lot, [and] I was very ambivalent about the final product, but I learned that that's kind of normal in Hollywood filmmaking. You're not really—you don't expect the script to stay what it is. but it was cool anyway, and I optioned a television pilot after that.
So that was like my first idea, but when I started writing plays, I just enjoyed that much more. [There’s] much less money involved, that's true, but there was just something more meaningful to me in writing plays and being with the people that get together and make it real. New York is a town where even small projects can get a lot of attention, so I graduated to playwriting soon after my writing for the screen.
But every now and then, I'm still doing projects that involve film and adaptations of my own plays, if someone's interested in optioning that. The book is, right now, under a six-month option, so will I write a screenplay of that, or will someone else? If that happens—it's still something I'm interested in still, yeah.
Sonja: So that might be next? The screenplay of She Danced with Lighting?
Marc: Maybe. Yeah, maybe. I have another play that I was working on before the pandemic that I'm thinking about getting behind again and starting to get that out there. Maybe even looking at that as a novel since I know this has been a pretty successful ride with this book that might give me another chance. It's good to have a few options about what's next because you do have to move on at some point.
Sonja: It's been great seeing you on TV during your book tour. What’s next? Do you have another state or city to go to?
Marc: Right now I have just some virtual stuff to do. I just did a big keynote speech for a wonderful statewide epilepsy conference with the Epilepsy Foundation, [Epilepsy] Alliance, and other groups just a couple of weeks ago. Coming up, I just have some book clubs that I'm attending virtually [with] folks up in New England and upstate New York.
Sonja: Thank you so much for your time. Is there anything else you want to share?
Marc: I just want to say thank you and how much it meant when I was first published in FICTION. I have the MA and MFA [in Creative Writing] from this program [at the City College of New York] [and] when I got here, I had never tried to write prose, I had never taken a writing class. I had already been a playwright and a screenwriter, but I had never really formally trained as a writer. And the program just made me a better writer, made me a better thinker, a better everything, in ways that I had no idea that it would. The literature courses I encountered, the writing courses, the teachers, the other students . . . it was just a huge and vital part of my maturity, and [IQ Test and From: When I Wore Floods] being published in FICTION were just—they remain great thrills. That is such a legitimizing credit for any writer, so I've been lucky to have two stories in there. So, thank you so much.
The audio track was transcribed
by Denise Domena
Afsana Ahmed is a fiction and screenwriter from Queens, New York. She is currently completing her MFA in Creative Writing from the City College of New York. She is a contributing writer for the satire women's magazine Reductress, and an Assistant Editor at FICTION.
by Marc Palmieri
I’D KNOWN FOR weeks that my father had gotten transferred to Long Island. We’d be moving in the winter after Christmas, and I’d be leaving my sixth grade class right in the middle of the year, but I kept it top secret at school, even from my friends. I hadn’t even broken the news to my teacher, Ms. Waters. Whenever it felt like the right time came each day, I put it off and tried to not think about it.