"Cultures collide in virtual space" with IAN ROWLANDS (Wales, UK)

What do you hope to gain from this project?

Inspiration as different genres / cultures collide in virtual space.

Who is your greatest writing influence?

My influences are outside the theatre. At 13, it was Jack Kerouac, in my thirties it was Umberto Eco then Baudrillard. Increasingly, Peter Sloterdijk, having been introduced to him by a Dutch colleague, Jeroen van den Berg, with whom I’m collaborating upon a production, Fragments of Journeys Towards the Horizon, to be staged internationally in 2016

Describe your writing room / process.

As I wrote, in an essay inspired by a comment once made by Amanda [Feldman, Lead Coordinator of The Around-the-Globe Chain Play] (and included in Historia, NoPassport Press, NY - a collection of plays I wrote whilst in NY).

‘The house in which I write these few notes is built upon a Roman wall on land once owned by a pre-Reformation monastery. I exist in a palimpsest of history. In the main, most Europeans do. In Europe it appears that there is no ‘No-space’. Here, no single thing is ‘virgin’. For no single thing is free of historic association; layered history is lived as life in the Old World.’ The room is a small back room; a book lined bubble (see Sloterdijk)

My process is haphazard / shards of time snatched in between the school run and the quotidian demands of life

How old or young are you?

Too old, but blessed by my children’s youth and surprised by my eternal anger at injustice, which drives my need to keep dreaming of Utopia for my children.