“Here’s the biggest mistake that people make when they’re writing a monologue,” the poet and playwright Howard Craft said to a group of people furiously taking notes. “It’s not a monologue: it’s a dialogue.” He explained that every character giving a monologue is talking to someone, and to write a good monologue, you have to figure out who that someone is.
Craft was sitting in a lounge at DREAMS, a center for arts education on the north side of Wilmington, North Carolina. He was one of eight artists giving free public workshops on March 4 on topics ranging from poetry to podcasting to songwriting.
Workshop participants included local artists, teachers, community members, and a group of under-caffeinated Duke University students, who piled into a van to ride to Wilmington during the early hours of the morning. They came as part of a class taught by documentarian Charlie Thompson and theater artist Mike Wiley, who organized the workshops with DREAMS as part of their ongoing project America’s Hallowed Ground.
