By Dahveed Bullis As we prepare for our second season, Dahveed reflects on our biggest lessons for SPL’s first season. Picture it: It’s October in Spokane 2021. You just finished your first trust fall with your arts community. The first workshop in SPL’s inaugural season that, when pitched to community leaders and potential collaborators, had most saying, “That sounds really interesting! I can’t wait to see it.” You’re brave, but not immune to feeling like nobody will actually care about what you’ve done. But tonight is different. Tonight is just a couple hairs over capacity in the beautiful W ..read more

by Dahveed Bullis “Don’t you wanna feel my bones on your bones? It’s only natural” -The Killers Hello dear readers! I am so grateful you chose to land your eyes on my words this week. It means a lot for you to join me in the meanderings of my mind. The first book in this series is Backwards & Forwards, and let me tell ya this book shapes my writing more than most anything I’ve come across. I first danced with this in a special course offered at EWU, and I was engrossed. Initially the plan was to write one post about each book, but that’s just not going to happen (sorry?). Perhaps my bi ..read more

You know you want to write something. You’ve cleared the time, the passion is there. Just one problem. You have no idea what to write about. You are at your computer staring at a blinking cursor. If only you had a good story idea. Or, maybe you’re mid-draft, and suddenly you have NO IDEA what comes next. Whatever the situation, you’re stuck… and you don’t know what to write. What do you do? This is the part where I’m supposed to launch into the virtues of pre-writing and story planning, right? Don’t get me wrong, I’m a HUGE proponent of prewriting. (Seriously, do it). However, there are coun ..read more

by Dahveed Bullis Greetings dear readers! Initially this week’s entry was going to be a first in a series of three posts about the three books that changed my life… and that will still come, I promise. But this week I had a revelation and felt it takes precedence instead. A little backstory. A few months ago we shot on a sample of the SPL Lab experience video for a grant application, and we used a piece that I wrote. Now, I’m a workhorse and just love putting stuff together and checking boxes. I approached the work of writing the piece as an item on a checklist to do. I gave it full focus when ..read more

One of my favorite questions to ask people is, “when was the last time a play changed your life?” I particularly love asking theatre artists this question. Aside from being an interesting conversation starter, it cuts right to the heart of what our collaboration will be. We at SPL believe the primary purpose of theatre is to change the people who experience it. So we, the playwrights and new-work developers, are in the business of creating stories that change lives. How do we do that? How do we set out creating scripts that have the potential to move an audience member, change their attitud ..read more