CEDERING FOX
Hello and welcome to WORDTheatre Weekly! I’m your host, Cedering Fox, WORDTheatre's Founder & Artistic Director.

It's summer and we’re changing things up for the next seven weeks with our new series of Staff picks. Each week you'll meet a member of the team, hear one of their favorite stories and then their interview with the story's author.

For the record, WORDTheatre holds the copyright to these recordings so no portion of anything you hear may be reproduced without permission. Also, these stories cannot be transcribed as there are underlying rights issues and that would be in violation of copyright law.

In advance, I would like to say thank you to Philanthropist and Benefactor, Ola Strøm and the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture for their ongoing support of this podcast, to Jonathan Sacks for composing our theme music, to all our interns and to you our listeners. Now, take it away team!

SCOUT RILEY
I first read “The Depletion Prompts” back In February when we were prepping content for our first Author•Actor Series of 2024. I was immediately taken with the form of this story, as well as how delicately the prose sunk into such interesting framework. Outside of my role as the Executive Coordinator at WORDTheatre, I am an aspiring writer, so I am all too familiar with the matter of prompts. Some people, at some times respond well to the structure and guidance that a writing prompt may provide, while others feel as if they push their thoughts into a preconceived direction that does little to aid their creative process. I am somewhere in the middle, and so I found myself wide open to anything I could glean from this story and what it would present on the matter. Bigger than prompt or no prompt, is the urge many of us feel to express the inexpressible, and writing is a means to fulfill this entirely human, entirely impossible mission. By illustrating the painstaking process of attempting to explain and to showcase the stories of our own lives, and showing how different approaches offer distinct angles on the moments themselves, David Means has created a truly special work, and a fleshed out, multidimensional look at one story that is dying to be told, as he etches out the details by means of self designed prompts. By way of reading the different prompts and all the responses they bring, we may actually catch a glimpse of the ephemeral. Tim Blake Nelson, whom I love in O Brother, Where Art Thou and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs does a magnificent reading of the piece that I think all of our listeners will enjoy.