Allison DeFrees
Novels
Acting
Poetry
Playwriting
Directing
Time may tell, but it doesn't take sides. It is equanimous. When I stop and smell the roses in the middle of a run, I don't lose time, I don't waste time, I don't make up time, I am simply in time. I want to take time, but from whom? From the murmurations of starlings that haunt the Thames near St Mary's Church? Is my regurgitative fascination with them a theft of my time, or am I gaining moments of time with each pause? Can you win time back? Woo it?
I want to understand why time passes, why we think we understand where it goes (to memory? to a ditch on the side of Highway 10 in west Texas? to the photo drawer in my mother's mahogany cupboard?). Why we think we know how we should use it, or what using time even means. Not just the what and the how, but the why. That is why I write.
I have been told that I try to do too much. I have been told that I ask too much of time, that I capitalise Time where perhaps I should not. I have been told that it is amazing, all the things I accomplish. I have probably been told to fuck off. I have been told that I hung the moon. I have been told that I am too much.
I like too much. I want to offer too much. I just need more time.
About
The website builder app has told me that here is where I briefly introduce myself and share something interesting with website visitors.
Me: I'm Allison DeFrees. I grew up in America and now live in London, where I have a day job that helps people get what they need, and in the night I write to get what I need: answers. I am nearly ready to submit my first novel, which has been in various states of being for about eight years, with several others flanking its sides. I write stories and poetry and direct and act in plays and adapt Shakespeare and Albee and Capote for the stage. I go to the theatre like other people drink water; I'll see literally anything, and often find the tube and the bus as apt a stage as the National. I read the unabridged version of Les Misérables in high school by choice, having read the abridged version for 12th grade English and been left wanting more, and thereafter was gifted tickets to the musical ELEVEN different times. I finally walked out at the interval at the last production; turns out that was enough more for me.
Something interesting: Frogs are like trees. Every year that a frog goes into hibernation, a new layer of bone forms; you can discover a frog's age by counting its bone rings.
