FLESH: A Cross-Medium Gestation

I'm Sophia Frank, a Brooklyn-based writer and performer with a super gross idea:

What would happen if you could get high from eating people?

The answering thought was: we'd tear each other to pieces immediately.

But, allowing for some suspension of disbelief, the core concept of the novel FLESH was born. I've been working on this piece in various forms ever since then. It's been a play, it's been a short story, it's been a novella, and now it's a novel.

My original training was in theatrical performance and writing. I was lucky enough to be trained at NYU's Experimental Theatre Wing where a heavy emphasis was placed on collaboration.

It wasn't until I began studying fiction in graduate school that I fully came to realize how lonely the process of writing a novel can be. This loneliness was amplified by total isolation for several months at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic which happened to coincide with the timeline for my graduate thesis. That version of the thesis was very dark and very gross and will never see the light of day.

One evening, in the throes of misery realizing that the version of the story I'd written was unreadable, Bailey and I decided to get dinner. I was ruining the dinner, whining to Bailey about how hard it is to write a book and how much I missed the collaboration of other artists. I wished I could collaborate on a book the way we had collaborated on works of theatre.

Bailey, the infinitely more intelligent of the two of us, simply asked: why not?

Essentially what we are proposing is this:

A 10-week workshop on the themes and characters of Sophia’s novel-in-progress: FLESH. We plan to do a deep dive into the content as it is written now and then use Grotowski and other theatrical techniques to deepen and explore the three main characters in the story. Our idea is to then repurpose what we discover in the workshop as prose for FLESH.

As this project is an experiment, we can't say for sure what our end product will be. But frankly, that is the most exciting aspect of this proposal: no matter what, we are going to learn something new about the nature of collaboration across mediums (and in our case, specifically prose and performance) and its impact on the development of character, dialogue and storytelling.

In order to run this experiment as equitably as possible, we need funding. We're reaching out to our community for help so that we can provide fair pay to all artists, book performance space, and cover production fees.

That's all. Every cent of your donation goes towards building this weird experiment we're trying.

And why did any of us come to New York except to try a bunch of weird shit?

At the end of our 10-week workshop we will bring you, our community, in on what we have discovered and what you have invested in. We hope to provide an opportunity for all to take part in a larger discussion about prose and performance, the value of cross-medium collaboration, and also cannibalism.