No One Is Safe Around Lilly Camp

The first-ever piece of writing advice I got was from my dad, when I was 15. I had taken a crack at writing a novel, which he read and then wrote a four-page review of; I’m sad to say it was a pan, in which he encouraged me to “write what I know” (the novel was about a mermaid society, so you can see how the advice was warranted). Incensed by his two thumbs down, I vowed to keep being weird… but then everyone else also gave me the same advice. I’m still struggling to take it, though I’m getting better—but my friend Lilly Camp, whom I met at the Dramatic Writing MFA program that brought me to this country, has not struggled with it at all… or rather, with a modified version of it: “write who you know.” Lilly has written not one, not two, but THREE plays based on their experiences with other people, and in the inaugural episode of Downtown Chats, I ask them: Is anyone safe around you?

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The following is an edited version of the transcript. Substack auto-generates its own, which you can turn on while listening—but I can’t guarantee its accuracy.

Francisco Mendoza: Hello, and welcome to Downtown Chats—the companion podcast to The Downtown Beat—where I talk with fellow artists about the craft and business of making art downtown. I am your host, Francisco Mendoza, and I am joined today by one of my bestest friends, Lilly Camp. Lilly, do you want to introduce yourself?

Lilly Camp: Hello, I’m Lilly Camp. I am one of Francisco’s bestest friends, and that’s probably my most important identifier. But beyond that, I am a playwright and a writer and a bunch of other stuff—because you can’t really just be that.

Francisco: What makes you a “downtown” artist?

Lilly: My most recent piece that went up publicly was called Why Taylor Swift Is Gay: A Presentation, which screams downtown to me because anything that can get you sued feels like a little bit more downtown than not.

Francisco: You and I both met in an MFA program. It feels like the natural progression would be: you start very downtown, very experimental, and then you finally get it right and you’re on Broadway. But for me, it’s actually been the opposite: I feel like the most mainstream work that I’ve produced was during or right after school, and the more I walk away from that experience, the weirder my art becomes. Would you say that’s the same for you?

Lilly: Yeah. I’ve actually been wondering how much of that is an internal thing and how much of that is a response to the world; the weirder the stuff, oddly, the easier it is to kind of make—a lot of the weird stuff feels also somewhat scrappy and cheap and accessible. I wouldn’t say that I’m after making anything weirder, but I do think that in part because they only let you into the club so much, and also because I like writing and I want to keep writing, I feel like I’ve shifted towards ideas that are a little more odd.

Francisco: Talking about things that are crazy to write: I wanted to focus our discussion today on a specific form of craziness, which is the craziness of writing about things that have happened, and about people who are still alive to find out that they’ve been written about. There’s a short story called Cat Person, by Kristen Roupenian, that was published in The New Yorker, and there was a huge social media cycle about it, because people did not love the protagonist. And then it all quieted down— about this particular subject, of course; there was a lot of anger and outrage about other things—but much, much later, a couple of years ago, there was a second cycle when a young woman claimed that her life had been appropriated for the story. And I remember a tweet that came out of that—I wish I remember who wrote it; if you’re the person who wrote it, please write to me and I’ll put it in the show notes—that said something like: “this new Cat Person cycle shows that it’s not just about not dating writers or being related to or friends with them, but that no one is ever safe as long as writers are alive.” So would you say people are safe as long as you’re alive, Lilly Camp?

Lilly: No, they’re not. But they really never have been, from any writer. So, no worse than anyone else.