"...hyperbolic stories, juxtaposing the ridiculous with the sublime. Braun's use of silence and sound, darkness and light, intensifies...The vision unsettles."

-Francine Russo, The Village Voice

My favorite movie image, from when I was a kid, was that of a burned-faced Sam Shepard walking from a jet fire in the desert. He looked big and fearless, like no one could see him but me.

True West was the gateway drug. I read the Sam Shepard play my sophomore year in college, not because it was required, but because Penn State was hammering Minnesota and I was avoiding my anthropology homework. When reading Shepard’s biography at the top of the text I realized the author was the same as the actor that played Chuck Yeager it in The Right Stuff. And I got Shepard’s play. I got it in spades. I understood in ways I never understood A Dolls House, or Oedipus Rex, or Hamlet, or any of the other plays I had to read in script analysis class. It was as if Shepard had written a twisted love letter, only to be viewed by yours truly. His words were big and rebellious, and his plays were complicated.

Before the curtain fell on the Penn State romp, I was headed to my college library to check out everything they had on Shepard. There were plays and flash fiction with giant snakes, cowgirls riding catfish, and space aliens torturing cheerleaders. His plays reminded me of the way I felt about the world back then: Violent, silly, and sexual. I liked his plays so much I found every book I could of his collaborators, most notably a small man named Joe Chaikin, who I would later meet in the lobby of Signature Theatre Company’s Peter Norton Space on 42nd Street.

And with that, I was in trouble. Chaikin would make references to James Joyce in letters to Shepard, so I had to read Joyce. Joyce led me to Albert Camus, who led me to Joseph Heller, who led me towards fellow Hoosier Kurt Vonnegut. Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas got on my reading list, and before I knew what hit me, I was failing anthropology. Their words were big to me.

I wrote my first play at the age of twenty. It was a bad stab at acting like Shepard. Most young writers start this way. The play was produced at my college, won a national award, and it all went to my head. I went to graduate school twice, took workshops with every writer I could get my hands on, and acquired jobs at West Village bars and bookstores to be with likeminded people. I would talk with co-workers about Tom Robbins and Erik Ehn the way children talk about cotton candy. No one really makes a living off writing, and that is not the intent of writing to begin with. I’ve come to learn that writing is to be naked and to show the world what you see, no matter how intimate or grand. Acting like another writer is easy. Writing like you is a trick.

My role as a writer has led me down many avenues. I've met "Suicide Girls", Roller Derby Queens, Japanese book makers, football legends, foul tempered chefs, golf course architects, political refugees, bone cutters, National Public Radio stars, glass blowers, a girl who makes kimonos from used tea bags, and a glutton of painters, puppeteers, poets, sculptors, writers, rodeo clowns, cowboys, cowgirls, and self-professed "mermaids." I've eaten alligators, flown planes, rode elephants, carved totem poles, served ice cream to rock stars, gotten lost in Ohio, been tattooed by an El Paso paramedic, arm wrestled an Irish dwarf in the Mexican mountains, hunted the Loch Ness Monster, and written a lot. And, I hope, I've got more to meet, do, and write about.

With this website I want to make my work more accessible in a globalizing world. A Japanese dramaturge once told me she enjoyed my writing because it was human, not humane. Writing should not be simple. It should be chewy and difficult to digest. Let this site be as big as you wish. No one is looking.

Timothy Braun