Steven Winn, Our Monday Visitor

A brief bio of Steven Winn

Steven Winn is an award-winning journalist and fiction writer who spent many years as a staff writer at the San Francisco Chronicle. A Philadelphia native and founding staff member of the Seattle Weekly, he held a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in fiction at Stanford University. His work has appeared in Good Housekeeping, National Lampoon, the New York Times, Parenting, Prairie Schooner, Sports Illustrated, and UTNE Reader. He lives with his family in San Francisco. 

Everyone come up with a question for him which you send to me beforehand.

A dance performance

the dancers’ bodies would compress with hunched shoulders, sunken necks and sharply angled elbows, then burst and flower open to connect with each other in feverishly inventive ways — hooked ankles, a head gripped and rolled in someone else’s hands, fluttering finger holds.

a touring play

Cusack’s line readings can make a romantic rival’s name or an offbeat phrase like “dirty biscuit” sound wonderfully overripe. She delivers a mediocre song (“I Had a Vision”) with the same brandy-voiced conviction she does the wrenching “Please Don’t Take Him” or her surging 11 o’clock number, “At Long Last.” In one choice scene, as touching as anything in the show, Alice joins her aging father (Stephen Lee Anderson) for a shot of moonshine. When he asks her about something for which he’s carried a load of guilt for decades, you can see and feel Cusack toggle away from the truth to tell him a merciful lie. She’s the single best reason to catch “Bright Star.”

a book

passages about a planned mating session with another dog (“The Rape of Rosie”) and her pet’s decline into incontinence are vividly done. So, in a very different, comic meter, is that imagined talk-show interview of Rosie by Oscar the puppet. “The pathetic thing about humans,” a wry and eloquent Rosie observes, “is they think that everything is in their hands, and their hands are in or on everything. Pat, pat, rubbing behind the ears, looking in your eyes for years.”

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