“We have to read and write something we hate to get to empathy,” said Dickinson College’s 2025 Stellfox speaker, Paula Vogel. Vogel is a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, inductee in the Theater Hall of Fame and retired professor at Brown University, where she founded a scholarship for struggling young playwrights.
Vogel is among many scholars who have visited Dickinson through The Harold and Ethel L. Stellfox Visiting Scholars and Writers Program. The program is in honor of the parents of English teacher Jean Louise Stellfox, who met Robert Frost during the poet’s visit to Dickinson in 1959. Inspired by her experience, Jean left Dickinson a large amount of capital to carry on her lifelong mission. The Stellfox Visiting Scholars and Writers Program started after her death in 2003.
Traditionally, the Stellfox speaker reads selected pieces from their works. Vogel chose to have an open and lively conversation with students, passing along gold minds of inspirational nuggets, from emphasizing the importance of art “in a time of national crisis,” to informing students about her bake off method to writing.
Many of the questions proposed by professors and students voice concerns about the current political climate. In response, Vogel cited history. She referred back to when Germans burned books and labeled the arts as degenerate and a time where singing and plays were outlawed because of the positive effect they had on morale.
She went further, saying that the invention of democracy and theater goes hand-in-hand. “How can we have democracy if you don’t understand other’s points of views?” Vogel asked. She went on to remind the audience that everyone is a playwright and an artist.
Vogel shared her method around writer’s block, called a bake off, that she came up with when she was a struggling playwright. A bake off is when an author is given a certain amount of time to write a play with specific criteria. For example, Vogel would give students the weekend to write a play where the dog is the main character and it has to include a front porch, the kitchen and a secret. She was always pleasantly surprised with how creative students could be.
One of her favorite bake off prompts to ask students is to write a play that tells the audience what it feels like to walk the streets in their community.
Vogel also made the interesting simile connecting playwriting to writing and playing poker at the same time. A playwright wants to win the audience over, but can’t reveal their hand until the end.
Right now, Vogel urges students to read authors they don’t like to gain empathy, write a voice we have never heard before–one that makes us question the world we live in–and to read “Eurydice” by Sarah Ruhl and “Baltimore Waltz” by Paula Vogel.
