Spoken Word Festival

05/24/2025

Welcome new members and supporters!

Spalding Gray, "the grandfather of contemporary solo performance" in "Swimming to Cambodia"

08/23/2024

FROM TODAY'S (Aug 23, 2024) "PASATIEMPO", Santa Fe's most prestigious Arts Magazine.

"Trules Hosts a Creativity Klatch

Alex Murzyn and Robert Fox are Santa Fe jazz royalty; one played tenor and soprano saxophone at Club Legato, the other piano and keyboards.

On Sunday, they’ll join Now You Are a Missing Person author Susan Hayden in a show featuring writer and performer Eric Trules, who will read from his collection of Santa Fe stories. The performance marks Trules’ 77th birthday.

Trules moved to Santa Fe in September 2022 and began writing about the art and culture here shortly thereafter via Substack. One can subscribe at trules.substack.com.

No alcohol will be sold, but attendees may bring their own." — Brian Sandford

07/26/2024

"Part 2 of "Farewell to 3 Deceased Dancers from my 1st 1970s Dance Company"

Goodbye to Susan Kimmelman, aka Max the Clown

https://erictrules.substack.com/p/part-2-of-farewell-to-3-deceased

I think Susan’s story was exactly the same as mine.

Dancing set her free. Gave her life a purpose. And after just a few months of taking classes with Shirley in her college senior year in 1970, Susan too, was invited to join Shirley’s fledging new dance company, just months before I was to be - with Donna and Mitch, in residence at Columbia College. Immediately upon graduation, she gratefully left her LSAT and law books behind at the University of Chicago, moved to Chicago’s Northside, and never looked back. She too, became a professional modern dancer, soon teaching classes in Columbia College’s Dance Department, and spending the next seven years of her life as my professional dance colleague and my intimate friend.

Goodbye to Susan Kimmelman, aka Max the Clown

03/05/2024

I previously published this piece on May 3, 2014, the first day I announced my “semi-retirement” from USC (the University of Southern California where I had been a theater professor for almost 3 decades).

I am re-posting it today as a tribute to my great friend and tennis partner/coach of just about the same 3 decades, who just recently passed away from a stroke, after living on the hard-scrabble streets of South Central LA, as a trickster, rabble-rouser, and keen-witted survivor.

NOTE: I previously published this piece on May 3, 2014, the first day I announced my “semi-retirement” from USC (the University of Southern California where I had been a theater professor for almost 3 decades). I am re-posting it today as a tribute to my great friend and tennis partner/coach of ...

02/23/2024

https://erictrules.substack.com/p/trules-reviews-the-decades-the-end

The decade of the 2010s began in the chaotic wake of the 2008 global financial crisis and ended with the impeachment of a U.S. president. The continued explosion of social media fueled mass protest movements like “Occupy Wall Street”, “Black Lives Matter”, and “Me Too”, bringing millions of people together around the globe in pursuit of common objectives. Britain saw a new generation of royals emerge, countries around the world passed new laws legalizing same-sex marriage, President Trump was impeached by the House of Representatives, and a beloved baseball team, the Chicago Cubs, ended a 108-year-long dry spell by winning a World Series.

Me? I started the decade with all things in order, the 3 pillars of my life still sturdily in place: the oldest of the three, my USC theater professor job heading into its 24th pedagogical year, the second oldest pillar, my home of 17 years (even though I never owned it) was still holding my hillside palace in place, overlooking the Pacific Ocean and the Hollywood Sign from the hills of Echo Park, and the third pillar, my unlikely marriage to Surya, an Indonesian woman 31 years my junior, was as secure as ever, going on its 7th year, 9th if you counted the year she actually joined me in 2001.

Of course, if I looked more closely, perhaps I could have seen some cracks in the pillars, some fissures in the masonry: things like another battle or two with my bullying Dean at USC, or an unannounced and hostile rent raise at “Lucretia Gardens”, or maybe even an angry and solo trip back to Sumatra by my wife to visit her family while she was depressed about her unemployment during “the recession”. But hey, who wants to look at cracks and fissures?

2010 to the Present... Finally!