Greg Pizzino

he/him

Primary Genres: Short fiction, long form fiction, live theater. They all have their pros & cons, but writing plays is really interesting because it's such a living organism compared to prose. Every production and every performance is going to be subtly (or sometimes wildly) different.

What might you like people to know about you as a writer? What you like people to know about you as a person?

I'm often inspired by "unlikely history." Right now I'm working on a musical about the 1855 Toronto clown riot. I'll constantly come across little oddities like that and go "that's a play" or "that's a sketch." I'm often surprised when I find something and nobody's done anything with it before.

YpsiWrites' theme this year is "Write for Change." Given this theme, what type of change do you think your writing inspires and what are your reasons for doing this writing?

I'm always trying to include diverse elements and representation into my work, especially when it comes to theater. People should be able to see themselves reflected on stage. My first muscial, "Benestopheles: The Last Days of Ghoulita Graves" (sadly delayed by the outbreak of covid-19) centers around an LGBTQ love story. My next play, "Lee's Grand Tiki," which gets its first staged reading next March, sent me down a days long rabbit hole researching efforts to decolonize tiki & Polynesian pop art. Striving for inclusion and diversity is an important step to getting more people involved in the theater community.

You can read more about Greg and his writing at his website https://bookshop.org/shop/Thomasgregory