March ended with two stories over two weeks, the TCL dissolution obviously a more important one both for me and for Richmond.
“Conscious Uncoupling” (Mar. 17)
Artspace gallery now open in Stratford Hills (Mar. 24)
Category: Writing
This year marks a more substantial return to Style for me, thanks to the support of editor Brent Baldwin. Here are the pieces I completed through March 14 (Pi Day!).
“How I Learned to Drive” preview (Mar. 8)
Book release interview for Tracey Gendron’s “Ageism Unmasked” (Mar. 1)
Profile of actor/model/teacher, Desiree Dabney (Feb. 22)
Theater companies exploring film, alternate content delivery (Jan. 25)
Since high school, I had a back-pocket dream of being a professional writer. Thanks to Style Weekly magazine, I finally became one in 1998. I’ve never made a living off my writing but I consider myself incredibly lucky to get paid to do something that I find very rewarding.
Thanks to my various writing jobs, I’ve been able to talk to some interesting people who were famous (Petula Clark, Chris Rock, Frank Rich, Israel Horovitz, Stephen Patsis, Stephen Wright, etc.) and a whole lot more people who were just interesting. My regular gig at Style as a theater critic inspired me to help found the Richmond Theatre Critics Circle, and my work with that group has resulted in some of the most magical nights of my life. In order to write a book review, I received a galley copy of “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” so had finished it before most people were able to pick it up. And, thanks to lenient and creative editors, I’ve been able to write stories either about my children or that have included them in fun ways.
So, in addition to the joy of seeing my byline every now and then, I’m thankful to have all of the memories of cool things writing has allowed me to do, and the opportunities I will hopefully continue to have.
A convenient series of events landed me the job of theater critic at Style Weekly. Allegedly, someone complained to Style because the guy who had the job before me wanted to be a playwright and he was bothering local theater people to read his work. So he was out and they needed a replacement pretty quick because they were covering the 2 or 3 shows that opened every week back then.
My wife had worked very hard to get a job as an editor of one of Style’s subsidiary pubs (Family Style) and wasn’t just going to ask someone there if her husband could have the job. But she could make sure the Arts Editor got a look at some spec reviews written by this guy, DL Hintz.
She ended up really liking the reviews and then Holly had to come clean who this DL Hintz actually was. For the first several years, I thought it charming that I was essentially writing under my maiden name (and email me if you really want to know the story behind that).
Here is a link to a search of Style’s site that will pull up my stories written as David Timberline. I’ve also had quite a few that ended up with a Dave Timberline byline. The several years worth of stories written under the DL Hintz byline are mostly lost to the digital dust bin but you can see some of them here.
My theater blog started because, after 7+ years of covering a LOT of theater both in and out of Richmond, I was having to really scale back the shows I was seeing. Our fourth kid had been born in 2003 and, after ignoring him for 3 years, he was getting to the age that I had to pay attention. Also, blogs were a relatively new thing then so I was on the backend of a hot trend.
I never would have guessed that I’d end up posting to it more than 1,100 times. And, even though most of the time I was writing off the top of my head, I also did some pretty good work. Looking at my metrics now, I was getting upwards of a 1000 hits on some of the posts which still surprises me. Was there just nothing else to read back then?
I’m fairly certain that my writing on this blog was more instrumental than my published criticism in getting me my Annenberg Fellowship at USC, an experience I still consider pivotal in my understanding of criticism and journalism.
It used to be called The Richmond Theater Blog but at some point someone complained because they said I was trying to be “THE” definitive commentary on theater in town. So I changed it to Dave’s Theater Blog to bring it down a peg. I’ve only posted to it 6 times in the last 5 years but I may pick that up a bit as I slide into my golden years.
Some of my favorite posts ever were:
— > The epic “Souvenir” performance, a night of 1,000 mishaps.
–> A dust-up that happened around a production of “Arcadia” that was worked through (relatively civilly) through several different blog conversations.
–> Any post that generated conversation about bigger issues about criticism, what it is and isn’t, and theater in general. Here’s just one example.