Playwright Advocate Wanted

I need help. From someone who really, really cares about playwrights.

I made something, and I need to give it away. To someone who will care for it better than I have.

A few years ago, I started collecting playwrights on Twitter. I created the IFollowPWs Twitter account, then went about madly finding playwrights to follow. It’s not that hard, really: you search for the term “playwright” on Twitter and follow anyone who claims to be a playwright in their Twitter bio; you spend time on the #2amt and #newplay and #playwrights hashtags and you follow the people who participate; most of all, you (carefully) follow back anyone who follows you. I give it maybe an hour a month of maintenance at most.

I’m up to about 2,000 people so far, and about that many people follow me back. That’s not a bad list. I don’t know of any bigger than that, though they might exist.

Here’s the thing, though: the list is really only a list right now. Useful, perhaps, for people looking for playwrights to follow. (All the big names who happen to be on Twitter are on there, if that’s your bag; it’s not mine, because I find the correlation between famous-ness and Twitter-excellence to be nebulous at best.) But the account could be so much more. It could be a huge digital resource for the people who follow it. It could serve our community in a wide variety of ways.

But I don’t have the time to use it that way. Not even close. I had enough time to make the thing, but not to use it; I have my hands in too many other projects. So… I’m going to give it away.

Maybe even to YOU, if you’re interested.

Here’s how I’m going to do it.

I’m going to ask you—if you think you can take the thing I built and do some good, long-lasting community service with it—to write to me (or tweet to me) and make a serious case for why you should be the one I give it to. I’m not going to put an application deadline on this: I’m going to pick the first person who wows me, and that’ll be that. I’ll co-manage the account for a while, just to ensure a smooth hand-off, then vamoose.

(You should know, if you’re interested and you’re either white or male, and especially if you’re both, that you’re going to have to make an even better case than someone who’s neither white nor male; my resource, my rules.)

Okay: grab the banana and let’s do this.