Michele Markarian
Michele Markarian first started writing for performance in seventh grade. An actor, Michele needed to write herself something funny to perform. As an aging ingénue, Michele still needs to write herself funny things to perform. She also writes to make sense of out reality. Michele has acted in her own plays in Boston and New York, and in other people’s plays, too. Michele can occasionally be seen reading from her high school diaries as part of Mortified Boston.
Michele has written prose and articles for Wising Up Press, Mom’s Literary Magazine and The Air Charter Journal. Her short plays have been published by Dramatic Publishing and Heuer Publishing, and have been produced throughout the United States and Great Britain. Her play Old Friends was a 2006 Heideman Award Finalist.
Michele is a member of the Dramatists Guild of America.
Here is an excerpt from her unpublished novel, Dent, a late bloomer’s coming-of-age tragi-comedy about what it means to be responsible for one’s own happiness in life:
I met him on a Wednesday in March of 1990.
“Please come to dinner”, asked my not-really-a-friend over the telephone. Her name was Angie Gerbour.“It will be fun”.
I didn’t think it would be fun. In fact, I was certain it would be anything but fun. Angie and I would
probably not have been friends except for the fact that we had both attended and graduated from the same
department of the same graduate school. June of 1989 in Boston, Massachusetts, was not the place for a recent
graduate to be on the job hunt armed with an M.A. in English Literature. Angie and I were both twenty-eight years
old, unemployed and miserable. Our friendship was not based on fun, but on work and lack of work.
“Come on, Cheryl”, she pleaded. “It will do you good to get out of your parents’ house.”
This I couldn’t argue with. Angie, industrious girl that she was, had saved up enough money during her
employment years to maintain her graduate school apartment. Me? After ten years of living on my own, I was
back in my childhood home in the suburbs. These accommodations, coupled with scores of rejection letters from
every potential employer in Massachusetts, were doing nothing for my self-esteem. Some nights I would just sit
on the floor of the small guestroom my parents had put me in – my younger sister had claimed my old room for
herself - and stare straight at the Jesus on the Cross hanging on the wall. Buck up, I’ve had it worse, Jesus might
have said, if He were a that’s-nothing-my-troubles-are-worse-than-yours kind of friend. Instead He stared mutely
back, a bit sad. My parents, in front of their television, would nod happily to each other about how good it was to
have me back, how I was no trouble at all, really.
“Help me”, I would whisper to the Cross.
