Stuff About Me
BIO
Melina Cohen-Bramwell dropped out of high school to join the circus but, as it soon became clear, was far better suited to a life of hermitage. He now communicates with the outside world primarily through scraps of paper covered in discarded lines that float out the window on breezy afternoons— and the occasional cohesive manuscript slipped in single pages under the door. If you wander about when the moon is high and the wind blows at just the right timbre, you might catch a glimpse of him darting in and out of the shadows in the San Francisco Bay Area. His play, Please Don’t Slow Me Down, was workshopped in PlayGround SF’s summer 2023 Free Play Festival. His play One of the Good Ones, received a reading in 2022 at Theatre Battery and in PlayGround SF’s 2024 Free Play Festival. Buy his book, Bar Fights with Sad Kids, available from Finishing Line Press or an internet commerce site near you.
ARTIST STATEMENT
I write about–
Abuse both individual and societal
Identity and alienation
Mental health
The unfortunate fact that there are no good people (but also few fully bad people. People are people.)
My writing is–
Surreal
A little gay (or a lot)
Got jokes
Complex (I hope)
Been described as “relentless”
I want people to–
Be moved
Leave with questions they feel like they need to answer
and ideas they need to discuss
Not be able to get it out of their heads
Feel challenged (in a good way, usually)
Laugh
Maybe cry a little
Give and receive vulnerability and raw emotional truth, the pain and jubilation at the core of us all
Have a good time
Come back for more
I want to ask as many questions as I answer. I write about what I’m afraid of being and becoming and what parts of the world I can’t look straight in the eye, what I need to process through fiction because it is too intense to be contained merely in reality.
Influences and inspirations include: Martin McDonough, Kafka, celebrity news, the way my friends talk, the unslakable thirst for success, trauma, What I Eat in a Day videos.
