A Story That Happens: On Playwriting, Childhood, & Other TraumasPaperback, 14 September 2021

Drawing on O'Brien's experience of cancer and of childhood abuse, and on his ongoing collaboration with a war reporter, the four essays in A Story that Happens--first written as craft lectures for the Sewanee Writers' Conference and the US Air Force Academy--offer hard-won insights into what stories are for and the reasons why, "afraid and hopeful," we begin to tell them.