What if playwriting took a cue from new media like tweets, memes, and shortform videos? I've been experimenting with that idea by writing what I call "short plays." These are similar to microfiction. They're concentrated, direct narratives. These short plays are shorter than a one-act play, often 10 or even 5 minutes long.

I am the founding editor of Infinity's Kitchen, a graphic literary journal of experimental and conceptual writing. Infinity's Kitchen is a print publication, web site, and performance series devoted to innovative forms of literature, made from new recipes, with compelling ingredients.

As a member of the Second Land collective, my role could be best described as "lyricist," although I mix my words with sounds and recordings during our live, improvised performances. Second Land is an audio/visual collective. We are Luke H., Curt S., Dani S. , Dylan K. and Aaron L. Our latest recording is called Copycat Sessions.We use various acoustic and electronic devices to create improvisational performances.

“The Doppler Effect” is a short story that began as an experimental attempt to write prose without adjectives, an attempt which was only mostly successful. It’s a story about an urban fire. It’s a story about trust and the absence of trust. 

voice recording with found sounds.
Published online at The Art of Everyone, with an editor's note:

In a brief introduction to his video published in Everyone Quarterly, Dylan Kinnett offered, “Augury began as a short story, written during stolen moments while waiting for the commuter light rail underneath Penn Station, Baltimore. I would like to thank Curt Seiss for the sound design.” It’s such an evocative video that we thought it would be interesting to hear a bit more about it, so Dylan provided this glimpse into his artistic process. 

Editing recorded words is very much like editing written words. You can add, subtract, rearrange the sounds in very much the same way that you can on the page. With sound there are additional ways to edit. You can revise the speed, pitch, volume, echo and decay. This prompted me to title the album "Strange Punctuation."

This is a work of spoken word performance art. I think of its script as a Fluxus score and of its performance as a “routine” in the manner of William S. Burroughs. A Fluxus score, like a musical score, is a sort of recipe for a performance, but is not a set of strict instructions. A Burroughs routine, like a vaudeville routine, is a spoken word piece that is theatrical and improvisational, changing with each performance.

I've performed this routine a few times before: first on the Ed Schrader Show, then as a featured performer at “Speak Your Piece” with the use of actual telephones, then in Knoxville, Tennessee, with a larger variety of telephones. With the August 2013 performance, I was able to actually ring the old phones and use an overhead projector for added imagery and atmosphere. The most recent performance of this piece was several times daily during Artscape, 2018.

My script calls for a single voice although it depicts multiple conversations. A slash mark “/“ indicates a shift from one telephone conversation to the next. These are snippets of a conversation that happen over and over again forever, each time with only slight variation.

There are two sides to the conversations here. The first: things that a telemarketer would say on the telephone, such as “you’re eligible to be entered into our fifty thousand dollar sweepstakes” and/or “how would you like to buy a subscription to TV Guide?”. The second: a series of responses, like “what’s the catch?” or “I can’t talk now, I’m busy” or “he isn’t here right now. Can I take a message?”

Instructions for the actor are simple:

Pick up a ringing telephone. Say part of the script.
Hang up the telephone.
Answer another ringing telephone. Say more.
Hang up, repeat as desired. Use varying speed and tone.