Ian Strasfogel
Filed under: Authors
My father was a coach and conductor at the Metropolitan Opera and I grew up in the opera house. I sang (not very well) in the Met's Boys Chorus and would hurriedly change into my street clothes to sneak out front to see the rest of the show. No doubt because of these immersive early experiences, the passionate stylization of opera always felt natural to me. It became my spiritual home.
I also loved literature as a young boy, madly, passionately—one might almost say, operatically. As a teenager, I would lug home scores of library books and vault from Auden to cummings, from Salinger to Kafka, reveling in their startling visions and exquisite word chains. I started my own work as a writer early. While still in high school, I published a number of articles in the magazine Opera News. (Surely, no surprise there!) On entering Harvard, I became a cultural reporter for the Harvard Crimson and majored in English History and Literature.
Once out of college, I was ensnared by opera again. I launched into a demanding career as impresario and opera stage director, leading companies in Washington, Philadelphia, and New York, while creating over a hundred productions of works old and new for theaters and festivals here and abroad. As the decades passed, the relentless pressures of the crazy world I was committed to started taking their toll. It was time for something new.
Well into my fifties, I left the opera house and returned to my other great love, literature. I began by writing plays. One of them, The Caregiver, won the Berrilla Kerr Award, had a successful run in Detroit, and was optioned for Broadway. (Alas, it never made it there.)
Undaunted, I turned next to writing a comic novel, Operaland. No moaning and groaning for me, it was time for something light. Using a wide array of first-person narratives, I focused on a protagonist as unlike myself as possible: Richie Verdun, a bumbling, well-intentioned, unsophisticated car salesman from the American heartland who stumbles his way into a successful international career as—you guessed it—an opera singer.
The facts speak for themselves. A writer is always doomed to write what he or she knows best.
Website: https://www.ianstrasfogel.com/
Winning Entry: Operaland
Contest Won: North Street Book Prize 2021, First Prize
