Ira S. Murfin

Artist Bio

Ira S. Murfin is a writer, educator, and theatre maker living in Chicago. His writing has appeared in Requited, elimae, Fiction at Work, Lark(!), Mobius, and the book The Mind Garden, among other places. Ira is Co-Artistic Director of the Laboratory for Enthusiastic Collaboration and a founding member of the Laboratory for the Development of Substitute Materials, two devised theatre collectives. His solo and collaborative writing and performance work has been presented at venues including the Chicago Cultural Center, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Links Hall, Version Fest, The Neo-Futurists, Chicago Calling Festival, Walkabout Theater at the Peter Jones Gallery, and the Red Rover, Powells North, Quickies & Reconstruction Room reading series. Ira is also the former Head of the Soleri Book Initiative at the urban design project Arcosanti. He is a graduate of the Dramatic Writing Program at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and holds an MFA in Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In addition to Urban Gateways, Ira teaches writing at St. Augustine College, North Park University, and other institutions of higher learning.

Artist Statement

My work engages language as a shared space through which we collectively attempt to describe and preserve the world. I am interested in the process of speaking and in the process of making and in the ephemeral tangibility of any act of spoken text. I see the creative process as collaborative discovery and view the result of that process as a document of the shared experience that is collective making. For me, this living relationship with spoken language exists both on the page and in performance. My work spans fiction and memoir, performed text, poetry and essay, solo and collaborative performance events, and collectively devised theatre. It is remarkable to me that we are always speaking potential text and writing potential speech and I wish to engage that potential, to make temporal the textual and enduring the extemporaneous. It is through language that we take measure of the world and our experience in it, it is the tool with which we collectively record and construct the world as it is and as it might be.

Educational Philosophy

My goal is to introduce students to language as a resource and a tool available to them every day. I hope to instigate awareness of the constant presence of language and to thin the daunting gap we have created between the words we see and use in our daily lives and the act of writing. I wish for us to notice the language we encounter in our homes, schools, city, and to use that language as raw material for describing the unique experiences that define us. Once we begin to notice, record, and share the world through language, we can use the words the world is made of to make of it what we wish, imagining new and fantastical, as well as pragmatically realistic, possibilities.

In the classroom we use conversation and language found in our environment to collaborate on describing our experiences. Using simple spoken language and found text we construct poems, stories, and performances that represent something of what it is to be the particular people that we are.  The inspiration for this comes from a diverse range of artists and writers – from objectivist poets to writers of fabulist fiction to experimental theatre makers – who recognize in the minutiae of the everyday the absurd grandeur of existence and find there words to play with.

In my classes we cross the boundaries of poetry, prose, and performance, collecting and transforming the words we discover together by arranging them on the page and speaking them aloud in the classroom. In this way, we share language as a communal resource we use to describe our experiences, map our city, model the things we imagine, and share what we have discovered.