Dan O’Brien 
A Story that Happens 
On Playwriting, Childhood, & Other Traumas

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. 

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Dan O’Brien is a playwright, poet, librettist, and essayist whose recognition includes a Guggenheim Fellowship in Drama & Performance Art and the UK’s Fenton Aldeburgh Poetry Prize. 
True Story: A Trilogy of O’Brien’s plays was published by Dalkey Archive Press in 2023, and in 2021 his collection of essays,  
A Story That Happens: On Playwriting, Childhood, & Other Traumas, was published by Dalkey Archive in the US and by CB Editions in the UK. His poetry collections are
 Survivor’s Notebook, Our Cancers, New Life, Scarsdale,  and
 War Reporter. His plays include 
The Body of an American, winner of the PEN USA Award, the Edward M. Kennedy Prize, and the Horton Foote Prize, and 
The House in Scarsdale, winner of a PEN America Award. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, the actor and writer Jessica St. Clair, and their daughter Isobel.