Larissa Pham '10
The Writer
Some people feel the need to write, and Larissa Pham admits that she is one of those people. Not that it would surprise anyone. She has published her poetry in the online journal Four and Twenty, she has directed a one-act play she wrote, and she can often be seen scribbling in her journal in spare moments.
“Writing is how I process my thoughts,” she said. “It is in the act of writing that I realize how I feel about something.”
From her public work, one might conclude that Larissa has some very troubled thoughts, but she says that is not true at all. She has many happy thoughts, but they just don’t make good literature.
“Sadness is more interesting than happiness because when you’re happy everything is resolved,” she explains. “In an unhappy story there’s something eating away at the root of the story that you need to find. That’s the pull you get from creating it or reading it.”
That is evident in “Catharsis,” the one-act play Larissa wrote and directed. The lead character is Cassandra, based on the Greek myth of a woman who sees the future but whose predictions no one believes. She leads the audience from sympathy for this misunderstood woman, to horror at the fulfillment of her prophecy, and then to musings about how much of our own destiny is determined by how we envision the future.
When Larissa began Art Ward’s playwriting class, she didn’t know where it would take her. An “enduring obsession with Greek tragedy” prompted her to write her own tragedy. She started with a monologue and it evolved, changing as the actors inhabited their roles.
“It’s incredible the transformation you make as a leader and a writer and an artist when you direct a play,” she said. “I have so much respect for theater, and to be able to envision an idea and then see it turn into this full-blown living, breathing animal on the stage is awe-inspiring.”
Besides writing, Larissa also creates art with watercolor, graphite, oils, and collage. She has won awards for her art, and she chose to work with Portland resin artist Julia Gardner for her Discovery project. During an exercise Gardner initiated, Larissa had an epiphany about why she feels compelled to create.
“She had me collect twigs and paint them white and then re-draw the wood grain on them with a Sharpie. And I was sitting there thinking to myself, this is so backwards; why am I doing this? But then I realized, 'I'm playing God. I'm re-creating something that's already been created. Re-interpreting the world as I know it. Isn't that art?”
