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After graduating from Ithaca College in New York (and spending four years in New Jersey), Megan Hook found herself heading to Tacoma to sing with their opera company. Perhaps because of those long winter nights in the Northwest, she was prompted to take up the pen. For a long time, nobody saw or heard anything she had written. But recently she went public; portions of her play Places, a finalist in the 1999 Puget Sound New Plays Project, were performed at Freehold Studio Theater, and her short story Sometime, If You Can was presented at the Richard Hugo House. She is currently working on a play about Mozart, whose music she describes as "synergy of human spirit, of motion, of sound, of silence, of God." In Sometime, If You Can Megan writes that someone once said "a woman's legs are like an architectural wonder." "If that's true," she continues, "then her shoes are like the basement and foundation upon which her structure is built. . . Shoes are very important." Megan is still paying for the plane ticket to Italy.The following is an excerpt from Sometime, If You Can. They call me and ask me to meet them in Alaska. My parents. I hesitate. I don’t think anything because I am simply frozen in a moment at the thought of meeting my parents in Alaska. I hear myself say yes. I buy a ticket. I pack a bag. I board a plane. And as I am walking toward the tarmac I feel myself slowly walking away from the woman I am. The woman who sings, the woman who writes, the woman who has friends, who has a job, who has fallen in love and out of love and back in love again – I leave her behind me. And I walk towards my past, my parents, and some strange small spoiled scared child who looks a lot like me when I was five. I arrive in Sitka. The isolation of this place is a blow, is like being struck. The absence of man, of his organization, of his deeply honed and often unquestioned need for busyness. That frenetic energy that has come to define the 20th verging on the 21st Century. Miles and miles of land, of water unbroken unmended uninterrupted by anything you can make with your hands. This is where I come to meet my parents. I come to Alaska – to neutral territory. Question – is anything or any place neutral once we’ve arrived?
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