I returned home from the Glasgow Worldcon less than 48 hours ago, and am still suffering from jet lag, but I’m not so groggy I can’t share with you what was my favorite item on the program there — Jenny Rowe’s one-woman show, Tiptree: No One Else’s Damn Secret But My Own. I loved her performance, and immediately reached out to see whether I could chat with her about channeling James Tiptree, Jr., and how she distilled the life of that brilliant writer into an hour-long arc. Luckily, we were able to connect in the Crown Plaza bar.

Rowe is an actor, improviser and writer who performs and teaches improv internationally. She wrote her solo show about James Tiptree, Jr./Alice Sheldon in 2018, was nominated for Best Female Performer at Buxton Fringe ’24, and continues to tour with the production. Her other performances include Read Not Dead (Shakespeare’s Globe) Clean by Sam Chittenden (Best Play Award, Brighton Fringe 2019), Mary Rose by J.M.Barrie (National Tour), and Somewhere in England by Mark Burgess.

A member of Impromptu Shakespeare and Brighton Fringe Comedy Award-winners, The Maydays, since 2006, she has guested on the iO Chicago mainstage with Whirled News Tonight and headlined at improv festivals across Europe. She also writes weird, dark short stories which occasionally get published in weird dark places: one is upcoming in the Map of Lost Places anthology from Apex Books in 2025.

We discussed the serendipitous way she learned James Tiptree, Jr. existed, the differing reactions to her one-woman show from SF vs. non-SF audiences, how she managed to nail Tiptree’s accent (some of which you’ll get to hear), why she ultimately decided not to begin or end the show with a gunshot, how she settled on the structure of her script (and why she decided to leave herself out of the story), the way inhabiting Tiptree affected her feelings about the controversy, why she’d have loved to meet Tiptree but not necessarily want to be her friend, the purpose of the play’s moment of audience participation, and much more.

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Coming up next — a return to StokerCon for my final episode recorded there, featuring my lunch with the Bram Stoker Award-winning Cynthia Pelayo, whose most recent novel, The Forgotten Sisters, was released in March and is a modern adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid.”

Thanks for listening!