Welcome to my website, and thank you for visiting. As an artist who works in several narrative mediums, I developed this website to consolidate my body of work. Here you will find featured pieces of writing, performance, and motion picture. Please subscribe to my blog, Cutting the Crap:
https://muiredougherty.substack.com
We live in dark times. As a commentator on society, I have deep concerns for its future. My political position is radical reality resulting in revolution. I arrived at this work along a hard path in which willful ignorance would have equaled death or dissolution. If this intrigues you, please read on!
The project I’m most excited about is my timeless and topical new book, whose working title is American Waif. The book is my story, the tale of a teenage girl who becomes homeless and survives by wits alone. Although it is a memoir, the themes are strongly those of the present day: homelessness, distrust of authority, criminalization of the poor, the questioning of the American Dream. But that’s not all! American Waif includes radical seventies lesbians, Hare Krishnas, unstable Me Generation parenting, rock and roll, and lots and lots of laughs. Enjoy sample chapters on the Book tab.
Whether it be through writing, motion picture, or performance, my work, when not hilarious or personal, has been described as “elegant” and “spooky.” I am a storyteller more interested in the truth of the unconscious than that tricky ruler, the conscious mind. That being said, I try only to tell a story that makes sense in the confines of the world it creates, and is not incomprehensible or niche. I am fascinated by the iconoclast, by will, by change. By what is spiritual and what is sexy. My worldview is esoteric and freethinking, and I see humor in virtually everything.
What lies above is only the outer layer of the onion. Join me in peeling this sucker down!
“Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom – poets, visionaries – realists of a larger reality.”
-Ursula K. LeGuin