Meet Miriam Wasmund

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Miriam Wasmund a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Miriam, appreciate you sitting with us today to share your wisdom with our readers. So, let’s start with resilience – where do you get your resilience from?

I think my resilience and work ethic have been something that has been an intrinsic part of me my whole life in a way. I had an exceptional role model, my mother. She was a single parent bending over backwards to keep her two children,my brother and I, safe and sound. She had, had a difficult life as did we as children but she always demonstrated that you have to keep going, that you have to find a way, that you have to be a good person and if it meant getting up early and staying up late you had to do what it took to survive an often unfriendly world. I think I internalized that as a young child. Find a way, if it matters to you, find a way. I have had to get back up many times over, I always carry with me a survivorship of sorts. I have to keep going to tell the stories to make the work to show up for things and people that matter to me, cause if not me then who?

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?

Your Faithful Reader is a performance company that merges the worlds of acting and dance with real letters, written by real people.

I believe whether you know it or not, the act of being a witness to some ones story makes you a character in that story. You become part of the narrative, you become a breeze to spread the story further into the world. At Your Faithful Reader, you’ll witness stories; letters that could be yours or mine. These fragments and tales that are so real and true and desperate to be told if only for one person to hear them and say “I see you. I know that feeling. Your story could be my story.” And for that, we are all woven a little closer together.

Your Faithful Reader began in 2019 after a serendipitous opportunity for me
to make work coincided with the question all artists ask themselves at
some point: “What do I do now?” This question fell to me after the preceding years of navigating the loss of my brother and mother had derailed my life as I knew it. I emerged a different person, one who could not quietly tuck her grief away. I missed sharing stories and letters with my family and didn’t want to feel like a burden to my support group, so I began writing. In turn, I asked my community to share their own
stories shaped as letters. With that great gathering of letter writers
and performers came a meaningful transformation: the ability to carry
all these experiences, cultivate joy and deepen connection. During our
very first read through we laughed and cried and related on a profound
level. We all knew we had to keep this connection going.

Making dance and theatre while working through grief has taught me lessons I believe to be universal. One is how important it is to allow ourselves to feel without shame; another is the immeasurable value of being a witness to someone else’s experiences.

Here we are five years later and the heart of Your Faithful Reader beats
just as loudly and strongly as it did that very first read through in 2019.
With each show we gather a bold and brave collection of writers, who have put
such amazing trust in me and our performers. I am always truly humbled.
Each season, we have managed to gather such a talented and beautiful
group of big-hearted performers, from all walks of performance life,
who hold space for each letter as both vessel and witness in truly
uncompromising ways. And then of course we have the audience, who take these important stories further by giving them another space to
land, be heard and felt.

I feel more than ever we have to be brave and share our stories, scream them if we have to. It seems to me the power and wealth desparity in this country and the world at large keeps trying to drown out peoples demands for equality, basic human decency and freedoms. We will only amplify, we will keep high-lighting the plights of being human, marginalized and othered, by shinning bright loving light on them. Even if it were to change one persons mind , to feel that moment of relating, or to say hey I can do better. It is scary to be loud in a passive crowd, but at Your Faithful Reader we create safe supportive space for every single person that shares, is involved or comes to bear witness. Story telling is powerful and we take that responsibility very seriously. It is a duty I hold with great reverance.

Every year comes with different challenges, this past fall we lost our venue with less then two weeks before our show opened. We managed to pivot and create two beautiful evenings of performance at two different venues. And now we are preparing for a huge 2025, with our original show going up, some reoccuring work shop events and an even longer run next fall.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

I have been making work and shows and community my whole life. From making little hand written paper magazines and stories as a kid to give to my neighbors, to being in an independent study program as a teenager where I end up making a full scale production, to over 20 years of choreography and gathering performers in NYC. I have always wanted to bring people together to be in the feeling of sharing what I/we have, however much or little. To say we have a moment to experience the spectrum of joys and strory, to create something that moments before wasn’t there. I have learned from many talented people, and through many difficult experiences that what we have to offer matters. Life is so brief and hard, we must persist in what matters to our hearts. None of us are above hard work and also we all have a right to be seen and heard.

How do we bake the cake!!… you have to think about your big picture, and all the ingredients and all the steps. You need to be able to zoom out and zoom in. Think about the whole recipe first, read the whole thing, make sure you have all your essentials covered. Know where you are going, know your strengths and weaknesses and bolster yourself/team with people/skills that balance yours out.

How you talk to and engage with people truly, truly matters. Be kind first and foremost. That doesn’t mean saying yes to everything, it means treating people like they matter always, even if you disagree or can’t give them the answers they want, your reputation is everything. You can be a bold, strong leader and still be kind. Never sacrfice decency.

I love that saying “perfect is the enemy of done” – I think as artists it is easy to get stuck in wanting everything to be perfect. People become afraid to produce and make and share their beautiful talents because “its not quite perfect yet” or “who really wants to see this” doubting. I get that. But it will get you nowhere. You will learn more from allowing the imperfections to happen and seeing what resonates with you and others. Someone wants to see your work or hear what you have to say , I promise. Do it for that one person, with all its imperfections, just say I am done here we are right now! And have at it, see what comes!

Okay, so before we go, is there anyone you’d like to shoutout for the role they’ve played in helping you develop the essential skills or overcome challenges along the way?

In the years since Your Faithful Reader has taken root, I have been lucky enough to gather the most incredible behind the scenes team. Each person who makes up the production team has essential skills and vested energy and spirit in the mission, the community and the production from start to finish. When we recently had the difficult setback of losing our space this past fall, it was out of our controll, but every single person on our team stepped up to manage the situation with tenacity, urgency and energized hope for finding the best possible solutions. Every person on our team and in our cast was able to create beautiful silver linings and that actually transalted into more opportunity. I think this is a testament to taking time to build out a team where it is a balance of your strengths and weaknesses, and to cultivate trust and alighned expectations and goals. To create a mission that everyone can see themselves inside of. I feel really realistic about what my skill set is and feel so grateful for every individual who takes charge of the things I am not great at. I think it wise not to rush this team building component, but take time to really find out what matters to people and motivates them and how they can fit in to your organization and feel proud of the work they do. Making strong foundational relationships can truly help you weather the storms when they come.

That being said, I want to give a huge heartfelt thank you to our whole production team and cast, their time, talent and energy mean the world to me! I am humbled always by their belief in Your Faithful Reader and what we hope to accomplish.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://Www.yourfaithfulreader.com
• Instagram: @yourfaithfulreader
• Youtube: https://youtu.be/Chkl-UeY15s?si=IPyZE_DQDn7cldyk
• Other: We want are always excepting letters ! Submit yours at :
  https://www.yourfaithfulreader.com/letter-submissions

  Please check out our short films to learn more about us!

  https://www.instagram.com/reel/C2PwJ3IOmRK/?igsh=MTI2Ym9mN3RicmNiNw==

  https://youtu.be/_h2_3vp3blI?si=tEHYQ9f1UnPc6vFz

Image Credits

Image credits: Jeremy Varner – personal image and images 2,4,7,8, 9, 10