Drawing on O'Brien's experience of cancer and of childhood abuse, and on his ongoing collaboration with a war reporter, the four essays in A Story that Happens-first written as craft lectures for the Sewanee Writers' Conference and the US Air Force Academy-offer hard-won insights into what stories are for and the reasons why, "afraid and hopeful," we begin to tell them. "This is a book for our times. It reminds us that theatre is 'fractured and failing yet struggling towards the mouth's translation of the heart's tongue.' Like [O'Brien], we buzz with the desire for the 'chance for more life, and for that most valued of theatrical currencies-change'."-Alice Jolly, Times Literary Supplement

"Part memoir, part philosophy, part pragmatic advice for young writers, [these essays] read like a master class in surviving through art."-Los Angeles Times "All the essays were written during the tumultuous Trump years, a period of bombastic rage, where the truth was not only clouded but disrespected . . . O'Brien does an unforgettable job accompanying the reader through the prism of his life experiences, offering more than mere lessons." -Jonas Schwartz-Owen, Broadway World