• 5. Three Male Writers Answer the original Overexcitability Questionnaire (OEQ).

This is from my book, “My Teeming Brain”: Understanding Creative Writers (2002). Three male award-winning creative writers, a playwright, a poet, and a prose writer, were kind enough to answer the 21 questions on the original Overexcitability Questionnaire.  This is Table 2.1 in the book.  I present it here.

Three Male Writers Answer the Overexcitabilities Questionnaire (OEQ)

A Study by Jane Piirto, Ph.D.

From Chapter 2 of “My Teeming Brain”: Understanding Creative Writers

I administered a questionnaire called the Overexcitabilities Questionnaire to three male writers—a poet, a nonfiction prose writer, and a playwright a few years ago —here is an example of the frankness with which writers speak. An expert on overexcitabilities, Michael Piechowski, said that their answers demonstrate the highest scores in overexcitabilities.  When these responses were scored for levels of intensity, the coding showed the dominant overexcitabilities were Imaginational, Emotional, and Intellectual.

THE OVEREXCITABILITY QUESTIONNAIRE (OEQ) –THREE MALE CREATIVE WRITERS

1. Do you ever feel really high, ecstatic, or incredibly happy? Describe your feelings.

PLAYWRIGHT (age 54);   Are you kidding?  Sexual highs are a delight.  After a poetry reading.  When I see one of my plays done well.  When I finish a novel I have been working on for years.  I’m also a great believer in beaches, sunshine, and leisure.  When I make a large amount of money.

POET:(age 46):          Yes, but only rarely ek statis (out of self) only twice once during a karate form exercise left my body and lost sense of time but made all the moves; during jazz performance when pianist slipped me an unexpected solo didn’t miss a change, no awareness of “out there,” no separation between self and instrument.  Also, in those rare moments while writing poetry did collection of 9 short poems cryptic and basic language danced from my fingers.   I whinnied like a horse, wrote standing knew what poems 5, 6, 7, 9 had to be while writing 1 & 2 “all coming togetherness.”  Couple of drug induced visions (mescaline) of overwhelming unity with massive earth powers only poems as “records” 3 short Key West pieces psychedelics energize, bringing on a time “tense” of “it’s all been great” as an eternal sensation a marveling in the beautiful temporariness of life.

PROSE WRITER: Age 45    Sometimes I feel the universe for a shining moment is really in focus.  I may be looking at a flower or writing a grammar book or playing with a child what the Catholics call grace, I believe.

2. What has been your experience of the most intense pleasure?

PLAYWRIGHT:       X-rated.  Not for publication.

POET: So I pour myself a glass of bourbon (small pleasure, to loosen the strands) and will try.  I will admit right now that I have been a pleasure junkie this web of nerves & sensations and “mind,” I figure, has been given me to open to whatever it can handle, and even can’t handle just to see how much over the top the cup can spill.  I have from time to time burning out my wiring on desire, on “love” (hateful ambiguous word), and less so on drugs.  Intense pleasure and intense experience are almost synonymous for me, though the second usually means some sort of learning, some sort of self-realization.  Let me also say here that for the past two years and more I have been living a pretty stable, normal (for me) middle American life and not the wild, passionate, driven, maniacal, nearly out of control jetstream ride that I found possible starting exactly August 17, 1983; though its intimations had been riding in my mind for over two years before then.  In short, I fell for the Queen of the Roost; the empress of self-destructive boozing, doping, sexually driven speed drivers on the ticket of the night who woke young & pretty every morning, shook off the effects of no-sleep debauchery, cleared her bed of whatever bodies sere in it (the size of a waterbed football field what larks, what larks!) And went off to a “normal” day of work.  Yes, she seduced the daytime and pleasured it at night.  Who could say no to this world of always, of immunity to time Shakespeare woulda shit his pants and never write a mutability sonnet had he known her.  You wouldn’t said “yes” too.  And for nearly four years, I was her main man, her romantic lover, her stud, her own little girl.  I was wined & dined, enwrapped in silk and pleasured in her thrill of me, and my thrill of her, the mental, o so romantic thrills & excitement every bit as not unified with the physical.  Also, she was candid, sensitive, the best no bullshit confidante.  We had few disappointments, though occasionally could not arrange to get together, which made, of course, our next meeting even more intense.  And yet, when I thought I had run out of sexual fantasies, she’d spontaneously arrange another.  I mean, a room full of fine women in feathers and beads, high on mescaline, marijuana, &: champagne (drunk naked in the kitchen at 5 a.m. midway break in the wildfuck scene, me reading them hot poems and they moaning in response?  Tell me of an artists’ audience!)  No.  Only a quick correlative, me and three bisexual lovelies, shooting 7 holes out of 9 in a game of sex golf; the mattress off its frame three times; the morning a wreck of (literally) clothes ripped off and pearls and cheap beads & fringes and veils tangled in heaps on the floor.  Yes, huge pleasing debauchery.  This has been my most intense pleasure and I am glad to glad I lived to know it all, and when it was over, it was over with very little regret or suffering.  I can easily now say it was all research , a key part of my life’s work and that some pale prints of it remain as a handful of poems.  (Is this over-excitability, Doctor?)

            PROSE WRITER:      Writing often gives me such an intense pleasure that I “have” to stop.  I often put off writing (anything) because I know “this half-hour task” will take me hours, that I will not want to quit.

3. What are your special daydreams and fantasies?

PLAYWRIGHT:       Something childish about this but for the sake of cooperation I’m living on my 50 ft. sailing yacht off the coast of Monte Carlo swimming and sipping cocktails dressing for dinner at the casino at night.

POET: Some occasional passing sexual fantasies, but temporary & undeveloped like walking through a huge art gallery, my appreciation of physical beauty is quickly focused, caresses with the eye, then moves on to the next beauty.  I’ve grown too old to dream of power and money and fame.  I’ve lived all my fantasies and don’t need any more.

PROSE WRITER:                  ?

4. What kinds of things get your mind going?

PLAYWRIGHT:       Beautiful women

                        Great writing

                        Great painting, theatre

                        Freedom to travel

                        Romantic places.

                        Intelligent conversation

POET: The simplest most common objects politics are a drag, economics-personal or grand scale, likewise; usually the confluence of two ordinary objects which create a metaphorical leap in my head some new spark.  Pointing to “eternal” themes:  birth, love, sex, death, the weirdness of living on this planet.

PROSE WRITER:      Anything can.

5. When do you feel the most energy and what do you do with it?

PLAYWRIGHT:       I get up every morning, make coffee, and go to the typewriter.  I write almost every day.

POET: Why, when I’m alive with language, of course I either write it or yak it: banter can be satisfying let those words words words play & do their handstands & cartwheels.

PROSE WRITER:      At the beginning of projects & possibilities (unless I’ve panicked).

6. In what manner do you observe and analyze others?

PLAYWRIGHT:       I observe others with great interest.  I do not analyze them unless forced to do so by circumstances for example, if someone cries or pulls a knife, some analysis is in order.

POET: Manner?

            Since I tend to be blunt, frank, & a “bald-faced con man” in social relations I only “analyze” when I’m attempting to be sensitive to someone’s problem or “wound.”  I “observe” & use words as tools or make them to account for what I see as part of writing practice.  “What’s what is important at first, usually “why’s what” doesn’t concern me.  This is this: speaks for itself.

PROSE WRITER:      afterwards I seldom take notes

7. How do you act when you get excited?

PLAYWRIGHT:       Calmly and efficiently.  I learned it playing football and in the marines.

POET: I wave my hands, stumble over my tongue & yak at hyperspeed “until my lips are ready to fly off.”

PROSE WRITER:      Depends on how, why

                                    maniac joking, wise-cracking

                        usually I get nervous and start moving sideways

8. How precisely can you visualize events, real or imaginary?

PLAYWRIGHT:       This is a question based on a false premise.  As a novelist, I have an active and fertile imagination, but precision has nothing to do with it.

POET: Imaginary only with great difficulty I have my hands (& mind) full enough dealing with the real, whether in memory or before my senses in the actual.

PROSE WRITER:      Very precisely, but I have to work at it it doesn’t come naturally.  On second thought, I think my “knowing” is first and primarily verbal.  I learn from m words.  I learn even visual stuff from my words I think.

9. What do you like to concentrate on the most?

PLAYWRIGHT:       Myself.

POET: Not this questionnaire!

            Probably completing the intricate web of accomplished form in a verbal construct poems, short writing, language structure as art object, to get it as right as I can, to bring it as close to “perfection” as possible a perfection emanating from the essential materials of its making.  (Michelangelo looked at that block of marble & saw his David in it that kind of question involving material vision technique & perfected form.)

PROSE WRITER:      Something interesting something I can add to or build on in some way.

10. What kind of physical activity (or inactivity) gives you the most satisfaction?

PLAYWRIGHT:       I love to swim in the ocean.

                        Write my poetry, prose, and drama.

                                    Also enjoy bars, smoking, and drinking.

POET: At one time, sex; bar dancing in a crowded barroom with or without a partner, drunk or high on marijuana, until I am soaked with sweat and exhausted.  Ideally, I’ve joined with dancers in the room by borrowing and transmitting dance moves to create a non- verbal communitas & unification of frenzied dancers.  Ai, Bacchus!

PROSE WRITER:      Gardening?  Finishing something.  Starting (planning, analyzing_ something.

11. Is tasting something very special to you? Describe in what way it is special.

PLAYWRIGHT:       I’ll have a Jack Daniels Manhattan up on the sweet side.  The cherry is not necessary.

POET: Yes, because of the huge variety of possibilities: women’s skin & genitals, French wines, tobacco & beers show me the wondrous multiplicity, the individuality, the unique perfection of every thing & person on the planet.  Of course, I have preferences of one over the other, top threes, memories of impossible to find wines, dead lovers.

PROSE WRITER:      I don’t like things that taste bad

12. Do you ever catch yourself seeing, hearing, or imagining things that aren’t really there? Give examples.

PLAYWRIGHT:       No, and I’m very upset by it.  I’d love to see an U.F.O., communicate with a ghost, etc.

POET: Only in one maybe two ways “mishearing” language always makes new & funny chance connections: “Give me some Pac-man change” (quarter for a game machine) becomes “give me some French champagne” & poets, like paranoids, find pattern & pattern where there would be none.  If it makes any difference, I often talk or mumble to myself & am told I “act like I’m in a world of my own.”

PROSE WRITER:      Of course, but only when things are there lots of cultural biases built into this question.

13. Do you ever think about your own thinking? Describe.

PLAYWRIGHT:       I’m usually too busy thinking to think about it.

POET: Only now but I have some sense of the associational, as opposed to logical way my mind moves.  I see certain things invested with meaning objects=amulets to be unlocked, not put under the microscope of reason.  A logic of the gut and heart pertain here.  “Logic” works in me thru the “logical” assembly of a poem in its close weaving, in its tricky balancing act to get from start to finish.

PROSE WRITER:      Of course I analyze myself, discuss with myself, etc.

14. When do you feel the greatest urge to do something? Describe.

PLAYWRIGHT:       When an experience inspires me to write about it, or to write something that is an outgrowth of that experience.

POET: The greatest urge?  When I feel I can intervene in a personal even physical level to right a wrong done to another.  My creative life is often overwhelmed with “fritter away,” non-concentration & long dry periods of lassitude.

PROSE WRITER:      When my bladder is full (or the equivalent).

15. Does it ever appear to you that the things around you may have a life of your own, and that plants, animals, and all things in nature have their own feelings? Give examples.

PLAYWRIGHT:       No.  See 12.

POET: 1.  What?  Are you crazy?

2. They don’t appear so but I can say that they do & suspend disbelief in others.
3. I have felt the life-aura of trees by hugging them.
4. If so, I couldn’t tolerate the idea of cutting a rose. If they do have feelings, for my peace of mind I make believe they are so different from ours that they don’t feel pain.
5. I know of “psychic sensitivity” in plants that respond to thought stimuli at a distance, but never verified the research.

PROSE WRITER:      At times levels of consciousness (experiments in consciousness) run through it all that’s different than saying everything has a life of its own less dramatic, less silly, more interesting.

16. If you come across a difficult idea or concept, how does it become clear to you? Describe what goes on in your head in this case.

PLAYWRIGHT:       What is required here is an analysis of how consciousness works, and I have no idea.  I think about something until it is clear to me.

POET: I either attack it piecemeal, to come to grips with it step by step or repeat it as a mantra (I just made that one up.) Or try to make a metaphor to explain that makes it somehow available to me.  Usually the metaphor for the concept comes first then apprehension of its meaning.

PROSE WRITER:      I break it into parts, try to find something to latch onto.  Eventually, I think I understand, through analogies and comparisons. well, sometimes by developing abstractions (and generalizations), by being able to teach it.  By writing about it.

17. Are you poetically inclined? If so, give an example of what comes  to mind when you are in a poetic mood.

PLAYWRIGHT:       I write a poem.

POET: Yes.

1. Staring blankly out a window.
2. Finding a rhythm or curve of words as I play with them, so form and meaning break open a new sense of their significance this is for me “high play.”  Luere= to play the game.  Homo ludens.  Huizenga.

PROSE WRITER:      “poetically inclined” language play following and exploring metaphors, wherever they lead.

                         I try to avoid being in a poetic mood

18. How often do you carry on arguments in your head? About what sorts of subjects are these arguments?

PLAYWRIGHT:       When you reach my age, 54, you’ve got a pretty good idea of your personal values.  Experience allows one to put things in context and decide whether they are positive or negative forces to be incorporated into one’s life or rejected.

POET: Never.  Ya mean if bla bla then bla bla if blu blu then blu blu therefore yak yak

Never arguments sometimes a realization and acceptance of social rules or “censorship” that I would rather not be there; but I don’t argue just step 1/4 inch to the side so the machine can rumble past.

PROSE WRITER:      Often usually brief, but sometimes I paralyze myself more after just talking to myself.

19. If you ask yourself “Who am I?” what is the answer?

PLAYWRIGHT:       See my resume.

                        Also, New Yorker, Italian, Irish, ex-marine pacifist.

POET: “[HIS NAME]-I”

            Come from variety of experience

            & energies which are quite diverse,

            Come from graces of premixed

            ethnic bloods & family inputs

            Come from some elements once

            difficult to mix, but

            Which have found the blend

            that works.

            Come from non ego bread

            & generic wine

            So mine & thine are one

            I & I verification

            *see also poem: “this poet” in [one of his books] stagey & grandiose, but deals with life as direction or purpose.

PROSE WRITER:      FATHER. HUSBAND. WRITING CENTER DIRECTOR. WRITING CENTER SERF. TEACHER ALWAYS. PROCRASTINATOR. MIND GAMER. DEVELOPING CHILD AFRAID OF THE DARK. OVERTHINKER. UNDERDOER UNABLE TO SIT QUIETLY WHO SHOULD TEACH HIMSELF TO SIT QUIETLY. RETREATER. RESTLESSNESS THE CENTER IS OUT OF FOCUS.

20. When you read a book, what attracts your attention the most?

PLAYWRIGHT:       Character development.

POET: 1.  Competence & style in writing.

2. How well it makes arcane information available for us.

PROSE WRITER:      Scenes, language, plot, page turning however it happens.

21. Describe what you do when you are just fooling around.

PLAYWRIGHT:       Eat out.

                        Sex is good.

                        Masturbation if there’s no partner around.

                        Reading.

POET: I tease & play word games which range from terribly witty to terribly dumb hee hee.  I almost always feel there is purpose to my energies; even if I am “wasting time” by arranging the papers & stuff piled on my desk.

PROSE WRITER:      Puncture pretensions my own, too.

                        Play peek-a-boo with kids; play chase with dogs.

22. In what ways do your dreams influence you?

PLAYWRIGHT:       I haven’t remembered my dreams for 30 years.

POET:  Not much, unless it’s really a shocker that makes me quiver & happy to awake.  I’m too quick to understand & rationalize their contents.

PROSE WRITER:      Feedback about living, etc.  Emotional support in stress times.  I am working on being an active dreamer.

END