Welcome to Wunderkammer

What is a Wunderkammer? It’s a place where curiosities and rarities are exhibited. A cabinet of curiosities.

I was thinking of what to call this newsletter and while Cabinet of Curiosities was an option, I wanted to refer back to my teenage years when I lived in Germany and decided that I wanted to become a writer.

Who is Autumn Widdoes?

I’m a a writer and theater artist. I write essays, poems, plays, screenplays and experimental performance pieces. My poetry has been published in journals such as Magma, White Stag, Fourth & Sycamore, and Helen (now defunct). I’ve written and staged plays and performance work in New York City, San Francisco, London, Las Vegas, Tampa, and Japan, and I was a founding member of the performance collective TASK 沖縄 while living in Japan. I was a managing editor and editor-at-large for Interim and edited issues 35.2 and 36.3.

With Wunderkammer, I am carving out a space here on Substack to discuss writing practices, literature, creativity, theater, film, art, music, philosophy, and any ideas and writing that I feel like sharing. I began this Substack in 2022, to counter the enormous grief I was dealing with after the death of my mother. It’s a space where I write about the things that provoke wonder at the marvel of being alive on this beautiful planet in this mysterious and vast universe.

I’m not capable of finding a niche. It’s just not the way my brain works. Most likely, the topics I focus on here will shift and I’ll post semi-regularly but not on a weekly basis.

I also host a series called Widdoes Peak distributed through this newsletter, where I interview writers and artists about their creative process and what they’re working on, among other topics.

Thanks for stopping by. I hope to hear from you and I hope you stick around.