The Nearness of Light unfolds as an imagined meeting in the living room of Connemara, the North Carolina home of poet Carl Sandburg, during the final decade of his life. Marilyn Monroe and Carl Sandburg met in the later years of their lives. What passed between them was never fully known.
This play imagines a conversation that might have occurred — an evening at Sandburg’s home in North Carolina, where two lives shaped by very different kinds of public attention sit quietly together.
Some literary projects begin not with certainty, but with a question quietly waiting in the background for years. The Nearness of Light emerged that way for me. The play imagines an intimate meeting between Carl Sandburg and Marilyn Monroe — not as public figures trapped within celebrity and mythology, but as two human beings attempting to speak honestly beneath the noise of image and expectation.
As the playwright, what interested me most was not reenacting history, but imagining what might unfold if language itself became a place of listening. Sandburg, long regarded as a poet of the American people, possessed a rare attentiveness to ordinary human dignity. Monroe, often reduced to brightness and projection, carried a searching inward life that many sensed but few fully acknowledged. The play tries to enter that quieter territory.
Written as dramatic literature in verse and dialogue, the work leans less toward spectacle and more toward stillness, conversation, and interior revelation. It is a meditation on identity, visibility, memory, and the longing to be truly seen.
An Invitation
This play does not ask the audience to judge its characters or decide what history should have made of them. Instead, it calls for a different kind of attention.
As the conversation unfolds, we begin to see how often human lives are reduced to impressions—public images, headlines, performances, expectations. Yet beneath those impressions, something quieter endures: the inner life that seeks truth, dignity, and meaning.
Carl Sandburg spent decades listening for that deeper voice in the American story. Marilyn Monroe, in her private notebooks and reflections, searched for it within herself.
Their imagined conversation becomes an invitation for us as well. To listen more patiently. To look beyond surface appearances. To notice the deeper light that sometimes appears when two people speak honestly.
When the play ends, the room becomes quiet again. The conversation, however, continues wherever language still matters.
In bringing these two voices together, the play suggests that literature, conversation, and the patient work of language have long helped Americans see themselves more clearly. Beneath fame, ambition, and public performance remains something quieter and more enduring—the human search for authenticity—a search that continues to shape the American story.
—Ron Starbuck, Publisher
Saint Julian Press, Inc. © 2026
Houston, Texas
Publication Date: July 31, 2026
Paperback: $16.95
Publisher: Saint Julian Press, Inc.
Print ISBN-13: 978-1-955194-54-9
eBook ISBN-13: 978-1-955194-55-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2026941464
Paperback: 94 Pages