By Melonie Magruder

January 3, 2012 -- Playwright and Annenberg Community Beach House Writer-in-Residence Lucy Wang is starting off her 10-week residency looking for inspiration from Santa Monica residents. Her first public Beach=Culture workshop takes place January 16 and she wants input.

“You don’t write in a vacuum,” Wang said of her approach to the residency. “I want to inspire and lead, but I want to be inspired and be led. You have to have interest in people for the writing to be true.”

Wang will have the opportunity to satisfy that curiosity at her first afternoon workshop when she invites participants to share their stories in an intimate exchange, hoping to find a jumping-off place for the projects on which she’ll be working.

Wang’s play “Junk Bonds” won awards from the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays and the Katherine and Lee Chilcote Foundation. Other works received the Television Writing Award from the Coalition of Asian Pacifics in Entertainment and have been performed at the Mark Taper Forum.

Pretty heady recognition for someone who began her career as a Wall Street bond trader and a deputy chief of staff for then-mayor of New York City, David Dinkins.

Born in Taiwan, Wang grew up in Ohio with a father who was a born-again Christian and traveling missionary, and a mother who abandoned the family while Wang was still young.

She studied economics at Georgetown University (“Till my scholarship funds ran out”), then University of Texas (“I had had it with Ohio winters”) before snagging an MBA from the University of Chicago.

Then, despite a professor’s belief that Wang was “really a writer,” she headed to New York to take on Wall Street, an experience that eventually inspired her award-winning play “Junk Bonds.”

Wang quit trading to work for Dinkins’ office, but his re-election loss to Rudy Giuliani meant that she was out of a job during an emotional holiday time of year. So, between job interviews, she started to write.

“I never took a theatre class or a writing class,” Wang said. “I did enroll for two weeks at Columbia and then my play “Bird’s Nest Soup” was accepted for a production.

"Because Columbia doesn’t let you study and work on something in production, I quit to see my work produced by a professional company. Then I just started exploring my voice.”

That voice, she maintains, is very American, inspired by family and the layered complexities of a society that is on one level homogeneous and on another, fractured into uneasy alliances of race, gender and economic class.

“We live in a world where everything is changing so dramatically,” Wang said. “Industries are dying. People are left in situations where everything they knew is now obsolete. How do we adapt?”

Wang plans on exploring this concept at her workshop, which she is calling “New Year, New Beginnings.” She wants participants to arrive ready to discuss the changes in their lives, whether subtle or abrupt. She is limiting the number of participants to 20.

“Sometimes, it isn’t easy for people to focus in on how their lives have been affected by change,” Wang said. “I found one question that people can really latch onto: what food has changed your life?

“Food is provocative. My mother, who is a great chef, once said that the only thing you can control in life is what you put in your mouth.”

Food is a subject Wang often returns to in her writing. In fact, she might use her writer’s residency to work on a second draft of her comedic play, “Moo Goo Gai Pan Asian.” She might work on adapting her young adult novel, “Teen Mogul,” into a screenplay.

This work came from her experience as a 16-year-old who got a job as director of marketing and communication for a consulting firm specializing in organizational development.

“When I told someone of about this time of my life, they said it would make a great novel,” Wang said. “I had no idea I’d end up in Hollywood with it.”

These are the types of stories Wang is seeking in her first workshop.

“There are turning points in people’s lives,” Wang said. “I remember having a hard time growing up. Mom left, Dad beat on us, and my brother left home. It was hard.

"Then I met Gloria Steinem who had dealt with a mentally ill mother and her own problems growing up. I figured if she could go through what she did and still become this icon, I could pull myself up.

It starts with change,” Wang continued. “At the end of the day, you can embrace that change and be proud of yourself.”

Lucy Wang’s workshop “New Year, New Beginnings” takes place Monday, January 16 from 2:00 to 4:00 p.m. Participation is free and reservations can be made at http://beachculture92-eorg.eventbrite.com/