How a playwright and novelist spends his Sundays

Vichet Chum, a Cambodian-American playwright, spent much of the fall promoting his debut novel for young adults, “Kween.” That was a horizon-expanding experience for Mr. Chum, 38, who describes his plays as “very mature.” His plays, like the book, often focus on Khmer identity and queerness.

Now that publicity for the book, which came out in October, is largely behind us, Mr. Chum continues to face the challenges of being a teenager by adapting ‘Kween’ for the stage. He also develops plays for Audible and for the Steppenwolf Theater Company in Chicago.

Mr. Chum and his partner, Jakob Plummer, 32, a Broadway stage manager, live in a one-bedroom apartment in Inwood with their dog Lucy, in the Great Pyrenees. On some Sundays there are theater salons.

puzzling Recently I wake up around 7:30 am and the first thing I do is play New York Times Connections on my phone. Then I do Wordle and then Spelling Bee. I used to hate those games. I found them so frustrating. But a few weeks ago I tried to do them first thing in the morning, and I completed all three. I thought, why can my brain be in that place where I can only do that first thing in the morning? Now it’s the first thing I do, consistently, every morning, while I’m in bed.

COLD COMFORT FOOD Since it’s a lazier day, my partner and I are going for a really long walk with Lucy on Sunday. We go to Inwood Hill Park, where there is an athletics area that leads into the forest. It’s idyllic. We can get a little lost in the woods. Then we stop at the Park Terrace Deli for breakfast sandwiches. It’s bacon, egg and cheese for him, and I get sausage, egg and cheese. Sometimes we go back to the apartment, but most of the time we dare to eat them outside, even when it is cold. Lucy has so much fur. She loves being outside in the cold.

FOLKSY I am a religious viewer of “CBS Sunday Morning.” The graphics and the fonts are so folksy, you know? Everything about the program is fun. I like the profiles and I find the narrators quite human. To me they feel like normal people.

TV CHANNEL I try to write every day, so I do that in the late morning or early afternoon. Usually it’s plays, but I’m currently developing a TV show and that’s taking up a lot of my time. Now that the Hollywood strike is over, there is a rush to get proposals out as quickly as possible

ALPHA DOG Our days are marked by Lucy’s walks. We have lunch, make something to eat or whatever, and then take her for another walk. She loves when we both walk her and she is also a fierce protector of ours because she is from the Great Pyrenees. They are herding dogs. She never barks at people, but she is a super alpha: she does bark at female dogs about her size.

GIVE VOICE We do a few salons a month for area playwrights. They start sometime mid-afternoon depending on people’s schedules. The group can vary from five to ten people. We read everything from a few pages of a play to an entire play, and usually throw it out the door right away. Even if people aren’t actors, they jump right in. As playwrights you have to hear things out loud; it has existed in your own brain for so long.

Smoothly I love hosting in this apartment. It’s not big, but there is a good atmosphere. We serve pizza or snacks or whatever we have nearby. I want it to feel really relaxed.

AT HOME OR ABROAD Jakob and I are going to eat afterwards. There is a great neighborhood restaurant called Inwood Farm. Sometimes we go there, but before we moved to Inwood, we lived in Washington Heights, and there’s an Italian place there called Saggios we like to go there. I love Italian food. It felt like some kind of miracle that we had that restaurant nearby.

SIGHTS AND SOUNDS After dinner, Lucy drags us wherever she wants for her nightly walk, and then it’s mostly just chilling in the apartment. I like listening to records – jazz, standards, Barbra Streisand, Chet Baker, Charlie Parker. Those kind of things. Then there are TV shows. Recently we watched “The Gilded Age.” It’s about rich people in New York. The costumes are quite elaborate and it is very female-oriented. If you can’t tell, we’re homosexuals.

PUTTING I go to bed at 11:30 or 12 noon, but I’ve noticed that sometimes my brain is still very alert and I’m awake at 1:30 or 12. I walk around the house trying not to wake up. my partner up.

Readers of Sunday Routine can follow Vichet Chum on X And Instagram @vicetchum.