Callie Kimball wanted to be an actress, but it was tough on her ego. To shield herself from the spotlight, she learned to write plays instead.

“Playwriting was the door that kept opening,” she said.

More accurately, Kimball keeps forcing it open. She’s been writing plays for about 10 years and admits that her graveyard of dead scripts is getting crowded. Lately, she’s found success as an emerging voice in Maine theater. This week, the New York theater collaborative Team Awesome Robot stages her play “Rush” about the Yukon gold rush of 1899, the secrets of Frank and Belinda, and the difficult nature of escaping your past. In March, the Halcyon Theater in Chicago mounts “Dreams of the Penny Gods,” about a 13-year-old girl with a criminal past.

Her futuristic play “May 39th” has been produced at fringe festivals from D.C. to L.A.

“2015 has been a huge leap forward,” she said. “It’s gratifying that people are interested and responding.”

Kimball lives in Springvale. In 2012, she was among the first graduates of Hunter College’s master of fine arts program in playwriting. She’s received a MacDowell Fellowship and was an O’Neill National Playwrights Conference semifinalist. In Maine, Mad Horse Theatre Company produced “Alligator Road” and Snowlion Rep included “Hungry Like A” in its Maine Dish plays-about-food festival.

Kimball’s schedule proves that an emerging writer never takes a break. Her life is back-and-forth between Springvale and New York. “Luckily, that’s just a five-hour bus ride,” she said.

A recent six-day run of work looked like this: Friday, she turned in the first two chapters of a book she is ghostwriting. Saturday morning, she was on the 6:30 bus to New York. She cashed in rewards points at a hotel and hunkered down all day Saturday and most of the day Sunday to work on a play she began this summer. Sunday afternoon, she took the subway to Harlem to crash on a friend’s sofa. Monday morning, she attended a reading of a new play called “Things That Are Round” at the Lark Play Development Center, where she will return in February for a winter residency.

After the reading, she spent an hour with the director brainstorming where they might get the play work-shopped or produced. Her next stop was a coffee shop, where she began promoting “Rush.” Monday night was a rehearsal for “Rush,” and Tuesday she had an all-day meeting with her ghostwriting client.

She attended another play Tuesday night and was on the 9:30 a.m. bus back to Maine on Wednesday.

This week, she’ll go back to New York for Friday’s opening of “Rush” at the Paradise Factory in the East Village.

“My schedule’s been like this for the last year or so,” she said. “It’s a ton of fun, but it takes a lot of careful scheduling to protect writing time and to maintain balance in my life. I feel like I’ve hit a sweet spot with the things that are happening in my career, and how I’m able to manage all my deadlines. The truth is, you work hard in solitude for years – in my case, a decade – and then, if you’re lucky enough to get a break, you then have to have enough reserve to push even harder to make the most of those opportunities.”

She moved to Maine after graduating from Hunter. She was born in Florida, and moved around a lot after her parents divorced. She spent her grade-school years in Kittery Point. She knew Maine, loved it and chose to base her professional life here after college. Maine represented a nostalgic ideal.

“I think I went to 12 schools by the time I graduated high school, even moving in the middle of my senior year,” she said, adding that the experience “probably served me well as a writer.”

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