PROLOGUE

Shorter one this time, folks. Since mid-November, I've been traveling as the Production Assistant for the first national tour of Miracle on 34th Street. This endeavor is my first professional theatre work, after years of trying to land such opportunities out of college. It is also a commitment which has seen me very busy.

More on that in Art.

In the meantime, I hope everyone had a happy Chanukah, a merry Christmas, and is gearing up for a festive New Year—if all goes according to plan, I'll be spending mine in Washington D.C., rounding out the year with the people who shaped my experience in Miracle. It feels like just the right way to spend it this year.

ART

I haven't been writing

The subtitle isn't entirely true. Throughout this fast-paced tour, I have been keeping a journal that, once a daily account, has been relegated to a rather less frequent occurrence.

It would be easy for me to say that the touring process doesn't allow sufficient time to write. Miracle has seen me waking up early to load in sets and transport teammates to work, spend long days and evenings working the show, and spend as much time as possible in between all these killing time with my friends and coworkers.

Really, though, there are plenty of measures to be taken if I am truly to commit to creative endeavors. I could wake up early, or go to bed late; I could spend my idle time writing instead of wandering around the tour's various locales; I could write on the long bus rides instead of listening to podcasts, chatting, and drifting in and out of sleep.

I hear stories aplenty of dedicated writers who rise before the sun crests the horizon in order to have 2000 words written ahead of their their nine-to-five every day. I hear about writers who down coffee late into the night to finish a chapter in the glow of their computer screen. I hear about writers who eschew social bonds for the sake of revising the latest draft of their opus.

At the moment, I am none of those writers, although I have been each of them at various moments in my life. As I write, I am more the Tennessee Williams type of writer, chipping away at paragraphs from the broom closet of the shoe warehouse, snatching words out of the aether as a diversion from my more mundane work. I haven't been in this spirit enough, though.

Since August 1st of this year, I have been keeping a Values Record. At the end of each day, in addition to my Mood Record and my Anxiety Record, I identify whether I have been living in accordance with a short list of values most pressing to me at the current moment. Each night, for each value, it's a simple check yes or no: did I fulfill this value in my actions today?

One of these values is: “Produced art which resonates with me.”

This one is important for me to check yes on. My standards aren't stringent. You can read in previous editions of the newsletter about how I'm releasing myself from the need to complete a chapter a day or have a draft revised each week. There's something discordant about the past month or so, though.

For the past month, I have been engaged full time in the first professional theatre job of my career. This past month, though, also has probably the lowest rate of me checking yes on that aforementioned value of any period of time in my keeping of this record: did I make art?

Maybe I should allow my contributions to this project to count as the creation of personally-compelling art. If I continue to expand too wide what this value counts for, though, it becomes meaningless. And… I don’t feel like I've been creating compelling art. I feel like I've been contributing to the efforts of a team I have a deep appreciation for. But directly responsible for the creation of art that resonates with me? That's trickier.

I'm not—to speak in such a way that doesn't violate the defamation clause of my contract—deeply compelled by this show. I appreciate that, as a working artist, this probably won't be the last time this is the case. It feels significant to know, though, that my professional commitment to art seems, at least in this instance, to negatively correlate with my personal commitment.

In the future—starting now—I want to do a better job at doing both. There is nobility, I think, to contributing even to a corny Christmas show; said shows and their ilk comprise the fabric of millions of people's experiences with their community and their culture. I have to keep pursuing what's meaningful to me, though.

Thankfully, I'm confident that my experiences on this show have contributed to my wholeness as a human being—I owe that to the places I've had the opportunity to travel and the amazing people I've had the opportunity to be around. My hope is, then, that this will prove to be an artistic gestational period—I'm looking forward to checking yes all the way down that value’s column once I'm home from my travels.

CRAFT

On style

Been noticing myself writing with simpler construction recently. Been trying to, rather than attempt to weave the most intricate sentences I can, focus on the story that I'm telling moment to moment with the information and details I dictate or reveal.

Story really is paramount. I've been trying to get better at telling them.

I wanted to try something special for the last edition of 2025, one that relates to sentence construction and the nitty-gritty of syntax; I wanted to get other people involved.

This past month, on my Instagram, I posed a prompt to my followers asking them to write a sentence about a place of significance to them. I then asked respondents why they had constructed the sentence the way they did.

I had one friend who took up the call. I assume the rest were occupied with matters of immense import. Here's Madz's response to the prompt:

About this sentence, Madz said:

I’m compelled by how Madz sought to create a distilled image of a memory of their grandparents’ house. Their lack of a comma before the “and” simulates the breathless enthusiasm of a kid poking their head into a hidden world; the later comma lets us take a breath and soak in what Madz and their sister saw when they did indeed poke their heads through.

They raise an interesting point about how we conceptualize writing, as well. Is it our duty to simulate speech? Is there specific artistic merit to it? Is it simply a useful writers’ aid? It depends on the medium and the material, of course.

Madz didn't want to write an overlong sentence—why? Does length necessarily occlude clarity? This sentence feels like just the right length for its task, it has a lovely rhythm—and what was to stop Madz from writing a glorious paragraph of a run-on, provided their meaning and intention were clear?

I would be curious to know how many times the author rewrote this sentence. I'm grateful for their efforts as a contribution to the newsletter this month; I am grateful, as always, for your own time and interest in this newsletter.

I would like to do more audience-participation activities such as this! It would likely make the most sense for me to bake their prompts into the newsletter itself rather than Instagram. Keep an eye out—more on their way.

In the meantime, happy New Year, everyone! Wishing you warmth as we turn our calendars over.

—

Michael