As I write the first draft of this, I have learned an artist I’ve followed for a while, Oliver Tree, has just passed away far too young. My favorite song of his isn’t even from when he was using his present stage name. It’s about facing endings and looking to new beginnings.

I stopped listening as much when he got more popular and his music more broad—the news was sobering to see regardless of my distance from his work. He had a very puckish style and persona, and a unique sound. I anticipate relistening to his music a fair bit in the coming weeks.

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This month has been a roller coaster with regards to my own feelings about my art. I’ve gone from absolutely living the writerly life—see Craft—and feeling like I’ve rekindled a deep-rooted creative spirit to—writing now a little beyond mid-month—feeling yet again like anything good I’ve ever written has been a fluke and I have nothing to bring to the creative arts.

Ah, well. Maybe grad school will stave off the existential dread a bit longer. I’ve resolved to apply this year, provided I have anything worth showing places.

As I review this one last time before publishing, I’m pleased to say I’ve gone back to feeling about neutral—vaguely okay about where I’m at. Time will tell.

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In other news, I'm ramping into an exciting summer where Ryan and I will be filming, in LA, a short film I wrote! I will also be traveling to Edinburgh, Scotland to be an assistant producer on four shows for the Fringe Festival. It is already proving to be quite the rush, and I’m eager to have more to say about the experiences as I experience them.

Art versus entertainment.

I saw a production at 59e59 Theaters this month called Youth in Flames. Thanks again to Madz for the free tickets.

The show was nifty—a former Edinburgh Fringe piece, which is cool given the aforementioned work I’m slated for this August. It was about a British girl attending high school in Hong Kong during the 2019-20 protests.

The piece itself was interesting. Madz and I were concerned it would lack perspective or be white-savior-y, given how it was a play about Hong Kong written and performed by a white woman, but writer-actor Mimi Martin managed to step inside her outsider status well enough to address the protests and her place adjacent to them without self-aggrandizement. Thematically, the play was fine; it didn’t land a particularly strong point, but its message about the importance of spreading accounts of civil struggles, as well as its perpetuation of Hong Kong’s story, was—remains—valuable.

I also saw the final two games of the NBA playoff this past month, also for free thanks to a friend’s streaming service, and they were spectacles I was able to experience with friends. Each game was an opportunity to hang out with people whose company I enjoy, indulge festive food and drink, and shoot the shit while yelling at a TV. It helped that the Knicks won extraordinary comebacks in both the games I watched—the first basketball games, by the way, I have ever seen in full.

The contrast of these two experiences had me mulling over the specific role art plays in my day-to-day. The Knicks games offered me more hedonistic delight, and were experiences with my friends I won’t soon forget. Youth in Flames, on the other hand, was an interesting dramatic experience I got to absorb with a friend; a friend whose own relationship to the country where the play is set allowed me to learn much more than I otherwise would have.

It occurs to me that the basketball games did not lack a story—the Knicks’ win this season was an underdog tale, evolving as the year went by in the reflections of fans, journalists, and the players themselves. I suppose this makes it an emergent narrative, which is a term I hear mostly in the game design sphere: story evolves as a response to players’ actions. I don’t know if this story has a deep thematic depth in and of itself, but the story of a group of people emerging victorious after a long period of despair can be spun any number of ways. And again, the experience of it all was entertaining.

Biased as I am, I want to believe handcrafted stories are more deeply fulfilling than mass entertainment spectacles. Following these games, though, reminds me I could stand to enjoy both.

A friend of mine says my two elated fan experiences were misleading, and that part of being a sports fan is about suffering… ah, well.

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I saw this play a day or two before this newsletter was set to go out, but I had to at least mention it here: Camping. A friend of mine is working as the assistant stage manager for it and they invited me to check it out; I couldn’t turn down a backstage tour.

The blurb for the play is very expressionistic:

I honestly think the flowery summary didn’t capture the play effectively—I think it sought to evoke intense feelings when I mean, really the thing that was compelling to me about the play was that it was an aching love story. This was a play that had me deep in thought. I sat right in the front row, right beneath the actors on the intimate stage as we witnessed the throes of their relationship. It felt deeply voyeuristic. The play didn’t end the way I was hoping it would, but that fact that it cultivated that devastating hope in me in the first place was a lesson in how the most compelling art can’t always give the audience what it wants.

Not enough time right now to go into further detail, but shoot me a reply if you’re interested—I’d love to talk about the piece more.

Clarity of purpose

I had the incredible opportunity—thanks to the beneficence of my parents—to attend the Yale Writer’s Workshop at the beginning of this month. I signed up for Session One on a whim at my mother’s suggestion, registering for their new Screenwriting program and being caught by surprise when I got in.

Days the the YWW were structured similarly throughout the duration of the workshop:

I had two main craft takeaways from the workshop. The one regarding screenwriting, which Derek made sure we had drilled into our heads, was that a screenwriter is a scene writer; his philosophy was that a writer needs to focus first on writing eight to ten great scenes, and then worry later about how they synthesize into a movie. People remember the great scenes, the idea goes—and those scenes are usually the parts that are the most fun to write.

This was an interesting new perspective for me, because I take a lot of comfort in building a solid outline before I think of writing too much. Still, as I’ve learned from past projects, an outline can only take me so far—the middles of my plays and screenplays can still come out feeling dead regardless, and the drafts can still land clumsy and dull.

The other big craft takeaway concerned the nature of prose writing.

The experience of theatre is rooted in its Dialogue; people would go to hear a Shakespeare play rather than see one, and early Greek drama was built on the conversation between ideas, Thesis against Antithesis.

The experience of dance is rooted in Movement; poetry in Song; film in Image—the best movie, I’ve often heard said, needs no words to communicate its meaning. Prose I thought might come down to Rhythm or something like that, but Derek made the case for it being Consciousness. The thing that prose delivers so effectively, like no other medium, the thing that guides a reader’s experience of prose, is the mind through which it is filtered, the perspective through which the audience receives information. 

For Catch-22, the consciousness is one which perceives and explores the irrationality of war, and it is that perception through which comedy and tragedy alike are delivered, the perspective that reflects on the fate of its characters. For Neuromancer, the consciousness of the narrator is fractal and hedonistic, delivering a story about a world where technology is moving too fast for people to keep up and the digital world is overwhelming the physical one. For Klara and the Sun—Taika Waititi had better not butcher the adaptation—the unique way in which the titular android protagonist perceives the world defines the reader’s experience as she describes her experiences as a companion to the humans in her life.

This perspective recontextualized how I see prose-writing, and I’m eager to apply it to a novel. How does the Consciousness of the narrator fuel the story and enhance the narrative? What shape does the writing take in the reader’s mind, and how does it prompt them to think about the writing?

Apart from these Craft discoveries, the Yale Writers’ Workshop frankly just reinforced to me how I want to live my life. I want to wake up and chat with people about what they’re working on, what’s compelling them. I want to spend the prime hours of my day in a room with bright artists pitching ideas and working through a creative process. I want to spend the rest of my day meeting with peers about matters that are important to me, exercising, exploring—and in my evenings, I want to enjoy some art or do some writing or partake in the company of friends. For a week, I lived I think just about exactly how I want to live. I think that’s a Craft lesson: how to build a life. Now I just need to get there.

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Michael

P.S: After I got back from the YWW, my end-of-year project with my fourth and fifth-grade students at the Reading Team was to make two short films recreating Percy Jackson scenes with them. We scrabbled together props out of cardboard, filmed each script in about a day or two, and shot and edited on my tablet. And you know what? By the end of the process, we had two fun short films with some modestly clever movie magic in them that my fellow teachers and the parents delighted in.

It was a blast. I think we really enjoyed it.