What you’ll find here…
I’ve spent a lot more time on Substack this past year, first to find more work and advice from some of my favorite writers, and then while swimming through (or, more aptly, against) waves of existential dread about the film & tv industry during the WGA strike. I started thinking about what drew me to writing in the first place and the freedom of thinking about writing and creating as something more than just a product or a means to an end.
I thought a lot about themes for this space. A particularly productive brainstorming session with my friend Aliza resulted in the below very inspiring idea:
As a tree loving gay, this made sense at the time. But ultimately, I hope this will be a space for writing that doesn’t otherwise have a category or a home.
That’s all to say, while I’m puttering from my kitchen table to my couch to the floor (really anywhere but my desk) I hope share some coherent thoughts with you all. I’m going to feel this out as I go in terms of frequency of posts, but initially I’m hoping to post something at least once a month. You can subscribe to get everything sent directly to your inbox!
Why ‘No Wrong Seasons’
As a self proclaimed Mary Oliver head (see above), no wrong seasons is part of a line from one of my favorite poems of hers, Hurricane :
Hurricane
It didn’t behave
like anything you had
ever imagined. The wind
tore at the trees, the rain
fell for days slant and hard.
The back of hand
to everything. I watched
the trees bow and their leaves fall
and crawl back into the earth.
As though, that was that.
This was one hurricane
I lived through, the other one
was of a different sort, and
lasted longer. Then
I felt my own leaves giving up and
falling. The back of the hand to
everything. But listen now to what happened
to the actual trees;
toward the end of that summer they
pushed new leaves from their stubbed limbs.
It was the wrong season, yes,
but they couldn’t stop. They
looked like telephone poles and didn’t
care. And after the leaves came
blossoms. For some things
there are no wrong seasons.
Which is what I dream of for me.
I’ve clung to that concept of no wrong seasons as a guiding light for my life and my work. Making a living as a writer can be murky and necessitate pivoting and expanding into unknown territories/mediums (like this space). If I have to be anything, I’ve made peace with being a stubborn tree; maybe I wasn’t so far off with the whole gay trees concept. Depending on my mood, perhaps I’ll rename it ‘back of the hand.’ Time will tell.
About Me
I’m primarily a film and television writer, you can check out some of my work on TNT’s Animal Kingdom. Outside of that, I like writing about media and music and I’ll probably write about both here alongside some more personal essays. Thank you for reading this far, I’m glad you’re here.
