Craig Lancaster's Blog, page 2

A glimpse into ‘A Post on the Prairie’

From Craig: This is a big deal. A piece by a Billings playwright, Ryan Gage, is being staged at the NOVA Center for the Performing Arts as part of its main program. Gage, a government teacher at Billings Senior High School, has tapped into his love of post-apocalyptic art to bring about this two-character play set on the Montana prairie. I can’t wait to see it (Oct. 4 matinee, baby!). Gage was kind enough to offer a behind-the-scenes look at how the play, and his nascent writing career, came about. Read on:

* * * * *

I started writing plays around 2007. However, theatre was not something new to me. I spent many hours in the audience watching my sister and other friends grow as people and as actors on the stages around Billings.

I was mostly an athlete growing up, following the footsteps of my father. He was an Olympic hammer thrower, having made the team in 1968 and 1972. His father died right before the 1968 Games in Mexico City so he withdrew from the competition, but he did make the team in 1972, finishing first out of the Americans in Munich a week after the Games were almost canceled due to the PLO-Israeli wrestlers hostage crisis. For me, it was always soccer. Regardless, my dad’s competitive athletic spirit was passed on to me and I spent a lot of my youth and earlier adult years playing and coaching soccer.

Ryan Gage with son Monte.

I found myself unexpectedly drawn to the theatre in 2007. I was working at Hastings and one of my co-workers, and later good friend, was a local actor and playwright. His name is Dan Paul Schafer and he invited me to participate and become a part of the wonderful world of live theatre. He had been writing in the One-Act Festival at Venture Theatre for several years and he told me I should come check out his show that year. It was a moving piece about 9/11 and more importantly a woman’s struggle with her place in life. Although I knew watching his piece that I wanted to write too, it was another piece that really inspired me to actually do so.

There was a piece that was historical fiction and, being the history teacher I am, I was really disappointed in it. I liked what the writer had tried to accomplish with it but both the style of the piece and the representation of history in it left me yearning for something more from it. It wasn’t bad. I just felt like I could do better. Part of that competitive spirit so engrained in me, I suppose.

The next day at work, Dan Paul and I were talking and I mentioned the “feeling like I could do better”, even though I knew nothing about writing plays myself, and he basically said, “Why don’t you?” And my experience in writing plays began. Sort of…

Dan Paul knew I had no clue what I would be doing and offered to assist me in my first script. We teamed up on a script called “La Mano del Diablo” for the next year’s One-Act Festival and he showed me the ropes. How to create story arcs, how to develop complex characters in those arcs, how to control and use stage direction, how to create subtext behind what was actually being said on the stage. You name it. It was largely a learning process for me even though I had come to him with the basic premise for the show.

Without that experience, I wouldn’t be writing this today. The past eight years have been a wonderful adventure of writing one-acts, participating in 24 hour play festivals, developing original pieces at the school I work at, getting on stage myself, and even dabbling in some directing here and there.

But my first draw has been the crafting of stories for the stage. And it remains my number one interest today.

On Oct. 2, my newest play will debut at NOVA Center for the Performing Arts. It is titled “A Post on the Prairie” and it is the most challenging, complex, and rewarding piece I have ever written. I’d like to tell you a little about its history and development.

First and foremost, this play has gone through numerous live readings and critiques from other established playwrights. The first live reading was of the first scene only. The biggest question I had for the audience that night was, “Do you want to see more?” The answer was a resounding  “YES!”  followed by a wonderful talkback session of likes, dislikes, what worked, what didn’t, and so on. The next reading, a year later, was of the full play in its first completed draft. Again, the response was immensely positive followed by another great round of discussing art, theatre, Montana, and everything in between. Another year of revising and retooling the script along with some critique by trusted friends and artists and here we are!

Let me tell you how this particular idea and play all began.

To a small degree, I suppose the idea was born shortly after my dad died. He dad died very suddenly from a heart attack in 2010. It’s not a story about him, or myself for that matter, but there are some things about him, me, and my relationship with my father that influenced my thought process and, more importantly, my desire to see this thing to through to the end.

Above all, it started with an idea that appealed to me the most and that I used as my inspiration. That idea? One final beer around a campfire with my dad.

To another degree, the idea is revisiting a setting in the first script I ever worked on. Stories and interactions around a campfire on a dark night in a prairie landscape. Many ideas start but never going anywhere in writing plays. I have several stories uncompleted. Some may be revisited, others will not.

That’s it. An idea. A simple idea.

I think that’s how any script or story takes root. A little itch needing to be scratched. Something seemingly insignificant stuck on the brain that begs to be explored.

Over time, that itch grew into something bigger and inspired me to come up with the most compelling and engaging story idea I could think of to write.

A post-apocalyptic tale. Set in Montana. Around a campfire. And yes, there is beer.

It was very important for me as writer and an individual to not make this about me in the end. A good writer friend of mine, Craig Kenworthy, once gave me some of the best advice when I was struggling in those early years of writing. I was struggling with the development of a play I had written or perhaps with coming up with a new idea. I honestly don’t remember the exact problem. What I do remember is what he wrote to me. He said, “Distance yourself from your plays. Branch out into material that isn’t about personal experience.”

It’s some of the best and simplest advice a writer, especially a playwright, can follow. It is hard to create new stories or write a play if it’s something too directly experienced by the writer in their own life. As much as my first two one-acts, “In Dog Years” and “For One Day”, made me feel great as a writer, they also left me wanting for something not nearly as emotionally invested. Overall, they were well received even though people cursed me for making them cry. They were largely based on my own experiences and were the easiest stories to tell as a new playwright. However, I also wrote myself into a box. Plus, being so emotionally invested to a script can be brutal to your soul.  And that was when I struggled and Craig gave me that great advice.

The next year’s One-Act Festival, I surprised everyone with a farce that was nothing but comical and had absolutely no connection to my own life experiences. It was the best exercise in writing I had partaken in to that date. It also gave me the confidence that I could write about anything and in any style I chose as long as I wanted it bad enough and worked hard enough.

“A Post on the Prairie” challenged me because while the idea began around a very personal desire of mine, I knew for the script’s success that I had to move further and further away from that idea and into something unrelated in order to really create a quality full-length play.

Eventually, the idea became about a post-apocalyptic encounter between two strangers surviving in that landscape who meet around a campfire on the Montana prairie. One individual, a cowboy, has been there for three years. The other, a man, wanders into his camp one night.

Post-apocalyptic stories have intrigued me for years. I think what I love about them the most is that they seem to force us to examine ourselves, the world around us, and how we interact with one another by pitting us against a seemingly impossible what-if scenario. Aside from Stephen King’s “The Stand”, most post-apocalyptic never really even addresses the “what happened” component, but rather focuses on the “what now” factor. From Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” to “The Walking Dead”, the most important question to be answered is how do we survive, how do we interact, and how do we become human again? That’s the part I love and the part I chose to focus on when writing “A Post on the Prairie”. If you’re expecting zombies, deadly viruses or comets, you’ll be disappointed.

The hardest part of writing this script was the concept of a two-man play. I had never written a show for a cast of two and it offers huge challenges I had never faced to that point. Unlike in larger cast pieces, a two-man show rarely sees either character leave the stage through its duration. If they do, it’s generally not for long. The problem then becomes how to write a compelling story and engaging dialogue between two people that keeps the audience’s focus and desire for more for up to two hours. Fortunately, I’ve had a few great examples to lean on for inspiration.

The first was “The Sunset Limited” written by Cormac McCarthy. This script was loaded with drama, action, comedy, and suspense that made you forget it was two men in an apartment the entire time. Having read the script and seeing the HBO adaptation, starring Tommy Lee Jones and Samuel L. Jackson, my interest and desire was definitely geared and excited towards trying to write one someday. However, later I witnessed two amazing two-man shows back-to-back right here in Billings that immediately sent me to my notebook and computer to get to work.

One was titled “A Steady Rain”, a story about two cops, and the other was “Red”,  a story about an artist and his apprentice. Between the compelling stories, the dialogue that drew you in, and the intimacy of such a small show in a single setting, I knew that was the challenge I wanted to take on with “A Post on the Prairie”. I could’ve easily expanded the cast, and I even fought back the temptation at times, but I knew in the end that this story had to be about these two men and their time together and effect on each other.

The other challenge was how to make a truly authentic post-apocalyptic tale. One that hasn’t been done before. Maybe I’ve succeeded there. Maybe I haven’t. It’s hard to create a truly unique idea. One could even argue it is impossible. And there are a lot of influences on me that are present in this play. However, I think there will be a lot of things in this show that will surprise you and remind us that the post-apocalyptic landscape doesn’t necessarily have to be that far from our own current one as we know it. Remember, in the end the genre is largely an examination of who we are in the here and now anyway. The question and the challenge is how to make those elements fit. Without out telling you too much more, I’ll just invite you to come and see for yourself and enjoy the show!

None of this would be possible without the support of some key people. First and foremost, my wife Liz. Without her love and support I may have wanted to quit along the way and go back to my comfort zone as a writer. She always pushes me to keep going and test myself. To feed that competitive side of me that is rooted so deep. Next, Patrick Wilson and Shad Scott for creating Sacrifice Cliff Theatre Co. and providing artists a place to play and develop new ideas. Without that venue and forum to workshop “A Post on the Prairie” it wouldn’t be the script it is today. Furthermore, NOVA Center for the Performing Arts for taking a chance on my script and putting it on their season and supporting us along the way as we get it on its feet. And finally, Dan Paul Schafer and Craig Kenworthy for helping me with scripts through reading and providing feedback and showing me how to become my own worst critic and evaluator.

The list goes on and on. I could write about every single person I’ve encountered on my journey as a writer in the theater, as each person and experience has helped me develop into what I am today as a writer. If we’ve crossed paths, you can bet you’ve left a footprint on me as an artist and a writer.

See you at the show!

If you’re in the Billings area and would like to see “A Post on the Prairie,” you can buy tickets here.

Beat Slay Love: a collaboration

From Craig: One of the things I love about where I live is the vibrant arts scene. So many writers, visual artists, actors, photographers, right here in a fairly isolated corner of the world. Author Lise McClendon is one of my friends who’s doing interesting work. I’ll let her tell you about her new collaboration:

* * * * *

Lise McClendon

Get any five writers in a room together and something combustible can happen. Also drinking. Cocktails, wine, you name it, your writer friends have imbibed.

Writers or not, we all love food (and drink – sensing a theme?) So when four of my writer friends and I started writing a novel together our love of sustenance, of American food, of regional specialties, came roaring to the surface. From lobster in Maine to weird, color-themed meals in California, to Texas barbeque, American food is fabulous and varied. Lots to discuss there, and salivate over. (What is a Montana specialty food, you ask? Could it be a tiny purple berry perhaps? More on that below.)

But first, why the hell write a book with four colleagues who live all over the country? We have an authors co-op and had already done a short story anthology. Since we’re novelists the logical (or nut-ball) next step was a collaborative novel. It wasn’t easy. Just coming up with a theme, some kind of sketchy general outline, was difficult. The momentum didn’t start rolling for, oh, years. At any point along the way we could have thrown up our hands and said, Well, actually, no.

But you may have heard something about persistence. It’s one of the keys to being a novelist. You must finish what you start if you ever want to get a book out there in the world of readers. So we persisted. We had google groups and email rounds. We came up with an idea of bumping off reality TV chefs, a silly notion that fell from the cosmos into our brains possibly because we’d like to do it in real life. Fiction is so cathartic.

Despite the craziness of the idea, it was fun. Lots of fun actually. We built a villain, developed a protagonist or two, learned some dark secrets about each other, and just went a little nuts. We fed off each others’ ideas and whipped them into shape. (And used just about every cooking metaphor known to writer.)

We decided to pattern the title at least on the iconic nonfiction book, Eat Pray Love. Initially we were going to call it Beat Flay Love. We couldn’t come up with anything better for ‘Love’ so left that but we realized ‘Flay’ was a little close to a real-life chef’s actual name. Unwilling to court defamation suits we changed it to ‘Slay.’ And we were off.

Like a herd of turtles.

Three years, much hair-pulling and, well, drinking later we finished Beat Slay Love: One Chef’s Hunger for Delicious Revenge. To celebrate we’ve put together a cookbook of party recipes called Thalia Filbert’s Killer Cocktail Party. To get a copy send a quick note to Thalia (our pseudonymous five-person author) at thaliapress@gmail.com.

As a long-time Montanan I wrote a special section in the novel set on Flathead Lake, involving a bison roast and huckleberry pot au crèmes. Also one particular drink, a Berry Drop, made from huckleberry vodka. In the book it has a special ingredient that you won’t want if you make it at home. I’ve left the puffer-fish poison out of the recipe in the Killer Cocktail Party book. The secret ingredients? Ginger-infused sugar for the rim and a sweet Montana huckleberry in the bottom.

With our sincere apologies to Elizabeth Gilbert, we offer up a slice of mayhem and laughs on October 1.

Beat Slay Love: One Chef’s Hunger for Delicious Revenge

by Thalia Filbert

Thalia Press

October 1, 2015

•    To pre-order the book for Kindle: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B015BQUZCK

•    To add it to your Goodreads shelf: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26258450-beat-slay-love

•    To request a paperback at your local independent bookstore: ask for ISBN: 978-0-9819442-1-0

•    To buy a paperback online: https://www.createspace.com/5737186

The great man smiled on us all

Tuesday night in Bozeman, in one of the singular honors of my writing life, I helped pay tribute to Ivan Doig at the Country Bookshelf. I’ll point you to the story I wrote for Last Best News if a nuts-and-bolts recounting is what you’re interested in.

For me, the moments of wonder came after the seven of us—Mary Jane Di Santi, Russell Rowland, Malcolm Brooks, me, Paul Wylie, Carrie La Seur, and Jamie Ford—had spoken, as we mingled with the full house of Doig admirers who came out on a lovely night, as past and present collided all around me, and the depth of the great writer’s impact on us played out.

I couldn’t help but think of just how much of my own life has been marked off by his books. How I fell in love with Dancing at the Rascal Fair after a thrown-together trip to Montana from Texas when I was nineteen years old. How the books kept coming and I kept going and the years kept rising and falling. I took newspaper jobs in Texas and Alaska and Kentucky and Ohio and California and Montana. I marched through my twenties and thirties and into my forties, and Doig kept returning to the Montana of his forebears, of his childhood, of his middle years, of his sunset. And I kept falling in love, over and over again.

What else and who else, family aside, had seen me through from a pimply teenager to a graying, balding middle-ager? Nothing and no one I can think of.

And there I was, introducing my Aunt Linda and Uncle John to my present-day colleague and friend Scott McMillion, and they told him stories of my little-guy years, things beyond the boundaries of my recollection. How I memorized facts and figures and spat them out indiscriminately, regardless of the interest of my chosen audience. How my harried mother would set me in the car in our driveway in Casper, Wyoming, and let me pretend just for a while that I was a driver, so she could buy some precious time with her own thoughts.

It was the second time during the evening that I was reminded of the awesome power of memory. Paul Wylie, who knew Doig when they were children, talked of Doig’s patiently sitting in a pickup on Main Street in White Sulphur Springs, waiting for his father, Charlie, to return from some errand. Doig, he said, was already sharpening the memories he’d return to throughout his career, taking note of how the buildings sagged and how the light struck them just so. That invocation of the past moved through me like a ghost. In a different, later time, I was that kid, sitting on a bar stoop, waiting for my own father to reach his limit, or watching from the cab of his water truck while he chased down just one more test shot in some far-flung Western locale. I marveled at this idea that Doig and I had both partaken of that thrilling loneliness, consuming some for sustenance and stashing the rest in the recesses of our minds, to be pulled out decades later and repurposed into fiction. (And that, by the way, is the only comparison with Doig I’ll ever allow myself to be pulled into. In matters of memory and letters and everything else, he is my greater.)

Everybody who spoke Tuesday brought some different aspect of Doig out for the appreciative crowd to consider. In totality, it covers a wide, deep field—past and present, identity given and assumed, the land as both character and anchor, and always, always an optimism that didn’t flinch in the face of darkness. It was quite a night. And while none of us is ready to let Ivan Doig go—not four months ago, when he died, not today, and not ever—I’d almost be willing to accept that he’ll never write another sentence if we could just sit down again, whenever we need to, and commune around the memory of all that he gave us.

This is what I wanted

My new book came out today, and now I’m awash in the joys and nervousness of a literary birth. The joys abound. The nervousness I can handle. Let’s move on.

A question I get regularly—and understandably—falls along these lines: How much of you (that is, me) is in the book? It’s an almost impossible question to untangle. Every book—every single one—is a mysterious blend of memory and experience and imagination, and at the outset, when I’m just trying to get my arms around an idea, I have no way of knowing how much of each ingredient will end up in the actual, tangible book. That’s what makes the whole endeavor fun and worthwhile, for my money. If the answers were all there and accessible, I’d have little reason to write.

That said, I can say this: This book, as much as any I’ve written so far, existed equally in memories of an ever-distant youth and a more recent past. If you cruise over to the book’s page on this site, you can read about that. I’m thankful for having been part of a family that really let me sink into the part of the world where This Is What I Want is set. I’m thankful, too, for having been there at an age where new experiences were swept into my system as if captured by a sponge. I leaned heavily on both of those eras of my life as I built and populated fictional Grandview, Montana.

The book also marks another change for me, this one in the realm of point of view. My first four novels, for different reasons, were written in the intimacy of first person. For all merits of closeness that come from seeing a story through a singular character’s eyes, I found that view entirely too limiting while acquainting myself with Grandview. Here, then, are eight or nine third-person points of view, with characters rotating in and out of the spotlight as four days in a town’s long history play out. In the end, each character has made his or her move—or several of them—and each has come to bear on the others, not to mention the wide cast of secondary and tertiary characters who make appearances. Human desire and human frailty are endlessly fascinating things, and Grandview has both in ample supply.

I’m proud of this book. My partners in bringing it to life—the friends and colleagues who offer encouragement, my agent and editors, the talented folks who build it into Kindle and paperback and audio versions—have helped shape what it became, and it would be much the less without their presence.

I say I’m grateful an awful lot. There’s a reason. I am.

Full cover for THIS IS WHAT I WANT

It’s a thing of beauty, no? It comes out July 28, 2015. Learn more about it here.

Making the leap

The other day, I had lunch with a friend who just left the corporate world and took the plunge into the full-time freelance life. She did it for the best reason I can think of: “I was constantly setting aside what I’m passionate about.”

The ostensible reason for the meet-up was to compare notes and talk strategy, although I knew going in that I wouldn’t have a lot to offer. I have friends who are true full-time freelancers, and that’s a hard (but rewarding) way to go. They earn their money every day, every month. They’ve had to develop an entrepreneurial spirit and learn to live on the roller-coaster of inconsistent income. There’s some of that for me—namely, the inconsistent income—but much more of my nut is made on work I finished long ago. Hooray for book sales and passive income.

I figured the best I could offer her is “work hard and have faith.” Come to think of it, though, that’s pretty advice for just about anything.

In the end, we talked about so much more. The media glut and how to create content that stands out and has legs (that is, it can exist in multiple venues). The changing tides of creation and ownership of work. Knowing the difference between work that’s valuable to pursue and jobs that should be avoided.

In the course of the conversation, I realized something. When I made my break with newspaper journalism in August 2013 and made the transition to full-time authorship and freelancing, I spent the first year decompressing from a quarter-century of daily newspaper work. I didn’t really care if I wrote, slept in, played golf, or whatever; I needed the time away from a job, any job, just to unwind the spring in my soul that had been twisted tight by the high-pressure life of daily deadlines.

That was the first year.

Now, deep into the second year of my new life, I find that I have a new problem: I don’t have enough to do. (Believe me, I’m not complaining. I’m just saying that I seem to have the opposite challenge from most of the people I know, hardworking people who can’t possibly cram the demands of their lives into the twenty-four daily hours they’re given.) I can’t, won’t and don’t write every day. I don’t need to take on any more freelance work than I already do. And I’m not a good enough golfer to spend my extra hours on the course.

So … in the year to come, I’ll be making yet another adjustment, adding a part-time job to my life. It’s something completely new to me, something that engages my mind and will afford me a bit of travel. I’m not ready to talk about it yet, but I will be soon, I imagine. Like everything else in this life I’ve built for myself, it’s something I can do on my terms, as much or as little as I want. I had a boss at the San Jose Mercury News who talked often about the need to re-plant himself every few years by taking on a new role or learning a new skill. I suppose I’ve always done that intuitively, but these days, I think about it more and more. The key to a life of engagement is constant learning. Here I go …

Hold a good thought for me, and for my friend Anna Paige, who’s taking her own plunge. She’s following her passion, and she’s betting on herself.

I think she’ll do great.

Farewell, Ivan Doig

I’ve been wrestling with whether to write this since I heard the news yesterday that Ivan Doig, the poetic chronicler of the American West and Montana, died at age 75.

Unlike so many of my friends, of whom I’m endlessly envious, I have no story about meeting the man. Though he surely has been a presence in my life for more than 25 years, I never had that particular pleasure. I know people who knew him well. Sue Hart, another recent loss and one of Doig’s best friends, told me once that he and I would get along, and I’ll absolutely take her word for it.

But I wasn’t sure I had much to add. And then I thought about it some more and decided the story is worth reliving. So here we go …

*****

When I was 19 years old, I was working steadily as a freelance writer for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram‘s Northeast Tarrant County bureau, writing sports, city government and general features. My boss at the time, Jim Fuquay, called me one day in early spring and laid out a particular problem the bureau was facing. The details have been lost to time, but essentially it came down to this: the publisher had promised advertisers in a special section that vignettes would be written about their businesses, but there was no one on the advertising staff to do that work, and Jim wasn’t about to breach the editorial-advertising wall by putting one of his regulars on the duty. He figured that I, as a freelancer being paid piecemeal for my work, could handle the assignment and keep his hands clean editorially. I was offered $5 per vignette, and those would take me about 10 minutes apiece. I figured out the hourly rate and fell over myself to accept the job.

I wrote dozens of those things. I don’t remember how many, exactly, but come payday, my check was a couple grand heavier than usual. I did the only reasonable thing any 19-year-old with a sudden windfall can do: I loaded up my ’79 Mustang, enlisted the companionship of my best friend Dan Gray, and I drove to Montana for a vacation.

You see, I had a Montana fixation. I’ve written about this before, and I’m glad to say there’s no known cure. I had a grandmother and an aunt and uncle and cousins who lived here in Billings, and Dan and I had a great week hanging out with them, playing heroic amounts of basketball, and being a couple of bums with a fat expense account.

So here’s where Jim Fuquay again figures into things: Before I left on my trip, he told me about this Montana author he really enjoyed, a guy named Ivan Doig. He told me I should pick up one of his books sometime.

*****

I found signed copies of Dancing at the Rascal Fair at a bookstore in Billings’ Rimrock Mall (the mall persists, but the bookstore is long gone). I bought two—one for Jim, and one for me.

And later, I fell in love. First with Doig’s lovely prose, and later with a girl. We read Doig together. Dreamed of a time when we might marry and raise up a couple of kids. If we were blessed with a boy and a girl, we said, we could name them Varick and Adair, just like in the book.

That never happened, the marriage or the kids or the names in honor of a man I’d never know. But Rachel’s still knocking around, still my friend, and we still talk about Ivan Doig sometimes.

In the years that followed, the books kept coming: Ride With Me, Mariah Montana (my favorite), Bucking the Sun, Mountain Time, Prairie Nocturne, many others.

My first year living in Montana brought The Whistling Season, one of Doig’s best in my estimation. A couple of years later, Doig gave us The Eleventh Man, and I was startled a couple of weeks ago when I took it with me to a restaurant, flipped it open and read an inscription from the woman I came to Montana to be with and marry: “For my favorite author, your favorite author.”

Angie and I divorced a couple of months ago. The inscription was a whisper from another time, and it brought a lot of things back to the surface.

And then Ivan Doig died, and all of those things, and so many more, came back again.

*****

I used to think I wanted to be like Ivan Doig. But that’s impossible. He was a true original, the genuine article. He cornered the market on being Ivan Doig, and we’re all the richer for it.

Lately, after a lifetime of running away from it, I’ve been cozying up to the idea of being like me. I can’t write the way that man could, but I can find my way around a sentence, and his example set out for me something I thought I might be able to do: to make my living by writing stories. I’d have liked to have met him and thanked him for the books, and for the inspiration. Didn’t happen. That’s life.

So I’ll do what I can do. I’ll keep pushing the plow down the field, and I’ll keep being thankful that he painted such a vivid picture of the Montana I wanted to come join. I made it.

Thanks for the push, Mr. Doig.

On fear and faith

I’d like to commend to your attention this essay by my friend Aaron Householder.

Read it first for Aaron’s perspective, which I always find valuable. Then come back and I’ll add my own rambling thoughts to the mix.

*****

Aaron and I grew up in the same town. Went to the same high school. As I recall, we were friendly but not necessarily friends; one of the drawbacks of attending a big-box high school is that you can’t really develop deep friendships with everybody you want to know. But as has happened with so many people I knew back then, social media has reconnected us, and in our adult years we’ve found a way of talking to each other that we didn’t have before.

In our case, we often approach each other from the poles. Aaron, a pastor, comes at things from a spiritual perspective. My viewpoint is secular. We’re often at odds on the political hot buttons of the day. But I always listen to what Aaron has to say, because he’s a thoughtful man whose ideas often help me shape or stress-test my own. Would that more people of differing viewpoints were willing to listen to each other, and to deeply consider what’s being said.

Which brings me to the line in Aaron’s essay that knocked me to the floor: “Fear is the opposite of faith.”

I’ve heard it before, probably from Aaron. But for whatever reason, it didn’t take hold of me until I read this piece. I recognized it this time because I’ve been living it.

It’s a hell of a thing, to realize how many of my decisions, how many of my losses I can ascribe to acting in fear. Fear of loving, fear of being loved, fear of hearing something I don’t want to hear, fear of being vulnerable, fear of being cast aside. It’s bad enough to inflict fear on myself; in recent months, it’s been compounded by a vicious cycle of my fear mingling with the fears of other people, to sometimes disastrous results.

Aaron’s essay talks, too, about the power of surrender. That’s always been difficult for me, but I’m learning. Of late, I’ve had some valuable lessons in letting go of outcomes and trusting the process. True to our natures, Aaron and I will cloak these things in different nomenclatures. He’ll talk of giving it to God, and I’ll talk of letting the universe hold sway, but in the end, I’d submit that we’re pointing to the same thing: faith. Only the connotations (godly vs. worldly) are different.

Some months ago, someone very important to me said, “Craig, if you are honest and forthright and of the right intention, you cannot lose by opening your heart.” I nodded politely and, internally, disagreed vehemently. I could tell you a million ways I can lose, I thought. In recent weeks, I’ve had a chance to put that contention to the test (more on this in a future ramble, or not at all), and damned if my friend wasn’t right. It occurs to me now that the message was the same as Aaron’s, dressed up in different words.

Be not afraid.

I’m trying, man. I’m trying.

The theater bug

Several weeks ago, I wrote about the effort to adapt my short story “This is Butte. You Have Ten Minutes” for the stage.

The effort, I should point out, belonged largely to other people: Patrick Wilson, the talented Billings actor, director and writer who prevailed upon me to offer something up for adaptation; and the cast who breathed life into the characters who previously existed only in the pages of Quantum Physics and the Art of Departure. (Of particular note here are Trevor Biondich and Kennedee Burk, who inhabited the mismatched pair at the center of the story.)

This past Friday night, after staying away from rehearsals out of deference to the cast and crew, I finally saw it on the stage, as part of the New Works Festival by the Billings-based Sacrifice Cliff Theatre Company. It was easily one of the coolest moments of my life, and I’m awed and humbled by what this group of artists did to make the story their own. I loved it so much that I’ll be back next weekend to see it one last time.

The whole experience has me thinking about ways I want to stretch myself in the months ahead. I’ve committed myself to starting a new novel this spring, but once I’ve finished with that (one way or another), I think I’d like to try my hand at a full-length play. That I really have no idea what I’m doing is part of the adventure.

I’m getting older. You should get books.

 

Sometime here in the next twenty-four hours or so, I’ll embark on a new trip around the sun.

There’s a lot I could say about adding another year to the odometer. I’ve certainly never been above doing so before.

But it occurs to me at my advanced age that true joy lies not in self-indulgence, nor in what is received. It’s sharing with others.

So let’s do this thing: To celebrate my own advancing mortality, I’ll give away signed copies of all five of my books to one lucky respondent. Want a shot at it? Just leave a reply to this post, along with a valid e-mail address (it won’t be published) so I can get in touch with you should you win.

The books:

600 Hours of Edward

The Summer Son

Quantum Physics and the Art of Departure

Edward Adrift

The Fallow Season of Hugo Hunter

The giveaway is open to anyone, anywhere, so long as you can be reached by some assemblage of postal systems.

I’ll leave this up for a week and draw a winner on Sunday, February 15th.

Good luck!