Mark David Gerson's Blog, page 23

CREW CALL for "MoonQuest" Movie Trailers

Anvil Springs Entertainment is currently accepting resumes for ALL CREW POSITIONS for for three feature-film trailers: for The MoonQuest and each of its two sequels, The StarQuest and The SunQuest.

When completed, the three feature films will comprise Mark David Gerson's Q'ntana Trilogy.

We will be filming the three feature trailers during two weekends in February in the Albuquerque and/or Santa Fe areas. This will be a non-union, low/no/deferred pay production.

Please send crew resumes to crew@anvilspringsentertainment.com.
Please NO PHONE CALLS.

(Anvil Springs is also holding a January 8 casting call in Albuquerque. Click here for details.)

For info on Anvil Springs Entertainment visit anvilspringsentertainment.com. ("Like" us on Facebook.)

CASTING CALL for "MoonQuest" Movie Trailers

Anvil Springs Entertainment is holding a second open casting call for speaking and background roles for three feature-film trailers: for The MoonQuest and each of its two sequels, The StarQuest and The SunQuest.

When completed, the three feature films will comprise Mark David Gerson's Q'ntana Trilogy.

Casting non-descript / all types; Ages 16+
(If you're under 18, you need a parent present.)
Various Speaking Parts Available
Background needed: Villagers and Soldiers

When: Saturday, January 8, 2011
Time: 3pm to 6pm
Where: Clarion Hotel, 7620 Pan American Fwy. NE, Albuquerque, NM

*** Please do not call the hotel with questions.

This is an action-packed, fantasy-themed trilogy: Think of The Chronicles of Narnia meets Lord of the Rings.

Filming will take place during two weekends in February. This is a non-union, no-pay shoot. However, meals will be provided.

If you can't make this open casting call, please submit your headshot and resume to: casting@anvilspringsentertainment.com

*** If you attended the previous casting call or have submitted via email, your information is on file. There is no need to attend this casting call.

(Anvil Springs is also accepting resumes for all film crew positions. Click here for details.)

For info on Anvil Springs Entertainment visit anvilspringsentertainment.com. ("Like" us on Facebook.)

Casting Call for "MoonQuest" Movie Trailers

Anvil Springs Entertainment is holding a second open casting call for speaking and background roles for three feature-film trailers: for The MoonQuest and each of its two sequels, The StarQuest and The SunQuest.

When completed, the three feature films will comprise Mark David Gerson's Q'ntana Trilogy.

Casting non-descript / all types; Ages 16+
(If you're under 18, you need a parent present.)
Various Speaking Parts Available
Background needed: Villagers and Soldiers

When: Saturday, January 8, 2011
Time: 3pm to 6pm
Where: Clarion Hotel, 7620 Pan American Fwy. NE, Albuquerque, NM

*** Please do not call the hotel with questions.

This is an action-packed, fantasy-themed trilogy: Think of The Chronicles of Narnia meets Lord of the Rings.

Filming will take place during two weekends in February. This is a non-union, no-pay shoot. However, meals will be provided.

If you can't make this open casting call, please submit your headshot and resume to: casting@anvilspringsentertainment.com

*** If you attended the previous casting call or have submitted via email, your information is on file. There is no need to attend this casting call.

For info on Anvil Springs Entertainment visit anvilspringsentertainment.com. ("Like" us on Facebook.)

Why Aren't You Writing?

Why aren't you writing? You don't know what to write? It doesn't matter.

Write anyway. Place one word, any word, on the page. A single word. That's all it takes.

That single word, whatever it is, will launch you on a journey into your creativity and beyond your imagination.

One word. That's all it takes.

Open any book to a random page, close your eyes and point.

Write that word.

What about the next word, and the word after that? And the word after that? What about sentences and paragraphs? What about a subject?

You are the subject.

I don't mean you will be writing about yourself -- though you might be. You are the subject and your pen is sovereign. And that pen will carry you on an extraordinary journey of discovery, if you let it...writing flowingly and freely on the Muse Stream, letting the sentences unfold without your conscious mind getting in the way.

What you will experience is freedom from your mind, freedom for your story. When you write on the Muse Stream, you throw off the shackles of logic and leap into the inkwell of the unknown -- a well within which reside all the stories you could ever want to write, all the catharsis you could ever want to experience, all the emotion you could ever want to express.

It's so simple.

Take the first word you write and, without thinking, write another. It needn't flow logically from the first. Perhaps it's an association -- "chair" makes you think of "table." What does "table" remind you of?

Don't think about it. Let the first word that comes to you, whatever it is, be the next word you write.

It doesn't make sense? It doesn't have to make sense. It may be better if it doesn't.

Just let one word trigger another and then another, until something shifts - and it will -- and the flow is undammed. From there, that flow can carry you on a current of words, images and emotions. If you let it..

Why not let it? Why not write now? Why not pick a word at random from this blog post? Why write that one word and then another, and then another. Why not keep writing for 10 minutes or 20 or 30? Why not let the words take charge, propelling you forward on a journey of discovery, wonder and awe.

~ adapted from The Voice of the Muse: Answering the Call to Write (LightLines Media) (c) 2008 Mark David Gerson

Photo by Mark David Gerson: the Yellowstone River, the longest undammed river in the lower 48 states

New Mexico Casting Call for "MoonQuest" Movie Trailers

Anvil Springs Entertainment is holding an open casting call for speaking and background roles for three feature-film trailers -- for The MoonQuest and each of its two sequels, The StarQuest and The SunQuest.

When completed, the three feature films will comprise Mark David Gerson's Q'ntana Trilogy.

Casting non-descript / all types; Ages 16+
(If you're under 18, you need a parent present.)

When: Saturday, December 18, 2010
Time: 1pm to 7pm
Where: Clarion Hotel, 7620 Pan American Fwy. NE, Albuquerque, NM

This is an action-packed, fantasy-themed trilogy: Think of The Chronicles of Narnia meets Lord of the Rings.

Filming will take place during two weekends in February. This is a non-union, no-pay shoot. However, meals will be provided.

If you can't make the open casting call, please submit your headshot and resume to: casting@anvilspringsentertainment.com

For info on Anvil Springs Entertainment visit anvilspringsentertainment.com. ("Like" us on Facebook.)

A Light on Your Creative Journey (Video)

"There are no rules."
~ Mark David's first rule for writing (and most everything else)

Back in November 2009, I was privileged to be part of Steve and Barbara Rother's Virtual Light Broadcast. In a 26-minute interview with author/editor Sandie Sedgbeer, recorded live before a studio audience in Las Vegas, we talked about writing, spirituality and the creative process.

"The universe is made up of stories, not atoms," I told Sandie, quoting poet Muriel Rukeyser. We all have stories to tell and we all have an innate ability to free those stories onto the page in a process that is nearly always life-changing -- for ourselves and for our readers.

Unlock your creative self by trusting the stories alive within you...and (re)discover the writer you are!

• Other inspiring videos on writing/creativity.




Give the gift of creativity and inspiration this holiday season, with special Holiday Gift Editions of Mark David's books and CDs...

For a limited time only: Gift-wrapped books + book/CD packages signed by Mark David to your friends/family members, and shipped directly to them with a card bearing the holiday message of your choice.
*** Order yours today!

A Light on Your Creative Journey

"There are no rules."
~ Mark David's first rule for writing (and most everything else)

Back in November 2009, I was privileged to be part of Steve and Barbara Rother's Virtual Light Broadcast. In a 26-minute interview with author/editor Sandie Sedgbeer, recorded live before a studio audience in Las Vegas, we talked about writing, spirituality and the creative process.

"The universe is made up of stories, not atoms," I told Sandie, quoting poet Muriel Rukeyser. We all have stories to tell and we all have an innate ability to free those stories onto the page in a process that is nearly always life-changing -- for ourselves and for our readers.

Unlock your creative self by trusting the stories alive within you...and (re)discover the writer you are!

• Other inspiring videos on writing/creativity.




Give the gift of creativity and inspiration this holiday season, with special Holiday Gift Editions of Mark David's books and CDs...

For a limited time only: Gift-wrapped books + book/CD packages signed by Mark David to your friends/family members, and shipped directly to them with a card bearing the holiday message of your choice.
*** Order yours today!

The Myth of Perfection

"The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one."
~ Elbert Hubbard


"Have no fear of perfection, you'll never reach it."
~ Salvador Dali


Are you frustrated?

Do you struggle to find the perfect words that consummately evoke the depth of your passion or flawlessly paint the fullness of your vision?

Are you frustrated because the words you have chosen seem inadequate, their ordering unsatisfactory?

You're not alone. Many writers echo your frustration.

It's a futile frustration, for language is an approximation. It's a powerful but often inadequate device for translating experience and emotion into a form others can share.

When I originally wrote these words for an early draft of The Voice of the Muse: Answering the Call to Write, the sun was sliding through a marbled Hawaii sky toward the Pacific, its light skipping across wind-rippled waters.

If I was successful in that description, you will have seen some version of an ocean sunset. Some version, but not mine.

It may approach mine. It may approximate mine. Yet my words, as expertly as I may have deployed them, cannot create a Kodak moment. (Even Kodak can't create a perfect Kodak moment.) My words are more likely to create an Impressionist moment.

That's not a bad thing. It gives readers space to have their own experience, to paint their own pictures from the words you have freed from your pen.

Just as you can't control the words that flow from you, you can't control your reader's experience of those words. Nor would you want to.

How often have you been disappointed by a film portrayal of your favorite literary character because your inner director cast the role more astutely than the movie director did?

Empower your readers to have their own experience and recognize that all you can do is translate your experience as heartfully as you're able into little squiggles on a page. Begin by recognizing that most of the time you're only going to come close. Continue by knowing that it remains within your power to have your words incite revolution, topple dynasties, overthrow "reality."

That's perfect enough for me. How about you?

Can you let go your natural human perfectionism long enough to let your story tell itself to you on the page?

What are you waiting for? Pick up your pen. Describe what you see, what you feel, what you yearn for, what you love. Don't try to be perfect.

Don't try at all. Just allow. And know that from that place of surrender, you are creating perfection.


Adapted from The Voice of the Muse: Answering the Call to Write, winner of an
Photos: Santa Monica sunset (c) 2010 Mark David Gerson. Image of Salvador Dali from the University of Buffalo's 2009 Anderson Gallery Dali exhibition.

Coming Out...As All That I Am

I first posted this piece two years ago on my previous New Earth Chronicles blog. Then, I titled it "Coming Out (Again) for Christmas." Reprinting it today, on the 32nd anniversary of Harvey Milk's assassination in San Francisco, feels an appropriate celebration of his life and legacy.

Harvey Milk insisted that we must be who we are out in the world, and it's a message that's as valid today as it was in 1978 -- whoever we are, whatever our orientation.


It's December 14, 2008 and I'm at the New Mexico Gay Men's Chorus's "Come Out for Christmas" concert with my friend Kathleen. It's our second year attending this event together and although this year's show is not nearly as good as last year's, there's something about being here this time that feels inexplicably right.

After the concert, Kathleen and I are chatting about this and that at a nearby Starbucks when I ask her, "Have I ever told you my 'gay story'?"

If you've been following this blog for a few years, you'll have read various versions of the story. What I told Kathleen was this:

For the first 20 years of my adult life, I lived as a gay man. Yet, as I awakened to my spirituality, I felt called to stop identifying myself as gay -- or straight. Rather, I began to see myself as a sexual being open to all possibilities. Still, I was somewhat surprised when, a few years later in Sedona, AZ, I fell in love with a woman.

When I told my gay friends that I was getting married (a sort of reverse coming-out), I explained that I had fallen in love with a wonderful spirit who just happened to occupy a female physique. From that place of love and passion, I said, gender and orientation were irrelevant and anything was possible. And it was.

Yet as profound, intimate and wonderful as our relationship was, it ended six and half years later, for reasons unrelated to sexuality.

In the four years since, I've often revisited the sexual orientation question. "Am I gay again?" I would ask in meditation. The answer was always, "Nothing has changed. Don't label yourself. Be open to all possibilities." Even though my primary physical attraction remained toward men, I honored that counsel and refused to categorize myself.

Something changed when I returned to Albuquerque in November after 40 days on the road. It was as though after 15 years of traveling in the spiritual realms, I had crash-landed back on earth and was reconnecting with the 38-year-old I had been before my spiritual awakening.

Suddenly, people from my past resurfaced, as did work opportunities disturbingly similar to those I hadn't pursued in 16 years. And at the very physical (read "earthly") job my financial situation pushed me into last month, I have been "Mark." Only friends and family from years back know me as Mark. To most everyone else I'm "Mark David."

I was starting to believe that I was living my own version of the infamous dream season of the 1980s Dallas TV series and that I would wake up and discover that nothing of the past decade and a half had really occurred.

Of course it all did, and I have a beautiful daughter (and all of you) as proof. What I have been experiencing, rather, is a giant turn of the spiral I wrote about in Everything Old Is New Again, a "full circle" far more comprehensive than any I remember having lived.

In spiritual terms, it's time to take all I have experienced on my spiritual journey and bring it down to earth -- into the practical, into the physical...to reconnect who I was with who I am now.

"Perhaps," as I wrote so presciently in The MoonQuest, "it is time...to allow the boy I was to touch the man I have become..."

When I leave Starbucks that Sunday evening, having shared my story with Kathleen, I feel the same kind of rush I felt 24 years earlier when I began coming out as a gay man to straight friends. I feel as though a tremendous burden has been lifted from me. I feel lighter.

Four days later, I go to see Milk, the film story of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay elected official in the US, who was assassinated in 1978 by a fellow San Francisco city supervisor.

The movie is brilliant, compelling and moving (as is Sean Penn's portrayal of the title role) and I find myself wiping away tears at frequent intervals.

It's compelling for another, more personal reason: the film's time frame covers the period of my coming out, and the gay activism it portrays is a bolder version of my activism in the Montreal of the mid- to late '70s. It's like watching my own life play out before me.

I leave the theater in an altered state and when I got into the car, I begin to sob uncontrollably. I sit there -- crying, heaving, releasing -- for 20 minutes. And when the tears stop I see that I have come full circle, that I have allowed the Mark I was to touch the Mark David I have become, that as open as I remain to the infinite realm of possibilities in life, I am a gay man. Again.

Even as I share this story with close friends in the days that follow, I'm not sure what to do with this realization. Is it appropriate to come out a third time? Is it necessary to be as openly gay at 54 as I was at 24 and 34? Does it even matter anymore to anyone but me?

This morning, in the midst of an interview with Joan Sotkin on her Prosperity Place radio show, I realize that it does matter. And I realize why.

During the show, Joan shares her spiritual coming out story and reveals how difficult it had been to let her spirituality have a place in her coaching work. And I note how vulnerable I felt putting out my most recent blog post, All That Matters Is That I'm Writing.

As we're talking, I remember how important it is to be vulnerable, how healing it is to share our truth and our stories out into the world. I remember, too, how much of my work is about helping give people permission to do those very things by doing them myself.

That's largely what this blog has been about. That's largely what Harvey Milk's message was about. He insisted that we must be who we are out in the world, and it's a message that's as valid today as it was 30 years ago -- whoever we are, whatever our orientation.

I realize, too, this morning that like Joan we all have many parts to ourselves and that each of these is more potent and transformational when operating as part of a oneness. When we fragment ourselves -- being spiritual only with our spiritual friends, gay only with our gay friends, Jewish only with our Jewish friends, vegetarian only with our vegetarian friends, Democrats only with our Democrat friends -- we cheat the world and ourselves of the strength, power and paradox of the human soul.

Each of us is a unit within which lives unparalleled diversity. Only when we can be at peace with that diversity within ourselves will we be at peace with that same diversity in others. And only then will we see peace in the world.

That peace begins in me. That peace begins in you. And it begins with me honoring all of who I am by integrating all of who I am into all that I do. One of the ways I achieve that integration is by being open and vulnerable with you, by letting you see more of me than I might always prefer you to see in the hopes that you will be inspired to share all of you with others.

Tikkun olam is a phrase in the Jewish tradition that translates from the Hebrew as "healing the world." That healing begins when I open my heart to myself so that I can see who I am. It grows when I open my heart to you and let you see who I am. It grows further when you do the same.

Won't you open your heart and share your light -- all of it -- with a world so desperate for healing? Won't you come out of hiding and be?


What parts of yourself are you hiding from yourself?

What parts of yourself have you hidden from the world?

Where can you integrate more of who you are into what you do?

Where can you be more open to others' diversity?

Where can you be more open to your own?

Won't you share some of who you are here?

Photos: Harvey Milk; Gay Santa from The Austin Chronicle; Me and my daughter; Book cover for The MoonQuest, designed by Angela Farley; Poster for the movie Milk, starring Sean Penn; Hebrew lettering for "tikkun olam"

Birth of a Book

You don't have to know how your story will end before you begin. You don't even have to know how it will start. All you need to do is begin. All you need to do is place one word after the other...and trust...

It's March 1994. I see The Celtic Tarot in Toronto's Omega Centre bookstore and it so seduces me that I can't not buy it. Days later, I use the deck in a writing class I'm teaching: With eyes closed, each student draws one of the major arcana cards and then, with eyes open to the chosen card, is led through a guided visualization into writing.

Generally when I teach, I don't write. I watch the students and hold space for them.

But this night's group is different. These five women are a subset of a larger University of Toronto class that I have just led through ten weeks of creative awakening. They don't require my usual overseeing and so, once they're settled into writing, some inner imperative has me draw a card of my own: The Chariot.

That same imperative has me pick up a pen and push it across the blank page. What emerges is a surprise: the tale of an odd-looking man in an even odder-looking coach that is pulled by two odd-colored horses. I know nothing about this man and his horses. I know nothing about this story. All I know is what emerges, word by word, onto the page.

Next morning, I'm drawn back to the story. I add to it. I keep adding to it daily, almost obsessively, rarely knowing from one day to the next (some days from one word to the next) what the story is about or where it is carrying me. A year later in Amirault's Hill, Nova Scotia, on the anniversary of that Toronto class, I complete my first draft of The MoonQuest .

It's May 2007, many drafts and years later. I'm in Santa Fe, New Mexico, a few weeks from seeing the first printed copies of The MoonQuest in book form.

I open my email to a message and image from Courtney Davis, the British artist who created the Celtic Tarot deck, now sadly out-of-print. The image is The Chariot card, which I haven't seen since I gave away my copy of the tarot deck in 1997. Davis has sent me the image so that I can write a caption for an upcoming retrospective of his art.

When I see The Chariot for the first time in a decade, I'm startled. Even though the cover designer never saw the tarot card and knows nothing of The Celtic Tarot or how it inspired me, there's a definite connection between the two. Not only are the horses identically colored, they are identically placed. There's even a tiny chalice just above the wording on the card. Apart from that, the two images just feel the same.

Today, The MoonQuest is an award-winning book on its way to becoming a movie. And although the story's opening has changed since that 1994 writing class and although the odd-looking man has been superseded in importance by other characters, The Chariot's inspiration is still evident throughout The MoonQuest's story -- a story that knew itself far better than I did...a story that knew me better than I knew myself...a story that insisted I trust it to reveal itself to me, moment by moment, word by word...a story that never let me down.

• How can you trust your stories to reveal themselves to you?

• How can you surrender to the mystery of the blank page? Can you do as author Ray Bradbury suggests: jump of the cliff and trust that you'll sprout wings on the way down?

• Can you write the story that wants to be written by you, even if you don't yet know what it is?

• Can you start? Now?

Art Credits: The Chariot tarot card by Courtney Davis; The MoonQuest cover by Angela Farley.