-D.W. Winnicott
It's time to stop hiding.
For the past four years, I have been writing film reviews on my blogsite Savage Cinema. For the past year, I have also been writing my thoughts about music on my blogsite Synesthesia. For even longer than that, much longer, I have been involved with some manner of creative writing.
Now, unlike all of the postings that I have shared through Savage Cinema and Synesthesia, I have held the cards of my creative writing, which has essentially consisted of screenplays and prose writing. so closely and firmly to my chest as barely anyone has ever even seen any of it. I have always written for myself and I have always housed dreams of having something that I have written going out into the world but at the same time, I have been extremely terrified at the prospect of sending something I have written out into the world because I am indeed sending out the innermost pieces of myself.
Through the process of writing the two aforementioned blogs, I have discovered how transparent of a writer I happen to be regarding the emotions I go through when viewing movies or when listening to music and now understanding how revealing myself within the context of those writings can help to engage with a potential audience. The other, and most crucial element I have discovered through this process is how the support that I have so thankfully received from readers has helped to build a self-confidence that I just did not have when these public writing experiences began.
And so, on the morning of June 7th, 2014, I happened to see the quotation that began this welcoming post and I had an idea of possibly housing the creative writing that I have been doing for years, years, and years on-line and again allow this process and experience unfold as organically as Savage Cinema and Synesthesia. I guess I am either feeling a little braver or it has been so long that perhaps this experience will help propel me to finish what I started over 15 years ago. But whatever the impetus, the time has arrived.
Between 1987-1989, I wrote a screenplay entitled "My First Year," which essentially worked as a near verbatim diary of my experiences as a Freshman in college at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Between 1991-1996, I wrote another epic screenplay entitled "Bailey Undertow," which involved the anxieties of the titular character as he is ready to graduate from college. So, I had the beginning and the end but what of the middle?
In the late 1990's, and as I was enthralled by the writing of my favorite author John Irving, I had an idea of perhaps trying to write a story in prose, something that I really had never tried before. I had what I felt to be a lots of different college stories in my head but none of them seemed as if they would make feature length movies to me. So, why not a novel or a bunch of short stories that could inter-connect like J.D. Salinger's Glass family stories and characters. And so, Tales From Memorial Union was born.
Throughout these years, the book has taken on many different formats and for most of that time, it even had a different title, which was Plastic Ram, a veiled Beatles' reference of sorts. I gave the book that title because as I was first thinking abut the possible stories, I didn't want to manufacture stories to unnaturally force characters to populate the campus' legendary student union if they didn't really need to be there. But, as I have been writing, all of the stories have naturally ended up having all of the characters populate Memorial Union at one point or another, so the original title re-surfaced. Simpler is better, as I keep telling myself. There's no need to try and be clever when you can just SAY IT plainly and clearly. And even so, Plastic Ram may even be misconstrued as some sort of oddball sexual reference and that is not what these stories are about at all.
I guess Tales From Memorial Union consists of the college stories that I feel that I do not see in movies and rarely in literature as those stories tend to focus on the more hedonistic and puerile aspects of that specific time period. Frankly, that was not my experience when I was in college between 1987-1991, which is also the time period during which all of the stories are set.
What I hope that you will see is that I am trying to write about a collective of characters who are decidedly more introverted, literate, musically obsessed, romantic, empathetic and are all people just trying to find their way in the world while also trying their best to connect with others. They succeed, fail, and try again and I am hoping you can feel their effort...as well as my own in trying to bring them to life on the page.
Some stories are explicitly autobiographical, some not as much and some have an element of hybrid and I hope that they are all emotionally true and you will respond to them in kind.
This is a massive undertaking for me and therefore, it will purposefully unfold slowly. I will not release postings at the same rate as Savage Cinema and Synesthesia because I need to go back and clean them up a bit and also...the book as a whole is not even finished yet! Maybe this experience will help me finish it before my memories grow to hazy or become buried in nostalgia as I want the hurts to really hurt and the great moments to soar as they did when I first experienced them.
But, mostly, I hope that you like them as they really are my children and no parent ever wants to see their children hurt.
And so, I am ready to dust these things off and release them...and myself.
I hope that you will be there to catch me...
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