Is This Thing On?

On Good Intentions Gone Awry

Pals,

Well, the last post I made in this space was well over two years ago, and it was wrestling with uncertainty and strangeness and how I had no idea what was going on.

Boy, I had no idea just how uncertain shit was about to get. If I could describe personal and professional upheavals of the past two years of my life to you, well, I would have a whole-ass novel. Okay, in fact, I do have a whole-ass novel about that time in my life, which I’ve just finished. It’s a metaphysical LA-noir tentatively titled If It Harms Me. Stay tuned for updates as I wrestle the final draft into submission this summer.

In the meantime, I’ve decided to dust off the free Substack for a few key reasons:

1. Over the past two decades, if you count university courses and visiting gigs, summer festivals, writers’ conferences, and brief residencies, I have taught over 3,000 students in my career. Many of these folks reach out to me over email quite regularly and ask questions; I’m afraid, to quote the band America, “I’ve been one poor correspondent.” I’ve not answered many of these emails, DMs, and requests to connect simply because of limited time and energy, even though sometimes I will wake up in the middle of the night and think, “Oh no! I never emailed back so-and-so about the use of free indirect speech!” So, in this Substack, I’m going to get back to briefer questions of craft and the writing life, and hope to add some audio and video content too. I see this as a bit of a thank you to all the people over the years who have made space to attend my classes or listen to my lectures, and as a way to stay in touch with my former students and others interested in what I do. So in this space, you’ll see a lot of what I am telling my students these days about writing stories, scripts, and essays. You’ll also get mini pep talks about one of my favorite subject—surviving the dark nights of the soul that accompany the creative life.

2. Speaking of essays, I’m collecting/editing twenty years worth of essays and lectures into a new collection, which, for now, shares the title with this Substack: No Soul No Dark Night. Some of the essays started out as lectures for the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and you can find those here. The other essays are new. You can find two fairly recent and brutally confessional essays about some of the hardest transitions in my life over at Switchyard, the amazing new magazine helmed by the indefatigable Ted Genoways. In these essays, I’m trying something a little different and playing with the traditional essay structure so that it gradually feels more and more like a short story, or maybe more and more like a dream; I’m trying to sort of mimic the Jungian process of engaging with your own shadow, but in essay form. Yes, I’ve been getting weirder as I approach fifty. Yes, it’s been fun.

3. Anyway, I wrote about two of my favorite films for Switchyard: One essay is about It’s A Wonderful Life and the toxic cycle of people-pleasing behavior that can cause severe depression (CW: suicidal ideation/depression); the other essay revisits the classic film Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind twenty years later and asks the question, if you could erase a painful relationship from your brain, would you do it? (CW: it’s pretty sad and weird).

4. Also, ICYMI, a few years ago I published a short story called The Dog over at the South Carolina Review. I’ve now adapted it for television with the good folks over at FilmNation, and in my next post, I will do a free crash course on how to adapt your own short story into a TV pilot (or at least my approach to doing so!)

Keeping it brief, and free, for now,

your pal,

DB

p.s. The reason my Substack is free is for now is because I don’t want the pressure of paying customers at this stage (see the two-year lull between posts for reasons) but also because I am a tenured professor at a university that pays me fairly and allows me time to write and research, in addition to teaching. If you have Substack money to spare, I’ll be recommending lots of excellent freelancers who rely on Substack to help pay the bills.