Inspiration Archives - Page 2 of 3

Feb 26 2017

Light, Desert, Sky

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Last summer on the way to Santa Fe, New Mexico, I avoided the fastest most direct route from I40, opting instead for the ‘scenic route’ just east of the city. I’d taken that same route before, and only agreed to my spouse’s suggestion to take that road knowing that sundown was still an hour or so away.

What I hadn’t counted on was the mute light in the waning hours of the day, making the hairpin turns more treacherous and the shadows a substantial impediment to knowing if someone had drifted over to my side of the narrow two-lane road. In between those white knuckle moments, were periods of stunning beauty. I had never before seen the light play off the red soil like that afternoon. I couldn’t recall among my many trips to New Mexico the strands of muted sunlight bring out the details of the terrain so well as it did on that stretch at that time of day.

Later that weekend, on Museum Hill just outside Santa Fe, an afternoon cluster of storm clouds became more dramatic through the dark lenses of my sunglasses. The mountains in the distance stood out more prominently, as did the vortex center of those clouds that at that moment discreetly held the rain and the raw materials to fuel the lightning and thunder that flashed and boomed shortly after.

I’m not a trained photographer, so I didn’t get the photos that would do justice to either of these phenomena. All I can do is share painter Georgia O’Keefe’s vision of what she saw of the desert from her home in Abiquiú, New Mexico.

These observations made me think of writing in terms of illumination and darkness. Consider one example: a girl and her brother and their friend discovering the world. Illumination comes from the father of the boy and girl as he explains the implications of race in their community. Later, darkness threatens the girl and her brother, and in the shadows a mystical character reveals himself in order to save them both. The book, of course, is To Kill a Mockingbird, and the characters are Scout and Jem Finch and their friend Dill. The mystical figure is one of my favorites from literature, Boo Radley. What reader of the book can forget Boo in the shadows, watching over a bed-ridden Jem?

We writers are weavers of light and darkness, daybreak and sundown. We hide the danger in spots of low-light along treacherous roads and call up turbulence just when everything seems calm in those bright blue skies. The safest story would have been for me to drive along the well-traveled freeway with nothing to hide. The struggle between darkness and light, shadow and filtered strands of sun make for a much more interesting ride.

In the end, I conquered my fear like any protagonist I would hope is worth reading about.

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Dec 29 2014

Year’s Midnight to New Year’s Dawn

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Some years are more difficult than others – 365 day periods when loss piles upon loss, when challenges appear at every turn. In the aftermath, recollections of pleasant events, travels and new friends may be hidden among the difficult memories of those times. If we’re lucky, the year passes and we move into a more hopeful period.

2014 has been one of those years for me, one I compare to the year 2000. In both years, my spouse and I each lost a parent. Well-loved pets died, three this year and two in 2000. For my husband Ron and me, the challenges of caring for each of our aging parents meant time away from each other as we helped wrap up our parents’ affairs and held vigil at the bedside when they were both in hospice care. It fell to the other one to take care of household tasks.

In his poem, “A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day,” John Donne called the longest night in December, December 21, “the year’s midnight.” When I learned of this poem, and especially that designation for the longest night of the year, the term especially resonated for me. The celebration of St. Lucy is one of light amidst the darkness, especially for peoples in the northern-most part of Europe.

Twice I have found in nature a balm for the bleakness. In the year 2000, Ron served as a Fulbright scholar in Chile which allowed us to travel this country of many countries–each of its five regions being distinct. A few days before we were about to leave for home, I found out that my father’s cancer had advanced and had become terminal. Our last trip in the country was to Chile’s lake region, a beautiful area south of the capital of Santiago. On our short visit, we’d both been disappointed as the lakes and volcanoes we’d come to see were obscured by a steady rain and thick fog as Chile’s winter approached. Near Lake Llanquihue, we stopped in a park and walked a path through a misty enclave surrounded by trees, the stones in the stream that ran through it illuminated by a bioluminescent and otherworldly green.

As we walked through that place showing signs of both life and death, the experience brought into focus that life-death cycle in a calming way, a way devoid of fear. I wished that my father could be there to experience it, too.

When we returned two years later during a Chilean summer of balmy weather and sunny skies, the volcano that had been so close to us as we walked that trail revealed itself. But as beautiful as the volcano was, the trail below it that I remembered had disappeared and in its place appeared a completely different one drenched in sunlight.

Early in the month of December of this year, two visions of the moon did their best to pull me back into that misty enclave. The moon appeared in a sky like I’d never remembered seeing, a sky at that point of blue turning to black and the full moon surrounded by a halo of light. The next night, after dark, I saw the moon through tree branches appearing to reach out for the lunar light. The branches belonged to a tree outside the house next door, once home to a neighbor who died just a few months before after a lengthy and debilitating illness. Both were life amidst the darkness, a sign of promise of a new day to come.

So I share this second moon with all who’ve passed and those of us left behind. We move into a new year with hope for more light and life. I wish that to everyone whose year has been a challenge as I pluck from John Donne these few lines that resonate with that hope:

Study me then, you who shall lovers be

At the next world, that is, at the next spring;

For I am every dead thing,

In whom Love wrought new alchemy.

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Oct 06 2014

Road’s End in the Texas Hill Country

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“Traveler, there is no path. The path is made by walking.
Traveler, the path is your tracks. And nothing more.”
XXIX, Antonio Machado

We made the drive in September, the beginning of the season when day slips early into dark. My husband Ron says that fall is the time when the older folks in the Texas Hill Country pass away, and the death in autumn of his father, two uncles, and an aunt lent support to that belief.

We’ve taken the route dozens of times over the past 20 years, through small west Texas towns, skirting farm and ranch land now stressed by drought. This time, instead of our usual visit to family, we made our way to say goodbye to Ron’s mother, Alta Wilhelm.

Over the years, the road and the destination helped my mind birth stories. The rolling hills covered with cedar inspired Guadalupe of the Angels, a novel set in the turn of the 20th century about the friendship of two farm girls, one Mexican and one white, one the daughter of landowners, the other of sharecroppers. Along with travels through East Texas, the landscape of the countryside about an hour north and west of San Antonio easily places me in a world of 100 years before.

As we approached our final destination, the weight of sadness fell slowly, a vague feeling in the quaint German town of Fredericksburg that thickened the closer we got to Kerrville, the town where my husband Ron was born and where his mother had died just a few days before. Mundane places along the road—grocery stores, diners–melded into recollections of the past and acted as reminders of what would never be again.

My mother-in-law, Alta, the epitome of a homebody, set out in the 1940s for Washington, DC., and as part of the Women’s Army Corps, was posted in the US capital. There, Alta served as a cryptographic technician, a decoder stationed in the Pentagon. Her work along with the fragmented decoding of other pieces of a message were compiled in another place. One of those messages revealed information on the dropping of the atomic bomb. To have left at a young age to travel to an unfamiliar place must have been a disconcerting trip for a girl from a small town in Texas.

A few weeks before her death, Alta made the same journey to the Pentagon at 92 years old, this time in a wheelchair, and visited the Tomb of the Unknowns and the World War II memorial. In the 70 years between the two trips, she preferred to stay close to home, to be surrounded by the familiar. The path throughout her life was often short and safe. Her son took a different route–we have traveled to Chile, Guatemala, Peru, Paris, Spain, England, with plans to travel more and often. Each journey has changed us because we want to be changed by them. Alta was more comfortable with the safety and security of what she knew, which makes that decision to set out for an experience thousands of miles away even more amazing to me.

We will make the Hill Country trip again, leave north Texas for the southwest of the state via Highway 67, but it will not be the exact same road. The regular stops will not be the exact same ones. The stories to be revealed will be new ones.

“By walking you make a path,
And turning, you look back
At a way you will never tread again.”

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May 17 2014

Vicki Caroline Cheatwood, Playwright

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Vicki Caroline Cheatwood is an award winning playwright and screenwriter with seven full-length plays and several shorter plays to her credit, in addition to screenwriting projects that include one recognized at Cannes. In 2002, her screenplay Air (Escopa Films) won the Special Jury Gold Award at Worldfest Film Festival, and in 2005, the dark comedy feature 10:10 was a finalist in the Austin Film Festival. She has been a finalist for several national play writing honors, including the Heideman Award (The Risen Chris, Actors Theater of Louisville), The Julie Harris Playwright Award (An Hour South), and the Eileen Heckart Drama Award (Manicures & Monuments).

One of her more recent plays is the powerful, Ruth, a beautiful re-imagining of the Hebrew/Old Testament story of Ruth and Naomi, set in contemporary America and focusing on the issue of immigration and displacement.

While we talk, Vicki and I are sitting on the terrace of this beautiful home on Lake Como in Italy drinking frothy glasses of San Pellagrino and enjoying slices of a wonderful pie.

For those of you in the Dallas, Texas area, Vicki’s play “Manicures & Monuments” opened June 2014 at WaterTower Theatre in Addison.

KB: Vicki, talk a little about your work. What are the projects you’re most proud of?

VC: Right off the bat, PUP Fest comes to mind. It’s the annual young playwrights festival produced by Kitchen Dog Theater and Junior Players of Dallas. I’ve been involved with PUP Fest since the beginning, something like 13 years now. It’s amazing to think of how many young artists – writers and actors – who have been positively impacted by the program. Very cool!

KB: I like to focus on imagination and inspiration in our storytelling. What’s the most unusual thing that’s ever inspired you?

VC: Road trips have always been a big source of inspiration for me. My play “Manicures & Monuments” began as a “Hey, what if…?” question to my husband, as we were driving down the highway in his red Ford Ranger.

On another road trip – probably in that same little pickup – headed east from Dallas on some little two-lane highway, Mark was driving and I was looking out the window. We passed this little house situated right off the highway, a little old farm house, and there was a man sitting on the porch, a farmer, dressed in his work clothes, but he had a cane. We were going 60, 70 miles an hour, so it was just a flash of this image, but it really hit me. This old man, still getting up and putting on his overalls, hat, boots, jacket – but he’s not able to work anymore. I started thinking about all the other porches, and all the other people who sat on them, sidelined, unable to participate in their own lives anymore. I jotted down some notes, and went off and wrote a play about life, death and religion: “Fits & Starts: The Sacred Heart.” It ran on Off-Off-Broadway, and was reviewed in Variety. It bombed, but hey, it was reviewed in Variety!

KB:Wow! Off, off broadway and a review in Variety. That’s more than cool.

I’m intrigued to know more about your screenwriting projects. I’ve heard of Cannes. Never been there. Have you met George Clooney? Sorry, I digress.

VC: It’s one of the biggest honors of my life thus far, to say that I had a film that was screened at the Cannes Independent Film Festival. The producer/co-director of the film, Keith Oncale and Shawn Washburn, the other co-director, did fly to France for the screening of our film “break.” There was no way that I could go. Even if I’d had the money, my husband was very ill and in treatment for throat cancer. The day of the screening, I walked around at work struck by this odd, vague depression of having something so huge happening, and being so disconnected from it. I finally told one of my coworkers, “Hey I wrote a movie, and it’s screening at Cannes in France today.” She said something like “Wow, really?” and then we went on with our work.

That whole period of time seems like someone else’s very bad dream. And damnit, I didn’t get to meet George Clooney!

KB: I didn’t realize that this was all going on during that very difficult time in your life. That has to have been very tough–having something that you would have celebrated come right in the middle of that bad dream.

I originally had an interest in screenwriting, but it seems so dog-eat-dog-steal-idea business, something I don’t worry so much about when writing fiction. What’s your take having been closer to that business?

VC: I like writing screenplays, but I don’t think I’m a screenwriter. I like the challenge of writing pictures, visuals, but my gift is writing dialogue. As far as the business goes, other than my two produced short films, I’ve had very limited success in screenwriting. I have two feature-length screenplays that got circulated around and got great feedback, but that’s as far as it went. I was a finalist one year in the Austin Film Festival, which gave me close access to some big name producers, writers, actors and agents, a couple of whom seemed interested in my work…and that’s as far as I got. My friend Stephen Dyer, a producer and screenwriter who’s had good success, likes to say, “Hollywood is the only place where you can die of encouragement.” He didn’t originate that quote, but he’s sure lived it. As have my other friends who have done very well in films and television.

Probably the best advice about screenwriting that I’ve had as a writer came from the very fine actor Donal Logue, who brought a film that he’d directed to the AFF that same year that I was there. He told me to play to my strengths, to keep writing plays, and that they – meaning Hollywood –would come looking for me. And he was right, to a point. After the Austin festival, they did. Nothing came of it, so far, but I’ve had a couple of thrilling phone conversations. There’s not much more exciting and strange than taking a call from big-name producer, while you’re at work crouched behind a counter, wearing a zoo uniform and praying that nobody comes in.

KB:Maybe someday you can wear that zoo uniform to the Tonys when you accept your award for best play. It paints a great picture.

Since I’m currently working on my own Biblically-based novel, a re-imagining of the life of Mary (Maryam), the mother of Jesus, I’m most interested in how your play, Ruth, came to be. How was it originally conceived?

VC: The seeds of “Ruth” came from my participation in a Disciple, an intensive and brilliantly designed study course that looks at the Bible as literature and history, as well as theology. I had such a rudimentary understanding of the Bible before going through Disciple. The stories really came alive for me, especially Ruth’s.

KB: In addition to “Fits & Starts: The Sacred Heart,” have the Bible/religion or Biblical characters inspired you in other ways?

VC: I wrote a short play about Jonah, a vaudeville/comedy. I love Jonah. He’s so me. Pissed off at God, and constantly running off in the opposite direction. And the story of Jael, the housewife who drives a tent stake through her enemy’s head. That one really stuck with me. Pun intended.

KB:Ha! I must learn more about this Jael. I, too, sometimes feel like I’m being pulled dragging and screaming toward my own Nineveh.

Of all the plays ever produced, what play do you wish you’d written?

VC: A cash cow! One that runs forever, and ensures that even if my sons grow up to marry women who can’t stand me, I’ll never end up living in a government-funded nursing home.

Seriously – I wish I’d written “My Big Fat Greek Wedding.” Something that real, charming, funny, and grounded. And, fundable by the wife of a major celebrity.

KB: Finish the following: “I someday want to see a play of mine produced starring _________ and ______ .”

VC: Me and George Clooney, but of course.

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Apr 19 2014

Cody and Summer: An Autism Story

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The Island of Lost Children, a modern retelling of the story of Peter Pan and Wendy

Not long ago, Cody, who is on the autism spectrum, asked my name.

“Kim,” I told him as he looked directly at me, his face beaming.

With his sky-blue eyes clearly fixed on me, he asked me again. “What’s your name?” I happily repeated my response. He seemed happy to have received it again.

Cody’s engaging me represented a transformation, a grace-filled connection. A connection to a little boy who not that long before ran through the halls of the church immersed in his own private place. Now he is a teenager who seeks out others. Wherever he is, it’s hard to miss that head of red hair.

For the past ten years or so, I have watched both Cody and his older sister Summer grow up. When they both were younger they seemed inseparable, especially those times Cody climbed into Summer’s lap during children’s time. She accompanied him to the altar and often held him while the minister spoke to the gathered group. He nestled into her lap, until his attention and curiosity often caught on something unrelated to the remarks.

The relationship of Summer and Cody inspired the Wendy and Michael characters I developed for my contemporary Peter Pan retelling, The Island of Lost Children. Wendy, while inspired by Summer, is not exactly like Summer. She is responsible for not only her brother Michael but also a rather challenging middle brother John, or JJ. Wendy’s busy and economically stressed parents have little time anymore for Michael, so Wendy steps in to do the work to engage him and improve his skills, even when she struggles with feeling disconnected from the family:

Wendy Darling did not belong with anyone. Not with her parents, who argued all the time. Not with her brother John, known in the family as JJ, who crashed and thrashed like a thunderstorm. And not with her youngest brother, Michael, who one minute fixated on the crackle of a candy wrapper against his ear and the next minute tore through whatever room tried to hold him. There were times when he slipped into Wendy’s lap and they came close to belonging with each other, but those times didn’t happen often enough.

The “crackle of a candy wrapper against his ear” came from my spouse, Ron, who worked with special needs children prior to getting a masters in special education.

It takes a village to make a character, as well as a child. I’m grateful for all those who contributed to Wendy and Michael’s development, especially a brother and sister I know. Those sibling relationships are so valuable and too infrequently explored. I continue to be inspired. Summer demonstrates on a regular basis how a caring older sister can be. As he grows more independent, Cody shows everyone how far he has come.

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