Hey, everyone! It looks like my plan to blog more regularly in 2025 has not yet come to fruition. It turns out being busy makes you busy, and isn't that an unusual thing? I have been doing some reflecting in the interim. Some of that is just reflecting on how much time has passed, and how much has happened in that time. A year ago I was sitting at the same desk I write to you all now, unemployed and clacking away at a story based in Russian mythology as the same March into April confused weather battered away outside and I devoured comfort episodes of my newest show obsession: Frieren.
For not even the second time in my life, I wondered what lay ahead and if I had made a mistaken choice of career, locale, even avocation. The queries for Madelen's story were beginning to get their first of many resounding rejections, and though this new story I was writing had seized me (to the point where I had finished the first 74,000-word draft), I wasn't sure what would come of it.
All this energy went into Ekaterina Grigoryevna Levina, a girl in a similar position to myself. So much of her world is turned on its head, and she finds herself thrust and lost and alone in a world she thought she knew, but one which is more expansive and magical and dangerous than she ever believed. Here was someone inspired by and empowered with the stories of her people, someone whose knowledge of the past helped her survive a world trying to make her forget it. As a counterbalance to her endlessly unimpressed pragmatism, though, I needed something more.
“So she speaks to me of magic, this clever little thing, and thinks it like a tincture I can summon while I sing! Child, magic is a power beyond anything we see, and it would not do to meddle with that which you cannot flee. My spells are mine and, if inclined, after we dine—find we align—then I’ll assign a fine divine signed power line. There’s nothing there remotely malign, though some call my ways saturnine. To make the world’s a man’s game, and they don’t care to share the table. But me? I think that’s a shame, and I help when I am able."
The challenge I posed to myself then was to write a character who spoke entirely in rhyming verse. Baba Yaga, the witch in the words in every story told, needed a hook to make her witchy, and weird, but also approachable and deep. Baba Yaga was to be that dichotomy of fantasy, of fairytales, the comforting side of magic and the depth of the lessons they maintain. A witch, and a woman, and a person, and a legend.
Two pages in and the rhyming verse disappeared because that was hard. Instead, the verse itself became an act she puts on in-universe—something to help her craft an image for herself and apart from the others. But the thing about writing is, as Phineas and Ferb will tell you, is that a hero is a hero, but everybody loves a good villain. As I had a rhyming verse and a structure for our great antiheroic witch, but her antithesis still lurked in the shadows. Koschei the Deathless remains one of the most entertaining villains I ever wrote, and I felt that if Baba Yaga had verse, then I needed a villain song as well.
"They call me Deathless
For I am endless
And my words paint in the minds of men a future
Hopeless
A pain that’s endless
And before they drown in their despair
I offer them a breath of air
A price for which they do not care
For I decide what payment’s fair
And everything is on the table
For everyone I see as able
To keep pain flowing endless
A future hopeless
A world where men turn into wolves
With hunger endless
And chaos deathless."
From there, I showed my father, who reminded me of a son of his friend, Will Saxe, who was in Dive-In Productions in Newmarket. Dive-In hosts the Dive-Incubator script writing seminar, organized and run by Jordan Formichelli and Ben Hunton, and since I had the rough template of a script and a long (long) love of theatre, why shouldn't I join? From there things escalated, and escalated, and I was myself thrust (in my case, thrust back) into a world I had long lost touch with.
Theatre is a love of mine, musical theatre thrice over. Performance is a key foundation of my personality, my actual career, and my day to day life. I go back often to a quote from Netflix's The Crown—a reflection then on regal paraphernalia: "Who wants transparency when you can have magic? Who wants prose when you can have poetry? Pull away the veil and what are you left with?" Service, hospitality, is as much theatre as it is genuine. Restaurant work and theatre have a long, entwined history. But the restaurant schedule precludes most of the same hours and days as theatre, and I had long thought myself relegated to spectator status for the remainder of my time, barring a sudden, shocking change.
Enter Jordan, and Ben, and Kat and Sean and Liza and Chris, and everyone else involved in a wonderful workshop production of A Spell of Ice and Snow. All through rehearsal, bitten by a bug which refused to be swatted, I kept writing and lengthening and dreaming dreams bigger than I had in a while. I had gained new employment, managing and sommelier-ing at a charming restaurant in Exeter with aspirations of opening a cocktail bar—one whose program I could craft and drive. Here were people acting out my words, my scenes, my characters before me.
And then Sean and Liza sat me down and asked if I had that lengthened script. If I wanted to do something more. Bigger. Musical. As if what I had written was worthy of any of those things.
Now and then, I get that nagging quote from Tick, Tick... Boom! stuck in my head, that, "The first presentation of your musical is like having a colonoscopy in the middle of Times Square. Only with a colonoscopy, the worst thing that could happen is you find out you have cancer. With a musical, you find out you're already dead."
And I get anxiety, and I fret, and I become overwhelmed with all of the other powerful emotions of someone who has dedicated a life, in his work and in his avocational endeavors, to creating experiences.
I have mentioned once before a painting, the first ever painting I purchased, of a girl playing her trumpet alone in the woods on a moonlit night; “A Little Night Music,” by North Carolinian painter Sharyn Fogel. The watercolor image is gentle, whimsical, and the girl plays on while there in the corner of a canvas sits a dog (or a cat), listening.
The question I always ask people I show the painting to is whether or not they think the girl knows someone is listening, and if she would care if she noticed. She plays on not for an audience but for the love of creating itself, I like to think, and because we say time and again that art is for its own sake, not to be perceived or heaven forbid accepted or praised or even acknowledged. That internal drive to create is something innate and insatiable, and as someone who has been self-publishing fantasy books for years (and who is poised to be part of a seminar about it), I can say that even if I was losing money hand over fist (and I kind of am if we look at the books from a purely business standpoint), I would still write. With sixty something queries for Madelen rejected outright, I still sat down and began writing another book.
The time between has not been easy, to be sure. The job I adore has grown in responsibility and time commitment as I throw myself wholeheartedly into making what had already been great better still, and as I plan for a new creative expansion on the horizon. Whereas when I sat writing Katya's story the first time grieving my grandmother, I prepare myself to sit in the stands grieving my grandfather. The show, the entire project, is dedicated to their memory. I have seen my former home of North Carolina flood and burn, as I have watched my second home of Vermont flood time and again. We sit in a new an unnerving age of our own totalitarian rise, unsure of a path through the darkness and forced to measure ourselves against a past we failed to save.
But I still write.
I wrote the book which became a play for me, first. I wrote it because a culture I admired was being consumed by the ravages of war, propaganda, and totalitarianism. I wrote because I read books which still explored the mythic vastness and endless depths of Russian and Slavic culture. I wrote because I was unemployed, and sad, and was just then being reminded that there is magic in the world and we can make it and admire it. I wrote because I remembered that so many of the great moments of life are made of small ones. I wrote because I needed to hear that compassion could overcome grief, that a cup of tea was the most healing thing in the world, that winter was a season owed respect but that summer matters too, and that stories are a power beyond anything we see.
I wrote when no one listened, when my parents listened, when a small table of dedicated peers listened, when a workshop audience listened... and now I have to gear up for Boston to listen as they are asked one simple question:
Are you cold? Let me know. For the world you're 'bout to enter is a world if ice and snow.