“Human beings are compelled to create—to lay down our lives however best we can. It is so that we might uncover the secrets of ourselves and that, with any luck, one-hundred years from now, someone will know that we were here.”
-Barbe Nicole (Haley Bennett), The Widow Clicquot (2024)
What a fascinating year it has been. I think there are invariably times in one’s life, at least in a life of someone as dedicated to the art of stories as mine appears to be, where one cannot help but analyze things through the lens of storytelling itself. If one were to examine the arc from this day last year, when I—still the manager of Raleigh Wine Bar + Eatery with a grandmother alive and whole extended family gathered for a multi-birthday celebration with plans for a Christmas gathering nascent, and not a single white hair (found last week)—sat down for an omakase experience at a newly-opened restaurant in South Boston to celebrate turning twenty-eight to the present, it offers something of an insight to the extreme variability of the experience of life and the incredible perseverance of the human spirit.
I think I have created what I have in the space between as a way of dealing with it. In the immediate aftermath of losing my job in December, I set out to write my first romantic comedy—one which just happened to involve bartenders and job loss and restaurant work in New England. Twice I have written thinly-veiled novels examining certain emotional moments of my existence. Our protagonist, Abbi, learns more about herself and those around her who support her through the entire experience and winds up falling in love with the intoxicating (ha) creativity of bartending and of rebuilding one’s life. I do not know if I will ever do anything with it, but I enjoy that it exists.
Perhaps the more subtle way of dealing with the events of the past year came when I sat down to write a Russian-fairytale inspired novel which later became a play. Oh! I wrote a play. It got performed. I cannot still fathom that. I have always had something of a fascination with Russian culture. Some of it stems from being an adopted person of color for whom the idea of being connected to one’s past feels always at odds with the reality that I am only ever me. Russian history and Russian culture are mythic, vast, and almost inspiringly pessimistic. There is actually a word for this, “Toska” which can be read as a prideful sense of understanding of the hardships of the world and our ability to live despite them.
While drafting the novel, a pretty 75k thing written entirely in a month, I frequently quipped a line which I am sad never made it into the draft. It’s an imagined conversation between a Russian character and either an American or Englishman.
“Your stories tell you that you can save the girl and slay the dragon. Ours tell you that you can survive the winter and the night. Tell me which you think is more realistic, and therefore tell me which is more inspiring in your day-to-day.”
Where this line wound up recurring was in the play adapted from my own novel. With the help of my father and a son of a friend of his, I leapt into Dive-In Production’s Dive-Incubator script writing seminar. Although the feasibility of writing and putting on a musical in under eight weeks was in question, what wound up happening was a beautiful play in verse depicting a sliver of the vast story behind in a way I could never imagine. And the heartbeat, the recurring question, was the deceptively simple:
“Are you cold?”
In both stories we have a Katya who ventures into the depths of the taiga in search of medicine and/or magic to help her ailing family. In both, we have Baba Yaga as self-serving ally. In both, we have the Lord of Winter, Morozko, as an immovable force of nature to be overcome, and in both we have Koschei the Deathless representing all the dark and chaos and evil in the world. The story is in part a reaction to the nature of totalitarian governments and collective memory loss (a plot inspired by an article in The Atlantic by modern Russian author Mikhail Shishkin which opens with the line, “Culture, too, is a casualty of war.”), but it is also in a very real sense a response to the grief swelling through the background of the past year.
I think it is little surprise that I create when I am in pain. I think that’s as valid a motivation to create as anything. I go back to a novel my best friend insist I read—The Elegance of the Hedgehog—which states not only that art gives shape to emotions, but which gives us the immaculately hopeful sentiment:
“Live, or die; mere consequences of what you have built. What matters is building well. …What matters is what you are doing when you die, and when June 16th comes around, I want to be building.”
Little wonder at my excitement when one of my favorite stories, the rise of Barbe Nicole Ponsardin Clicquot, was getting a film adaptation. The struggle of a widowed woman in revolutionary-era France to build a champagne empire is an immaculate tale of everything just described, and came (as I often find art does) at the right time. I myself was just beginning a new job as General Manager of Vino e Vivo in Exeter—a transition at once rapid, emotional, and enthrallingly promising. There is hope of a cocktail bar expansion, where I would again build a program from scratch. Creativity there, too. Something which would not have happened had not other tragedies befallen.
The novel The Widow Clicquot, it must be said, has one of my favorite lines in literature, one which I reference frequently enough that it is nearly a cliché among my friends, taken from a letter between father and depressed son.
“Do not abandon yourself to a sort of melancholy gloom that can harm you and retard the development of your faculties and prolong the weakness of your temperament. Your existence, your happiness, is all that makes mine precious.”
If there are two things which I can credit for helping me maintain my temperament and mindset, the first are the people around me who helped me navigate this incredibly unsure time and cheered on the victories I have amassed. Without the support of those I love and those who love me, I do not know how I would have made it. I visited my brother in New Mexico last week and was consistently reminded not only of the importance of family, but of communication and understanding. I miss not being able to see him every day, but I am glad he is happy and that he is working towards a life meaningful to him. The same is true of the majority of my close friends—most of whom are scattered about the world as happens when one travels and goes to school in different places.
In a way, they are pieces of myself scattered around the world. There are those traces of my impact not only in them, but in the things I’ve done and seen visiting them. The thought brings me comfort and inspiration, and helps alleviate the sense of being alone in this (which, I know, I am not). The vineyard in North Carolina still uses the tasting notes I wrote for their wine. There is an article online about my cocktail win from Raleigh’s existence. A wine shop in Minneapolis asks when I am returning to stock up on Teutonic wines. My brother and I were the first table of a New Mexican winery’s existence. An audience applauded my little play in verse, and someone at the end of the night pulled me aside to tell me that it was the most spiritually moving thing he’s seen since a festival in Glasgow. Two other actors, not even in my play, asked if they could use pieces of it to audition in the future.
We are in talks to keep the play running, too. Make it longer! Never thought that would happen, but then I think I have come more into myself and accept the surprises that come with life.
I am here, and I have traces of the fact that I have been here.
All of this is probably why Frieren (which has its own lengthy blog post and analysis) had such an impact on me. I credit it also as a story which helped me maintain my sanity especially in the stretch from February to June when my life was at its most uncertain. I value highly the magic in the mundane, be it a spell to create a field of flowers or the defeat of the Lord of Winter with a cup of hot tea sweetened with honey, and the show reminded me not only of that, but of the impact of small actions, the power of remembrance, and the innate desire to move forward even when you think the story’s over.
In the original blog post, I spoke about two of my favorite moments in the show: Old Man Voll and the flashback to Flamme and Serie. I’ll include another here, one which broke me in the moment and still brings a tear to my eye now. Of course, it involves food, and memory, and grief, and hope for the future. After the first part of the mage exam Frieren and Fern take in order for their journey to progress, the plot slows to allow us to get to know some of the new characters (Ubel, my heart) and check-in with our main cast. Many wind up at a local restaurant, one which Frieren visited with the band of heroes previously and which promised her would remain the same no matter the passage of time. Even when the promise was made, Frieren was skeptical. A flashbacked conversation with Himmel goes:
“Life is long, and food is aplenty—there’s always next time, you know.”
“Thought so too until I found myself up at night mourning the flavors of yesterday.”
Of course, the place has changed. But even though Frieren offhandedly dismisses the change by opining, “What a joke,” she stops and takes another bite.
It tastes better now than it did then.
Beyond journey’s end, indeed.
Anyway, yesterday I turned twenty-nine.
So I’m dwelling on cycles
And walking in circles
Perpetually lost in the snow
Revolution, reaction
My hopes losing traction
I must save this life I know
And after, I’ll be free
My future ahead of me
Who knows just what I’ll find?
When I finally break free
And take this road under me
I’ll cherish whatever I find.
-Katya (Liza Robinson), Ice and Snow