Building the Fort, a Short Film, and some Lists
What exactly is going on in here and why is it an email?
I. INTRO & WHAT’S UP
What’s in a name? “Pillow Fort” for example.
I’d like to build something with you and this is where I’ll start.
The thing about a pillow fort is that, even after the structure has been demolished and all the pillows plumped and returned to their old functional spots, now there’s an element and aura of FORT and PLAY and POTENTIAL1 imbuing the couch cushions, pillows that were, just moments before, the sails of a pirate ship or the walls of a castle or the airlocks to a space station.
As a kid, building a fort is a way to carve out a corner of a world that isn’t designed for you. At 32, I reckon I’m trying to do the same with this little corner of the internet. I’ve been thinking about what it means (and how it feels) to be online.2 The word “town square” gets tossed around a lot but we also know it as a web, a super highway, a strip mall, a content-eating-Hydra, that-gif-able-scene-from-Clockwork-Orange-where-your-eyes-are-held-open, and/or/also a new frontier teeming with wild targeted ads. What else could it feel like?
Do you hold on to the internet as it rushes past?3 I take screenshots of moments and jokes and recipes and photos of my nephews that are posted to Instagram stories before they disappear. My clouds (ALL OF MY CLOUDS) are overflowing with screenshots, sparked by the same part of my brain that, as a child, put the ocean in a teensy glass bottle with a tiny cork to try to hold onto something ephemeral like “summer”. Perhaps, it is also the same part of my brain that chose to incorporate my hands “for scale” in a series of disposable camera photos I took (alone) in Costa Rica a decade ago.
So, what can you expect from Pillow Fort? It’s already happening! We’re smack dab in the middle of your expectations! Additionally, expect a healthy dose of digital and analog wandering and wondering. For now, I’m swimming in the same micro-essay-pond as Sarah and Ross and Beth, and all of my hyperlinks and footnotes are a way to say LOOK and GO and EXPLORE. Crumbs to follow for a bit of choosing-your-own-adventure, but if the crumbs just feel messy there’s nothing wrong with brushing them away and reading from top to bottom the way Gutenberg intended.
These dispatches will also be a place for me to share what I’ve been cooking on and what I have coming up. For example, looking for some last minute gift ideas?! I’m teaching a DIY filmmaking class at Lillstreet this Winter if you’re in Chicago and that’s your cup of tea!
Ok? Make sense? Buckled up & subscribed? Gotta jump in before we chicken out.
II. RITE OF PASSAGE - A Short Film with Liner Notes
***LINER NOTES FOR POST-SCREENING PERUSAL**
We filmed this over the course of a rainy weekend in the spring of 2022. Locations included an Episcopal Church, two-and-a-half cemeteries, an AirBnB, a shallow creek that required off-road driving, and a little patch of woods that SHOULDN’T require off-roading but had a perfect muddy field for two of your friends’ cars to get stuck in.
The cars were stuck because I, the director, led them astray. I confidently mixed up a field with a road (ROOKIE MISTAKE) and got us all into trouble before we had filmed our first shot. This was the morning of our “big scene” (only scene?), so at this point all we had in the can was a bunch of ritual-inserts and my streak to the stream with Dan. Basically, what was missing, was the entire movie.
Here are the last two pages of the shooting script for the short that was, at this point, still called THAT’S ONE WAY OF DOING IT:
Originally, as you can see above, there was a Narrator who really stuck around. I had dreams of crafting an email to
to ask him to voice our omnipotent guide4, but then (see: A Swim in a Pond in the Rain and hundreds of helpful posts from ), ultimately, followed his writing advice and boiled it down to let the geese have the last word.One discovery was that, while I had written this role for myself to play, in the edit I found it much easier to linger on my friend Dan (The Park Ranger) then end the short with my own character. A hundred little notes from countless friends helped shift me towards the final cut. In the end, I had to come around to the fact that I as the filmmaker didn’t think my character deserved to have this cathartic moment of release. I spent draft after draft judging him/me for faking or forcing or trying to hold on to something ephemeral and ineffable. It wasn’t until I realized that I was falling into the same trap as this character (binary thinking, right-and-wrong ways of being, fixed ways to live correctly, etc.) that I could relax and let the short end the way it does.
The way I see it now? He’s gotta get out of the water eventually. His clothes will be muddy and his socks will have sand in them. The memory will fade. He’ll try to tell the story to capture how it felt in the moment and he will get frustrated with all the ways his description falls short. It will become a story and the original feeling will degrade faster the more he revisits it. But, for a moment, he’s not thinking about any of this. Just looking and listening and floating.
A common question: How did we get the geese shot?
My common answer: We didn’t, it’s a movie-magic special effect. But, between you and me -
I came up with the idea for the short while filming a bar mitzvah. When we filmed the short I hadn’t live-streamed a funeral yet, but now I’ve done that too. The day after wrapping up the shoot I climbed aboard an airplane, the Hero’s Journey in faded sharpie on my arm, and flew back to Arkadelphia, Arkansas to help my parents pack up and move out of my childhood house.
Wedged into this truck was the couch we would always flip over, using the cushions to build new worlds.
A good couch. Perfect for fort making.
(p.s. If you like THINGS and people talking about how they made them, I truly can’t recommend
highly enough. Claire gave me tips on how to make a zine two years ago and there’s no DOUBT my ruminating on this short was directly inspired by her beautiful breakdown of the lime lady masterpiece.)III. The End of Year Lists
A bit of wrap-up and also a clearing-of-the-hoppers to keep me honest and sharing fresh, unexpired, new work the next time you hear from me in 2024.
5 Things I Made in 2023
Valentine’s Day Mortified Show - Essay & Dramatic Reading of a 6th Grade Diary
The Optimization Blues - A very chill essay about buying a used Apple Watch
HOMING - an essay about getting older, getting lost, losing someone, and pigeons
Couples Costume - a spooky & goofy short about Halloween anxieties
Books I Loved in 2023
(If you ever want to have a little after-the-fact book club about any of these HIT ME UP! I famously forget everything about what I read unless I talk to someone about it asap, so please do us both a favor and let’s talk!)
Thin Places - Jordan Kisner
The Scar - China Miéville
Bliss Montage - Ling Ma
The Death of Vivek Oji - Akwaeke Emezi
Such a Fun Age - Kiley Reid
Weather - Jenny Offill
The Dispossessed - Ursula K. Le Guin
Bel Canto - Anne Patchett
How to Write One Song - Jeff Tweedy
Pachinko - Min Jin Lee
Saving Time - Jenny Odell
Boxers & Saints - Gene Luen Yang
Giovanni’s Room - James Baldwin
The Children of Men - PD James
Circe - Madeline Miller
Gilead - Marilynne Robinson
The Song of Achilles - Madeline Miller
Parable of the Talents - Octavia Butler
Matrix - Lauren Groff
Fledgling - Octavia Butler
The Vaster Wilds - Lauren Groff
Fates and Furies - Lauren Groff
All the Light we Cannot See - Anthony Doerr
The Democracy Project - David Graeber
Movies I Loved in 2023
(Please see “Book list” above regarding “clubs” and “hitting me up”)
Women Talking
The Long Goodbye
Cleo from 5 to 7
No Bears
Passages
War & Peace
Pride & Prejudice
Beau is Afraid
Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda
Le bonheur
Mystic Pizza
Asteroid City
Barbie
Oppenheimer
Fantastic Fungi
All Quiet on the Western Front
The Descent
Stand By Me
No One Will Save You
Jeanne Dielman
Hardcore
Breaking Away
Killers of the Flower Moon
Past Lives
May December
Ok, not gonna do TV shows in a VERTICAL bullet pointed list just to keep everyone on their toes, but Tour de France: Unchained, Scavengers Reign, Station 11, Jury Duty, The Other Two, Heartstoppers, Andor, and Somebody Somewhere all got me going this year.
~
That’s it! We did it! Next newsletter drops on Sunday, 1/7/24 and then every two weeks after. Let me know what you liked, don’t be a stranger, and, if I can leave you with one last lil plug: please go read and subscribe to
’s newsletterSTAT. We got our stacks up and grooving with some accountabili-budding, but she’s already two posts in and they’re both absolute bangers.I equate films with sand castles. You get a bunch of mates and you go down and you say I’m going to build this great sand castle and you build it. Then, the tide comes in and twenty minutes…it’s just smooth sand. And that structure you made is in everybody’s memory and that's it. - Robert Altman
Robin Sloan plays with this idea in his interactive piece Fish: a tap essay which asks the question: What does it mean to love something on the internet today? Take it for a spin if you have 10 minutes to spare!
No one has described this feeling better than Patricia Lockwood and I can’t recommend this book enough. If these footnotes are a little annoying, I bet you’d also enjoy this impeccable piece. If you’re reading this and you happen to be my literal Dad, (eyes off everyone else) are you still reading Infinite Jest?
I love his books but maintain that the below video remains his magnum opus.
beautiful!! loved seeing the film and then reading those early pages with the narrator. and thank you for the very sweet shoutout!