Moving on ...

Stories from the 428 moves on. Here we are, the 8 of us Week 2 writers with Gus at our first script meeting last week.

Photo: Leah McGirr

It's been interesting and deeply enjoyable to meet the other writers and hear their work; not to mention creating my own 2 short scenes: Pass and The Party. And realise that although our contributions are all quite different, there are echoes and overlaps—in content, voice and style.

Both my scenes, but particularly Pass, have an underscore of loss and mourning. Today, the 18 February, was my father's birthday. He died 18 months ago. In that time I've come to understand something of the subtle, complex, nuanced, insistent, unpredictable nature of grief—but it's not all bad, because I've also come to understand that, strange as it may sound, grief allows me to continue a relationship with my father.

Now for another jump-cut or whatever the writing equivalent of that is:

Recent anxiety: Am I endlessly rewriting the same material? And if I am, is this a problem, or do most artists return, perhaps obsessively, to mine their core material from different angles? What is my core material?

Recent reading: Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger. To remember was once difficult and costly and forgetting was the norm, but in our digital world this has flipped, and now remembering is the default.

Recent listening: Don Byron plays the music of Mickey Katz. Can Jewish musicians play jazz, can an African-American clarinetist play klezmer? Absolutely.