When Dream Drifters eat the fruit native to our planet they grow to 10x their ginormous size and rampage for fun.
http://www.jafdesign.net/
Showing posts with label melissa leo. Show all posts
Showing posts with label melissa leo. Show all posts
Thursday, September 14, 2017
Dream Drifter Rampage
When Dream Drifters eat the fruit native to our planet they grow to 10x their ginormous size and rampage for fun.
http://www.jafdesign.net/
Monday, July 31, 2017
SULIS OF THE S.U.L.
S.U.L., Suberterranean Upper Lifeform, a government-church acronym given to this species of mole-people.
Descendants of a thousand founding families who
pioneered the Core of the planet. The SUL were rediscovered in 3654 of the Night Mare's reign.
The
SUL culture is inward and mystic, influenced by the ethylene gas in
the air of their underground city. Ethylene is believed to have opened the minds of the
Oracles at Delphi.
SUL are unwelcome in Winkin City as too delusional. Fantasies are free floating and anyone might catch them.
But the Night mare likes a good oracle, so they are tolerated at the Manus Market and as homesteaders in the ruins Off-right.
Friday, June 2, 2017
FEST in Espinho!
I've been invited to co-teach a workshop with Melissa Leo (actor) and Jen Gatien (producer) and me along as writer/director at FEST- New Directors New Film in Espinho Portugal. I'll be on a film jury as well.
The stars align. Just when I'm trying to get It's a Nightmare off the ground an opportunity to re-educate myself arrives. Talking movies, teaching movie making, and watching movies, all on the coast of Portugal...I feel my luck and am so grateful for the opportunity.
The stars align. Just when I'm trying to get It's a Nightmare off the ground an opportunity to re-educate myself arrives. Talking movies, teaching movie making, and watching movies, all on the coast of Portugal...I feel my luck and am so grateful for the opportunity.
Saturday, April 1, 2017
The Janitor's Daughter
http://www.rigorous-mag.com/v1i1/nicole-quinn.html
"My father's a janitor." I said. " My tuition is covered by a welfare scholarship. My mother takes in laundry for a rich white family who bought my clothes and loaned me the Benz."
That's what I told the blonde social queens of our convent school in response to their question,
"How much money does your father make that you can afford to be here?"
It was 1970, we were sophomores at a girl's finishing school, the Benz was an old 1959 190SL, and it was a 16th birthday present from my father. I thought I'd said too much, gone too far with a narrative whose details didn't seem plausible. They'd know I was making it up, mocking them as they mocked me.
On the contrary, they loved my frank humility, and for a few weeks I became a favored pet.
We were never to ask questions about money, and everyone at school knew it. It was considered incredibly rude. The story about my father being a janitor came out as a knee-jerk reaction. I was a kid at boarding school, sometimes forgetting that my skin color made me different, because there were other girls who had accents and customs that identified them as more foreign than me in the school of 300 girls.
The social queens came upon me in a courtyard during lunch. I remember it clearly, the wall of blonde varsity volleyball team that stepped in front of me, blocking my way. It wasn't aggressive, it wasn't overtly hostile, but it was a challenge. Prove yourself to us. They were trapping a wild animal for observation, and for their own protection, as my behavior in captivity was still an unknown, they did it as a group.
They'd grown up together, gone to parochial elementary and junior high in segregated, though it was called exclusive, neighborhoods before coming to the convent for high school. They were a gang of we don't think we're mean girls, we just think we're better than you. They were determined to take down, or absorb into their pack, any lone wolves who appeared to threaten their dominion over the realm of smart, pretty, and going places.
I was a boarding student. They were day-dogs. I don't know why we called them that, but we did. They'd started at the convent as freshmen. I'd been living there since I was eight. It was more home to me by then than home. I knew secret places to escape. I knew the old nuns and the cook and the pastry chef. I knew how to live in community, how to get along with different cultures.
By high school I had already met this particular beast untethered, white privilege that assumes its superiority, in the guise of nuns bending over backward to accentuate our differences with blatant attempts to cull us from the herd. You could usually see them coming, the ones with veils flying and heels tapping, hurrying with offers of extra-help because of course you people always need it. Some openly treated my sister and me as if we were charity cases, though our parents paid the same tuition as everyone else. Early accusations of plagiarism, or the times I had to take repeat tests alone to be certain I could replicate my answers, negated the fact that my sister and I had taken an arduous day long test to skip grade three when we first came to the convent. But these were things of the past. Surely my credibility and bona fides at this institution had already been firmly established after a seven years tenure? But now, here it was again, prove yourself worthy.
My father wasn't a janitor, he was an aerospace engineer and he had helped to put man on the moon. The only janitor I knew personally worked at the special education school where my mother was a speech pathologist. Mr. Quimby was his name, and he was right off the boat from Ireland, where he said his people were considered niggers too. He sold Mama Irish Sweepstakes tickets once a year. He told wonderful stories and bawdy jokes. I could almost smell the peat smoke and hear the flutes and concertinas in his brogue. He had apple cheeks and a big belly laugh and a closet full of cleaning supplies. He was lovely, and I learned from him that lovely people do many things for a living, but it's not what measures their worth.
For weeks the social queens gathered at lunchtime to hear stories of my Janitor's daughter's life, so foreign from our own. It was a colorful saga - of many people living together crammed into a one room shack, with no running water, and an outhouse. I shared the secrets of washing clothes in river water slapped against big rocks, and introduced the notion of foraging for food. I embellished Mr. Quimby's colorful history of poverty and pretended it was my own.
Sister Kathryn was my favorite nun. She was our movie star beautiful, virtuoso violin playing, dean of students. She stopped by my room one night, several weeks after the janitor's daughter was born, and invited me to meet in her office the next morning. There she confronted me with my stories, and was incredibly knowledgeable about the details of same.
"A janitor's daughter? How would your parents feel about the way you've described them? They've worked very hard to achieve what they have." She admonished.
"I think they'd laugh. They'd know why I did it." I said.
"Why did you do it?" She asked sincerely.
"I just told them what they wanted to hear. They don't want the truth, that I'm just like them, or that heaven forfend, I might even be smarter, prettier, and happier then they're supposed to be. They want stories that make the world make sense to them. So that's what I gave them. It's what they want to believe, that they're better than me. What do I care if they believe that my father's a janitor? What difference does it make, especially if I'm the architect of that belief?"
We were silent for a while. I could see she'd understood. I was hopeful.
"You'll have to apologize." Sister Kathryn said at last.
"WHAT?! But they're just stories!" I cried, desperate not to be humiliated in front of that pack of she-wolves.
"You lied." she said.
I wrinkled a brow and pouted,
"White lies." I offered. "Who was hurt by them?"
Here her face clouded and she looked down at her hands and at the wood floor.
"Your stories first came to our attention when we noticed a large uptick in scholarship donations. Many were given in your name." She confessed.
We stared at each other, and then we burst out laughing, then I started to cry.
"That's why I have to apologize?"
She nodded sympathetically.
"Will you get to keep the money if I do, for someone else?" I asked.
She shrugged.
"I suppose so, no one will take back a donation."
The time and place were fixed for my apology. An informal tea in the French parlor at the convent, with Sister Kathryn, the four social queens and their mothers on a Sunday afternoon. I was to host them all.
I spent the entire weekend writing and trashing hundreds of apologies. But I couldn't figure out how to serve the brief and still win. I was spitting angry and tearfully frustrated at my hopeless situation when Sister Kathryn paid me a visit in my room, now a landscape of wadded paper balls. She looked at the tears rolling down my cheeks.
"Having a hard time with it?" She asked of the obvious.
I nodded and snorted.
"I might be able to help you." She said.
I looked at her, surprised and hopeful that there might be rescue.
"I think you've lost sight of where this all started. It's always best to go back to the beginning." She smiled reassuringly. She handed me a handkerchief plucked from her sweater sleeve and left my room.
Back to the beginning? How was that helpful? Where it all started? Back to the beginning? Then it hit me. Absolutely true and simple and to the point.
I took a clean sheet of paper and wrote one sentence on it. Then I cleaned up my room.
The French parlor was so called for the Louis quinze style gilt and brocade furnishings, the ornate portraiture on papered walls edged in mahogany wood, and Aubusson rugs. The room had an over done opulence that said money, once upon a time.
The social niceties were observed that day, it was a finishing school after all, where we were taught how to ice our enemies in the nicest ways. Chit-chat, observations on the weather, it was southern California, so almost always nice, and the traffic, almost always bad. The mothers wore mink coats against the chill of their air conditioned Cadillacs. The furs were now laid on a settee with shapely legs in the corner, the fur turned in to monogrammed silk linings. Large carat weight diamonds winked on well manicured hands, like headlights, blinding when caught in the sunlight through tall windows.
Suddenly I was on. The clink of sterling against china hushed, and I could feel hungry expectant eyes urging me on to the main attraction, my own humiliation. Maybe I imagined it, or in the reinvention of memory it's become more dramatic than it was, but it seemed like the moment in an epic battle where the hero must prove her metal to move on, or fall away to nothing. The many headed mother-daughter monster salivated in unseemly triumph before me. They saw me already smacked me down, the lying outlier who dared to take them on as equal, while they fed at my neck. Or maybe they just wanted to watch someone grovel, to make themselves feel superior. I'll never know.
I smiled. I remember doing it because it made me feel less afraid once I had. I took the room in, this tribe of blonde women who hated me on general principal, and Sister Kathryn who I knew had my back, but wasn't allowed to show it lest it appear as favoritism, or, god forbid, pity.
"I'm sorry for misleading my peers," I began, reading my prepared sentence. "But I didn't know how to respond when they asked me how much money my father made."
It took a moment for it to sink in, for the diamonds to dim, for the mother's smiles of triumph to become forced and social, for the girls to begin imagining their own punishments for this compounded social comeuppance. It took everything I had not to be smug. They'd been hoist on their own petard. They'd assumed I didn't know how to play the game. But Sister Kathryn saved me. She showed me all the game pieces I had to play, and I didn't want to blow her rescue. I didn't want to be lessened in her esteem.
It's funny to me now and rather charming that my revenge was so inventive. I see now that even in losing there was victory. Story is a powerful tool. But the ability to shape narrative should never be taken lightly, nor fiction and feeling be allowed to supplant the truth. I know now that I was always worthy and need not have passed anyone's test, but then if none of that had happened, I wouldn't have had this story.
"My father's a janitor." I said. " My tuition is covered by a welfare scholarship. My mother takes in laundry for a rich white family who bought my clothes and loaned me the Benz."
That's what I told the blonde social queens of our convent school in response to their question,
"How much money does your father make that you can afford to be here?"
It was 1970, we were sophomores at a girl's finishing school, the Benz was an old 1959 190SL, and it was a 16th birthday present from my father. I thought I'd said too much, gone too far with a narrative whose details didn't seem plausible. They'd know I was making it up, mocking them as they mocked me.
On the contrary, they loved my frank humility, and for a few weeks I became a favored pet.
We were never to ask questions about money, and everyone at school knew it. It was considered incredibly rude. The story about my father being a janitor came out as a knee-jerk reaction. I was a kid at boarding school, sometimes forgetting that my skin color made me different, because there were other girls who had accents and customs that identified them as more foreign than me in the school of 300 girls.
The social queens came upon me in a courtyard during lunch. I remember it clearly, the wall of blonde varsity volleyball team that stepped in front of me, blocking my way. It wasn't aggressive, it wasn't overtly hostile, but it was a challenge. Prove yourself to us. They were trapping a wild animal for observation, and for their own protection, as my behavior in captivity was still an unknown, they did it as a group.
They'd grown up together, gone to parochial elementary and junior high in segregated, though it was called exclusive, neighborhoods before coming to the convent for high school. They were a gang of we don't think we're mean girls, we just think we're better than you. They were determined to take down, or absorb into their pack, any lone wolves who appeared to threaten their dominion over the realm of smart, pretty, and going places.
I was a boarding student. They were day-dogs. I don't know why we called them that, but we did. They'd started at the convent as freshmen. I'd been living there since I was eight. It was more home to me by then than home. I knew secret places to escape. I knew the old nuns and the cook and the pastry chef. I knew how to live in community, how to get along with different cultures.
By high school I had already met this particular beast untethered, white privilege that assumes its superiority, in the guise of nuns bending over backward to accentuate our differences with blatant attempts to cull us from the herd. You could usually see them coming, the ones with veils flying and heels tapping, hurrying with offers of extra-help because of course you people always need it. Some openly treated my sister and me as if we were charity cases, though our parents paid the same tuition as everyone else. Early accusations of plagiarism, or the times I had to take repeat tests alone to be certain I could replicate my answers, negated the fact that my sister and I had taken an arduous day long test to skip grade three when we first came to the convent. But these were things of the past. Surely my credibility and bona fides at this institution had already been firmly established after a seven years tenure? But now, here it was again, prove yourself worthy.
My father wasn't a janitor, he was an aerospace engineer and he had helped to put man on the moon. The only janitor I knew personally worked at the special education school where my mother was a speech pathologist. Mr. Quimby was his name, and he was right off the boat from Ireland, where he said his people were considered niggers too. He sold Mama Irish Sweepstakes tickets once a year. He told wonderful stories and bawdy jokes. I could almost smell the peat smoke and hear the flutes and concertinas in his brogue. He had apple cheeks and a big belly laugh and a closet full of cleaning supplies. He was lovely, and I learned from him that lovely people do many things for a living, but it's not what measures their worth.
For weeks the social queens gathered at lunchtime to hear stories of my Janitor's daughter's life, so foreign from our own. It was a colorful saga - of many people living together crammed into a one room shack, with no running water, and an outhouse. I shared the secrets of washing clothes in river water slapped against big rocks, and introduced the notion of foraging for food. I embellished Mr. Quimby's colorful history of poverty and pretended it was my own.
Sister Kathryn was my favorite nun. She was our movie star beautiful, virtuoso violin playing, dean of students. She stopped by my room one night, several weeks after the janitor's daughter was born, and invited me to meet in her office the next morning. There she confronted me with my stories, and was incredibly knowledgeable about the details of same.
"A janitor's daughter? How would your parents feel about the way you've described them? They've worked very hard to achieve what they have." She admonished.
"I think they'd laugh. They'd know why I did it." I said.
"Why did you do it?" She asked sincerely.
"I just told them what they wanted to hear. They don't want the truth, that I'm just like them, or that heaven forfend, I might even be smarter, prettier, and happier then they're supposed to be. They want stories that make the world make sense to them. So that's what I gave them. It's what they want to believe, that they're better than me. What do I care if they believe that my father's a janitor? What difference does it make, especially if I'm the architect of that belief?"
We were silent for a while. I could see she'd understood. I was hopeful.
"You'll have to apologize." Sister Kathryn said at last.
"WHAT?! But they're just stories!" I cried, desperate not to be humiliated in front of that pack of she-wolves.
"You lied." she said.
I wrinkled a brow and pouted,
"White lies." I offered. "Who was hurt by them?"
Here her face clouded and she looked down at her hands and at the wood floor.
"Your stories first came to our attention when we noticed a large uptick in scholarship donations. Many were given in your name." She confessed.
We stared at each other, and then we burst out laughing, then I started to cry.
"That's why I have to apologize?"
She nodded sympathetically.
"Will you get to keep the money if I do, for someone else?" I asked.
She shrugged.
"I suppose so, no one will take back a donation."
The time and place were fixed for my apology. An informal tea in the French parlor at the convent, with Sister Kathryn, the four social queens and their mothers on a Sunday afternoon. I was to host them all.
I spent the entire weekend writing and trashing hundreds of apologies. But I couldn't figure out how to serve the brief and still win. I was spitting angry and tearfully frustrated at my hopeless situation when Sister Kathryn paid me a visit in my room, now a landscape of wadded paper balls. She looked at the tears rolling down my cheeks.
"Having a hard time with it?" She asked of the obvious.
I nodded and snorted.
"I might be able to help you." She said.
I looked at her, surprised and hopeful that there might be rescue.
"I think you've lost sight of where this all started. It's always best to go back to the beginning." She smiled reassuringly. She handed me a handkerchief plucked from her sweater sleeve and left my room.
Back to the beginning? How was that helpful? Where it all started? Back to the beginning? Then it hit me. Absolutely true and simple and to the point.
I took a clean sheet of paper and wrote one sentence on it. Then I cleaned up my room.
The French parlor was so called for the Louis quinze style gilt and brocade furnishings, the ornate portraiture on papered walls edged in mahogany wood, and Aubusson rugs. The room had an over done opulence that said money, once upon a time.
The social niceties were observed that day, it was a finishing school after all, where we were taught how to ice our enemies in the nicest ways. Chit-chat, observations on the weather, it was southern California, so almost always nice, and the traffic, almost always bad. The mothers wore mink coats against the chill of their air conditioned Cadillacs. The furs were now laid on a settee with shapely legs in the corner, the fur turned in to monogrammed silk linings. Large carat weight diamonds winked on well manicured hands, like headlights, blinding when caught in the sunlight through tall windows.
Suddenly I was on. The clink of sterling against china hushed, and I could feel hungry expectant eyes urging me on to the main attraction, my own humiliation. Maybe I imagined it, or in the reinvention of memory it's become more dramatic than it was, but it seemed like the moment in an epic battle where the hero must prove her metal to move on, or fall away to nothing. The many headed mother-daughter monster salivated in unseemly triumph before me. They saw me already smacked me down, the lying outlier who dared to take them on as equal, while they fed at my neck. Or maybe they just wanted to watch someone grovel, to make themselves feel superior. I'll never know.
I smiled. I remember doing it because it made me feel less afraid once I had. I took the room in, this tribe of blonde women who hated me on general principal, and Sister Kathryn who I knew had my back, but wasn't allowed to show it lest it appear as favoritism, or, god forbid, pity.
"I'm sorry for misleading my peers," I began, reading my prepared sentence. "But I didn't know how to respond when they asked me how much money my father made."
It took a moment for it to sink in, for the diamonds to dim, for the mother's smiles of triumph to become forced and social, for the girls to begin imagining their own punishments for this compounded social comeuppance. It took everything I had not to be smug. They'd been hoist on their own petard. They'd assumed I didn't know how to play the game. But Sister Kathryn saved me. She showed me all the game pieces I had to play, and I didn't want to blow her rescue. I didn't want to be lessened in her esteem.
It's funny to me now and rather charming that my revenge was so inventive. I see now that even in losing there was victory. Story is a powerful tool. But the ability to shape narrative should never be taken lightly, nor fiction and feeling be allowed to supplant the truth. I know now that I was always worthy and need not have passed anyone's test, but then if none of that had happened, I wouldn't have had this story.
Wednesday, March 15, 2017
UPDATE: The Gold Stone Girl
I love this journey with Mina. She's hard and feisty, she does what it takes to make her dreams come true in an action adventure story with a female of color in the lead, without a gun! Many lessons have been learned and earned along this path. Mostly about honoring my own dreams and purging my nightmares
The script is a semi-finalist in the Series Fest/Rose McGowan Featuring Women Initiative
Script Competition
and a quarter finalist in the Screen Craft China-Hollywood Screenwriting Fellowship
It's a Nightmare is entered in a few other film/media competitions in the hope of bringing Mina to the attention of potential partners. May this cautionary tale spread its roots into deep rich healthy loam.
Thursday, January 12, 2017
SULIS of the SUL
http://www.jafdesign.net/
S.U.L., Suberterranean Upper Lifeform, a government-church acronym given to this species of mole-people.
The SUL are descendants of a thousand multi-ethnic founding families who pioneered the Core of the planet before Ulger blew the blue orb apart, and it reformed as the Pangeic-like continent of Blinkin.
The SUL were rediscovered in 3654 of the Night Mare's reign.
The culture is inward and mystic, influenced by the ethylene laced gas in the air of their underground city. Ethylene, they say, influenced the Oracles at Delphi.
SUL are unwelcome in Winkin City as too delusional. Fantasies are free floating and anyone might catch them.
But the Night mare likes a good oracle, so they are tolerated at the Manus Market and as homesteaders in the ruins Off-right.
Sunday, December 18, 2016
http://www.jafdesign.net/
PAP, the name taken from the ancient Paparazzi, a photographer who pursues celebrities to get photos of them.
The word Pap was derived from a character name in Fellini's La Dolce Vita.
A name given by the Night Mare to babies randomly selected at birth to have cameras implanted in place of eyes. Paps supply the screen feed in Winkin City. Their tongues are removed to improve focus.
DREAM DRIFTER, personal guard to the Night Mare. Imported early in her reign to rid the world of dreamers.
Heron-headed thugs, white-eyed dream addicts in shabby wool overcoats and sunshades. The smell of a Drifter is like wet towels mildewed in a locker.
Squijal, is the term used to describe how a Dream Drifter moves, the way a slug slimes across marble.
*Dream Drifters are seriously allergic to the sweet fruit of the planet. If consumed they grow to 10x their ginormous size and rampage for fun.
Wednesday, July 27, 2016
Friday, July 22, 2016
Sulis of the S.U.L.
S.U.L., Suberterranean Upper Lifeform, a government-church acronym given to this species of mole-people.
The SUL are descendants of a thousand multi-ethnic founding families who pioneered the Core of the planet before Ulger blew the blue orb apart, and it reformed as the Pangeic-like continent of Blinkin.
The SUL were rediscovered in 3654 of the Night Mare's reign.
The culture is inward and mystic, influenced by the ethylene laced gas in the air of their underground city. Ethylene, they say, influenced the Oracles at Delphi.
SUL are unwelcome in Winkin City as too delusional. Fantasies are free floating and anyone might catch them.
But the Night mare likes a good oracle, so they are tolerated at the Manus Market and as homesteaders in the ruins Off-right.
Saturday, June 18, 2016
Winkin City, the Bridge of Tears
"She sees the monolithic buildings of the Night Mare’s Winkin City, glowing blue and breathing, looming like asthmatic giants set to hunt her."
Friday, June 10, 2016
I was Brock Turnered.
image credit: http://usslave.blogspot.com/2012/05/fabrice-monteiros-amazing-images-of.html
(How many stories like this are there? too many. I couldn't figure out why I was so angry about this whole scenario, until my own memories welled up. To Brock Turner's victim, I'm with you.)
I was 14, home from boarding school for the Easter break. It was the first time my mother hadn’t hired someone to take care of me. I’d begged her not to. I had a friend home from school with me, someone I wanted to impress. She was a southern belle, a year older, and much more worldly.
My brother was home then too. He’d been recently released from jail. I couldn’t tell you which time or for which crime. He was 17, he could pass for white, he was a sociopath. My friend liked him.
By 10am on that April weekday in 1970 my brother was bored. He made a few phone calls and an old cellmate of his arrived soon after. He was white, stringy blonde hair, tall and bean pole skinny, with legs that bowed as if he’d ridden there on a horse. I don’t remember his name.
It wasn’t long before the three of them were ordering Southern Comfort to be delivered. It was my friend’s choice. My brother's friend had an i.d. Maybe he was 21, possibly older.
My gut was churning. None of this was supposed to be happening. My friend was supposed to be my ally and not theirs. Don’t be uncool. Come on it’ll be fun! I wanted to call my mother, tell her that I needed a babysitter. I wanted to run from the house and race up the wash to find my sister at her school. I wanted not to be there, but I stayed.
I’d had beer and wine before, sips on gin and tonics, but this sugary alcohol went down easy and way too fast, especially in rounds of drinking games. Soon everything was spinning.
What I remember:
I fell into the pool fully dressed, to laughter and cheering. I dragged myself out of the water and sloshed into my room. I was changing into dry clothes when my brother’s friend spoke to me. I don’t know when he came in. I don’t know what he said. I couldn’t get my leg into the baggy sailor trousers, salvaged from some surplus supply store. I stumbled. I fell down. I passed out.
I woke up with vomit in my mouth and the friend pumping away on top of me. I couldn’t figure out what was happening. I passed out again. When I opened my eyes next it was to my friend and my brother frantic beside me, both apologizing to me, naked, sprawled on the wall to wall carpet, vomit on both sides of my head and in my hair.
I never told my parents. I took a shower and went to a play rehearsal, where I was the only female in the cast at an all boy’s school. I’d liked it, being the only girl, till that day.
The few girls I confided in suggested it was my fault. It was a time when we were considered spoiled for having sex before wedlock. We were so steeped in rape culture that we worried more about ourselves as products to be selected fresh and unsealed off the market shelves, and not about the violence done to us when we have no say.
My brother’s friend came to see me, months after, when my brother was no longer around. He asked me out on a date. My mother and father were as surprised as he was when I shrieked at him to,
“GET OUT!”
I shouted him all the way to the door,
"GETOUTGETOUTGETOUT!" Like a mantra, a protective chant.
I slammed the door on his wide eyed face, and locked it after him, my parents staring open mouthed.
“I don’t want to talk about it.” Is what I said, and walked past them.
Now, suddenly, I want to talk about it!
Monday, June 6, 2016
Celebrate Summer Reading with FREE DOWNLOADS!
The trilogy is available to download FREE 6/7-6/11. Or, get book one from Audible for only $1.99.
"Being the weird girl is never easy, but in a dystopian future where women are breeding stock and domestic pets, it's a nightmare. A magical foundling born inside a willow tree, Mina is raised by canny off-gridders who teach her to value herself and feign compliance. But talent will out, and her transformative gifts threaten the ruling Night Mare and her copper-skinned son. Quinn's feminist hallucination weaves gorgeous imagery and dimensional characters with glints of dark humor." Chronogram Magazine
"Being the weird girl is never easy, but in a dystopian future where women are breeding stock and domestic pets, it's a nightmare. A magical foundling born inside a willow tree, Mina is raised by canny off-gridders who teach her to value herself and feign compliance. But talent will out, and her transformative gifts threaten the ruling Night Mare and her copper-skinned son. Quinn's feminist hallucination weaves gorgeous imagery and dimensional characters with glints of dark humor." Chronogram Magazine
Friday, April 8, 2016
We can be Heroes
I particpated in the Woodstock Writer's Festival Story Slam last night. I did not win, but I had fun. Here is the story I told.
I always wanted a hero who looked like me. I looked for her everywhere, in books in plays, and movies, but she was missing in action.
At age five, I mounted my fist production of Peter Pan. I was ten when I produced it again. Both times I played Peter, and directed, and I cued everyone on their lines from the stage. The nuns worried about me wanting to be a boy. I told them that they had it all wrong. Peter was a woman who didn’t want to grow up to be a man. Every production I’d ever seen had a woman playing Peter. Peter was my hero. A brave orphan who could fly, which is who I thought I might be under different circumstances.
When I was eleven I attended a boarding school in Mexico. Returning home for the winter holidays I filled out the immigration form on my own for the first time. Under race I put human. I was detained until I chose a race. Though I pointed out that what they really wanted was my ethnicity. December 1967, I became a Negro.
In high school I led a protest of the Vietnam War. Threatened with suspension, ten of us sat out on the lawn singing protest songs and sneaking cigarettes in the bushes. In a school of a couple hundred, 10 is a significant number, so instead of suspending us, they created courses in civil disobedience. I learned that being brave can effect change, but no one ever called us heros. 1970, I became an activist.
When my kids were little I used heros to teach them the large arc lessons of bravery.
“I think the bravest humans beings on the planet are superheroes,” I would bait. “Yeah, because they have super powers,” my son would lisp through missing teeth.
“Nah,” I’d say, “You’d have to be totally brave to get away with wearing underwear over tights AND a cape.” I think he got the point.
When Amadou Diallo was shot 41 times for being black in America I was contacted to participate in organized civil disobedience, to be arrested blocking the doors to the NYC police precinct. I explained to my children why it was important to break the law, if the laws were unjust or unfairly applied. I told them that I might not be home that night, but that I hoped they would be proud of me, that they would think me a hero. I went to jail in excellent company. Ruby Dee and Ozzie Davis were arrested at the same time, we were held in the same cell. Two of my own heroes. 1999, the year I was arrested.
When I came home from jail my son asked me if I wore underwear over my tights.
“Yes,” I assured him, “and I had on my invisible cape.”
We can be heros, all of us, but just for one day at a time please. Hero is too costly a suit to wear everyday, and underwear over tights is completely impractical.
I always wanted a hero who looked like me. I looked for her everywhere, in books in plays, and movies, but she was missing in action.
At age five, I mounted my fist production of Peter Pan. I was ten when I produced it again. Both times I played Peter, and directed, and I cued everyone on their lines from the stage. The nuns worried about me wanting to be a boy. I told them that they had it all wrong. Peter was a woman who didn’t want to grow up to be a man. Every production I’d ever seen had a woman playing Peter. Peter was my hero. A brave orphan who could fly, which is who I thought I might be under different circumstances.
When I was eleven I attended a boarding school in Mexico. Returning home for the winter holidays I filled out the immigration form on my own for the first time. Under race I put human. I was detained until I chose a race. Though I pointed out that what they really wanted was my ethnicity. December 1967, I became a Negro.
In high school I led a protest of the Vietnam War. Threatened with suspension, ten of us sat out on the lawn singing protest songs and sneaking cigarettes in the bushes. In a school of a couple hundred, 10 is a significant number, so instead of suspending us, they created courses in civil disobedience. I learned that being brave can effect change, but no one ever called us heros. 1970, I became an activist.
When my kids were little I used heros to teach them the large arc lessons of bravery.
“I think the bravest humans beings on the planet are superheroes,” I would bait. “Yeah, because they have super powers,” my son would lisp through missing teeth.
“Nah,” I’d say, “You’d have to be totally brave to get away with wearing underwear over tights AND a cape.” I think he got the point.
When Amadou Diallo was shot 41 times for being black in America I was contacted to participate in organized civil disobedience, to be arrested blocking the doors to the NYC police precinct. I explained to my children why it was important to break the law, if the laws were unjust or unfairly applied. I told them that I might not be home that night, but that I hoped they would be proud of me, that they would think me a hero. I went to jail in excellent company. Ruby Dee and Ozzie Davis were arrested at the same time, we were held in the same cell. Two of my own heroes. 1999, the year I was arrested.
When I came home from jail my son asked me if I wore underwear over my tights.
“Yes,” I assured him, “and I had on my invisible cape.”
We can be heros, all of us, but just for one day at a time please. Hero is too costly a suit to wear everyday, and underwear over tights is completely impractical.
Friday, April 1, 2016
Monday, March 28, 2016
Wednesday, March 23, 2016
Monday, March 7, 2016
WAMC Rountable:Nicole Quinn
http://wamc.org/programs/roundtable#stream/0
Roundtable with Joe Donahue and Sarah LaDuke
March 15, Nicole Quinn
on air: aprox 11:10 a.m.
For:
Upwift presents: Reel Women In Film
The Linda WAMC’s Perfoming Arts Studio
Friday, March 18, 2016 from 8:00 PM to 11:00 PM (EDT)
Albany, NY
Roundtable with Joe Donahue and Sarah LaDuke
March 15, Nicole Quinn
on air: aprox 11:10 a.m.
For:
Upwift presents: Reel Women In Film
The Linda WAMC’s Perfoming Arts Studio
Friday, March 18, 2016 from 8:00 PM to 11:00 PM (EDT)
Albany, NY
Friday, March 4, 2016
Upwift presents: Racing Daylight
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/reel-women-in-film-tickets-21731022072
Reel Women In Film
The Linda WAMC’s Perfoming Arts Studio
Friday, March 18, 2016 from 8:00 PM to 11:00 PM (EDT)
Albany, NY
Reel Women In Film
The Linda WAMC’s Perfoming Arts Studio
Friday, March 18, 2016 from 8:00 PM to 11:00 PM (EDT)
Albany, NY
Friday, February 19, 2016
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