Screenwriting : A Saturday Afternoon Reverie by Geoff Hall

I’m coming to the end of the book, ‘Catching The Light’ by Joy Harjo.

Joy is a Muskogee Creek Nation poet who has grabbed my attention over the last few years. She is the inspiration behind the screenplay “Breathe” and more besides.

Here she writes about speaking truth to an age:

“Each generation bears its own network of tales. Being a poet, a musician, or storyteller is not a career. It is a calling, a demand by your spirit to speak to the truth of an age, an appeal to assist justice in finding a home, for healing to take place so the succeeding generations are greeted with an abundance of food, beauty, and fresh air and water.” p116

I wonder if I am the only writer here on Stage32 that feels the same way, that writing is a calling; that we bear “the network of tales” to our generation, that we work to find a home for justice, because these days justice appears to be homeless, abandoned on the streets of unforgiving cities?

We write for our children, as Harjo states, for their future. Writing is the perpetual move of my spirit, my compulsion, my passion. I write for the children living in war-torn lands where cities bear the scars of battle and where the screams of pain are painted on the walls of ruined houses that once bore the laughter of family meals.

I write for children living in cities destroyed by economic shifts and convulsions, created by our self-appointment masters and managers of contorted values; of fits of rage. For those who have not, have what little remained snatched away from them.

It seems that my calling to write, finds me creating dystopian and not utopian worlds; a metaphor for reality and not the sugar-coating of some promised, far away and hoped for reality.

For sure I long for Eden, as long as snakes are banned and apples are simply the good filling of pies and not a seduction to fall into some kind of imagined judgement or condemnation.

I wonder if I find myself alone in this place we call Stage32, in an arid wilderness - or perchance an oasis; a community where those of us who help bear the “network of tales” for this generation dwell, and find help in the bearing and the production of stories that help justice find a home?