AJ McNamara

AJ McNamara is my pen name. I was born Aimee Jeanette McNamara in New Brunswick NJ on No.1 1975 to James and Rosanna McNamara. James was a PHD candidate at Rutgers University at the time. and their three children were all raised in a very academic atmosphere.

I was diagnosed in 1979 with Type 1 Diabetes and the following year my family relocated to a small Presbyterian Mission college town in Northern Arizona on the Navajo Reservation where my father taught biology. I was quickly adopted into the native culture there. Like most indigenous cultures, the Navajo place heavy emphasis on intellectual development and proper education.

Another value that was trained into my way of thinking is the enormous role of charity in keeping people alive during difficult times in uncertain circumstances. At age eight, I began assisting with charity projects to assist on a local level when people needed assistance things like vehicle repairs, medical/funeral expenses and so forth. Most of what I did involved running off flyers on the aging mimeograph machine and stapling them up around town for small events like a movie night in the crumbling mouse-infested cafeteria, bake sales, car washes and so forth. Some of my experiences could serve as field research for cultural anthropology studies. Many of these experiences have ended up in my writing.

I worked with local groups that organized small pow-wows in the old gymnasium for charity purposes as well. During High School I volunteered with a thrift store in Santa Fe NM. In college I organized charity events with the local branch of the Society for Creative Anachronism, where I also studied and taught late medieval rapier technique for over a decade.

The tiny town I was raised in was so terribly remote that The Peace Corps sent new trainees to us in order to acclimate themselves to rough physical conditions in utterly foreign cultures. More than a few ran screaming back to civilization. The National Guard dropped supplies into us during the heavy snowfalls in winter and every morning I awoke to find someone I knew from the desert using the garden hose to fill a water buffalo in the driveway. Stinginess was never even considered as an option

The enormous disparity in the world view I was raised with and the culture I was born into has proven to be difficult to reconcile, but charity is one of the few placers where these world perspectives actually agree.

We can fast forward through turbulent college years ending with a bachelor's degree in University Studies, a lost eye and two brain tumor surgeries to the present, where I sit with an enormous script that in essence is very much about my life and I intend to use it to establish a charity streaming channel to support humanitarian organizations. Here's where the movie industry angle of my experiences kicks in. The studio in Albuquerque supports dozens of the people I have known for decades, and just like everything else, is under economic threat from many angles. This channel idea can easily begin here in the home of the personal computer. You will find most of my posts in this forum to be about such efforts. There are many, and the media does not hold them up for what they are.

You may be curious: What qualification does a half-blind ex-journalist have to offer as a screenwriter? Honestly, only this: I wrote the script for my second-grade class Easter play. In the end, the aliens left and we got our Easter Eggs back.Since then, a movie was filmed in my house which went straight to DVD and I was a zombie extra in a local film that did the same thing. I don't have movie industry stripes. What I have are the sort that come from years of practical application of things learned about storytelling from indigenous cultures and how storytelling holds together what we call culture. I'm using my experience to build a tool for the storytellers to rebuild our world.