Last July The New York Times David Marchese featured a delicious interview with the multi-talented, British creative Phoebe Waller-Bridge that I
recommend because it captures a point in her career while she’s sought-after and succeeding with exciting new ventures. Whilst she has had a storied career, bejeweled with Emmy statues and accolades, who would have guessed she’d end up acting in and writing for the lastest Indiana Jones movie?
Not this fan. I’ve loved her since her series Fleabag aired which she wrote and starred in. According to Marchese Fleabag was “ribald, form-breaking, swoon-inducing show she created and starred in.”
Fleabag also won 6 Emmys and was nominated for 11 in its second season. It’s about grief and how to handle life when things really fall apart. It’s hilarious.
I’ve been writing more lately and realizing I want to be inspired by risk-taking artistic projects, especially of the storytelling kind. And their creators. So I’m going to rewatch the series because it fits the bill and it was orginally based on a one-woman show she performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Next 
weekend I’m attending a local play, Eleanor where one actress is going to play multiple parts. And I’m wildly curious about the screenplay and how actress Margie Boule is going to pull it off. As in at least one of the parts she’s playing is male. The play depicts the life and passions of Eleanor Roosevelt, someone who has always inspired me.
Lately, I’ve been reading more than one book at a time, and am so enjoying singer-songwriter Mary Gauthier’s memoir, Saved by a Song. The subtitle is: The Art and Healing Power of Songwriting and I’m learning a lot about the slow and painstaking process.
I’ve also become a a fangirl of suspense writer Jamie Mason. Her debut mystery Three Bags Full had me up reading in the middle of the night while hooting and chortling. It’s so full of twists and oddballs and wordsmithery and I cannot recommend it enough. You might want to study the magic she creates with figurative language. Her second novel, Monday’s Lie is much different and also wildly fresh. Interestingly, there’s a dead character in the story and it’s simply fabulous how much we come to know her. And how she looms over the story.
And more often these days my house is filled with music, including Mary Gauthier’s Rifles and Rosary Beads, in which she features combat vets. Mostly, I’m just paying closer attention to who and what feeds me; a theme for this year.
In the Times interview Waller-Bridge reveals how the creative projects she’s been involved with include the ‘rascals’ she admires. Because she so enjoys the complexity and handiwork of anti-heroes, don’t-fit-the-mold types. As do I. After Fleabag came the oh-so naughty, bizarre, and edgy spy-thriller Killing Eve which she wrote and directed. Not too many TV series around that feature female assassins. Lately, besides her role in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, she contributed to the screenplay for the latest James Bond film, No Time to Die and is occupied with a video game based on Tomb Raider. And I loved the place in the interview where she said, and that writer is with me everywhere I go.
So, my questions to writers out there: who inspires you?
Keep writing, keep dreaming and may the writer within you go everywhere with you.
Oh, and I recently came upon this advice that I want to pass along: Sit with the warrriors. The conversation is more interesting.
Writing names the world, and the power of description should not be underestimated. Literature remembers its religious origins in some of those first stories. Stories of sky gods and sea gods not only became the source of an ocean of stories that flowed from them but also served as the foundations of the world into which they, the myths, were born. There would have been little blood sacrifice in Latin America or ancient Greece if it had not been for the gods. Iphigenia would have lived and Clytemnestra would have had no need to murder Agamemnon and the entire story of the House of Atreus would have been different. This would have been bad for the history of the theater, no doubt, but good in many ways for the family concerned. Writing invented the gods and was a game the gods themselves played, and the consequences of that writing, holy writ, are still working themselves out today, which just shows that the demonstrable fictionality of fiction does nothing to lessen its power, especially if you call it the truth. But writing broke away from the gods and in that rupture much of its power was lost. Prophecy is no longer the game, except for futurologists, but then futurology is fiction too. It can be defined as the art of being wrong about the future. For the rest of us, the proper study of mankind is man. We have no priests, we can appeal to no ultimate arbiter, though there are critics among us who would claim such a role for themselves.In spite of this, fiction does retain the occasional surprising ability to initiate social change. Here is the fugitive slave Eliza, running from Simon Legree. Here is Oliver Twist asking for more. Here is a boy wizard with a lightning scar on his forehead bringing books back into the lives of a generation that was forgetting how to read. Uncle Tom’s Cabin changed attitudes towards slavery, and Charles Dickens’s portraits of child poverty inspired legal reforms, and J. K. Rowling changed the culture of childhood, making millions of boys and girls look forward to 800-page novels, and probably popularizing vibrating toy broomsticks at boarding schools. On the opening night of Death of a Salesman, the head of Gimbels department store rushed from the theater vowing never to fire his own aging Willy Loman.
