Sean P Carlin

Writer of things that go bump in the night

Tag: extractive capitalism (Page 2 of 2)

The Road Back: Revisiting “The Writer’s Journey”

September 28, 2020 / / 20 Comments

On the twenty-fifth anniversary of Christopher Vogler’s industry-standard screenwriting instructional The Writer’s Journey:  Mythic Structure for Writers, here’s an in-depth look at why the time-honored storytelling principles it propounds are existentially endangered in our postnarrative world… and why they’re needed now more than ever.

In The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell identified the “monomyth”—the universal narrative patterns and Jungian psychological archetypes that provide the shape, structure, and emotional resonance of virtually every story in the Western literary canon.

As it’s more commonly known, this is the “Hero’s Journey,” in which the status quo is disrupted, sending our protagonist on a perilous adventure—physically or emotionally or both—through a funhouse-mirror distortion of their everyday reality (think Marty McFly in 1950s Hill Valley, Dorothy in Oz) in which they encounter Mentors, Shadows, Allies, and Tricksters throughout a series of escalating challenges, culminating in a climactic test from which they finally return to the Ordinary World, ideally a bit wiser for their trouble.  From the Epic of Gilgamesh to a given episode of The Big Bang Theory, the Hero’s Journey is the foundational schema of storytelling.

The Writer's Journey graphic
The stages of the Hero’s Journey

The book’s influence on the visionary young filmmakers who came of age studying it was quantum:  George Lucas consciously applied Campbell’s theory to the development of Star Wars (1977), as did George Miller to Mad Max (1979), arguably transforming a pair of idiosyncratic, relatively low-budget sci-fi projects into global phenomena that are still begetting sequels over forty years later.  After serving Western culture for millennia, in the waning decades of the twentieth century, the Hero’s Journey became the blueprint for the Hollywood blockbuster.

In the 1990s, a story analyst at Disney by the name of Christopher Vogler wrote and circulated a seven-page internal memo titled “A Practical Guide to The Hero with a Thousand Faces,” a screenwriter-friendly crib sheet that was notably used in the development of The Lion King (a classic Hero’s Journey if ever there was one), evolving a few years later into a full-length book of its own:  The Writer’s Journey:  Mythic Structure for Writers, a twenty-fifth anniversary edition of which was published this past summer.  The nearly 500-page revised volume is partitioned into four sections:

  • MAPPING THE JOURNEY:  Here Mr. Vogler characterizes the mythic archetypes of the Hero, Mentor, Threshold Guardian, Herald, Shapeshifter, Shadow, Ally, and Trickster.
  • STAGES OF THE JOURNEY:  Each monomythic “beat”—The Call to Adventure, Crossing the First Threshold, Approach to the Inmost Cave, etc.—is given thorough explanation and illustration.
  • LOOKING BACK ON THE JOURNEY:  Using the tools he teaches, Mr. Vogler provides comprehensive analyses of Titanic, Pulp Fiction, The Lion King, The Shape of Water, and Lucas’ six-part Star Wars saga.
  • THE REST OF THE STORY:  ADDITIONAL TOOLS FOR MASTERING THE CRAFT:  The appendices are a series of essays on the history, nature, and cultural dynamics of the art and craft of storytelling.  After 350 pages of practical technique, Mr. Vogler earns the privilege of indulging a bit of literary theory here, and his insights are fascinating.  He devotes an entire chapter to the subject of catharsis, “comparing the emotional effect of a drama with the way the body rids itself of toxins and impurities” (Christopher Vogler, The Writer’s Journey:  Mythic Structure for Writers, 4th ed. [Studio City, California:  Michael Wiese Productions, 2020], 420).  Stories, in that sense, are medicinal; their alchemical compounds have healing properties—more on this point later.

Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey codifies mythic structure for contemporary storytellers, demonstrating its form, function, and versatility through more accessible terminology than Campbell’s densely academic nomenclature, and by drawing on examples from cinematic touchstones familiar to all:  The Wizard of Oz, Star Wars, Titanic, etc.  Like The Hero with a Thousand Faces before it, The Writer’s Journey has become, over the last quarter century, an essential catechism, affecting not merely its own generation of scribes (including yours truly), but the successive storytelling programs that stand on its shoulders, like Save the Cat!

Comparison of Vogler’s Hero’s Journey and Snyder’s “beat sheet”

But why is it essential?  If Campbell and Vogler and Blake Snyder have simply put different labels on narrative principles we all intuitively comprehend from thousands of years of unconscious conditioning, why study them at all?  Why not simply trust those precepts are already instinctive and immediately type FADE IN at the muse’s prompting?

Because just as a doctor requires an expert’s command of gross anatomy even if no two patients are exactly constitutionally alike, and an architect is expected to possess a mastery of structural engineering though every building is different, it behooves the storyteller—be them screenwriter, novelist, playwright, what have you—to consciously understand the fundamentals of the narrative arts:

The stages of the Hero’s Journey can be traced in all kinds of stories, not just those that feature “heroic” physical action and adventure.  The protagonist of every story is the hero of a journey, even if the path leads only into his own mind or into the realm of relationships.

The way stations of the Hero’s Journey emerge naturally even when the writer in unaware of them, but some knowledge of this most ancient guide to storytelling is useful in identifying problems and telling better stories.  Consider these twelve stages as a map of the Hero’s Journey, one of many ways to get from here to there, but one of the most flexible, durable, and dependable.

ibid., 7

I’ve read and reread previous versions of The Writer’s Journey endlessly, and I take new insight from it each time:  An excellent primer for aspirants, it yields yet richer dividends for experienced writers—those that can readily appreciate it vis-à-vis their own work.  Though this updated edition, which includes two brand-new essays in the appendices (“What’s the Big Deal?” and “It’s All About the Vibes, Man”), was certainly sufficient reason in its own right to revisit The Writer’s Journey, I had a more compelling motivation:  I wanted to see for myself how Mr. Vogler makes a case for the type of conventional story arc he extols in the face of mounting evidence of its cultural irrelevance in our postnarrative era.

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What Comes Next: Lessons on Democracy and Narrative from “Hamilton”

August 18, 2020 / / 8 Comments

Less than three months out from arguably the most important presidential election in living memory, our democracy is in deep, deep shit.

Need we recap?  Commuting Roger Stone.  Gassing Lafayette Square.  Suppressing the vote.  Sabotaging the Postal Service.  Floating the postponement—and actively undermining the credibility—of the November election.  Sending federal agents to detain (read:  abduct) protestors in Portland.  And that’s just a topline best-of-Trump-2020 compilation.

This is America?

Let’s face it:  The spirit of nihilism that animates MAGA was never about making America great again so much as it was burning the Republic to the ground.  That’s what Trump’s supporters really voted for in 2016, and it’s the one big (if never quite explicit) campaign promise he might actually deliver on:  reifying the very American carnage he once claimed exclusive qualification to redress.  To wit:  The nightly news plays like an apocalyptic bookend to the rousing founding-of-America story told in Hamilton.

Daveed Diggs, Okieriete Onaodowan, Anthony Ramos, and Lin-Manuel Miranda in “Hamilton”

While Lin-Manuel Miranda’s revolutionary masterpiece certainly challenges us to appreciate anew the value and purpose of democracy—a timely reminder if ever there was one—it somewhat less conspicuously does the same for an equally imperiled institution:  narrative itself.

Hamilton has been described by its creator as “a story about America then, told by America now” (Edward Delman, “How Lin-Manuel Miranda Shapes History,” The Atlantic, September 29, 2015).  But if the musical’s creative approach to its subject matter is unorthodox, its narrative structure is very much a conventional hero’s journey.  (For my Save the Cat! scholars, it’s a “Real-Life Superhero” tale, and not, as some “experts” would have you believe, Golden Fleece.)  The power in and of narrative is a central preoccupation of Hamilton; the show literally opens with a dramatic question posed to the audience:

How does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a
Scotsman, dropped in the middle of a forgotten
Spot in the Caribbean by providence, impoverished, in squalor,
Grow up to be a hero and a scholar?

Alexander Hamilton is a man who imagines—who writes—his way out of poverty, and, in turn, “rewrote the game,” by “Poppin’ a squat on conventional wisdom”—meaning, the institutionalized “divine right of kings” narrative.

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Challenging Our Moral Imagination: On Hollywood’s Crises of Climate, Conscience, and Creativity

May 25, 2020 / / 18 Comments

“What about Thanos?”

A strange question, I’ll concede, to emerge from an impassioned conversation about the transformative systemic overhauls required to our energy policy, our health care, and our economic ideology in the wake of the coronavirus—

—because what could the cartoon villain from the Avengers movies possibly have to do with any of that?

The answer, frustratingly, is:  More than you may realize.

During a recent online confab with the leadership team of the San Fernando Valley Chapter of the Climate Reality Project, the discussion drifted momentarily from existential matters to televisional ones:  What’s everybody been binge-watching?

Now, anyone who knows me—in person or through this blog—is peripherally aware of my immedicable disdain for movies and television.  Yet… with no baseball this spring to occupy my time, I’ve been reluctantly compelled to sample quite a bit of scripted media to which I’d have otherwise turned up a nose.  And, to my surprise, I find myself excited to share a handful of programming that, in my view, embodies creativity with a conscience.  (We’ll get to those coveted endorsements shortly.)

The cast of “Schitt’s Creek” (2015–2020)

To that end, one of our Climate Reality Leaders recommended Schitt’s Creek:  “The evolution of the self-absorbed yet well-meaning characters as they deal with the adversity that helps them discover what it really means to love is quite endearing,” my colleague said, “and I believe has left an impact on many who are out there now hoping for the world to refashion itself in that way.”

Schitt’s Creek is one of those shows that got away from me in our era of Peak TV, but I second the motion for more prescriptive fiction that both challenges us to be better—individually and collectively—as well as provides a model to do so.  Hard as this may be to fathom for those born into a postnarrative world, but our popular entertainments used to reliably perform that public service.  To wit:  Earlier this month, this unflinching indictment of white privilege from a 1977 episode of Little House on the Prairie resurfaced on Twitter to considerable gape-mouthed astonishment:

Bet you didn’t recall that show being so edgy.  Thing is, the stories we tell about the world in which we live are only as aspirational—and inspirational—as the moral imagination of our storytellers.  Alas, ever since meaningless worldbuilding supplanted purposeful storytelling, the function of popular fiction has shifted from lighting a path forward to drawing us down a rabbit hole of “Easter eggs” and “spoilers” that lead only to the next installment of a given multimedia franchise (meaning:  keep your wallet handy).  As the late Neil Peart wrote forty years ago:

Art as expression –
Not as market campaigns
Will still capture our imaginations
Given the same
State of integrity
It will surely help us along

Talk about advice unheeded.  Consequently, our commercial entertainment is often embedded—however unconsciously—with culturally pernicious values, from glorifying vigilante justice (superhero sagas; revenge thrillers), to undermining trust in public institutions (the self-serving White Houses of Scandal and House of Cards were a far cry from the empathetic Bartlet administration), to romanticizing criminal sociopathy (the street-racing “rebels” of Fast & Furious) and—bonus!—thereby validating a mindset in which “environmental degradation is not only a given but a goal” (robin, “The Fast and Furious Films and Mad Max Fury Road,” Ecocinema, Media, and the Environment [blog], September 20, 2019)

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Misery Sans Company: On the Opportunities and Epiphanies of Self-Isolation

April 20, 2020 / / 18 Comments

March?  Please!  I’ve been in self-isolation since January.

No, I was not clairvoyantly alerted to the impending coronavirus pandemic; only our dear leader can claim that pansophic distinction.  Rather, my wife started a new job at the beginning of the year, necessitating a commute, thereby leaving me carless.  (Voluntarily carless, I should stipulate:  I refuse to be a two-vehicle household; as it is, this congenital city kid, certified tree-hugger, and avowed minimalist owns one car under protest.)

My obstinance, however, comes at a cost:  I don’t live within convenient walking distance of anything save a Chevron station (the irony of which is only so amusing), so while the missus is at work, I’m effectively immobilized.  I got nowhere to go… save the home office opposite my bedroom.  Thusly, I made a conscious decision at the start of the year to embrace my newfound confinement as a creative opportunity—to spend the entirety of winter devoted all but exclusively to breaking the back of my new novel.  I kept my socializing and climate activism to a minimum during this period, submitting to the kind of regimented hourly schedule I haven’t known since my college days.

Johnny Depp in creative self-isolation in “Secret Window” (2004), from Stephen King’s novella

Before long, my period of self-imposed artistic self-isolation was yielding measurable results, and I’d been looking forward to emerging from social exile.  The week I’d earmarked for my “coming-out party”?  You guessed it:  The Ides of March.

I instead spent St. Paddy’s week mostly reeling, knocked sideways—as I imagine many were—by the speed and scale at which this crisis ballooned.  But in the days that followed, I resolved to compartmentalize—to get back to work.  I still had my codified daily routine, after all, which required a few adjustments and allowances under the new circumstances, and I had a project completely outlined and ready to “go to pages.”  So, that’s what I turned to.

And in short order, I’d produced the first two chapters, which, for me, are always the hardest to write, because I have no narrative momentum to work with as I do in later scenes.  You open a blank Scrivener document, and—BOOM!—all your careful planning and plotting, your meticulously considered character arcs and cerebral theme work?  It ain’t worth shit at that ex nihilo instant.  You may’ve built the world, but how do you get into it?  Writing that first sentence, that first paragraph, that first scene, that first chapter is like feeling your way around in the dark.  (Fittingly, my first chapter is literally about three guys finding their way through a forest path in the pitch black of night.)

“Going to pages” turned out to be just the intellectual occupation I needed to quell my anxiety, to give me a reprieve from our present reality.  And now that I’ve got story momentum, slipping into the world of my fiction every morning is as easy as flicking on the television.  For the three or four hours a day I withdraw to my personal paracosm, I’m not thinking about anything other than those characters and their problems.  As such, I’ve thus far sat out this crisis in my study, trafficking in my daydreams to pass the time; I’m not treating patients, or bagging groceries, or delivering packages, or working the supply chain, or performing any of the vital services upholding our fragile social order.  Instead, I’m playing make-believe.

Self-isolation didn’t serve Stephen King’s Jack Torrance particularly well in “The Shining”

It wasn’t long ago—Christmas, in fact—I’d issued an earnest, hopeful plea that in the year to come we might all forsake our comforting fictions, our private parallel dimensions, in favor of consciously reconnecting with our shared nonfictional universe.  And now here many of us find ourselves, banished from the streets, from the company of others, confined by ex officio decree to our own hermetic bubbles—as of this writing, 97% of the world is under stay-at-home orders—with nowhere to retreat but our escapist fantasies.  I’ve been reliant upon them, too—even grateful for them.

And that got me thinking about Stephen King’s Misery.  As masterful, and faithful in plotting, as Rob Reiner’s movie adaptation (working from a screenplay by William Goldman) is to King’s book, the theme—the entire point of the narrative—gets completely lost in translation.  This is a story about addiction, as only King could tell it:  It’s about how drugs (in this case, prescription-grade painkillers) help us cope with misery, but it’s also about how art can be an addictive—and redemptive—coping mechanism, as well; how it can turn misery into a kind of beauty, especially for the artist himself.

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A 2020 Vision of Hope

January 21, 2020 / / 16 Comments

“The good news is that the impacts of climate change are no longer deniable,” Penn State climate scientist Michael E. Mann said recently.  “The bad news is that the impacts of climate change are no longer deniable.”  Over the two decades preceding Dr. Mann’s good-news/bad-news pronouncement, when what reasonably seemed like a dire existential threat wasn’t quite getting the public attention it arguably merited (on account of, we later learned, orchestrated misinformation campaigns by Exxon and others), I was doing whatever I thought I could for the cause:  swapping out my lightbulbs, carrying reusable grocery bags, voluntarily opting for a greater percentage of renewable energy sources from my local utility.  And I looked to former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, having voted for him in 2000 and been inspired anew by An Inconvenient Truth, for direction—and certainly for hope.

So, when I decided to do more than simply recycle and make the occasional donation to a green group—when I sought to become an environmental activist—I knew instantly the organization I wanted to join:  Vice President Gore’s Climate Reality Project.  I applied to the Climate Reality Leadership Corps, and was trained by Mr. Gore in 2018.

Since that time, I’ve had no shortage of opportunities to participate in climate rallies hundreds of thousands strong (in Downtown L.A. and New York), take meetings with elected officials (also in both L.A. and New York), give public presentations, and directly help to bring U.S. counties—including our most populous—into the County Climate Coalition, a nationwide alliance of jurisdictions committed to upholding the standards of the Paris Accord.  The Climate Reality Leadership Corps has opened a world of opportunities—of hope—for me.

Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore (Paramount Pictures)

And along the way something unexpected began to happen:  Just as I had looked to Mr. Gore for hope—and still do—people in my life started looking to me for reasons to be hopeful.  They’ve seen the coverage of climate change–caused catastrophes that have been (at long last) dominating the headlines, heard repeatedly about something called a “Green New Deal,” and—right here in L.A.—choked on the acrid, ember-speckled smoke literally right outside their front door.  Friends and relatives have contacted me asking what can be done about climate change (a lot), or where they might move to avoid the worst effects of it (alas, we are all in the sacrifice zone now), and—most tellingly—if there’s any cause left for optimism on this crisis.

There is.

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Naomi Klein’s “On Fire” (Book Review)

October 18, 2019 / / 20 Comments

Since I trained under former vice president Al Gore to serve in his Climate Reality Leadership Corps just over a year ago—a period in which no fewer than eighty-five federal environmental regulations have been rolled back, greenhouse-gas emissions have spiked (after leveling off in years prior), polar-ice melt is outpacing predictive modeling, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has strenuously warned us we have a mere decade to halve our current rate of carbon-burning if we hope to avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change—there is one distinct emotional state that has been entirely absent from my life.

Despair.

I might, in fact, be happier and more optimistic than at any other point in my adult life.

Activism, I’ve discovered, is the antidote to despair, to doomism.  Over the past year, I’ve given public presentations on the Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act, a bipartisan bill in Congress that would charge fossil-fuel extractors for the privilege of pollution—of treating the public commons of our atmosphere like an open sewer—they’ve thus far enjoyed free of charge.

This past March, my Climate Reality chapter was proud to enlist Los Angeles into the County Climate Coalition, an alliance of jurisdictions across the United States, formed by Santa Clara County Supervisor Dave Cortese, that have formally pledged to uphold the standards of the Paris Accord.  Less than six months later, we were in attendance as the L.A. County Board of Supervisors voted to adopt the OurCounty sustainability plan, one of the most ambitious green initiatives in the United States.

And just last month, I joined 300,000 activists in Lower Manhattan for the Global Climate Strike as we swarmed the streets of City Hall, marched down Broadway, and rallied at Battery Park—where no less than Greta Thunberg addressed the crowd.  None of that, as it happens, has left much time to actually worry about the climate breakdown.

Greta Thunberg at the Global Climate Strike in New York City on September 20, 2019 (photo credit: Sean P. Carlin)

But that level of activism, I acknowledge, isn’t something to which everyone can readily commit.  So, if you want to share my profound hopefulness about the solutions to the climate crisis—if you want to appreciate the world-changing opportunity humanity has been handed by history—do yourself a favor and read a book that might admittedly be outside your comfort zone:  Naomi Klein’s On Fire:  The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal.

Naomi Klein’s “On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal”

I promise:  You won’t be inundated with scientific facts and figures; if you want to understand the basic science of global warming, Mr. Gore’s documentaries An Inconvenient Truth (2006) and An Inconvenient Sequel:  Truth to Power (2017) are both excellent primers.  Naomi Klein’s On Fire is a recently published collection of her essays and lectures from the past decade, bookended by all-new opening and closing statements on why a Global Green New Deal is the blueprint for an ecologically sustainable and socially equitable twenty-first century:

The idea is a simple one:  in the process of transforming the infrastructure of our societies at the speed and scale that scientists have called for, humanity has a once-in-a-century chance to fix an economic model that is failing the majority of people on multiple fronts.  Because the factors that are destroying our planet are also destroying people’s quality of life in many other ways, from wage stagnation to gaping inequalities to crumbling services to the breakdown of any semblance of social cohesion.  Challenging these underlying forces is an opportunity to solve several interlocking crises at once. . . .

. . . In scale if not specifics, the Green New Deal proposal takes its inspiration from Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s original New Deal, which responded to the misery and breakdown of the Great Depression with a flurry of policies and public investments, from introducing Social Security and minimum wage laws, to breaking up the banks, to electrifying rural America and building a wave of low-cost housing in cities, to planting more than two billion trees and launching soil protection programs in regions ravaged by the Dust Bowl.

Naomi Klein, On Fire:  The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal, (New York:  Simon & Schuster, 2019), 26
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All That You Can’t Leave Behind: On Memories, Memorabilia, and Minimalism

April 30, 2019 / / 22 Comments

A lifelong packrat, here’s the story of my unlikely conversion to minimalism.

Concert tickets.  Refrigerator magnets.  Christmas ornaments.  Comic books.  Trading cards.  Greeting cards.  Bobbleheads.  Bank statements.  Photo albums.  Vinyl records.  Shoes.  Shot glasses.  Jewelry.  Blu-rays.

What does the stuff we collect, consciously or unconsciously, contribute to the story of our lives?

And… what does it mean for us when there’s less of it?

Photo credit: Ticketmaster blog, June 26, 2015

In an opinion piece that appeared in the New York Times earlier this month, columnist Peter Funt laments the obsolescence of analog mementoes in a Digital Age:

And so ticket stubs join theater playbills, picture postcards, handwritten letters and framed photos as fading forms of preserving our memories.  It raises the question, Is our view of the past, of our own personal history, somehow different without hard copies?

Peter Funt, “Does Anyone Collect Old Emails?,” Opinion, New York Times, April 5, 2019

In recent years, I’ve expanded this blog from its initial scope, an exclusively academic forum on storytelling craft, to chronicle my own personal history, often in no particular order.  I am ever and always in search of a clearer, more complete, more honest perspective on my past, and how it has shaped the narrative arc of my life; I mine my memories regularly for content, and for truth.

I have also routinely expressed apprehension about the practices we’ve lost in a Digital Age, the kind to which Mr. Funt refers, particularly as that applies to the corrupted discipline of storytelling itself:  From the superhero crossovers of the “Arrowverse,” to the literary Easter-egg hunt of Castle Rock, to the expansive franchising of Star Wars, today’s popular entertainments are less concerned with saying something meaningful about the human condition than they are with challenging the viewer to catch all their internal cross-references.  Whereas stories once rewarded audiences with insight, now the reward is the esteemed privilege of calling oneself a superfan—a participatory designation earned by following all the breadcrumbs and connecting all the dots… an assignment only achievable if one never misses a new installment:

In a nod to the subscription model of consumption—where we lease cars or pay monthly to a music service—the extended narratives of prestige TV series spread out their climaxes over several years rather than building to a single, motion picture explosion at the end.  But this means energizing the audience and online fan base with puzzles and “spoilers”. . . .

. . . The superfan of commercial entertainment gets rewarded for going to all the associated websites and fan forums, and reading all the official novels.  Superfans know all the answers because they have purchased all the products in the franchise.  Like one of those card games where you keep buying new, expensive packs in order to assemble a powerful team of monsters, all it takes to master a TV show is work and money.

Douglas Rushkoff, Team Human (New York:  W. W. Norton & Company, 2019), 163

Fanboys and -girls thought they were legitimized when the geek subculture went mainstream—when superheroes and sci-fi went from niche hobby to pop-cultural monopoly—but they were really just commodified:  “geek” shifted from a stigmatized social category to a lucrative economic one.  Leveraging our telecommunications-induced FOMO, a new permutation of commercial narrative was contrived:  the “mega-franchise,” which seeks not our intermittent audience, but rather our habitual obedience.  Sure, you may not have even liked the last four Star Wars or Terminator or Transformers movies… but do you really wanna run the risk of skipping this one?

More is more: Every “Star Wars” character has its own backstory and action figure—collect them all!

So, given those two ongoing preoccupations—personal history and receding traditions in the Digital Age—the thesis of “Does Anyone Collect Old Emails?” would’ve spoken to me regardless, but the timing of it was nonetheless uncanny, as I have devoted no small degree of consideration in recent months to the matter of the physical objects we amass, wittingly or otherwise, and how they tether us to the past.  Here’s the story.

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Dreaming Dreams and Seeing Apparitions: On Writing Horror and Fighting Climate Change

October 30, 2018 / / 26 Comments

It certainly occurred to me, ahead of last month’s post, that the blog’s left turn into environmentalism might’ve whiplashed those expecting the customary deep dive into craft or culture.  As part of our training as Climate Reality Leaders, we’re asked to reflect on our personal climate stories—the origins of our interest in the movement—something I’ve invested no small amount of time doing this past month.  To that end, it dawned on me that the very same formative circumstances inspired both my passion for horror fiction and climate activism; they are not unrelated callings but very much part and parcel.

It was at the confluence of the Harlem and Hudson Rivers, my old stomping ground, where many of my first boyhood adventures were undertaken.  My friends and I would scale the towering steel foundational girders of the Henry Hudson Bridge as high as we could climb.  We’d cross Spuyten Duyvil Creek by way of the century-old railroad swing bridge to explore the Indian caves in the vast, lush expanse of Inwood Hill Park at the northernmost tip of Manhattan.  (Incidentally, those caves feature prominently in the 2003 historical fantasy Forever, Pete Hamill’s centuries-spanning ode to Gotham.  Great novel.)

On weekends, my parents would drive us up the Hudson Valley—to Sleepy Hollow or Nyack or Bear Mountain—which was a particularly spellbinding delight this time of year.  It’s a truly magical region that in many respects looks just the same as it did to the Dutch explorers who first arrived in the early seventeenth century—and, more to the point, the Lenape Indians who called the valley their home for a dozen millennia before that.  For the conservation of this land, you can thank—and I can’t believe I’m saying this—J. P. Morgan.

And not just him—George Walbridge Perkins and John D. Rockefeller, too.  Owed in part to the efforts of these forward-thinking businessmen-philanthropists at the turn of the twentieth century, much of the woodlands on the banks of the Hudson was spared from development, as were the Palisades, the magnificent cliffs along the west side of the river.  Consider it:  These capitalists preserved the natural harmony of the Lower Hudson Valley from the ravages of capitalism itself; on account of their preemptive actions, much of it remains to this day virgin forest to be (re)discovered by successive generations.

The woodlands just blocks from where I grew up in the Bronx (photo credit: Sean Carlin, 29 December 2012)

As a writer of supernatural fiction who continues to draw inspiration from this region—virtually all my stories are set there—I walk in the footsteps of literary giants.  Two of the first American authors—horror authors, no less—lived in the area and wrote about it:  Washington Irving and Edgar Allen Poe.  Savor the way Irving lets this “region of shadows,” pregnant with manes, cast a spell over his receptive imagination in the Halloween classic “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”: Continue reading

Living Here in “Allen Town”: The Fight to End Oil Drilling in Los Angeles

September 30, 2018 / / 17 Comments

In the previous post, I addressed recent efforts to emerge from the comfort of my social cocoon and rejoin the human race.  As such, I trained this past summer to be part of the Leadership Corps of the Climate Reality Project, a group of 17,000-plus social and environmental activists who’ve organized to communicate the stories of climate change and inspire urgency to act on this existential crisis.

To that end, I will on occasion be utilizing this blog—which has been from Day One a venue to promote the many forms and functions of storytelling—to talk about matters relating to the climate crisis with the same intellectual curiosity and comprehensive examination as my posts on craft, pop culture, and personal experiences.

I realize this is a subject that tends to provoke either denial or despair, but I have found that the more I learn about it, the more empowered I feel to effect change—and empowerment is the antidote to doomism.

Show of hands:  How many out there are aware that on September 8, organized Rise for Climate rallies were held in ninety-five different countries, on seven different continents, in a grassroots effort to compel a dramatic, immediate, and legislatively mandated transition away from fossil fuels?

Probably not many of you—am I right?  Lay some blame for that on the media.  Even though the nightly news, to hear Al Gore accurately describe it, has become “like a nature hike through the Book of Revelation,” coverage of this past summer’s worldwide extreme weather—the record-breaking heatwaves, hurricanes, and wildfires, for instance—barely if ever connects it, even if only suggestively and nondefinitively, with human-caused climate change.  Such willful denial—known as climate silence—can no longer continue:  Mother Nature is now refusing to be ignored, and so, for that matter, is the environmental movement—both, it seems, have reached a tipping point.

As such, over 900 actions were taken this past month as part of the Rise for Climate initiative.  The big assembly was up in San Francisco, ahead of Governor Jerry Brown’s Global Climate Action Summit on September 12–14; Los Angeles hosted a more modest event, focused on a local environmental campaign:  the establishment of a 2,500-foot health and safety buffer between communities and urban oil-drilling sites—L.A. has 1,071 active wells, 759 of which are located within 1,500 feet of homes, churches, schools, and/or hospitals.

The gathering was convened on West 23rd Street in University Park, South Los Angeles, a tucked-away residential lane with Esperanza Community Housing on one side, and, behind a leafy redbrick façade, the two-acre AllenCo Energy drill site—with its twenty-one oil wells—on the other.  For four years, residents of the underprivileged community complained of noxious odors, nosebleeds, nausea, and respiratory ailments.  “One child living near the site was sent to the hospital with severe headaches, stomach pains and heart problems” (“The AllenCo Site,” STAND-L.A.).  In 2013, after an inspection by the Environmental Protection Agency that “resulted in more than $99,000 in fines,” operations were suspended and AllenCo became the subject of investigations by multiple governmental agencies.

However, earlier this month, “AllenCo sent a written plan to the state Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources citing a ‘planned startup date’ of Oct. 15.  It indicated that the facility would be staffed and operating all day, every day” (Emily Alpert Reyes, “Oil Company Says Disputed Site in South L.A. Could Reopen in October,” Los Angeles Times, September 19, 2018).  For the residents of this South L.A. community, this issue is never closed—it’s a specter that looms, needlessly and perennially, over their daily lives; when a drilling moratorium was imposed on the site five years ago, all that meant was that their children’s health was assured for now.

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