I can pinpoint the exact moment I fell in love with this show. How often can you say that about something? And the exact moment I just knew it was going to change my life. The moment I cried more at any comedy show than I’d cried before (to that point). The moment I knew I was never coming back from my off at the deep end nerdery with it. I didn’t have the words for what it meant. For the reasons that the night I watched the finale I went to bed and cried. The next morning, I sat sobbing- actually sobbing at my desk at 11am. For everything the show had meant, did mean.

In order to get to all that, I thought I’d go through some of the ones I see talked about less, don’t worry we’ll get on to ‘the wine not the label’ and my need for a Queer happy ending. But here’s some other things that made Schitt’s Creek feel like home…

Dressing differently is ok

And that the way you dress says something about you. I’ve never been one who fit in with a ‘mainstream’ look…as a teenager I dressed ‘strangely’ by ‘fashion’ standards and as much as, like Moira I have always adhered to the idea that you can never be over-dressed for an occasion. I realised though I’d been swayed by fears of looking ‘too weird’ ‘too Queer’ and ‘too fat’ (all of which society thinks are terrible things). Subtly this show gave me back my fashion confidence. And not just in the show…Dan Levy going his own way, and truly loving fashion is something teenage me in a weird array of clothes getting beaten up for it…needs to see 30-something Dan Levy living his best fashion life.

Everyone is beautiful (but not in the usual way)

Related to the above, that people in the show look like real people.

Don’t get me wrong, there are some seriously good-looking people in this show. But not Hollywood cookie cutter beautiful. And that’s nice. Because beauty is more than one thing.

30-Somethings living with their parents

Ok so the Rose kids don’t do it by design…but then neither do my fellow Millennial 30-somethings who end up back at home. We didn’t ask to lose our jobs or be priced out of rents…or indeed for a global pandemic to force us back home. And the show always felt like a nice reflection of that, while also showing you can build something great with your parents as a grown up too.

Alexis’ ‘I’m basically his only friend’ about Johnny as a way to say she’ll miss him is important. Not everyone lives a totally separate life to their parents when they leave home. Not least only children like me which leads me on to…

Only children who aren’t a joke

Being an only child is the thing I remember being joked about as much as being ‘Gay’ as a child of the 80s/90s. While Patrick’s being an only child is probably a logistical choice over a narrative one, any other show would have jumped on the chance to make those jokes. About his competitive nature, need to take charge, confidence, even in his ‘coming out’ I can hear the lines about parents ‘disappointed in their only child’…because I’ve heard them all.

But that, just like the Queer characters are allowed to just be, Patrick is allowed to just be an only child without it being an ‘issue’…I don’t know how to express to anyone who hasn’t had ‘only child’ thrown at them to explain their ‘broken’ parts…but it matters. Even if it was coincidental and if anyone in that writer’s room did fight against making ‘only child’ jokes, I thank you.

On the flip side too, that Patrick the only child gets a new extended family in the show is nice too. Only children don’t pine for the siblings we never had…but as an only child with zero extended family and only one parent, I can’t say that the idea of finding a bigger extended family isn’t appealing. Just as long as it doesn’t come with jokes about my not being able to share.

‘You don’t care for children’   

Another set of jokes I’m used to is about not liking children. David babysits a kid like I would- from a distance, staring at Roland Jnr in his pram never touching him, and that is kind of funny. Moira’s ‘No thanks I can see it from here’ is also what I plan to say any time someone brings a baby into an office and tries to foist it on me. Moira too, reminds us not everyone is naturally maternal. She reminds me of my own Mum that way- not enamoured with children or blessed with particularly maternal images (she would likely have put the baby in a different wing given a chance and nurses a cold like Moira does) but she still loves the kid she’s got.

But for those of us, like David who ‘don’t care for children’ or like Moira, lack a natural maternal inclination, the dominant narrative is that we’re wrong, broken.

But it is like many things the way Patrick and David handle the issue of babies that felt like a revelation. The exchange where Patrick simply says ‘plans change’ it feels like a revelation on a par with David’s ‘Wine not the label speech’ because I’ve never watched a show where the character who does want kids is the one who changes their plan. It feels so small maybe to others, I imagine others were outraged- Patrick is ‘denied’ children by David surely…because that’s the dominant narrative.

I’ve been made to feel a failure and a freak for not wanting kids, by dates, by other women, I’ve even been disowned by ‘friends’ for it, made to feel I’m somehow defective for lacking maternal inclinations. Family isn’t just making babies, and I’m really grateful to Patrick (and Dan Levy) for making me feel less of a freak for not wanting them. For acknowledging that babies aren’t a condition of long-lasting love either.

It also goes back to Queer chosen families too- I can be a Mama figure to people in my chosen family, just like I’m already a ‘big sister’ despite having no blood siblings. And that our relationships- friendships and romantic ones are just as important.

Women not defined by their relationships

Something we don’t realise we lack sometimes- because romantic relationships are always the ‘endgame’. Which is why Stevie and Alexis seem so refreshing because both in their own ways, and for their own reasons, don’t end up with romance as their end ‘win. Stevie finds her purpose, and contentment in career, Alexis goes to chase after her dreams, neither of which are dependent on men.

Even Moira- especially Moira- her ‘win’ isn’t dependant on Johnny ‘giving’ her happiness again. She wins in her own right, and her husband follows her to a new chapter in life. That’s the kind of women role model I want on TV.

I love a good romcom, but ‘I got off the plane’ and ‘I’m just a girl, standing in front of a boy.’ Just isn’t enough for our female characters in 2020. More Moira Rose, that’s what we could all do with being. Even if it takes us, like her, a while to get there.

Not knowing what you want to do with your life (and messing it up sometimes)

In that respect, David (and Alexis and Stevie, even Patrick) all chased the wrong dreams at some point. They’ve all messed things up career-wise (ok Patrick seems slightly more sensible but you must have messed up somewhere to end up working for Ray right?!)  And none of them really gets it together until they’re 30-something. I find myself often at the mercy of judgement of other people and myself for not having my life fully together. For chasing things that turn out to be the wrong thing. For changing my mind. Maybe I just haven’t found my ‘Rose Apothecary’ yet.

Wetting the bed

A detour into an odd one, a slightly disgustingly personal one  maybe but bear with me when I say ‘The Incident’ for me was one of the most powerful David and Patrick moments for me. Firstly, the way it deals in the love in the every day, rather than the big moments. But on a personal level, the idea of someone offering love, gross bodily functions and all, was powerful. I have a condition called Ulcerative Colitis, which is similar to Crohn’s disease. If you really want more on me talking all things erm poop, here is a blog). On a really personal level embarrassing things thanks to my body are a reality-and I don’t know it just felt like, underneath the laughs, a really sweet way to acknowledge that actually really love accepts all those kinds of things. And that the right partner in life does the same.

As with a lot of this show, what looks like a funny silly moment to some people, in a show that deals in kindness and acceptance, end up feeling like a revelation to people who see themselves in it.

‘Nobody is thinking about you the way you’re thinking about you.’

I see a lot of me in David Rose, sometimes a ball of anxiety, sometimes someone a bit too selfish, sometimes a big mouth with no filter. Quite often feeling like I’ve failed in life a fair bit, feeling like you’re just a bit much, a bit too damaged for people to stick around for. I can’t actually remember seeing a character on TV that I felt so like- plenty I’ve wanted to be like, but none who felt so familiar.

David gave me a way to explain something to myself I’d never understood too, when Alexis says, ‘David nobody is thinking about you like you’re thinking about you’ It was like a slap in the face and a bucket of cold water, and a revelation. It’s not a revelation that I’m able to take to heart and remember often enough. But the fact that someone else (David) felt like I did- that everyone was talking about, thinking about them- was also a revelation, as was who David was allowed to be in other ways.

‘The Wine Not the Label’

I knew of the ‘wine not the label’ speech long before I started watching the show. And I thought it was a cute, lovely way to talk about pansexuality, and I was glad it was ‘out there’ whatever this show was. But when I got to watching it, I realised just how much I needed David Rose. I’m the same age as David/Dan and I had never heard a character articulate my sexuality as I understood it, so clearly but also, I’d never really seen a pan/bi character just…exist on TV and just exist without it being their only personality trait and narrative, or crucially that doesn’t get erased. David’s pansexuality isn’t questioned, it doesn’t disappear when he’s in a relationship- which often happens in real life as well as on TV- he just is. And it was beautiful to see.

Coming out in your 30s (and changing your mind)

But despite the above, in a really complicated way (as such things are) a little while after rejoicing in David’s ‘the wine not the label’ moment, something shifted in hearing Patrick talk about not knowing what ‘right felt like’. I wrote more about it in another blog, but the revelation, that maybe I hadn’t realised some things about myself was a startling, but important one.  This is why we need more Queer stories, maybe I’d been resting on the narratives I had clutched at as a teenager, and it took someone else to explain something in a different way, to reflect it back on myself.

Regardless of those additional ‘complications’ though, Patrick came to mean so much because, for someone who didn’t come out first until their 20s, but really not until their 30s seeing a ‘Coming Out story’ for grown-ups, not high school kids, also changed everything. To see someone who had waited, who hadn’t perhaps had all the answers, or the language, or even maybe the circumstances. To be told it’s ok, that not everyone gets everything figured out in High School, and not everything is straightforward as announcing it at Prom or to your parents at Friday night dinner and that sometimes we mess it up a bit too. It felt strangely, like having a friend in that character who understood.

Truth be told that episode affected me so much it stayed with me for days and it’s not an episode I’ve been able to re-watch despite its beauty. For me a greatly unsettled feeling that I actually will never get that experience- to come out to one parent, because my Dad died before I could. I’ll never get to come out to one parent. And even if I had, it wouldn’t have gone like that, quite the opposite. And bizarrely that was something I never realised until watching that episode. So, it hurts, but an important kind of hurt.

Queer chosen family

While I might not have got Patrick’s coming out experience in real life, or David’s even, through the show I get to imagine a world where Johnny Rose or Clint Brewer are the kind of Dad life gave me. It might not be true, it might make me sad in a way, but also it also gives me hope. It reminds me those Dads do exist- that Eugene Levy exists in real life and talks so eloquently about supporting his gay son, that he helped his son create this story too gives hope to all of us who don’t have a Johnny or Eugene in our lives.

It gives us hope that we’ll be able to help build that world for other people. I wish I’d had this show as a teenager. But I’m glad I had it in my 30s too, because we need stories that reflect us at all points in our lives.

The family element also extends beyond that moment of escapist ‘what if’ to what it creates in the real world. My Mum shares my love of this show, but she’s also learned so much from it. Despite having read entire PhDs, articles and books I’ve written on Queer culture, she says my writing on this, the conversations we’ve had about the show are the ones she’s learned most from. I think she understands me better from lovingly mocking my similarities with David, and by understanding what Patrick goes through. My Mum is in her 70s, and this show educated her, changed her viewpoints on things, strengthened our relationship… I can’t think of anything more hopeful than that.

Telling your stories

And as a Queer person and a writer, I needed these stories to give me the hope and the confidence to tell my stories.

Because that’s not my authentic set of stories, and why should I shrink that down to make other people feel comfortable? Not to ask permission any more to take up space or mediate my writing or myself in the hope that it makes me and my work more palatable. To, forgive the cliché, write my truth because actually little else is worthwhile.

I might be nobody right now. But maybe someday those stories will get told, and someday change someone who watches or reads them. That’s all we can hope for, right?

Happy Endings…

As a scholar of Queer Culture, as someone who spent their life with their head in how we tell Queer stories, of course the actual happy ending felt huge. I wrote more about it in line with my academic work here. And on a personal level, of course having something happy as a Queer person to dive into, instead of constant grief and trauma driven stories, feels like a revelation. I love a romcom, I love comedy….I waited until my 30s to feel like I had one for me.

The ‘Happy Ending’ of the show is one that I think we all need sometimes. The moments we feel a bit lost like both David and Patrick did at some point- I’m still in my pre-Patrick David Rose phase. But that’s ok. Because what the show did was give me hope. In the moment I watched the finale I needed to let go of some things- in the midst of a pandemic, having everything taken away from me, I felt most keenly of all David’s decision to finally let his life in New York go, and stop fighting for something that wasn’t right. Sometimes you need fictional characters to teach you a lesson you already know.

This story changed me; I think it saved me a little bit too. The end of this essay (and sorry it has been one) isn’t the place for the why and wherefore of that. But I know without a doubt, this show got me through. Not just in the watching of it, the stories it told, but in having something to look forward to, to focus on, while everything fell apart. It might seem impossibly trivial, it mattered. From thinking ‘hey that interview is coming out’ to getting excited about award shows or hanging onto Noah Reid’s albums like they were a life raft it gave me that in times I needed something. I know people mock it, say it’s only TV. To which I say, part of me hopes you never needed those stories that badly, to feel seen that badly. But part of me hopes you do experience that one day, because finding something that speaks to you, whatever it is, always changes things.

The reason I cried so much for the ending of this show, was at that moment I needed it most once again, this little show told me it was ok to be who I am. To be burned and bruised by life, to be the one who doesn’t quite fit in, or who hasn’t found their path or their person yet. And that sometimes, it does work out, even for us.

It got me through the darkest of times, it excited me again as a writer and academic, and it made me feel less alone. Really, the town where everyone fits in.

So in what became a month-long romp through my love for, and some insight into writing a book on Schitt\’s Creek we\’ve done:

How Noah Reid\’s Music got me through 2020

How Writing a Book on Angels in America became a book on Schitt\’s Creek

What this show meant to me, and why it took a while to write on it.

And you can support the crowdfunded for 404 Ink\’s Inklings series of which my mini-book on this show Love the Journey for Me is a title here.

And here? here is a somewhat random collection of some bits that have really meant something to me in this show and why (non-exhaustive, I\’ll always have more to say)

I can pinpoint the exact moment I fell in love with this show. How often can you say that about something? And the exact moment I just knew it was going to change my life. The moment I cried more at any comedy show than I’d cried before (to that point). The moment I knew I was never coming back from my off at the deep end nerdery with it. I didn’t have the words for what it meant. For the reasons that the night I watched the finale I went to bed and cried. The next morning, I sat sobbing- actually sobbing at my desk at 11am. For everything the show had meant, did mean.

 

In order to get to all that, I thought I’d go through some of the ones I see talked about less, don’t worry we’ll get on to ‘the wine not the label’ and my need for a Queer happy ending. But here’s some other things that made Schitt’s Creek feel like home…

 

 

Dressing differently is ok

 

And that the way you dress says something about you. I’ve never been one who fit in with a ‘mainstream’ look…as a teenager I dressed ‘strangely’ by ‘fashion’ standards and as much as, like Moira I have always adhered to the idea that you can never be over-dressed for an occasion. I realised though I’d been swayed by fears of looking ‘too weird’ ‘too Queer’ and ‘too fat’ (all of which society thinks are terrible things). Subtly this show gave me back my fashion confidence. And not just in the show…Dan Levy going his own way, and truly loving fashion is something teenage me in a weird array of clothes getting beaten up for it…needs to see 30-something Dan Levy living his best fashion life.

 

 

Everyone is beautiful (but not in the usual way)

 

Related to the above, that people in the show look like real people.

 

Don’t get me wrong, there are some seriously good-looking people in this show. But not Hollywood cookie cutter beautiful. And that’s nice. Because beauty is more than one thing.

 

 

30-Somethings living with their parents

 

Ok so the Rose kids don’t do it by design…but then neither do my fellow Millennial 30-somethings who end up back at home. We didn’t ask to lose our jobs or be priced out of rents…or indeed for a global pandemic to force us back home. And the show always felt like a nice reflection of that, while also showing you can build something great with your parents as a grown up too.

Alexis’ ‘I’m basically his only friend’ about Johnny as a way to say she’ll miss him is important. Not everyone lives a totally separate life to their parents when they leave home. Not least only children like me which leads me on to…

 

Only children who aren’t a joke

 

Being an only child is the thing I remember being joked about as much as being ‘Gay’ as a child of the 80s/90s. While Patrick’s being an only child is probably a logistical choice over a narrative one, any other show would have jumped on the chance to make those jokes. About his competitive nature, need to take charge, confidence, even in his ‘coming out’ I can hear the lines about parents ‘disappointed in their only child’…because I’ve heard them all.

 

But that, just like the Queer characters are allowed to just be, Patrick is allowed to just be an only child without it being an ‘issue’…I don’t know how to express to anyone who hasn’t had ‘only child’ thrown at them to explain their ‘broken’ parts…but it matters. Even if it was coincidental and if anyone in that writer’s room did fight against making ‘only child’ jokes, I thank you.

 

On the flip side too, that Patrick the only child gets a new extended family in the show is nice too. Only children don’t pine for the siblings we never had…but as an only child with zero extended family and only one parent, I can’t say that the idea of finding a bigger extended family isn’t appealing. Just as long as it doesn’t come with jokes about my not being able to share.

 

 

‘You don’t care for children’   

 

Another set of jokes I’m used to is about not liking children. David babysits a kid like I would- from a distance, staring at Roland Jnr in his pram never touching him, and that is kind of funny. Moira’s ‘No thanks I can see it from here’ is also what I plan to say any time someone brings a baby into an office and tries to foist it on me. Moira too, reminds us not everyone is naturally maternal. She reminds me of my own Mum that way- not enamoured with children or blessed with particularly maternal images (she would likely have put the baby in a different wing given a chance and nurses a cold like Moira does) but she still loves the kid she’s got.

 

But for those of us, like David who ‘don’t care for children’ or like Moira, lack a natural maternal inclination, the dominant narrative is that we’re wrong, broken.

 

But it is like many things the way Patrick and David handle the issue of babies that felt like a revelation. The exchange where Patrick simply says ‘plans change’ it feels like a revelation on a par with David’s ‘Wine not the label speech’ because I’ve never watched a show where the character who does want kids is the one who changes their plan. It feels so small maybe to others, I imagine others were outraged- Patrick is ‘denied’ children by David surely…because that’s the dominant narrative.

 

I’ve been made to feel a failure and a freak for not wanting kids, by dates, by other women, I’ve even been disowned by ‘friends’ for it, made to feel I’m somehow defective for lacking maternal inclinations. Family isn’t just making babies, and I’m really grateful to Patrick (and Dan Levy) for making me feel less of a freak for not wanting them. For acknowledging that babies aren’t a condition of long-lasting love either.

 

It also goes back to Queer chosen families too- I can be a Mama figure to people in my chosen family, just like I’m already a ‘big sister’ despite having no blood siblings. And that our relationships- friendships and romantic ones are just as important.

 

Women not defined by their relationships

 

Something we don’t realise we lack sometimes- because romantic relationships are always the ‘endgame’. Which is why Stevie and Alexis seem so refreshing because both in their own ways, and for their own reasons, don’t end up with romance as their end ‘win. Stevie finds her purpose, and contentment in career, Alexis goes to chase after her dreams, neither of which are dependent on men.

Even Moira- especially Moira- her ‘win’ isn’t dependant on Johnny ‘giving’ her happiness again. She wins in her own right, and her husband follows her to a new chapter in life. That’s the kind of women role model I want on TV.

 

I love a good romcom, but ‘I got off the plane’ and ‘I’m just a girl, standing in front of a boy.’ Just isn’t enough for our female characters in 2020. More Moira Rose, that’s what we could all do with being. Even if it takes us, like her, a while to get there.

 

 

Not knowing what you want to do with your life (and messing it up sometimes)

 

In that respect, David (and Alexis and Stevie, even Patrick) all chased the wrong dreams at some point. They’ve all messed things up career-wise (ok Patrick seems slightly more sensible but you must have messed up somewhere to end up working for Ray right?!)  And none of them really gets it together until they’re 30-something. I find myself often at the mercy of judgement of other people and myself for not having my life fully together. For chasing things that turn out to be the wrong thing. For changing my mind. Maybe I just haven’t found my ‘Rose Apothecary’ yet.

 

 

Wetting the bed

 

A detour into an odd one, a slightly disgustingly personal one  maybe but bear with me when I say ‘The Incident’ for me was one of the most powerful David and Patrick moments for me. Firstly, the way it deals in the love in the every day, rather than the big moments. But on a personal level, the idea of someone offering love, gross bodily functions and all, was powerful. I have a condition called Ulcerative Colitis, which is similar to Crohn’s disease. If you really want more on me talking all things erm poop, here is a blog). On a really personal level embarrassing things thanks to my body are a reality-and I don’t know it just felt like, underneath the laughs, a really sweet way to acknowledge that actually really love accepts all those kinds of things. And that the right partner in life does the same.

 

As with a lot of this show, what looks like a funny silly moment to some people, in a show that deals in kindness and acceptance, end up feeling like a revelation to people who see themselves in it.

 

‘Nobody is thinking about you the way you’re thinking about you.’

 

 

I see a lot of me in David Rose, sometimes a ball of anxiety, sometimes someone a bit too selfish, sometimes a big mouth with no filter. Quite often feeling like I’ve failed in life a fair bit, feeling like you’re just a bit much, a bit too damaged for people to stick around for. I can’t actually remember seeing a character on TV that I felt so like- plenty I’ve wanted to be like, but none who felt so familiar.

 

David gave me a way to explain something to myself I’d never understood too, when Alexis says, ‘David nobody is thinking about you like you’re thinking about you’ It was like a slap in the face and a bucket of cold water, and a revelation. It’s not a revelation that I’m able to take to heart and remember often enough. But the fact that someone else (David) felt like I did- that everyone was talking about, thinking about them- was also a revelation, as was who David was allowed to be in other ways.

 

 

‘The Wine Not the Label’

 

I knew of the ‘wine not the label’ speech long before I started watching the show. And I thought it was a cute, lovely way to talk about pansexuality, and I was glad it was ‘out there’ whatever this show was. But when I got to watching it, I realised just how much I needed David Rose. I’m the same age as David/Dan and I had never heard a character articulate my sexuality as I understood it, so clearly but also, I’d never really seen a pan/bi character just…exist on TV and just exist without it being their only personality trait and narrative, or crucially that doesn’t get erased. David’s pansexuality isn’t questioned, it doesn’t disappear when he’s in a relationship- which often happens in real life as well as on TV- he just is. And it was beautiful to see.

 

 

Coming out in your 30s (and changing your mind)

 

But despite the above, in a really complicated way (as such things are) a little while after rejoicing in David’s ‘the wine not the label’ moment, something shifted in hearing Patrick talk about not knowing what ‘right felt like’. I wrote more about it in another blog, but the revelation, that maybe I hadn’t realised some things about myself was a startling, but important one.  This is why we need more Queer stories, maybe I’d been resting on the narratives I had clutched at as a teenager, and it took someone else to explain something in a different way, to reflect it back on myself.

 

Regardless of those additional ‘complications’ though, Patrick came to mean so much because, for someone who didn’t come out first until their 20s, but really not until their 30s seeing a ‘Coming Out story’ for grown-ups, not high school kids, also changed everything. To see someone who had waited, who hadn’t perhaps had all the answers, or the language, or even maybe the circumstances. To be told it’s ok, that not everyone gets everything figured out in High School, and not everything is straightforward as announcing it at Prom or to your parents at Friday night dinner and that sometimes we mess it up a bit too. It felt strangely, like having a friend in that character who understood.

 

Truth be told that episode affected me so much it stayed with me for days and it\’s not an episode I’ve been able to re-watch despite its beauty. For me a greatly unsettled feeling that I actually will never get that experience- to come out to one parent, because my Dad died before I could. I’ll never get to come out to one parent. And even if I had, it wouldn’t have gone like that, quite the opposite. And bizarrely that was something I never realised until watching that episode. So, it hurts, but an important kind of hurt.

 

Queer chosen family

 

While I might not have got Patrick’s coming out experience in real life, or David’s even, through the show I get to imagine a world where Johnny Rose or Clint Brewer are the kind of Dad life gave me. It might not be true, it might make me sad in a way, but also it also gives me hope. It reminds me those Dads do exist- that Eugene Levy exists in real life and talks so eloquently about supporting his gay son, that he helped his son create this story too gives hope to all of us who don’t have a Johnny or Eugene in our lives.

 

It gives us hope that we’ll be able to help build that world for other people. I wish I’d had this show as a teenager. But I’m glad I had it in my 30s too, because we need stories that reflect us at all points in our lives.

 

The family element also extends beyond that moment of escapist ‘what if’ to what it creates in the real world. My Mum shares my love of this show, but she’s also learned so much from it. Despite having read entire PhDs, articles and books I’ve written on Queer culture, she says my writing on this, the conversations we’ve had about the show are the ones she’s learned most from. I think she understands me better from lovingly mocking my similarities with David, and by understanding what Patrick goes through. My Mum is in her 70s, and this show educated her, changed her viewpoints on things, strengthened our relationship… I can’t think of anything more hopeful than that.

 

Telling your stories

 

And as a Queer person and a writer, I needed these stories to give me the hope and the confidence to tell my stories.

 

Because that’s not my authentic set of stories, and why should I shrink that down to make other people feel comfortable? Not to ask permission any more to take up space or mediate my writing or myself in the hope that it makes me and my work more palatable. To, forgive the cliché, write my truth because actually little else is worthwhile.

 

I might be nobody right now. But maybe someday those stories will get told, and someday change someone who watches or reads them. That’s all we can hope for, right?

 

Happy Endings…

 

As a scholar of Queer Culture, as someone who spent their life with their head in how we tell Queer stories, of course the actual happy ending felt huge. I wrote more about it in line with my academic work here. And on a personal level, of course having something happy as a Queer person to dive into, instead of constant grief and trauma driven stories, feels like a revelation. I love a romcom, I love comedy….I waited until my 30s to feel like I had one for me.

 

The ‘Happy Ending’ of the show is one that I think we all need sometimes. The moments we feel a bit lost like both David and Patrick did at some point- I’m still in my pre-Patrick David Rose phase. But that’s ok. Because what the show did was give me hope. In the moment I watched the finale I needed to let go of some things- in the midst of a pandemic, having everything taken away from me, I felt most keenly of all David’s decision to finally let his life in New York go, and stop fighting for something that wasn’t right. Sometimes you need fictional characters to teach you a lesson you already know.

 

This story changed me; I think it saved me a little bit too. The end of this essay (and sorry it has been one) isn’t the place for the why and wherefore of that. But I know without a doubt, this show got me through. Not just in the watching of it, the stories it told, but in having something to look forward to, to focus on, while everything fell apart. It might seem impossibly trivial, it mattered. From thinking ‘hey that interview is coming out’ to getting excited about award shows or hanging onto Noah Reid’s albums like they were a life raft it gave me that in times I needed something. I know people mock it, say it’s only TV. To which I say, part of me hopes you never needed those stories that badly, to feel seen that badly. But part of me hopes you do experience that one day, because finding something that speaks to you, whatever it is, always changes things.

 

The reason I cried so much for the ending of this show, was at that moment I needed it most once again, this little show told me it was ok to be who I am. To be burned and bruised by life, to be the one who doesn’t quite fit in, or who hasn’t found their path or their person yet. And that sometimes, it does work out, even for us.

 

It got me through the darkest of times, it excited me again as a writer and academic, and it made me feel less alone. Really, the town where everyone fits in.

Last week I wrote about what Schitt’s Creek meant to me, and why I needed to write about it. (You can read that here )

My ‘Inklings’ book with 404 Ink aligns perfectly with my academic and fangirl brain because that’s where this whole thing started. Specifically, while trying to finish my ‘academic’ book on Angels in America. I used watching the final season of Schitt’s Creek as bribery.

Long story short there’s now a Dan Levy quote in my book on Angels in America. I’m weirdly proud of that.

And here, for the maybe three people who share my nerdy interests, is a deep dive into the weird connections my brain made while doing both, that I quite frankly can’t fit anywhere else.

First, a little aside. In 2005, in a video store in Montreal, my flatmate suggested renting Angels in America (forever calling that no-brand video store Rose Video now). That was a particularly dark time otherwise, and that series/play ended up changing my life because I got a bit too nerdy about it. 2015, a decade later, a little Canadian show started…I’ve got nothing deeper other than video stores and Canada there….

So what weirdness did my brain come up with looking at both side by side? how do even I link seminal, Brechtian Epic AIDS play and quirky Canadian comedy? good question… a huge part of what I (try) to do is look at the big picture. ‘Know your history’ I’m fond of saying to students. My biggest fight with my Literature Purist PhD supervisors, aside from War Horse (long story) was that I wanted context.

This is because we are a minority telling stories, we are not the dominant cultural narrative. So, we become interlinked, consciously or otherwise. In our writing, and our reading of these stories. Therefore, even if in the subject matter they seem worlds apart, the existence of work like Angels in America has allowed work like Schitt’s Creek to exist. In the same way, we have any rights as LGBTQ+ people, we needed people before us to kick down that door so that we can ask for more. And that’s how I see the through-line of theatre and TV. Most often theatre did a lot of that door kicking for Queer representation so TV and film could follow. Know your history.

Of course, Angels didn’t kick down that first door. Angels owe a debt too, to those who went before openly- the Mart Crawleys with The Boys in the Band the Martin Shermans with Bent giving us contemporary and historical stories about Queer people. It took those who hid their Queerness like Tennessee Williams for the stage or Christopher Isherwood (more on him later) on the page. And those who didn’t in their lifetimes and stayed closeted like EM Forster, or those who were outed, and couldn’t finish what they started, like Oscar Wilde, but so many others too.  So many whose names and stories we never heard.

To use another ‘know your history’ example, it is the ‘I belong to a culture’ speech from The Normal Heart. And, if ever there was a man kicking down doors, it was Kramer- when he says, ‘I belong to a culture.’ Ned’s speech begins ‘I belong to a culture that includes Proust, Henry James, Tchaikovsky, Cole Porter, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle….’ He goes on and adds ‘These are not invisible men’. The point being of course they were…in terms of their true identity, in terms of the stories we tell. He includes EM Forster- a man who stopped publishing his work when he started writing gay stories, he includes Auden, Byron, Tennessee Williams, all of whom hid their sexuality in plain sight. He says, ‘all through history we’ve been here.’ And that’s what I talk about when I talk about that ‘through line’ in Queer history.

All my work is that speech really- connecting those dots. At least that’s what I’d hope it to be, plan it to be. (points for that reference). Actually, that’s all I want to do- with my critical writing, my creative writing, connect those dots, continue that conversation.

My obvious Queer-connecting dots with Schitt’s Creek were, of course, an academic of musicals, the Cabaret connection. I damn near lost my mind when they shifted Patrick from Cliff to the Emcee, for reasons that need (and have) their own essay. But as my poor students of the last year or so know, the through-line-history of Cabaret to Schitt’s Creek, from pre-war Queer short story to genre-defining Queer comedy…it is very very much my particular brand of nerding. Know your history. Or ‘Go know’ to quote Kushner.

And I can’t tell you how damn excited thinking about talking about the Cabaret connection made me, in a ‘need to share all this somehow’ way that I hadn’t had for a long time.

Admittedly I was losing my mind in summer 2020 (and every month beyond truth be told) while writing the book. But in writing about Angels that ‘through line’ lingered and with my ‘distraction’ and ‘bribery’ Queer show, I started connecting the dots between the two in my slightly pandemic-addled brain. I looked at Joe’s closeted existence in New York far from home, and saw his sad, desperate coming out over the phone to his Mom…and I saw the happy parallel in Schitt’s Creek with Patrick. I looked at ‘Mother Pitt’ who said, ‘You’re old enough to know your father didn’t love you without being ridiculous about it’ to her son’s coming out and represented a particular kind of coming out experience in stories and related it to becoming Moira saying, ‘it isn’t a phase’ and accept their children unconditionally. And thought that we now tell stories where the ‘Joes’ are now ‘Patricks’. Or I looked at Louis, neurotic, full of ideas, who says the wrong thing so often, who feels like a failure, and who makes terrible choices but isn’t a terrible person but who loses the love of his life in doing so. And I thought the Louis’ of our stories could one day becomes the ‘Davids’.

These are just the slightly unhinged parallels that exist in my mind, from two things I happen to have filled up my mind with, that I happen to love as my Queer stories. But the bigger point is, when Angels was written those were the characters whose stories needed to be told. And in knowing that, we look at the new, and see how far we’ve come. That isn’t a revolutionary idea of course, but it’s important to acknowledge that debt of history, of stories.

Just like when Waugh wrote Brideshead Revisited or Forster wrote Maurice or of course, Isherwood wrote Goodbye to Berlin those were the Queer characters at that moment whose voices were needed. And there’s a through-line to what we have today, to Schitt’s Creek, not a direct one (though there is of course in those examples) but in the cumulative canon of storytelling, and those people kicking down the doors ahead of it.

In Brideshead we have the wine metaphor, and the ambiguity of a character’s sexuality, his infatuation with Sebastian which maybe (or not) leads to something more. In Maurice, we have one of the first (and if I may) most lovely of ‘happy endings’ for a Queer love story. And in Goodbye to Berlin, we have …Sally Bowles, the Emcee and my favourite, ever-evolving through-line of Queer stories…from short story to play, to musical, to film to musical in a little TV show.

The point (‘the point dear the point’ quote Angels) is that these are my personal Queer through lines. So, I saw Patrick in Joe Pitt, I saw Moira in Mother Pitt and I saw Louis in David because these are the stories I used to construct my histories. Finding my stories.

Because in being a Queer person consuming media, I’m forever constructing my own histories. When my history isn’t the dominant one, I have to pull together the bits and pieces I can find until I can construct a story. These roads all lead to one place for me, for others they sound like nonsense. But that’s ok when we’re all writing our own history.

And so, what I incorporated into my book on Angels was the fact, that in that play, Kushner shows gay men just being…gay men. Unapologetically living their lives, and of course in context, cut short by AIDS, by homophobia and a Government set on denying basic human rights. But (so this bit of my book argues) Kushner was doing his bit for kicking down doors- or more accurately throwing Angels through the ceiling-the power of Angels which shows five gay men, on stage, and doesn’t apologise for their sexuality or expression of it, is still a rarity today. While representation might have increased- on TV perhaps more so than even in theatre and certainly in films- such as Black Mirror or Greys Anatomy continues to bring LGBTQ+ characters into a more ‘mainstream ‘non-queer show’ and in my moment of being stuck and ultimately in the book I made the comparison with Schitt’s Creek and what Dan Levy has said about the ongoing resistance to telling gay stories;

‘I know that in writer’s rooms across North America there are still conversations about how much is too much when it comes to intimacy between, in my case, two men. That’s an insane conversation to be having. Like, ‘How many times can we show them kissing on-air?’ (The Advocate, 2019)

That quote became the unlocking of what I wanted to say about the importance of the play I was writing about, and why that show had become so important to me in the process of writing it. That Angels was part of a through-line that led to this show I loved now-. Levy said, he hopes audiences learn acceptance ‘by osmosis’ in that respect, in contrast to what he calls the ‘extreme tragedy’ of many Queer narratives, even today,

And based on that, the personal through-line, the history we curate for ourselves, it took me several months to also have the revelation as to why during the most painful time of writing my book on the ‘definitive AIDS play of the 20^th century’ that I went off at the deep end on Schitt’s Creek?

Happy Endings.

I’ve spent a decade of my life writing about AIDS theatre. Reading these plays, living these stories over and over. My head stuck in these years of Queer trauma, discrimination and death. Arguing for these stories to be told. Reading over and over the tragic stories that are grounded in an even more tragic reality that I was also reading. And I just wanted a happy Queer story.

So, on a personal level of my academic work this show meant a lot. It was, while I worked on the book of a play that changed my career, and my life, I was able to have the quiet revelation that, there was a hopeful future. This isn’t the place for it either, but I see Schitt’s Creek in that academic way as part of the post-AIDS era storytelling.

I didn’t realise it at the time, but I was so excited because for me it was part of an evolution of Queer storytelling, I could trace a though-line to in my other work, and a wonderful, beautiful gear change in that; that happy endings, the Queer men free from having to talk about AIDS to be allowed to be sexual beings, without the show also has to be an information film as well. This is very niche in some ways, a thing probably most viewers never even think of- probably even the writers never did- but it was important to me. Especially with my head in that book. Niche, but again it was something I needed right then.

I was also writing about a pandemic in a pandemic. Not least I was writing about a pandemic in which people were neglected by Governments, allowed to die…and I was living through that as well. Is that why so many Queer people also leaned into Schitt’s Creek too? Consciously or unconsciously, whether AIDS is, like for me, something ingrained in our personal work and activism, or whether it’s a memory or a piece of history. AIDS is part of Queer History, and Queer trauma too. And in living through another pandemic surely most of us on some level remembered that? There is something about being part of a group that has a lost generation, and a generation lost to a pandemic in such recent history that affected how collectively and individually we were responding. And that maybe for that reason too, as Queer people we desperately needed to lose ourselves in a happy story, in positive representation as a counter to that. To be blunt, seeing this kind of poster, and not the AIDS information film ones, is an apt comparison.

Because it takes toll, maybe not for all academics, but for the work I do, I had always put my all into it, emotional investment included, and ten years of that, of those stories- as much as there’s hope in the sadness, will take a toll. I realised I had shut down emotionally. A combination of burning out from my own work (writing a book will do that to you regardless of topic but also writing a book about a pandemic and how we responded, how governments neglected us so we turned to art…in a pandemic where that particular artform was halted?

I’m surprised I was still standing (actually by March 2021 when I write this…I’m not really).

But I lost my fight for ‘my’ work…when Russell T Davies’ It’s a Sin was broadcast, I struggled to connect with it, joking to my friends I was officially ‘dead inside’. I waited a decade for one of my favourite writers to tell me that story and I couldn’t appreciate it. Not in the moment anyway. Too many stories of a pandemic, in a pandemic, too much of me thrown at trying to get the world to listen to them.

I couldn’t bring myself to ‘hustle’ to write stories on Rent’s 25^th anniversary. Rent one of my first loves, and I had nothing left…after a decade of writing about Pandemic Queer Stories, another pandemic had broken my ability to do it.

In finishing that book in the midst of this pandemic, I think I lost the ability that had always been both my secret weapon and downfall as an academic- how strongly I felt it.

And so I leaned my nerding and my passion into this set of happy Queer stories. Because not only did I personally need it (more on that in my next blog) but because my academic, nerd brain also needed that, not reset, but evolution.

And so this little book of mine happened. And just like with the show itself, I found joy in writing it. Found energy in talking about telling Queer stories, our culture and history again. I realised I still do want to talk about how we tell those stories. I just needed perhaps a change of gears. And that perhaps its time to hand the other stuff onto someone else.

Time for the stories I tell about stories to change, just like those stories have changed too. I know my history and maybe it’s time to be more about where we are now- taking all that with me. Like that through-line of stories, we all have to adapt and change, find something new to put our energy into in order to do it right. I’ve often joked that in another life I’d be a Doctor of Sitcoms and Romcoms, maybe this little show I love is the start of being able to be a Doctor of Queer Romcoms and Sitcoms instead of Queer pandemics and loss. And wouldn’t that be something?

 You can pre-order my ‘Inklings’ short book on Schitt’s Creek with 404 Ink here

I can write an essay on Moira\’s premiere dress

Last week I wrote about what Schitt\’s Creek meant to me, and why I needed to write about it. (You can read that here )

My \’Inklings\’ book with 404 Ink aligns perfectly with my academic and fangirl brain because that\’s where this whole thing started. Specifically, while trying to finish my \’academic\’ book on Angels in America. I used watching the final season of Schitt\’s Creek as bribery.

Long story short there’s now a Dan Levy quote in my book on Angels in America. I’m weirdly proud of that.

And here, for the maybe three people who share my nerdy interests, is a deep dive into the weird connections my brain made while doing both, that I quite frankly can\’t fit anywhere else.

this moment, really is what keeps me writing about this play

First, a little aside. In 2005, in a video store in Montreal, my flatmate suggested renting Angels in America (forever calling that no-brand video store Rose Video now). That was a particularly dark time otherwise, and that series/play ended up changing my life because I got a bit too nerdy about it. 2015, a decade later, a little Canadian show started…I\’ve got nothing deeper other than video stores and Canada there….

So what weirdness did my brain come up with looking at both side by side? how do even I link seminal, Brechtian Epic AIDS play and quirky Canadian comedy? good question… a huge part of what I (try) to do is look at the big picture. \’Know your history\’ I\’m fond of saying to students. My biggest fight with my Literature Purist PhD supervisors, aside from War Horse (long story) was that I wanted context.

Do your research, just like Louis…just don\’t be happy about it.

 

This is because we are a minority telling stories, we are not the dominant cultural narrative. So, we become interlinked, consciously or otherwise. In our writing, and our reading of these stories. Therefore, even if in the subject matter they seem worlds apart, the existence of work like Angels in America has allowed work like Schitt’s Creek to exist. In the same way, we have any rights as LGBTQ+ people, we needed people before us to kick down that door so that we can ask for more. And that’s how I see the through-line of theatre and TV. Most often theatre did a lot of that door kicking for Queer representation so TV and film could follow. Know your history.

 

Of course, Angels didn’t kick down that first door. Angels owe a debt too, to those who went before openly- the Mart Crawleys with The Boys in the Band the Martin Shermans with Bent giving us contemporary and historical stories about Queer people. It took those who hid their Queerness like Tennessee Williams for the stage or Christopher Isherwood (more on him later) on the page. And those who didn’t in their lifetimes and stayed closeted like EM Forster, or those who were outed, and couldn’t finish what they started, like Oscar Wilde, but so many others too.  So many whose names and stories we never heard.

The Normal Heart- which urges us to know our recent history, and those we lost

 

To use another ‘know your history’ example, it is the ‘I belong to a culture’ speech from The Normal Heart. And, if ever there was a man kicking down doors, it was Kramer- when he says, ‘I belong to a culture.\’ Ned’s speech begins ‘I belong to a culture that includes Proust, Henry James, Tchaikovsky, Cole Porter, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle….’ He goes on and adds ‘These are not invisible men’. The point being of course they were…in terms of their true identity, in terms of the stories we tell. He includes EM Forster- a man who stopped publishing his work when he started writing gay stories, he includes Auden, Byron, Tennessee Williams, all of whom hid their sexuality in plain sight. He says, ‘all through history we’ve been here.’ And that’s what I talk about when I talk about that ‘through line’ in Queer history.

All my work is that speech really- connecting those dots. At least that\’s what I\’d hope it to be, plan it to be. (points for that reference). Actually, that\’s all I want to do- with my critical writing, my creative writing, connect those dots, continue that conversation.

The Normal Heart- an angry necessary part of that storytelling

 

My obvious Queer-connecting dots with Schitt\’s Creek were, of course, an academic of musicals, the Cabaret connection. I damn near lost my mind when they shifted Patrick from Cliff to the Emcee, for reasons that need (and have) their own essay. But as my poor students of the last year or so know, the through-line-history of Cabaret to Schitt’s Creek, from pre-war Queer short story to genre-defining Queer comedy…it is very very much my particular brand of nerding. Know your history. Or ‘Go know’ to quote Kushner.

this picture will forever feel like home

And I can\’t tell you how damn excited thinking about talking about the Cabaret connection made me, in a \’need to share all this somehow\’ way that I hadn\’t had for a long time.

 

Admittedly I was losing my mind in summer 2020 (and every month beyond truth be told) while writing the book. But in writing about Angels that ‘through line’ lingered and with my ‘distraction’ and ‘bribery’ Queer show, I started connecting the dots between the two in my slightly pandemic-addled brain. I looked at Joe’s closeted existence in New York far from home, and saw his sad, desperate coming out over the phone to his Mom…and I saw the happy parallel in Schitt’s Creek with Patrick. I looked at ‘Mother Pitt’ who said, ‘You’re old enough to know your father didn’t love you without being ridiculous about it’ to her son’s coming out and represented a particular kind of coming out experience in stories and related it to becoming Moira saying, ‘it isn’t a phase’ and accept their children unconditionally. And thought that we now tell stories where the ‘Joes’ are now ‘Patricks’. Or I looked at Louis, neurotic, full of ideas, who says the wrong thing so often, who feels like a failure, and who makes terrible choices but isn’t a terrible person but who loses the love of his life in doing so. And I thought the Louis’ of our stories could one day becomes the ‘Davids’.

I\’m so obsessed with Moira\’s look for the party.

These are just the slightly unhinged parallels that exist in my mind, from two things I happen to have filled up my mind with, that I happen to love as my Queer stories. But the bigger point is, when Angels was written those were the characters whose stories needed to be told. And in knowing that, we look at the new, and see how far we’ve come. That isn’t a revolutionary idea of course, but it’s important to acknowledge that debt of history, of stories.

Me visited by ghosts of Queer stories past

Just like when Waugh wrote Brideshead Revisited or Forster wrote Maurice or of course, Isherwood wrote Goodbye to Berlin those were the Queer characters at that moment whose voices were needed. And there’s a through-line to what we have today, to Schitt’s Creek, not a direct one (though there is of course in those examples) but in the cumulative canon of storytelling, and those people kicking down the doors ahead of it.

 

In Brideshead we have the wine metaphor, and the ambiguity of a character’s sexuality, his infatuation with Sebastian which maybe (or not) leads to something more. In Maurice, we have one of the first (and if I may) most lovely of ‘happy endings’ for a Queer love story. And in Goodbye to Berlin, we have …Sally Bowles, the Emcee and my favourite, ever-evolving through-line of Queer stories…from short story to play, to musical, to film to musical in a little TV show.

honestly, my brain practically explodes trying to write about Cabaret in Schitt\’s Creek, in a good way

 

The point (‘the point dear the point’ quote Angels) is that these are my personal Queer through lines. So, I saw Patrick in Joe Pitt, I saw Moira in Mother Pitt and I saw Louis in David because these are the stories I used to construct my histories. Finding my stories.

true fear is a boyfriend with an acoustic guitar

Because in being a Queer person consuming media, I’m forever constructing my own histories. When my history isn’t the dominant one, I have to pull together the bits and pieces I can find until I can construct a story. These roads all lead to one place for me, for others they sound like nonsense. But that’s ok when we’re all writing our own history.

 

And so, what I incorporated into my book on Angels was the fact, that in that play, Kushner shows gay men just being…gay men. Unapologetically living their lives, and of course in context, cut short by AIDS, by homophobia and a Government set on denying basic human rights. But (so this bit of my book argues) Kushner was doing his bit for kicking down doors- or more accurately throwing Angels through the ceiling-the power of Angels which shows five gay men, on stage, and doesn’t apologise for their sexuality or expression of it, is still a rarity today. While representation might have increased- on TV perhaps more so than even in theatre and certainly in films- such as Black Mirror or Greys Anatomy continues to bring LGBTQ+ characters into a more ‘mainstream ‘non-queer show’ and in my moment of being stuck and ultimately in the book I made the comparison with Schitt’s Creek and what Dan Levy has said about the ongoing resistance to telling gay stories;

 

‘I know that in writer’s rooms across North America there are still conversations about how much is too much when it comes to intimacy between, in my case, two men. That’s an insane conversation to be having. Like, ‘How many times can we show them kissing on-air?’ (The Advocate, 2019)

That quote became the unlocking of what I wanted to say about the importance of the play I was writing about, and why that show had become so important to me in the process of writing it. That Angels was part of a through-line that led to this show I loved now-. Levy said, he hopes audiences learn acceptance ‘by osmosis’ in that respect, in contrast to what he calls the ‘extreme tragedy’ of many Queer narratives, even today,

 

And based on that, the personal through-line, the history we curate for ourselves, it took me several months to also have the revelation as to why during the most painful time of writing my book on the ‘definitive AIDS play of the 20th century’ that I went off at the deep end on Schitt’s Creek?

 

Happy Endings.

 

I’ve spent a decade of my life writing about AIDS theatre. Reading these plays, living these stories over and over. My head stuck in these years of Queer trauma, discrimination and death. Arguing for these stories to be told. Reading over and over the tragic stories that are grounded in an even more tragic reality that I was also reading. And I just wanted a happy Queer story.

 

So, on a personal level of my academic work this show meant a lot. It was, while I worked on the book of a play that changed my career, and my life, I was able to have the quiet revelation that, there was a hopeful future. This isn’t the place for it either, but I see Schitt’s Creek in that academic way as part of the post-AIDS era storytelling.

 

I didn’t realise it at the time, but I was so excited because for me it was part of an evolution of Queer storytelling, I could trace a though-line to in my other work, and a wonderful, beautiful gear change in that; that happy endings, the Queer men free from having to talk about AIDS to be allowed to be sexual beings, without the show also has to be an information film as well. This is very niche in some ways, a thing probably most viewers never even think of- probably even the writers never did- but it was important to me. Especially with my head in that book. Niche, but again it was something I needed right then.

 

I was also writing about a pandemic in a pandemic. Not least I was writing about a pandemic in which people were neglected by Governments, allowed to die…and I was living through that as well. Is that why so many Queer people also leaned into Schitt’s Creek too? Consciously or unconsciously, whether AIDS is, like for me, something ingrained in our personal work and activism, or whether it’s a memory or a piece of history. AIDS is part of Queer History, and Queer trauma too. And in living through another pandemic surely most of us on some level remembered that? There is something about being part of a group that has a lost generation, and a generation lost to a pandemic in such recent history that affected how collectively and individually we were responding. And that maybe for that reason too, as Queer people we desperately needed to lose ourselves in a happy story, in positive representation as a counter to that. To be blunt, seeing this kind of poster, and not the AIDS information film ones, is an apt comparison.

 

Because it takes toll, maybe not for all academics, but for the work I do, I had always put my all into it, emotional investment included, and ten years of that, of those stories- as much as there\’s hope in the sadness, will take a toll. I realised I had shut down emotionally. A combination of burning out from my own work (writing a book will do that to you regardless of topic but also writing a book about a pandemic and how we responded, how governments neglected us so we turned to art…in a pandemic where that particular artform was halted?

I’m surprised I was still standing (actually by March 2021 when I write this…I’m not really).

But I lost my fight for ‘my’ work…when Russell T Davies’ It’s a Sin was broadcast, I struggled to connect with it, joking to my friends I was officially ‘dead inside’. I waited a decade for one of my favourite writers to tell me that story and I couldn\’t appreciate it. Not in the moment anyway. Too many stories of a pandemic, in a pandemic, too much of me thrown at trying to get the world to listen to them.

I couldn’t bring myself to ‘hustle’ to write stories on Rent’s 25th anniversary. Rent one of my first loves, and I had nothing left…after a decade of writing about Pandemic Queer Stories, another pandemic had broken my ability to do it.

In finishing that book in the midst of this pandemic, I think I lost the ability that had always been both my secret weapon and downfall as an academic- how strongly I felt it.

 

And so I leaned my nerding and my passion into this set of happy Queer stories. Because not only did I personally need it (more on that in my next blog) but because my academic, nerd brain also needed that, not reset, but evolution.

And so this little book of mine happened. And just like with the show itself, I found joy in writing it. Found energy in talking about telling Queer stories, our culture and history again. I realised I still do want to talk about how we tell those stories. I just needed perhaps a change of gears. And that perhaps its time to hand the other stuff onto someone else.

Time for the stories I tell about stories to change, just like those stories have changed too. I know my history and maybe it’s time to be more about where we are now- taking all that with me. Like that through-line of stories, we all have to adapt and change, find something new to put our energy into in order to do it right. I’ve often joked that in another life I’d be a Doctor of Sitcoms and Romcoms, maybe this little show I love is the start of being able to be a Doctor of Queer Romcoms and Sitcoms instead of Queer pandemics and loss. And wouldn’t that be something?

 

 

You can pre-order my \’Inklings\’ short book on Schitt\’s Creek with 404 Ink here

I wrote a little pink book on a little Canadian show that means a lot to me. You can order a copy here

This book came about because I quoted Dan Levy to make an argument about Angels in America in another book. If you know me, weirdly that probably makes perfect sense. If you don’t…we’ll get there. 

me haunted by writing ideas

I’m going to start by saying, I’m terrified. I’ve never written about anything that quite so many people care about before. As an academic, I’m used to writing about 30-year-old plays that a handful of people care about. As a playwright, I’m used to talking to…well the back room of a pub.

But people care a lot about this show I’ve written this little book about. I\’m one of them. And finding the words, even as someone who has a lot to say about a lot of things, I’ve not been able to find the words for something that feels like it…saved me. 

Firstly though, I want to assure any fans that it comes from a place of love. While I don’t flatter myself anyone involved in the show will read this or the book, if they did, that it also comes from a place of love. And my need, as an academic and as a first-class nerd to document and shout about its importance. 

So, in my case, how do we get from Angels in America to Schitt’s Creek? Well firstly about 30 years of Queer cultural history on stage and screen. But that’s another blog post or lecture (obviously I have written that blog post). Ok seriously, how did I get there?

Bribery. I used the final season of Schitt’s Creek as bribery for finishing my Angels book last summer. And I used the other five seasons to keep me sane while I wrote said book (the keeping sane part didn’t quite happen). Long story short, a Dan Levy quote made its way into the Angels book as quite a central argument that I’ll probably end up arguing with the editors over. And somehow in that process, the slow realisation that this show had saved me more than a little bit. But that aslo, I really had to find a way to write about all the things I now had in my head about it. 

How? Why? That’s the stuff that’s really hard to put into words. 

I can pinpoint the exact moment I fell in love with this show. How often can you say that about something? The moment I cried more at any show than I’d cried before (to that point). And the exact moment I just knew it was going to change my life. The moment I knew I was never coming back from my off at the deep end nerdery with it. And when it ended? I went to bed and cried, and the next morning, mid-work, sat at my desk and sobbed. 

bye now…you are fabulous creatures…oh wait that\’s the other book

Reading this some people will nod in agreement, others will roll their eyes. But I know the people who get it, get it. 

I fell in love with the show at the end of season two. Like many of us, the Roses’ dancing together stole my heart and I knew in that second I wasn’t coming back. My Mother got there a few scenes earlier, she never talks to the TV, but as Johnny and Moira had dinner my very British Mother declared ‘That’s Schitt’s CREEK!’ along with Johnny. And at the end of that episode, I knew I would have these characters in my life forever. 

I cried more than I’ve cried at a tv show (to that point…this same show obviously took that crown again…and again) during ‘Singles Week’ and David’s speech to Ted…and again at the ending. 

The moment I knew it would change my life was hearing Patrick say ‘you make me feel right’ and articulating something I’d never had the words for before. And later in his coming out story, giving me a way to understand parts of myself I hadn’t, even at 30-something. (I wrote more thoughts about his coming out story here) 

The moment I knew I was going off at the deep end with nerdery was Patrick’s Cabaret audition. As a musical theatre nerd and as a former academic of musical theatre, specifically Queer musical theatre, my brain near exploded. Basically, the need to write about this show started with a need to write about Cabaret and this show. 

I have so many nerdy thoughts on this you are not ready.

When it ended? It fell as these things do, at a moment I really needed it. Everyone’s last year has been filled with low points, and when I finally reached the finale I was at probably the worst of mine, and so I needed it. So yes, I went to bed and cried. And yes, I sat at my desk the next day and outright sobbed. And judge that if you want to, but I cried because it meant something. 

I can (and I will) tell people what this show means in terms of Queer TV, in terms of representation, of stories told. But really it\’s what it means to us all in the big and the small, individually, that matters. 

Of course, it’s the ‘big things like ‘the wine not the label’ and yes, hearing someone talk about your identity in a way that made sense. It was ‘nobody is thinking about you the way you’re thinking about you’ and again having the words for something you didn’t before. It’s a coming-out story for grown-ups, that makes you feel seen because not everybody has it all worked out in high school. It\’s the coming out story not all of us get to have. It\’s a collection of flawed humans figuring life out, it’s a group of kick-ass women who aren’t defined by their relationships. It’s feeling like you have a ‘family’ on TV. 

Its a Happy Ending to a Queer story. That thing that 30-somethings Queer people didn’t grow up with. We grew up with legislation that meant we couldn’t talk about being Queer in school. We grew up in the wake of AIDS, we grew up with maybe two famous Queer people to look up to. So that’s why lots of us needed Dan Levy and his show too. For what’s inside the show, and what’s outside. 

The ‘Happy Ending’ of the show is one that I think we all need sometimes. The moments we feel a bit lost like both David and Patrick did at some point- I’m still in my pre-Patrick David Rose phase. But that’s ok. Because what the show did was give me hope. In the moment I watched the finale I needed to let go of some things- in the midst of a pandemic, having everything taken away from me, I felt most keenly of all David’s decision to finally let his life in New York go, and stop fighting for something that wasn’t right. Sometimes you need fictional characters to teach you a lesson you already know.

For what the show means outside of itself too, lots of 30-somethings needed that. To see a gay man, as a writer and showrunner owning his Queer stories and fighting for them. Yes, following in the footsteps of others who had gone before, but also, more importantly paving the way for others to come after. To see that man unapologetically be out, and proud talking about his show. And I know for lots of us, the power of seeing his Dad by his side supporting that. The sheer hope in that, especially for anyone who didn’t grow up with that, was so powerful.

And finally, too, Dan Levy’s personal style, showing all us quirky kids who got made fun of in high school for dressing differently, that embracing fashion for a sense of who you are (especially as Queer kids) is ok. 

I really need a yellow suit

Again, for anyone who never needed any of this maybe it seems silly. But I know this story changed me; I think it saved me a little bit too. I know without a doubt, this show got me through. Not just in the watching of it, the stories it told, but in having something to look forward to, to focus on, while everything fell apart. It might seem impossibly trivial, it mattered. From thinking ‘hey that interview is coming out\’ to getting excited about award shows or hanging onto Noah Reid’s albums like they were a life raft (which I also wrote about here) to take the Native Studies Course with the University of Alberta (which I wrote about here) to just, having something to be nerdy about with friends, it gave me that in times I needed something. 

What about those people who want to mock it? saying it’s \’only TV\’. To which I say, part of me hopes you never needed those stories that badly, to feel seen that badly. But part of me hopes you do experience that one day, because finding something that speaks to you, whatever it is, always changes things.

 

The reason I cried so much for the ending of this show, was at that moment I needed it most once again, this little show told me it was ok to be who I am. To be burned and bruised by life, to be the one who doesn’t quite fit in, or who hasn’t found their path or their person yet. And that sometimes, it does work out, even for us.

As a writer writing about this show saved me a bit too. In January an academic publisher told me I didn’t have enough expertise to write a book on the topic of my actual PhD and while it says more about the nature of academia than me, being told you aren’t good enough to write about the thing you spent years working on….that knocks you. I’ve spent nearly ten years all told on the research in my ‘PhD books’ and this one, from the little show that helped me get through trying to write one of those will get published first. I was told I wasn’t ‘good enough’ to write about one thing I wrote a PhD on, but a publisher saw the love and yes ok downright nerdery I have for this show and gave me a chance. That matters. 

With my ‘creative’ writing hat on too, this show and what it created gave me something to cling to. Not only, when, as a playwright, but my whole industry also disappeared overnight in 2020. While at the same time I kept getting told I was a variation of ‘too nice’ a writer. I wasn’t ‘edgy’ enough, and really let\’s face it not cool enough. I found myself asking ‘am I enough’ because all the stories I wrote for the theatre were dismissed for being ‘too romcom’ ‘too sitcom’ …basically not ‘cool’ and ‘edgy’ enough…and while I can’t ‘fix’ my writing style for theatre, this show made me see the power in stories that are nice. That isn\’t cruel, that isn\’t filled with suffering or darkness. Obviously, those stories have their place, but this show taught me shows that are nice, and happy are equally, if not more so powerful to the people they matter to. 

This show matters to people. It lights up my slightly jaded heart every time I see someone mention it, because it makes me feel like that person shares an understanding of something special. It got me through the darkest of times, it excited me again as a writer and academic, and it made me feel less alone. Really, the town where everyone fits in.

And so, I’ve written this little book, with the help of 404 Ink to celebrate that to try and put some of that into words, and explore why it means so much. 

You can support their crowd funder here and I’ll be blogging some more in the coming weeks to talk about other pieces of the show that got me through. 

Today 404 Ink launched their Crowd Funder which includes my book Love that Journey for me: The Queer Revolution of Schitt’s Creek.

This book came about because I quoted Dan Levy to make an argument about Angels in America in another book. If you know me, weirdly that probably makes perfect sense. If you don’t…we’ll get there. 

I’m going to start by saying, I’m terrified. I’ve never written about anything that quite so many people care about before. As an academic I’m used to writing about 30 year old plays that a handful of people care about. As a playwright I’m used to talking to…well the back room of a pub.

But people care a lot about this show I’ve written this little book about. I’m one of them. And finding the words, even as someone who has a lot to say about a lot of things, I’ve not been able to find the words for something that feels like it…saved me. 

Firstly though, I want to assure any fans that it comes from a place of love. While I don’t flatter myself anyone involved in the show will read this or the book, if they did, that it also comes from a place of love. And my need, as an academic and as a first class nerd to document and shout about its importance. 

So, in my case, how do we get from Angels in America to Schitt’s Creek? Well firstly about 30 years of Queer cultural history on stage and screen. But that’s another blog post or lecture (obviously I have written that blog post). Ok seriously, how did I get there?

Bribery. I used the final season of Schitt’s Creek as bribery for finishing my Angels book last summer. And I used the other five seasons to keep me sane while I wrote said book (the keeping sane part didn’t quite happen). Long story short, a Dan Levy quote made its way into the Angels book as quite a central argument that I’ll probably end up arguing with the editors over. And somehow in that process, the slow realisation that this show had saved me more than a little bit. But that aslo, I really had to find a way to write about all the things I now had in my head about it. 

How? Why? That’s the stuff that’s really hard to put into words. 

I can pinpoint the exact moment I fell in love with this show. How often can you say that about something? The moment I cried more at any show than I’d cried before (to that point). And the exact moment I just knew it was going to change my life. The moment I knew I was never coming back from my off at the deep end nerdery with it. And when it ended? I went to bed and cried, and the next morning, mid work, sat at my desk and sobbed. 

Reading this some people will nod in agreement, others will roll their eyes. But I know the people who get it, get it. 

I fell in love with the show at the end of season two. Like many of us, the Roses’ dancing together stole my heart and I knew in that second I wasn’t coming back. My Mother got there a few scenes earlier, she never talks to the TV, but as Johnny and Moira had dinner my very British Mother declared ‘That’s Schitt’s CREEK!’ along with Johnny. And at the end of that episode I knew I would have these characters in my life forever. 

I cried more than I’ve cried at a tv show (to that point…this same show obviously took that crown again…and again) during ‘Singles Week’ and David’s speech to Ted…and again at the ending. 

The moment I knew it would change my life was hearing Patrick say ‘you make me feel right’ and articulating something I’d never had the words for before. And later in his coming out story, giving me a way to understand parts of myself I hadn’t, even at 30-something. (I wrote more thoughts about his coming out story here) 

The moment I knew I was going off at the deep end with nerdery was Patrick’s Cabaret audition. As a musical theatre nerd and as a former academic of musical theatre, specifically Queer musical theatre, my brain near exploded. Basically, the need to write about this show started with a need to write about Cabaret and this show. 

When it ended? It fell as these things do, at a moment I really needed it.Everyone’s last year has been filled with low points, and when I finally reached the finale I was at probably the worst of mine, and so I needed it. So yes, I went to bed and cried. And yes, I sat at my desk the next day and outright sobbed. And judge that if you want to, but I cried because it meant something. 

I can (and I will) tell people what this show means in terms of Queer TV, in terms of representation, of stories told. But really it’s what it means to us all in the big and the small, individually, that matters. 

Of course it’s the ‘big’ things like ‘the wine not the label’ and yes, hearing someone talk about your identity in a way that made sense. It was ‘nobody is thinking about you the way you’re thinking about you’ and again having the words for something you didn’t before. It’s a coming out story for grown ups, that makes you feel seen because not everybody has it all worked out in high school. It’s the coming out story not all of us get to have. It’s a collection of flawed humans figuring life out, it’s a group of kick-ass women who aren’t defined by their relationships. It’s feeling like you have a ‘family’ on TV. 

It’s a Happy Ending to a Queer story. That thing that 30-somethings Queer people didn’t grow up with. We grew up with legislation that meant we couldn’t talk about being Queer in school. We grew up in the wake of AIDS, we grew up with maybe two famous Queer people to look up to. So that’s why lots of us needed Dan Levy and his show too. For what’s inside the show, and what’s outside. 

The ‘Happy Ending’ of the show is one that I think we all need sometimes. The moments we feel a bit lost like both David and Patrick did at some point- I’m still in my pre-Patrick David Rose phase. But that’s ok. Because what the show did was give me hope. In the moment I watched the finale I needed to let go of some things- in the midst of a pandemic, having everything taken away from me, I felt most keenly of all David’s decision to finally let his life in New York go, and stop fighting for something that wasn’t right. Sometimes you need fictional characters to teach you a lesson you already know.

For what the show means outside of itself too, lots of 30-somethings needed that. To see a gay man, as a writer and show runner owning his Queer stories and fighting for them. Yes, following in the footsteps of others who had gone before, but also, more importantly paving the way for others to come after. To see that man unapologetically be out, and proud talking about his show. And I know for lots of us, the power of seeing his Dad by his side supporting that. The sheer hope in that, especially for anyone who didn’t grow up with that, was so powerful. And finally too, Dan Levy’s personal style, showing all us quirky kids who got made fun of in high school for dressing differently, that embracing fashion for a sense of who you are (especially as Queer kids) is ok. 

Again, for anyone who never needed any of this maybe it seems silly. But I know this story changed me; I think it saved me a little bit too. I know without a doubt, this show got me through. Not just in the watching of it, the stories it told, but in having something to look forward to, to focus on, while everything fell apart. It might seem impossibly trivial, it mattered. From thinking ‘hey that interview is coming out’ to getting excited about award shows or hanging onto Noah Reid’s albums like they were a life raft (which I also wrote about here) to taking the Native Studies Course with University of Alberta (which I wrote about here) to just, having something to be nerdy about with friends, it gave me that in times I needed something. 

What about those people who want to mock it? saying it’s only TV. To which I say, part of me hopes you never needed those stories that badly, to feel seen that badly. But part of me hopes you do experience that one day, because finding something that speaks to you, whatever it is, always changes things.

The reason I cried so much for the ending of this show, was in that moment I needed it most once again, this little show told me it was ok to be who I am. To be burned and bruised by life, to be the one who doesn’t quite fit in, or who hasn’t found their path or their person yet. And that sometimes, it does work out, even for us.

As a writer writing about this show saved me a bit too. In January an academic publisher told me I didn’t have enough expertise to write a book on the topic of my actual PhD and while it says more about the nature of academia than me, being told you aren’t good enough to write about the thing you spent years working on….that knocks you. I’ve spent nearly ten years all told on the research in my ‘PhD books’ and this one, from the little show that helped me get through trying to write one of those will get published first. I was told I wasn’t ‘good enough’ to write about one thing I wrote a PhD on, but a publisher saw the love and yes ok downright nerdery I have for this show and gave me a chance. That matters. 

With my ‘creative’ writing hat on too, this show and what it created gave me something to cling onto. Not only, when, as a playwright, my whole industry disappeared overnight in 2020. While at the same time I kept getting told I was a variation of ‘too nice’ a writer. I wasn’t ‘edgy’ enough, and really let’s face it not cool enough. I found myself asking ‘am I enough’ because all the stories I wrote for theatre were dismissed for being ‘too romcom’ ‘too sitcom’ …basically not ‘cool’ and ‘edgy’ enough…and while I can’t ‘fix’ my writing style for theatre, this show made me see the power in stories that are nice. That isn’t cruel, that isn’t filled with suffering or darkness. Obviously those stories have their place, but this show taught me shows that are nice, and happy are equally, if not more so powerful to the people they matter to. 

This show matters to people. It lights up my slightly jaded heart every time I see someone mention it, because it makes me feel like that person shares an understanding of something special. It got me through the darkest of times, it excited me again as a writer and academic, and it made me feel less alone. Really, the town where everyone fits in.

And so, I’ve written this little book, with the help of 404 Ink to celebrate that to try and put some of that into words, and explore why it means so much. 

You can support their Crowd Funder here and I’ll be blogging some more in the coming weeks to talk about other pieces of the show that got me through. 

Photo Jake Sherman via Noah Reid\’s Instagram

 

I sat on a draft of this one for a while, but on the anniversary of the theatres closing in the UK, instead of thinking about what that meant, I’ve decided to share something about what helped me through. 

Everyone will be relieved to know this particular ‘music that saved me in 2020’ blog is not about Taylor Swift. I also appreciate it’s a bit late for a ‘music that saved me in 2020’ post but what can I say time has lost all meaning…

 

Instead, it’s about how Noah Reid’s albums got me through writing a book (in slightly comedy fashion), helped me to figure out a story I needed to tell (in weirdly serendipitous fashion) but mostly got me through this last year. 

It’s about how in times of trouble music can be a life raft. We all know, that, right? We’ve all got songs, albums that got us out of the dark times. Or the ones we go to in the dark times. The music we lean on to feel our feelings or not feel our feelings accordingly. The songs that lift a mood or let us wallow in it. 

 

My trouble was that for the last decade or more most of my music for those purposes has been musical theatre. And in 2020, I found myself unable to listen to what was my usual musical lifeline. Maybe it sounds silly to ‘normal’ people but musical theatre- as an academic, and a writer of musicals- was a huge part of my life. Once the theatres shut in March though, listening to musical theatre became like listening to the music that reminds you of the person who broke your heart. Because you know what? My heart was broken…I had lost a huge part of my life overnight and right at that moment had no idea if and how it would be back. And because of that, I’ve spent a year barely able to listen to the music that was once the soundtrack to my life and work.

 

And so, I needed something else and in May I stumbled across Noah Reid’s new album.

 

Have you ever heard an album that just feels like coming home? That’s what Gemini felt like. It felt like the kind of music I listened to in my teens and twenties all grown up. And I mean that as the highest compliment. Like if all those folk-indie bands I saw in club backrooms and supporting other folk-indie bands, grew up and sang songs about what life had been life in the meantime. The same sound and feel, but with lyrical storytelling for grown-ups. (Obviously, as a musical theatre nerd lyrical-musical storytelling is a big nerdy thing for me).

 

The way Gemini is put together is also beautifully produced- firstly the mixing and production on it are exquisitely done, forgive a bit of nerdy commentary but seemingly simple moments like the mix from the end of Jacobs Ladder into Neverending December are perfectly engineered. It’s also a really wonderful balance of instruments and voices to create the mood of each song- when to bring in an accordion, when there’s a choral arrangement backing, which tracks have drums…all music producing 101 sure, but it’s done so well and with such attention to detail. I guess in a world of mass-produced pop that feels a bit conveyor belt it’s also nice to feel like something was made with this kind of attention to detail for the whole album experience. It’s also put together in what has become a slightly ‘old school’ A and B side format, with the more upbeat side A and a contemplative B side…again this isn’t revolutionary, but the thought into it is apparent too. I needed to be dorky about music in another way it seemed, in the absence of my usual way.

 

Gemini and the 2016 predecessor Songs from a Broken Chair inadvertently became woven into my work, but also became one of the things that got me through.

 

What did that look like? I should thank Reid in my book acknowledgements. I’m not sure being thanked in a book about Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America was exactly what he had in mind when writing these albums, but here we are.

 

Partly, because I listened to those albums on a loop almost every day (ok yes, every day I’m that writer) while in the worst of writing that book. Secondly because of two sets of lyrics that amused me greatly. It shouldn’t really be a surprise the play talks about Angels (political, erstwhile Angels with multiple genitals, but that’s splitting hairs) but also specifically the story of Jacob (albeit in a homoerotic allegory) what the play also talks about is Mormons. Hopefully anyone who knows the albums is one step ahead here.

 

So, I’m typing away, listening to Noah Reid’s Gemini for one of the first times while wrestling away with my own Angel-based-writing. When I realise I’m hearing the lyrics ‘I’m wrestling with Angels’ I did a full cartoon stare at the speakers. On realising it was a song called ‘Jacob’s Dream’ I might have whispered the words ‘the fucking audacity. Later, while I’m continuing to write about ‘my’ Mormons, I’m listening to Reid’s earlier album Songs from a Broken Chair and hearing the lyric ‘Dancing on the Graves of Mormons’…Sometimes a song speaks to you, and sometimes it just makes you smile when you’re wrestling with a book that just might be trying to take what’s left of your 2020 sanity. But every time I heard either of those lyrics while I was writing this play about…wrestling with Angels and Mormons…it made me smile. Made me feel like I was being cheered on by the universe a bit. And I’ll forever think of those songs whenever I think of the play, and vice versa.

The video for this one at least feels like a hopeful summer\’s day too…maybe we\’ll get that this year…

 

I think actually…that does mean they’re owed a thank you in the acknowledgements. So, Noah Reid, bet you never thought you’d end up thanked in a book about a play about Angels, AIDS and American politics eh? 

 

I’m a big old nerd for the stories songs can help us tell (did I mention musical theatre academic?!) And help us understand. And that’s really what I fell in love within Reid’s albums. One song in particular I had a Dream Last Night is a song that genuinely gives me chills in terms of visceral perfect storytelling. I can see every moment of it, which is beautiful. The kind of song you want to stop and just properly listen to and hear the story.

 

Songs also help us understand and tell our own stories. And that’s what happened with my second weird work-related link. And one of the reasons these albums have come to mean a lot. Actually, it already had with this set of lyrics from ‘Tiff Song’ 

 

‘I bought this jacket, because the front said Montreal, 

That’s a town I had to leave I didn’t want to leave at all

And when I wear it

It makes me feel alone

It\’s a reminder that I needed a reminder

Of a place I once called home’

I too used to call Montreal home, it was a place I lived a strange best and worst year of my life. And one I didn’t want to leave. Being locked away all year also makes you think of the places you miss, and the people.  I lived in Montreal for a year when I was 19/20, it was one of the happiest times of my life. It was also in that sort of contradictory way life is, the year my Dad died on Thanksgiving weekend that year. Those lyrics made me think about that ‘city I had to leave but didn’t want to leave at all’ and I wrote about that year for the first time in a blog. It was the first time I’d told that story out loud, or looked at what that time meant to me.

 

Later, I was making a documentary about the LGTBQ+ community, and my director asked me to write in that story I told in that blog- the messy love for a city where I first became myself, where I first ‘came out\’, a place I didn’t want to leave while my world changed at home. All from a song I hadn’t heard a year earlier.

 

That’s nothing to do with the song itself. But isn’t that the beauty of songs that strike us? That they can spiral into whole worlds of meaning for us personally as well. I’ll forever be thankful to that song for giving me the way into a story I didn’t know I needed to tell. And that for me will always be the power of music that we find at the right time for us- the stories they help us tell and to find.

 

And these dorky stories aside, this music will forever also be part of the story I tell about this strange and terrible last year. And the fact they made it better. Not just better, really honestly, got me through at times.

 

And continue to, because let’s face it, that’s not over yet. 

 

For me, when my anxiety rears its full force, music and repetition are good if not cures, then balms. I spent many hours in August and September wandering the roads and nearby parks of suburban Cardiff with ‘Gemini’ in my ears. And it became a moment of quiet, away from the online noise, away from the confines of being home all the time. It gave me a little pocket of escape. I did the same walk so often to this album I could almost time which bush I’d walk past to a lyric. And it helped so much.

 

The lyrics to Hate this Town felt very apt for being stuck in my hometown all year, but also my feelings about the theatre industry there a little too…now that I was on an enforced break from it. Although the lyric ‘what kind of people are afraid of the rain’ couldn’t really apply to the Welsh…but in my endless daily walks in my own neighbourhood the daydream that was American Roads that idea that one day the idea of seeing ‘sunlight on a canyon, thin layer of snow’ from a car would be possible again, and indeed the idea of ‘can’t take it for granted when you feel this alive’ certainly rung true.

 

We all had our real low points, and for me every time I hit one these two albums provided solace in a way, actually I hadn’t needed since that year in Montreal I talked of earlier. (That year it was Sarah McLachlan and Rent, which you know, is on-brand at least as well as dates me). And sometimes you just need the music you feel you can hide inside.

Photo Jake Sherman via Noah Reid\’s Instagram

 

But I think for lots of people who loved this album, two songs too I think took on particular added meaning in 2020 ‘I Guess I’ll Just Lie Here’ and ‘Hold On’ one feels like accepting where you are and Hold On felt like trying to hope for the future. And they both felt like a soundtrack to different sides of the pandemic mood. And indeed, a bigger life mood. Some days you just have to lean into that feeling of being stuck. For me, losing the bigger picture of all my work, my industry ‘And the poisonous thread, they leave behind to work on my mind while I got nothing but time’ felt apt for the time and those endless nights of insomnia. But on the flip side, Hold On with its reminder to, well yes hold on. It’s a sad song really, about not being where you want to be, about missing someone you love, and we could all relate to that this year the ‘being on the wrong end of too many telephone calls.’ As a writer, the line that felt like a stab to the heart was ‘it’s hard to write songs when you can’t even speak.’ But ultimately that song still became one of hope to me- I’m not ashamed to admit I cried to it more than once, but it’s come to mean a sort of grim determination to get through this year, and the next and whatever else.

By the way the video for Hold On is also completely beautiful…

 

I could write a ‘proper’ review of all the songs. I certainly in my dorky way have lots of thoughts. From the way, Underwater has some soaring melodies that remind me actually, of the kind of musical theatre nobody thinks is musical theatre and tells a perfect story. Or how False Alarms feels like the perfect scared-of-your-feelings song. Or how Heroes and Ghosts now feels like my song of the moment in a way that’s just sort of intangible to explain. Or how Mostly to Yourself has become my post-pandemic, take charge of your life mantra. 

 

And really that’s where the beauty lies, despite taking a lot of words to say this, that intangible meaning something that matters gives you.

Photo Jake Sherman via Noah Reid\’s Instagram

 

I used to work in a record shop. The kind of place you get a sort of High Fidelity meets Black Books snobbery. The kind that would have dudes (always dudes) turning up their noses at ‘yeah but you found this guy’s music because he was on a TV show.’ Yes, imagine that, because this guy was on a TV show, I was able to find a whole world of something that has come to mean something. Something that picked me up off the floor when I needed it more than ever. And also, if you haven\’t heard Noah Reid singing \’Simply the Best\’ from that TV show, what really are you doing with yourself? I\’ll just leave it here…

To bring this back (sort of) to how this started…Noah Reid was in the middle of his first tour when all this happened. But luckily, some wonderful industrious fans uploaded a lot of videos of those concerts that did happen to YouTube. And they too have been both solace and hope in dark times. Much like listening to musicals, I haven’t been able to get on board with online theatre. But I frequently lost myself in those concert videos, for a little break, a little reminder of the world how it was- I wouldn’t have made it to that tour, so it felt like the usual peek into something I didn’t get to be part of. They made me, even more, a fan, seeing Reid perform live, and wishing- but also wishing turning slowly to hope- that I would be able to do that one day too. So, by association that thing I’d turned to when theatres closed, and my livelihood and love disappeared, and I couldn’t face that world, became my hope of live performance returning. Because hope, as well as solace, is so important right now, a year from live performances ending.

So I think I’ll just make a promise to myself, next time Noah Reid tours, even though I’ll have to cross an ocean to do it, I’ll be there. To celebrate the music that got me through the darkest of times (and writing that damn book), and as a thank, you, to Noah Reid for writing those songs that picked me up, kept me company and kept me going, when things were truly dark. They\’ll forever be part of my life for that, and I\’m really grateful.

You can buy both Noah Reid\’s albums from his website here. And please do, support artists in this time!

Photo Jake Sherman via Noah Reid’s Instagram

I sat on a draft of this one for a while, but on the anniversary of the theatres closing in the UK, instead of thinking about what that meant, I’ve decided to share something about what helped me through. 

Everyone will be relieved to know this particular ‘music that saved me in 2020’ blog is not about Taylor Swift. I also appreciate it’s a bit late for a ‘music that saved me in 2020’ post but what can I say time has lost all meaning…

 

Instead, it’s about how Noah Reid’s albums got me through writing a book (in slightly comedy fashion), helped me to figure out a story I needed to tell (in weirdly serendipitous fashion) but mostly got me through this last year. 

It’s about how in times of trouble music can be a life raft. We all know, that, right? We’ve all got songs, albums that got us out of the dark times. Or the ones we go to in the dark times. The music we lean on to feel our feelings or not feel our feelings accordingly. The songs that lift a mood or let us wallow in it. 

 

My trouble was that for the last decade or more most of my music for those purposes has been musical theatre. And in 2020, I found myself unable to listen to what was my usual musical lifeline. Maybe it sounds silly to ‘normal’ people but musical theatre- as an academic, and a writer of musicals- was a huge part of my life. Once the theatres shut in March though, listening to musical theatre became like listening to the music that reminds you of the person who broke your heart. Because you know what? My heart was broken…I had lost a huge part of my life overnight and right at that moment had no idea if and how it would be back. And because of that, I’ve spent a year barely able to listen to the music that was once the soundtrack to my life and work.

 

And so, I needed something else and in May I stumbled across Noah Reid’s new album.

 

Have you ever heard an album that just feels like coming home? That’s what Gemini felt like. It felt like the kind of music I listened to in my teens and twenties all grown up. And I mean that as the highest compliment. Like if all those folk-indie bands I saw in club backrooms and supporting other folk-indie bands, grew up and sang songs about what life had been life in the meantime. The same sound and feel, but with lyrical storytelling for grown-ups. (Obviously, as a musical theatre nerd lyrical-musical storytelling is a big nerdy thing for me).

 

The way Gemini is put together is also beautifully produced- firstly the mixing and production on it are exquisitely done, forgive a bit of nerdy commentary but seemingly simple moments like the mix from the end of Jacobs Ladder into Neverending December are perfectly engineered. It’s also a really wonderful balance of instruments and voices to create the mood of each song- when to bring in an accordion, when there’s a choral arrangement backing, which tracks have drums…all music producing 101 sure, but it’s done so well and with such attention to detail. I guess in a world of mass-produced pop that feels a bit conveyor belt it’s also nice to feel like something was made with this kind of attention to detail for the whole album experience. It’s also put together in what has become a slightly ‘old school’ A and B side format, with the more upbeat side A and a contemplative B side…again this isn’t revolutionary, but the thought into it is apparent too. I needed to be dorky about music in another way it seemed, in the absence of my usual way.

 

 

Gemini and the 2016 predecessor Songs from a Broken Chair inadvertently became woven into my work, but also became one of the things that got me through.

 

What did that look like? I should thank Reid in my book acknowledgements. I’m not sure being thanked in a book about Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America was exactly what he had in mind when writing these albums, but here we are.

 

Partly, because I listened to those albums on a loop almost every day (ok yes, every day I’m that writer) while in the worst of writing that book. Secondly because of two sets of lyrics that amused me greatly. It shouldn’t really be a surprise the play talks about Angels (political, erstwhile Angels with multiple genitals, but that’s splitting hairs) but also specifically the story of Jacob (albeit in a homoerotic allegory) what the play also talks about is Mormons. Hopefully anyone who knows the albums is one step ahead here.

 

So, I’m typing away, listening to Noah Reid’s Gemini for one of the first times while wrestling away with my own Angel-based-writing. When I realise I’m hearing the lyrics ‘I’m wrestling with Angels’ I did a full cartoon stare at the speakers. On realising it was a song called ‘Jacob’s Dream’ I might have whispered the words ‘the fucking audacity. Later, while I’m continuing to write about ‘my’ Mormons, I’m listening to Reid’s earlier album Songs from a Broken Chair and hearing the lyric ‘Dancing on the Graves of Mormons’…Sometimes a song speaks to you, and sometimes it just makes you smile when you’re wrestling with a book that just might be trying to take what’s left of your 2020 sanity. But every time I heard either of those lyrics while I was writing this play about…wrestling with Angels and Mormons…it made me smile. Made me feel like I was being cheered on by the universe a bit. And I’ll forever think of those songs whenever I think of the play, and vice versa.

 

The video for this one at least feels like a hopeful summer\’s day too…maybe we’ll get that this year…

 

 

 

I think actually…that does mean they’re owed a thank you in the acknowledgements. So, Noah Reid, bet you never thought you’d end up thanked in a book about a play about Angels, AIDS and American politics eh? 

 

I’m a big old nerd for the stories songs can help us tell (did I mention musical theatre academic?!) And help us understand. And that’s really what I fell in love within Reid’s albums. One song in particular I had a Dream Last Night is a song that genuinely gives me chills in terms of visceral perfect storytelling. I can see every moment of it, which is beautiful. The kind of song you want to stop and just properly listen to and hear the story.

 

Songs also help us understand and tell our own stories. And that’s what happened with my second weird work-related link. And one of the reasons these albums have come to mean a lot. Actually, it already had with this set of lyrics from ‘Tiff Song’ 

 

‘I bought this jacket, because the front said Montreal, 

That’s a town I had to leave I didn’t want to leave at all

And when I wear it

It makes me feel alone

It\’s a reminder that I needed a reminder

Of a place I once called home’

 

I too used to call Montreal home, it was a place I lived a strange best and worst year of my life. And one I didn’t want to leave. Being locked away all year also makes you think of the places you miss, and the people.  I lived in Montreal for a year when I was 19/20, it was one of the happiest times of my life. It was also in that sort of contradictory way life is, the year my Dad died on Thanksgiving weekend that year. Those lyrics made me think about that ‘city I had to leave but didn’t want to leave at all’ and I wrote about that year for the first time in a blog. It was the first time I’d told that story out loud, or looked at what that time meant to me.

 

Later, I was making a documentary about the LGTBQ+ community, and my director asked me to write in that story I told in that blog- the messy love for a city where I first became myself, where I first ‘came out\’, a place I didn’t want to leave while my world changed at home. All from a song I hadn’t heard a year earlier.

 

That’s nothing to do with the song itself. But isn’t that the beauty of songs that strike us? That they can spiral into whole worlds of meaning for us personally as well. I’ll forever be thankful to that song for giving me the way into a story I didn’t know I needed to tell. And that for me will always be the power of music that we find at the right time for us- the stories they help us tell and to find.

 

And these dorky stories aside, this music will forever also be part of the story I tell about this strange and terrible last year. And the fact they made it better. Not just better, really honestly, got me through at times.

 

And continue to, because let’s face it, that’s not over yet. 

 

For me, when my anxiety rears its full force, music and repetition are good if not cures, then balms. I spent many hours in August and September wandering the roads and nearby parks of suburban Cardiff with ‘Gemini’ in my ears. And it became a moment of quiet, away from the online noise, away from the confines of being home all the time. It gave me a little pocket of escape. I did the same walk so often to this album I could almost time which bush I’d walk past to a lyric. And it helped so much.

 

The lyrics to Hate this Town felt very apt for being stuck in my hometown all year, but also my feelings about the theatre industry there a little too…now that I was on an enforced break from it. Although the lyric ‘what kind of people are afraid of the rain’ couldn’t really apply to the Welsh…but in my endless daily walks in my own neighbourhood the daydream that was American Roads that idea that one day the idea of seeing ‘sunlight on a canyon, thin layer of snow’ from a car would be possible again, and indeed the idea of ‘can’t take it for granted when you feel this alive’ certainly rung true.

 

We all had our real low points, and for me every time I hit one these two albums provided solace in a way, actually I hadn’t needed since that year in Montreal I talked of earlier. (That year it was Sarah McLachlan and Rent, which you know, is on-brand at least as well as dates me). And sometimes you just need the music you feel you can hide inside.

 

Photo Jake Sherman via Noah Reid\’s Instagram

 

But I think for lots of people who loved this album, two songs too I think took on particular added meaning in 2020 ‘I Guess I’ll Just Lie Here’ and ‘Hold On’ one feels like accepting where you are and Hold On felt like trying to hope for the future. And they both felt like a soundtrack to different sides of the pandemic mood. And indeed, a bigger life mood. Some days you just have to lean into that feeling of being stuck. For me, losing the bigger picture of all my work, my industry ‘And the poisonous thread, they leave behind to work on my mind while I got nothing but time’ felt apt for the time and those endless nights of insomnia. But on the flip side, Hold On with its reminder to, well yes hold on. It’s a sad song really, about not being where you want to be, about missing someone you love, and we could all relate to that this year the ‘being on the wrong end of too many telephone calls.’ As a writer, the line that felt like a stab to the heart was ‘it’s hard to write songs when you can’t even speak.’ But ultimately that song still became one of hope to me- I’m not ashamed to admit I cried to it more than once, but it’s come to mean a sort of grim determination to get through this year, and the next and whatever else.

 

By the way the video for Hold On is also completely beautiful…

 

I could write a ‘proper’ review of all the songs. I certainly in my dorky way have lots of thoughts. From the way, Underwater has some soaring melodies that remind me actually, of the kind of musical theatre nobody thinks is musical theatre and tells a perfect story. Or how False Alarms feels like the perfect scared-of-your-feelings song. Or how Heroes and Ghosts now feels like my song of the moment in a way that’s just sort of intangible to explain. Or how Mostly to Yourself has become my post-pandemic, take charge of your life mantra. 

 

And really that’s where the beauty lies, despite taking a lot of words to say this, that intangible meaning something that matters gives you.

 

Photo Jake Sherman via Noah Reid\’s Instagram

 

I used to work in a record shop. The kind of place you get a sort of High Fidelity meets Black Books snobbery. The kind that would have dudes (always dudes) turning up their noses at ‘yeah but you found this guy’s music because he was on a TV show.’ Yes, imagine that, because this guy was on a TV show, I was able to find a whole world of something that has come to mean something. Something that picked me up off the floor when I needed it more than ever. And also, if you haven\’t heard Noah Reid singing \’Simply the Best\’ from that TV show, what really are you doing with yourself? I\’ll just leave it here…

 

 

To bring this back (sort of) to how this started…Noah Reid was in the middle of his first tour when all this happened. But luckily, some wonderful industrious fans uploaded a lot of videos of those concerts that did happen to YouTube. And they too have been both solace and hope in dark times. Much like listening to musicals, I haven’t been able to get on board with online theatre. But I frequently lost myself in those concert videos, for a little break, a little reminder of the world how it was- I wouldn’t have made it to that tour, so it felt like the usual peek into something I didn’t get to be part of. They made me, even more, a fan, seeing Reid perform live, and wishing- but also wishing turning slowly to hope- that I would be able to do that one day too. So, by association that thing I’d turned to when theatres closed, and my livelihood and love disappeared, and I couldn’t face that world, became my hope of live performance returning. Because hope, as well as solace, is so important right now, a year from live performances ending.

 

 

 

So I think I’ll just make a promise to myself, next time Noah Reid tours, even though I’ll have to cross an ocean to do it, I’ll be there. To celebrate the music that got me through the darkest of times (and writing that damn book), and as a thank, you, to Noah Reid for writing those songs that picked me up, kept me company and kept me going, when things were truly dark. They\’ll forever be part of my life for that, and I\’m really grateful.

 

You can buy both Noah Reid\’s albums from his website here. And please do, support artists in this time!

I wrote a version of this blog post back at the end of last summer. I’d just jumped back into Fan Fiction for the first time in nearly 10 years. And it had meant a lot in not just the difficulties of 2020, but in the mess of my own head. I’ve taught fanfiction in many forms. I’m always honest about it- it’s been part of my life for (gulp) 20 years now, and it is nothing to be ashamed of. But somehow I held off on putting this out there. 

And then at the weekend, someone was waging a war against FanFiction again and it felt like time. 

But I realised, while I teach with an honesty that fanfiction is indeed a drug of choice, I’ve never really talked about why that is. I think there’s a case of ‘if you know you know’ and maybe some people are just hardwired for it too. Is there some interesting analogy with sexuality there? Maybe. 

And this isn’t a blog about directly about the importance of Queer Fan Fiction. Because that’s a longer essay in itself. But I will say to the person tweeting at the weekend that it was wrong to consider Fan Fiction part of Queer heritage, of Queer Culture or Literature: you are wrong. It’s a vital part. Just because not all Queer people engage with it doesn’t mean it’s less vital for those who do. Not all Queer people, it might shock you to know, enjoy going to Gay Clubs, but that doesn’t make Gay Clubs any less a vital part of Queer history. 

I teach a Queer Literature course. My final session is about Fan Fiction. It’s part of the bigger conversation about how we ‘Queer’ narratives, or reclaim them (or both). But it’s also about that gap in literature, in culture many Queer people feel. And have for many many years chosen to write their own narratives for. It’s often a formative part of growing up and coming out for a lot of young people. But it also continues to be an important part of life for many people as they grow older, grow up. So yes, when I teach fanfiction it’s usually through the lens of ‘Queering Literature’ how people have used fanfiction for decades to see the narratives they are missing elsewhere. So, on a very basic level, when they make Merlin and Arthur Gay, because there aren’t enough gay narratives on TV. Or you make the Doctor’s companions fall in love with each other and run off and save the world instead of waiting for him.

The short version of that lecture: Because we still don’t have enough stories that show our world, ourselves. And so as weird as people may find it, there are still thousands of people creating their own stories that way to fill the gap. 

Long Version: there are many reasons to write Fic, and alongside that, fanfiction functions as a way for people to work through other things, their traumas, griefs, their dreams they can’t confess elsewhere, and yes ok, weird sex stuff. It’s not just for Queer people. But yes, that’s an important strand. It’s not just for teenagers, as important and formative as it is for young people. But for some people, some of us, it’s a space we go back to time and time again- when life gets tough it’s a refuge, when creativity hits a wall, it’s a way out. It’s a way into a community, for connection and friendship. 

This isn\’t that lecture (though if anyone wants me to give it I will) nor is it one of the (many) excellent analyses of Fanfiction that exist in academic form in the world already;  this is one woman’s 20-odd-year love affair with it as a drug of choice. And how, in 2020, it taught me to love writing again.

What is fanfiction to me then? It’s both my escape and refuge, but also my writer’s sandbox. As disparaging as people are about it, outside of school assignments, yes Fanfiction was the first thing I ever wrote. And as a ‘proper’ ‘Published Author’ (and yes also holder of a PhD and alleged serious person) in 2020 I went back to Fan Fiction again, both reading and writing. 

My history with Fan Fiction started in High School. On dial-up internet and X Files Forums. And thankfully for my teenage writing, lost to the mists of time. But here’s the thing with Fan Fiction, it’s been a rare thing for me; I fangirl a lot, and fangirl hard. But it’s rare I take the leap to read  Fic, much less to write it. There are in fact exactly three things I’ve written Fic for in my life. It’s this particular ineffable thing where you need to leap back inside something. There are so many shows I have next level fangirl knowledge for. And I have zero desire to read much less write fanfiction for. Equally, there’s fanfic I’ve looked at for teaching or research reasons that we will NEVER SPEAK OF AGAIN.

But last August, in the depths of the year we’d like to never speak of again…I felt that thing. That weird thing where I wanted to write it again. And so I decided to dip a toe back in just to see what happened. 

What happened was I wrote a lot. 

I started using writing Fic as a ‘break’ other writing or job applications. While I was finishing a draft of my Big Scary Academic Book I was writing Fic on the side. Partly to keep my sanity. But also it’s a productive ‘waste of time’ far better to spend 20 minutes writing a story than doomscrolling Twitter. But more than that, it became a refuge- it’s not difficult to work out in 2020 that maybe many of us needed that, a space to hide out in our heads. But also a place to work through a lot of the stuff in my head. 

But here’s the thing too: I genuinely believe it made my other writing better. You can also write about such niche things that you nowhere would see in ‘real writing’. From the obvious things like ‘deleted scenes’ from TV and Film that you’re writing about- who doesn’t love a good ‘what was the next moment’ fic. Or just write the really boring lives of the characters that wouldn’t make it to screen. I’ve never played The Sims or Animal Crossing, but imagine it a bit like that- just playing in an imaginary world with no massive agenda or aims at times. I wrote a heavily detailed description of a headache for one story last year that would never make it into a script or a chapter. But it’s work that’s worth doing. Especially for me as someone who has operated solely in dialogue or this kind of critical writing for about 10 years. Learning to write descriptions and emotions, and move characters around a god-damn room (I’m used to leaving that to directors) was a revelation. 

That tweet at the weekend talked about how writing Fanfiction made you a worse writer. How no matter how many ‘proper’ writers cut their teeth on it, then they still weren’t doing ‘proper writing’. All the above contests. But also? Recently I got into a pretty-cool (and selective) writing course. And how did the writing same, and novel pitch I used in my application start out?

As fanfiction. 

There’s no science to that. It’s just a good piece of writing and the start of an idea I have in my brain currently. Just like any other piece of writing. But fanfiction allowed me to access it. 

And even if it didn’t, what did it matter? It’s about so much more. 

Firstly, as a writer, it gives you a feeling of being part of something. Of achieving something. In a sea of critique and rejection. So while I was busy filling a rejection jar with £5 and Andrew Scott gif for my ‘real’ writing, I was cultivating kudos and comments for my fic by the 100s. And yes, it felt good. Away from ‘you’re not good enough’ I heard ‘this really moved me’ and that was enough.in a sea of rejections that matters. Because I look at my A03 comments and think ‘I made something that mattered to someone’ even if it only mattered to them for an afternoon, a moment in the middle of the night. I made a corner of someone’s world a bit brighter. And writing it made mine a bit brighter too. So it’s win-win. 

And you can also write the utterly obscure and self-indulgent. Yes, sometimes this is the sexual content everyone likes to giggle about. But also just the very-particular-to-you stuff. That thing that feels so self-indulgent you couldn’t write anywhere else about it. That maybe nobody cares about. But also maybe they do. That headache story? People loved it. Because it\’s more than that. It’s character exploration, relationship development, dialogue, internal monologue and descriptive writing.  

And it’s all that while playing in the sandbox of something you love. 

And that my friends is a particular and potent kind of drug. 

And I can’t explain it to anyone who doesn’t know. But if you know. You know. 

But on a more serious note. Many Fic writers, myself included, use it to work out, quite frankly, their own shit that they can’t elsewhere. And in a pandemic, locked away from other humans this has quite literally been a lifeline. All those messed up feelings that you’re having? All those issues long repressed that you can’t distract yourself from? Got nobody to talk to? Talk them out with your characters. We write our way out. In a way that we never could  in ‘proper’ writing. And sometimes, often in fact, it speaks to someone else going through the same thing. And you feel a little less alone. 

Here’s the thing about writing Fanfiction. It’s incredibly personal in a way very few things you write in life are. Interestingly when I was pouring my heart and soul into an incredibly personal documentary last year, I was also pouring a lot of that dark energy into my Fic writing. But the things you write in Fic are the things you don’t have the words for in the real world yet. I’m incredibly good at oversharing on the internet. Always have been. I have blogged my way out of more bad situations than I care to think about. But I realised I don’t hide my Fic writing, my identity there, because I’m ashamed of writing it. I do it to protect that space, and what that writing allows me to do. It’s such a precious delicate thing. And you only ever share it with people from your ‘real life’ when you’re ready. I’m sure sooner or later someone might figure it out. And that’s ok I’m not ashamed, it’s just a particular corner of our worlds most of us choose not to cross the streams on. 

Related to that, the original version of this blog had more direct reference to what I’d been writing this year. What I’d spent all that extra time and energy on. And what I was using it to work out in my head. But actually? I’m not ready to over-share in this corner of the internet. That still belongs in my Fic-corner of the internet (for anyone who knows me it won’t be a massive leap to figure out some of it). And actually, that reminded me why those semi-anonymous internet spaces are important. But also why those creative spaces are important too. 

I get to people whose brains aren’t wired this way, all this seems very, very odd. But also we use stories, fiction to understand our own lives all the time. Fan Fiction is just a particular kind of extension of that. I can imagine people asking if I have to be quite so extra about a TV show. If I have to be quite so literal. But what if we flipped that, what if we said, that after all this time, a TV show was able to show me something I’d never seen in myself. What if writing about it, jumping inside it helped that. I’ll always think that’s a bit magical. 

So to all of you working that magic writing Fan Fiction keep at it. You never know when you’re going to make a huge difference to someone’s day with a story you couldn’t tell elsewhere. Or whether you’re going to connect with someone in a way you never could elsewhere. Maybe you’ll finally say the things you can’t even say to yourself through that character you love with all your heart. And maybe too, we all remember the joy in writing and reading too. 

And maybe, in all that, judgmental people who have never known that particular joy of finding a Fic so cosy it warms your heart, the payoff in the slowest of burn fics, or the joy in a perfect description of the touch of a hand, maybe they’ll mind their own business if they can’t find that joy too. 

 Writing about achievements in 2020 seems redundant, it also seems insensitive (I’m looking at you, anyone posting about their income, new home or generally bragging, read the room my dudes). But I did want to spend time thinking, and fittingly writing, about how my relationship with writing changed in 2020. 

I preface this with, if you didn’t write a single word in 2020 you are still a writer. Similarly if you didn’t read a single book (God I hate the end of year brag lists at the best of times). Spoiler I read basically nothing all year. I started and put down so many books. I couldn\’t handle anything that required me to think. Do I feel a bit of a failure for it? Sure. Am I going to let that both me for long. Nope. What I am saying is, I couldn’t read this past year very much- not my usual amount anyway. So if you couldn’t write, that’s valid. 

And for the first part of the year, neither could I. 

Pre-Pandemic times, I think were normal? I honestly can’t remember. Actually what I know was all I was doing was theatre reviewing. 

I hate to say it in some ways- and I in no way wish the year we’ve had that caused it- but I have enjoyed the break from reviewing theatre. In a way, I felt like I was on a bit of a treadmill with it- a sentiment we can all relate to in different areas. But in another I had long had a creeping discomfort with the position of the critic in, at least local theatre writing. There was a great amount of pressure to ‘review everything’ or you weren’t seen as ‘supporting’ theatre. But only if you reviewed in the ‘right’ way (I’m looking at the husband of a performer who started a twitter pile on here). Things felt increasingly fraught, and I increasingly wanted no part of it. There’s also a sense of critical exhaustion, if it’s the only writing you get time to do, then it\’s like you get burnt out. So I don’t know if I’ll return to it. On one hand it’s something I do deep down love, like the last piece I wrote before lockdown, on Daf James’ Twlyth. This kind of cultural deep-dive, reflective reviews are how I started. So maybe it’s just a step back and a return to that, on my own blog. Or maybe, after almost 10 years, it’s just time to hang up that hat. 

I still seem to have blogged a lot in 2020- I think around 30 blogs. But they’re all over the place. Some are reflections on the state of things, some are random book reviews, some are about creativity in a pandemic….and that’s…ok? This was the biggest revelation of writing in 2020 for me; literally nothing was going to happen for several months so I could do what I wanted. 

And aside from those blog posts, from March to July I wrote nothing at all. 

And in August something in my brain kicked in and I could write again. When everyone else was reveling in being briefly allowed back outside, I was apparently really excited to stay in and write. 

And from August- October I was actually able to finish a draft of my ‘PhD book’ which had been in limbo for nearly 3 years. 

Let me preface this by saying: IF YOU WROTE NOTHING IN 2020 IT’S OK. 

For me this is the reason it worked finally: I had stepped off the job hunt treadmill because there were no jobs to apply for. I had stepped off the theatre treadmill because there was no theatre. There was finally nothing else I ‘should’ be doing that was ‘a better career choice.’ because in trying to be a ‘theatre person’ I’ve spent 5 years with a constant pressure to be out at theatre, reviewing theatre, writing theatre, applying for theatre things, applying for jobs. Oh and also keeping a day job, which obviously is fixed term, and I will have to find a replacement for. 

And massive spoiler alert: books are the slow path. They take time, and concentration. They take research and also the PROCESS from proposals through drafts and peer review are slow. And all this ties in with my ‘rejection pot’ blog (here) from this year and the pressure we feel constantly under to be ‘showing what we’re doing’ and ‘showing our successes’ if we’re not visibly doing ‘stuff’ then we aren’t succeeding. Me writing the book has nothing to show for it yet, it won’t for some time. It might never (I mean please dear God I hope it does). It’s the slow path. And I was scared of the slow path for a long time. Because I thought from the outside it looked like a failure. Like I wasn’t doing anything. Doing enough.  That also it looks self-indulgent ‘man how long does it fucking take to write that thing?’

Turns out a fucking long time. 

Also you try writing a book on Tony Kushner’s beast of a play and see how long it takes you to untangle some of that mess. 

Also when you love something, it’s harder to write about. 

Also, fuck you writing a book takes ages. 

But here’s the thing…I enjoyed it. When I finally had the headspace and ‘permission’ to do it in the absence of anything else. In absence of the pressure that I ‘should’ be doing other things…I enjoyed it. I remembered I am also sort of …good at it (let’s not count our chickens\’ pre-peer review, but I’m not terrible at it let’s say). 

And, in August I also started writing other things again. I needed a parallel to the Angels book to keep me sane (It didn\’t work. I still fully lost my mind in the process, but if you don’t lose your mind a bit writing about Angels I’m not sure you’re doing it right). Partly my writing was yes, fanfiction. I’m not ashamed. There is a whole other blog in how fangirling and fanfiction in a pandemic saved me a bit too. But in doing that (and yes, a lot of that) I rediscovered my love of writing prose too. I also started getting crazy things like being inspired to write things. Write things that aren’t scripts, and enjoy them. 

It was like once the option of theatre was switched off, I realised a lot of things. And a key one is: I don’t think I want to write for the theatre any more. 

Even when it was an option, at my beloved 14/48 theatre festival. I hated it. I’m so sorry, but I hated writing those scripts. And right now, I’m not sure I ever want to pick up another theatre script again. 

And maybe it’s a self-preservation thing. Maybe it’s grieving for the loss of theatre this year. 

But maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s finally accepting, without sadness, that this is not the right path. That maybe I just don’t fit with theatre, and I can love it, I can even be good at making it. But that it might not be the right path. 

Theatre never came naturally to me. I wasn’t born into it like some people.  I fell into it and late. I fell into it because I’m lowbrow and wanted to see a TV actor on stage. And then I loved musicals. And you know what I’ve never been quite high brow enough for theatre. I trained in improv (there’s a thing you didn’t know!) and devising. My roots will always be in being a child of comedy of sitcoms and romcoms. I will never be the high concept dark and twisty political theatre scriptwriter. 

And that’s ok. 

I don’t write how theatre wants me to write so maybe it’s time to stop trying. 

I get told in my academic work I’m too ‘journalistic’ I get told in theatre I’m ‘too screen’ I don’t fit. So maybe I should just stop trying to fit. Maybe I just write what I write and see what sticks.

And, when the pressure was off in 2020. When there was no writing for ‘the next thing’ or it felt like for a bit the noise was turned down on competing with everyone else to write something, it felt like some things fell into place. I wrote more words this year than I think I ever have, even during my PhD. I didn’t write to be productive, I wrote to stay sane. And in doing that…I found some things I wasn’t looking for but might have needed. 

So I wrote stories, lots of stories. Many of which will never see the light of day, and that’s ok. And I wrote critical works. I wrote in the space that my academic/journalist brain falls into naturally. 

And I stopped trying to be the academic that I’m not. Kushner aside I am not that ‘high brow’ theatre person. I’m musical theatre and feelings. Not concept and politics. 

I might not even be a theatre person any more either as an academic. And that’s ok too. 

I fell into writing because I followed my heart and some stories as a teenager. I fell into theatre academia because I followed my heart. Maybe it’s time to follow my heart again, and write about what matters to me, not what I think I should be writing.  

I described writing to a friend not long ago as ‘company in my head’ and that’s what I feel like again finally. I have company in my head, I have living breathing characters talking to me (I really hope other writers feel this otherwise I truly look crazy). I have ideas for non-fiction stuff I’m doing that I am so, so excited about (really, when you hear about this you will HEAR about this because I am very very excited). I’ve remembered why I love writing. 

And I think it’s because when you find the things you should be writing, it feels right. I spent many years not knowing what right felt like for writing- it didn’t feel natural like it fit. Finally, I think I know what right feels like. 

And so I think I’m shifting once again where my priorities are in writing. I have a few things in progress that I really hope I get to shout about soon in 2021. And I think actually if they fall into place it’s a sign, if I needed one, that’s where to shift. But also the sign is, writing what you love. What you want to do. Because if you’re going to live with voices in your head, they might as well be good company. 

Writing saved me in 2020. I needed to write my way through this. I also needed to write my way out of where I’d ended up.