cal armistead

Since it’s been so long since I posted on this blog page, I thought it was time to refresh it with something fun that is both BOOK and FOOD related.

I’ve belonged to a fabulous Book Club for about 20 years and every month, we take turns choosing the book and hosting the meetings with appropriate goodies that correspond to the book we’ve just read. Now these are smart, creative women, and the bar is high, believe me. 

Last night it was my turn to host, and the book I’d chosen was Remarkably Bright Creatures, by Shelby Van Pelt. 

It’s about a woman named Tova working at an aquarium who becomes friends with a Giant Pacific Octopus/escape artist named Marcellus. Marcellus serves as one of the narrators of the book (I LOVED the audiobook and the narration of the octopus by Michael Urie), and helps Tova unravel the mystery of her son’s death in the sea thirty years earlier. 

We all agreed that we loved the book, and gave it 4 out of 5 stars, withholding only one star due to some plot twists that pushed the willing suspension of disbelief a tad too far.

I racked my brain trying to come up with Book Club munchies that would be more creative than just, say, Marcellus’s favorite seafood treats or (God forbid) noshing on octopus itself. (How could anyone ever eat octopus after reading this book or Soul of the Octopus or watching My Octopus Teacher and Secrets of the Octopus?!?)

And so, I scanned the Internet and found surprisingly few options, other than hot dogs sliced into octopus bodies (not particularly appetizing), but finally discovered a creation that made me smile. Hence: Marcellus the Octopus as a vessel for crab dip, with his body a bread bowl from Panera, legs make of Pillsbury bread sticks and suckers of black olive slices.

Not an original idea, and I know that technically the tentacles are upside-down, but it made everybody laugh, so I call it a success. Feel free to steal. 

I am taking off the month of April. At least, this is my plan. 

Although technically it seems I’m already violating my plan by writing these words here and now, this is writing, as opposed to WRITING. There’s a difference.

I’ve been working on what feels like a VERY IMPORTANT WRITING PROJECT , one that has been percolating and haunting and torturing me for almost ten years now. Recently, I got very serious about finishing and polishing this project. I enlisted constructive feedback from mentors and trusted fellow writers and took many classes to refine my craft, and although this input is extremely helpful, I find myself…in a word… 

Paralyzed.

There are too many voices in my head. Too much instruction. 

Is this how it works for some of us? The more we write, the more we learn about the craft and structure and secret inner workings of writing, the harder we try to get it right, the more impossible it is…to actually write? 

The good news is that I know what my problem is. I am right-brained. An ENFP. A Gemini. (If any of that matters.) My jam is intuition and gut-feels and expansive skin-tingling soul emotions. 

So I’ve come to the conclusion there is only one thing I can do. 

I need to stop trying so hard. I need to find my JOY. 

To re-discover the MAGIC.  To trust my intuition and imagination and heart tugs.

We’re not playing to win. We’re playing to play. And ultimately, playing is fun. Perfectionism gets in the way of fun. A more skillful goal might be to find comfort in the process...Setting the bar low, especially to get started, frees you to play, explore, and test without attachment to results. This is not just a path to more supportive thoughts. Active play and experimentation until we’re happily surprised is how the best work reveals itself.

From The Creative Act: A Way of Being, by Rick Rubin.

Last week, I took an impromptu walk around Walden Pond and fell in love with awakening emerald moss, lacey gray-green lichen, the majestic repose of a dead branch with curling bark, and last fall’s oak leaves in the shallows, magnified in clean cold water that rippled in the sunlight. This helped. 

I started working on a collage, ripping up patterned papers, ancient sheets of music and an old National Geographic magazine, to create messy images that please and inspire me. This too, is helping.

I’m reading for fun instead of research. Dancing with my grand-baby in the kitchen to songs I make up for her on the spot. Writing journal entries with zero stakes that make me feel free. Writing this. 

It is Spring. Nature is waking up, and so I hope, is my joy. 

No more work. It’s time to play.

Full disclosure: Being Henry David is not in theaters…YET. But here’s the exciting news: I have taken the first step.

Being Henry David is officially a screenplay!

This was a project born of Covid isolation, when we became intimate friends with Netflix and Prime and Hulu and HBO and I thought to myself, “Huh…they need a lot of content to create all these shows for all these channels. Why not try my hand at adapting BHD to film?”

And so, dear reader, I did it. I took a bunch of classes through the Gotham Writing Workshop online and via Zoom. (They are fabulous, by the way. Shout out to instructor C.C. Webster and my tough, discerning, but encouraging classmates!) And it was HARD. I was humbled by how much I didn’t know about screenwriting, and how different it is from writing novels. Then, when I got Covid myself this past May, the silver lining of that long isolation was that I finished the first full draft. I’ve been polishing it obsessively ever since.

Last night, I gathered together a small group of dear friends, most of them seasoned community theater folks, and we did a read-through of the script. It was AMAZING! In addition to it being fun, it was helpful. (Gotta get my red pencil out and do a few more tweaks.) And, a cool fun fact: One of them, Rachel Crane, was one of the first readers of Being Henry David when it was first published in 2013 and she was a middle school student, and this year she graduated from (get this) film school! We had such a great time talking about the excitement and challenges of screenwriting and the “biz.”

Here are a few photos…including a cheesy one of me slapping shut a pretend clapperboard (I had to look up the proper term for that thingie just now…) before shouting “ACTION!” Plus, my cast of fabulous friends and the movie snacks. Yep, I love me a party theme.

So….I am doing this. I’m currently moving forward with this script, making my first connections in the industry, and learning more every day. Obviously, I will keep you posted as things progress!

Wish me well, AND HEY, if you happen to have any connections in the movie business, someone who might find it intriguing that an acclaimed award-winning YA novel has been adapted for film by the original author of said YA novel, please feel free to drop me a note at cal.armistead1@gmail.com.

Hey, it’s a tough business. But you never know…

One of my favorite questions to ask friends and acquaintances lately is this: What are three things you absolutely need in your life? I don’t mean love, health, sex, shelter, oxygen, the kind of thing everybody wants/needs. I mean the things you do when you have free time to do exactly what you want most to do.  And furthermore, if you’re unable to do these things, you don’t feel right. You’re “off.” It’s like your skin doesn’t fit quite right.

I love to ask this question, because it so often reveals someone’s unique passion or hobby. Like a friend who apparently trained dogs in her free time. How did I not know this? Or the woman sitting beside me at a wedding who crafted musical instruments out of strange objects. Or the high school kid whose hobby was real-life survival games. People can definitely surprise you. 

And so I ask you: What are the three things you do because you can’t not do them?

Here, I’ll share mine—not just because I need desperately to update this page with a new entry so I can finally replace the one about Christmas—but also because I’m feeling chatty. Besides, maybe you want to know. I mean, you’re here, right? On my page and all.  

No big reveal here, but WRITING is, and always has been, my first “thing.” And because it’s also my work, I’m one of those outrageously fortunate people who gets to do what I love most on a daily basis. OH, (she added excitedly), and lately, I’ve been taking classes to explore forms of writing I haven’t tackled before. This week, I’ll start my first Memoir class, and also the third round with Screenwriting. Yep, I’m so excited I can’t stand it. Big time writer geek. 

Second on my list tends to shift over the years. Right now, it’s ART. Especially making multi-media art, collage, and these hanging art things I call (for lack of a more creative, original term) “mobiles.”  I make them out of whatever I fancy in the moment…like beads, crystals, nature stuff like shells and feathers and pinecones, and miscellaneous mementos like keys and lockets and antique jewelry. And I’m learning how to make stained glass and mosaic. In short, I’m obsessed. (Clearly, I also like taking classes.)

Third on my list at the moment is MUSIC, although it used to run a close second. I think it’s because I’ve been able to feed my music passion over the years by doing so much of it. I was lead singer in a band for 6 ½ years, had a handful of leading roles in community theater (my favorite was Martha in “The Secret Garden”), and I’ve sung semi-professionally in an a cappella group for the past 18 years. But—true story—soon my group will be disbanding.  Without a regular fix of singing, will I experience withdrawal? Will I seek a new outlet? We will see…

There.

I have successfully replaced my Christmas entry, and had fun blathering on about myself for a little while. If you’re still with me now and have read all the way to the end, God love ya. And hey, tell me your three things. I want to know.