Mountains, Valleys, and Hamster Wheels
The joys of Theater Camp for Writers, the lows of watching your pensions decimate
I’m leading with the positive today, because looking at what’s happening to the markets in Asia and Europe, we’re all going to need it.
I spent the last four days at the Highlights Foundation in the foothills of the Poconos, reconnecting with my inner high school theater geek at the amazing Theater Camp for Writers created by the amazing Chris Tebbetts, and co-led with the equally amazing Sarah Aronson and S Maxwell, with Zoom sessions from Andrea J Loney and Eileen Robinson.
I loved being involved in theater as a teen, but for reasons I will explore in another post, it was lost to me because of what happened my sophomore year. Theater became yet another part of young Sarah that became lost along the the way. This workshop helped me reconnect with that girl, the one who loved to immerse herself in different roles.
I guess that’s what I do as a writer, too, but writing is a lonely profession, which is why investing in workshops and retreats is so important to me for continued growth and professional development. There’s something truly magical about being with a group of smart writers who are willing to experiment and be open and vulnerable.
Through a combination of improv, acting out scenes, tarot (I can hear my husband snorting, but it was uncanny how it worked for my character!) I came away with critical insights for how to revise what I’ve written so far, exercises I want to do with my co-writer, and a deeper understanding of the POV character I'm writing.
This was my second time at Highlights - the first was a personal retreat where I cracked the back of the third major rewrite of Some Kind of Hate. This was my first workshop, and it was worth every penny.
Best of all was the reminder of why I love to write after having felt incredibly burned out; learning to rediscover the joy and learning that comes from curiosity, play and experimentation.
And of course, there were the cookies…
I’m also grateful-particually in the context of the bookI’m working on- that it provided a safe space to talk about the painful things that have happened in the Kidlit world over the last year and a half and how lonely it’s felt to not be uncritically supportive of Israel for some and not uncritically anti-Israel for others. To see the President of the United States weaponizing antisemitism to suppress free speech at universities and bring us even closer to facism by denying people who are legitimately in the United States due process.
And that brings me to the valley. I’ve written before about how after years of being a Type A workaholic, I’d finally gotten to the “Carpe F*cking Diem” stage of life. We recently went to the UK where, despite losing two days of the trip due to delays caused by the Heathrow shutdown, I spent a week reconnecting with friends and family from my 15 years of living there and making peace with the emotionally difficult parts of moving from Manhattan to a rural English village. More on that in another post.
As a 24 year old working on Wall St, I experienced Black Monday in 1987. I’ve lived through the Dot Com crash, 2008, and 2020 crashes. This morning feels like that all over again.
Having lived through this so many times now, I know that the market is cyclical and that things will eventually recover. There are two differences though:
this is entirely self-inflicted by an incompetent, irrational, authoritarian wannabe president, who took a growing economy and wilfully and stupidly crashed it, aided by a complicit and compliant Congress and unelected billionaires and,
At 62, I’ve got way less time before retirement to make up those losses again. It’s exhausting. And I recognize that I’m much better off than many of the voters who chose to believe that Trump would make their life better despite all the evidence to the contrary, including that he has screwed pretty much everyone else he’s ever dealt with and is a pathological liar. (PS: we need to graduate high school students with at least a basic knowledge of how government works and macroeconomics - otherwise it’s so easy for them to be hoodwinked.)
Okay, I want to try to write while I’m still energized from Theater Camp, before the state of the world and my retirement accounts drags me back into the abyss. So I’ll leave you with some Layla pics. Her antics have been helping me step back from the edge.
It’s so important to hold on to joy, however you find it, to give yourself the strength to keep fighting the good fight.
xo Sarah