Writing 

The Axe sits in my grip comfortably, the weight of its blade balanced for the handle to carry out any objective. It was a good choice in utility with 19" of hickory holding a 3lb head. It leans against my desk as I stand to write this, at a standing desk, because a life in the chair requires a performance in posture, with a prop to give me something tactile. 

The first axe was too big, oversized in my hands, but I swung it wholeheartedly, not fearing the knot where it landed. Rejection. An editor’s no, a producer’s pass, an author’s twenty years in the page overruling my twenty year old opinion. There was room for the big messy swings, at the Whelchel family homestead, learning the way of words and publishing houses at National Writers Literary Agency.

The swing grew stronger, the pitches landed for clients, and I showed my axe at conferences. I saw myself on camera interviewed in Rusty Nixon’s Scribes, and saw just how oversized it was amongst the others: Diana Gabaldon, Terry Brooks, Jack Whyte. The axe I needed had a smaller handle, but sharper blade, and it waited for me in a basement in Brooklyn. The film department at Brooklyn College, under Foster Hirsch, bleeding red all over my takes on Hitchcock, Kurosawa, Welles, China’s Fifth Generation.  

There was also the cozy cabin of Walter J. Miller down the path. An NYU professor of Science Fiction literature, who took me in as a helper to relish in his detailed carvings around the works of Jules Verne and Mary Shelley. The smaller axe felt dwarfed as only the halls of cinematic and literary academia can do.

With my stance more rooted in the ground, I freelanced, finding I could give shape to just about anyone’s vision or needs, in the written form. The Ghostwriter of books on sweatshops, Uffizi Gallery biographies, silent poisons in nutrition, migraines, Pop Surrealism, the business of music, a barefooted soul in the Philippines. The sign read, “will write for food,” but the axe still leaned in aspiration against my desk.

It swung in the darkness. The blade reflected the projected glow in dark rooms of film festivals and press screenings. What I saw was the stories of the filmmakers, the same faces of the authors I served years prior. There was an instinct to protect and make a clearing in the woods for the stories they were trying to tell. The axe settled at the foot of the Rocky Mountains. Bradley McHargue opened the door to those dark rooms, as my editor, and we molded editorial presence with www.milehighcinema.com.

The axe got carried into Fika, a local coffeehaunt in Parker, the filmmaker across the table had a story and his paintbrush. We built a workshop, where the wood was a WWII Reconnaissance pilot, Bergman-inspired camping bears, wayward travelers across Arkansas and Mars, and a genomics librarian. A weirdly wonderful woodland of creative creatures, not asking for permission to exist. The axe swung vividly with the illusion of life, also telling the story, Ffish as filmmaker, Barry Kooser’s brushstrokes, of a little studio that could, protecting and clearing the path.

There was another room in that same era, no puppets or paint, just Ffish, Sean Bridgers, and pages passed across a table until a screenplay found its shape. The Ten Year Rule is still unproduced, as some wood doesn't get carved all the way through, but the proof is in the grain.

The blade still found shape in other strange places, beyond screens. The liner notes of Kasia Głowicka’s Seven Sonnets, read only by those with the compact disc in hand. The late night songs draped over acoustic guitar and a midi. Solo swings, while the workshop was lifted onto the battleship that was Tipping Point. The grain of brand systems, instructional multimedia, history, metaverses, all requiring words of operational rigor, creativity, government compliance, with the same craft.

The words and the act of writing, protecting and crafting never held the shape of an axe. Until my progeny inspired a name that could be the container for any endeavor. Axe & Petal. The brand myth of a woodsman who came upon a single blue flower, and knelt beside it in a covenant of strength in service of wonder.

The blade is at the ready. Some days pointed at Colorado's own film history, unwritten and overdue. Other days I go in search of whoever needs a story cut into shape next, whatever shape that turns out to be.

Full résumé / Indeed