The Dinner Parting

How are you? What are you working on, artistically or otherwise? Who or what has shaped who you are? What inspires you? What do you love? Send a letter to luke@retroduck.com and let me know. These letters inspire me. I hope they inspire you, too.

William Sterling is a podcast editor by day, and aspiring (and talented!) actor and writer by night. Here he is on the pressures of productivity during the pandemic. Stills from The Dinner Parting, which we shot last December.

Hi.

I’ve been working on a book. As such, my prose might seem stilted. Or there might be long run on sentences where I’m endeavoring to, like Hemingway, bring more thoughts together than deserve to be brought together and I will use more “ands” than any writer should ever use and you’ll understand it’s all because I have so many important things to say and these words will spread this brilliance and everyone will cheer and there will be roses and I will sleep well.

Or, at least, that may be my inner dialogue.

I suppose I struggle with this actor’s/writer’s need for recognition. And by this, I mean my own. Please pardon the disjointed cocktail of the actor and the writer like Jekyll and Hyde. Quarantine does not do well for my state of my mind. Instagram helps. I haven’t been able to bring myself to brave the world of Tik Tok considering I feel like only yesterday I was twenty-one.

I have had a lot of thoughts recently about the pressure of productivity. About how much I think I should be creating and how much I am creating. I do believe there is such a thing as too many voices. Too many pressures outside the pressure cooker of the self. Because we really are too hard on ourselves.

Prior to this version of the end of the world, my personal world ended a few months ago when I lost my dog. My best friend. The sometimes-uncontrollable fate of cancer consumed him, and I was crushed. But this was early November. Just before my thirty second birthday. And before I traveled to Michigan to star in a feature film co-written and produced by none other than Mr. Luke Allen Hackney. There I met so many souls and felt so much love and stretched so many creative muscles it felt like, finally, I was swaying in that hammock of doing the thing I had been destined to do.

But much to, hopefully all, of our woes, we had to wrap and go our separate ways. And then there was Christmas. And then the New Year. And I told myself 2020 would be the year of me. Because I had spent so many years at the beck and call of my day job. Answering the midnight calls of any pseudo-celebrity that needed an edit or a way to make them look better. But no, this year was going to be mine. I was going to learn the power of now. I was going to push back a little. I was going to set some healthy boundaries. I was going to make the others, not just see but, feel my presence and ability.

And it seemed to work for a few weeks.

But then the sickness came, and everyone forgot. And I can’t blame them. There are a lot of things I have forgotten or foregone or ignored because of the stress of this event. An event everyone is likely tired of hearing about or reading about or thinking about. But from this pressure I have also felt the core of my creativity push back.

For the first two weeks I pretended like every hour was the happy one. For the third, I wandered the wasteland of the mind wondering what it was all for. The fourth, I found productivity. The fifth I found tequila. And by this, as of now, end of the sixth I have completed what, by word count goal, will be one quarter of a book. One I began while filming in Michigan.

But I also dragged my ass through a vomit draft of a screenplay with my writing partner. And I’ve taped monologues and done scenes with my roommate and read books and newspapers and caught up on old New York Times magazines and watched some television and spent quality time with my girlfriend and become pretty good pals with her cat; monster. (Remember the “ands?”)

Needless to say, I think what I’ve discovered most in my process of writing this book and being way too hard on myself, upon forcing myself to reflect I realize I have accomplished quite a great deal. And if you’re willing to look at it from the outside in, you have too. That when push comes to shove and we’re not going into work and we’re left to our own devices, eventually the depression will dry out and the self-doubt will come up short and we’ll realize; we’re doing just fine. Because at the end of panic is peace. If we are willing to give ourselves grace, at the depth of that dramatic self-reflection is a determination that even nature cannot diminish.

I am, therefore I create. Not the other way around. And you are too.

It has been a blessing to be reminded by the clay that my hands have molded, even if I were left with nothing at the end of this; I would still be someone. I would still be me. And that me had enough to say to dig my way out of the holes that misfortune has created. And I take confidence in knowing that we can do this together. Because I’m still just a boy with a dream. Still an unpublished writer. Still an actor who hasn’t broken through to the other side of having no day job.

The truth is, at the end of it all, all the work in the world is only part time. And we all know that part time on this earth is borrowed, still. So why not listen to the call of the wild? The beat of the heart that continues, despite our desire to give up. Art is never ending. And just like you and I, it pulsates and pounds in the temples, and it cannot be stopped. During times of doubt, do not lean into disbelief. Remember that, even at the end of it all, all this, ourselves included, may only be temporary. But our art is not. The only positive thing to come from a pandemic is passion. And that is permanent.

Will