Story Frame 83 – Letting Go of the Monkey Bars ... (This bird has flown)

Jun 24, 2025

On the morning of the 30^th of November, 2001, Zoë came into my bedroom, sat on my bed and stared at me until I awoke. I sensed her presence, but resisted for a few moments, lingering in subconsciousness.

“I’ve got sad news for you, Mamma,” she said when I eventually gave in and opened my eyes. All kinds of things came into my mind, but not what she had to tell me.

“What is it?” I asked. “Are you okay?”

She paused a beat before saying, “George Harrison died.”

Knowing he was my favorite Beatle, Zoë had wanted to be the first to give me the news.

I especially associated George Harrison with “Norwegian Wood,” the first Beatles song on which he played the sitar. Being half Danish and having spent most of my twenties in the Scandinavian furniture industry, I often thought of this as my theme song.

When the album “Rubber Soul” was released in December 1965, my sister Karen bought a copy. She brought it home and played it for Mom and Dad. I remember her laughing at the lyrics of “Norwegian Wood,” which my ten-year-old self thought a bit shocking. It was about a man and a woman spending the night together and there she was, playing it and laughing about it in front of our parents.

In an interview with Rolling Stone magazine about his seeming lack of contributions to the Beatles output of songs, Harrison said the breakup of the Beatles was the best thing that could have happened to him as a creative person.

Being a part of the Beatles, he said, “was like having diarrhea and not being allowed to go to the toilet. I think a lot of people were surprised to see, 'Oh, he writes songs, too.'"

I’ve never forgotten that quote because I so identified with it.

For decades I’ve been working with all kinds of creative people, helping them get their work ‘out there.’ I’ve published articles here and there and occasionally been hired professionally as a photographer. But ever since I can remember, I’ve been longing to work and create just for myself – books, photography, illustrations, whatever. My ideas, my stories.

In 2006, five years after George Harrison’s death, colleagues at Oregon Public Broadcasting sent me a copy of a new documentary to see if I would be interested in working with them to represent it to PBS stations nationally. Out of the Shadow told the very personal story of filmmaker Susan Smiley’s mother, Millie, and her struggles to raise her two small daughters while navigating schizophrenia’s bizarre behaviors and the tangle of her own personal mental jungle.

This sounded frightening to me. Worried that watching it might torpedo my hard-earned positive spirits, the DVD sat on my desk untouched for almost two weeks. Eventually the nudges from Portland grew more persistent until I could no longer avoid getting back to them with my thoughts on the film.

One evening, glass of wine in hand, I finally watched it. Empathy grew inside of me as I watched Millie, a beautiful young blonde with movie star radiance in faded and jittery home movies as she alternated between loving mother and lost soul.

To my surprise, sad as the story was, it didn’t depress me. It was a warm and loving portrayal of what was often a difficult and bewildering childhood. I took on the film and became friends with Susan through the process.

It wouldn’t be accurate to say the film foreshadowed or changed my life in any way. At least I didn’t think so until now.

As I neared the end of writing this memoir, I decided to re-read The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. I still had my original dog-eared, highlighted copy on the shelf amongst other books I have accumulated on writing and creativity. It had been twenty-five years since I’d first read it (not long after the interview with Madeleine L’Engle) and Cameron’s tools of ‘morning pages’ and ‘artist dates’ were both well ingrained in my daily and weekly routines.

Reading it again, however, I noticed two words I’d highlighted, then apparently forgotten about: ‘shadow artists.’

Shadow artists are to be found shadowing declared artists… Artists love artists. Shadow artists are gravitating to their rightful tribe but cannot yet claim their birthright…. Shadow artists often choose shadow careers, those close to the desired art, even parallel to it, but not the art itself.

A shadow artist. I had apparently realized that’s what I was when I first read this book so many years ago. I recognized that about myself but also knew I had to earn a living. And that came from working with other people’s stories.

I decided it was time to take one last cue from the many films I’ve worked with, step out of the shadow and focus on my own storytelling.

I’ve loved writing since I was nine years old. At the time, we were living in London and Bunty – my favorite weekly comic book for girls – had just announced a poetry competition. Immediately, I knew I wanted to enter.

“But what should I write about?” I asked my mother.

“Well, they always say to write about something you know,” she replied.

I looked around my bedroom and decided to write a poem about my Danish troll. I sent the resulting eight lines off to the editors of Bunty, then waited impatiently to see my name in print.

Several weeks later, a small envelope addressed to me in beautiful handwriting came through the letter slot. Inside I found a very polite rejection letter. I was shocked. Certain they had made a mistake – and against the better judgement of my mother – I sent them my poem again. This time, they didn’t bother to reply.

It makes me smile each time I remember this – not because I was rejected, but because that little nine-year-old had such confidence in her writing. Where did that come from, I’ve often wondered. Shy and quiet, and often on the periphery, I didn’t have that same confidence in any other area of my life.

At 14, I began writing an illustrated newspaper for my family about all the mundane little nature events that happened in our two-acre garden in Pennsylvania. It had a grand distribution of six, one of whom was a foreign correspondent for the New York Times (but only because he was my uncle.)

By the time I was 17, we were once again living in London. I kept writing, crafting somewhat off-the-wall short homework assignments for my senior year English class. My teacher liked them.

“Kris is a natural language arts student,” my teacher Linda Riebel wrote in my quarterly report. “I hope she pursues literature and writing in the future.”

It was my favorite report card ever, my north star. I re-discovered it in a box of old papers a few years ago and now keep it taped to my computer as a reminder of Ms. Riebel’s confidence in me.

I think in stories. They are always telling themselves to me in my head. And I am always listening. That’s why the world of documentary film has been so appealing to me. What’s always held me back from telling my own stories until now, however, was letting go of my hard-won financial safety net. Now, nearly two hundred film projects later, I am challenging myself once again to ‘be not afraid’ and jettison myself from my safety perch, out into the void. As C.S. Lewis wrote, it’s like crossing monkey bars – you have to let go at some point in order to move forward.

This collection of story frames is my ‘opening farewell’ – as Jackson Browne might say – to the world of documentary films that has inspired and sustained me as I struggled to raise, then launch two unique individuals out into the world. I’m incredibly proud of them both. They made it through the ups and downs of being raised by a hardworking mother freelancing on the fringes of the fascinating but ephemeral and always changing world of documentary film and television.

With Susan Smiley’s Out of the Shadow, it wasn't the substance of the documentary that inspired or changed my life. Once again, it’s just the title giving me a nudge me that it is now time to come out of the shadow of other people’s artistry and give myself the freedom and permission to be a working artist myself, telling my own stories.

I’ve already taken a few steps in this direction. I recently fulfilled a decades-long dream of moving to southern Europe. One of the most appealing features of my little house is that it came with a room I instantly saw as my writing studio.

My father’s old English pine cupboard and bookshelves are on one wall. His colorful, antique Persian rug lies on top of the tiled floor. There’s a black drafting table with art supplies against another wall. My computer sits on a second black drafting table with another old English pine chest of drawers close by filled with paints, brushes, and my old carving tools.

The walls are hung with posters and artwork from my storyboard years – a poster bought during one of the American Byzantine shoots in Italy as well as a poster signed by the designer Alexander Julian, a souvenir from my earlier career in design. Copies of articles I’ve written and writing awards I’ve won are taped on a door, vision boarding this next stage of my life.

I can do this.

Many years after we parted ways, I got an email from Martin. It was in response to an email I’d send him congratulating him on an award I saw he’d won for one of his films. Along with my congratulations, I wrote a few words about the films I was working on, as well as news about the book I was researching and writing on my grandmother’s life in Ethiopia. I ended with a few words of appreciation for all I’d learned from my years working with him, expressing the hope that my work would be a credit to his mentoring and support.

To my surprise, I received a response from him that afternoon telling me about a film he was making on the topic of forgiveness. He ended with a few words of encouragement.

“The work you are involved in sounds terrific,” he wrote, “and very much you. The book is something I think you wanted to get under your belt … now maybe it will be two or three. You don’t need mentoring, just a chance to show your stuff.”

A Storyboard Life

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