Story Frame 82 – The Unseen Cartoonist

Looking back over the past 30 years, I can see the storyboard frames moving me along in the right direction, as if there was an unseen cartoonist always just a step ahead of me, sketching out where I should go and what I should do next.

It’s been a career with amazing highs. Like any junkie, I love the euphoria that comes with being upbeat and genuinely happy. But there were also times when it felt more like a game of snakes and ladders as hidden serpents seemed to jump out at me if I attempted to move up a rung. During the time of snakes, I caved to the stresses, pressures, disappointments, frustrations and all out weariness that comes with having lived this body of work and these experiences.

I now understand how some older women have become so fierce. I’m now one of those fierce older women myself. And I’m finally letting all that fierceness and creativity shine through without fear of rejection and criticism. Now that I’m in my sixties, there are days when I simply don’t give a damn about other people’s opinions anymore – and how freeing is that?

I’ve come too far and been through too much to be anything other than what I am – a world-wise, compassionate, creative and opinionated older woman. It’s liberating and exhilarating to be and feel this way – making full use of decades of work, people encounters, travels, storytelling, and life experiences.

A top market PBS station general manager, for whom I’d worked as a freelancer on several projects, once asked me to talk to someone on his staff for an hour or so, and “tell her everything I know.” He didn’t offer any compensation for this, mind you, but did offer to “toss a few airdates my way” if I helped him out. (And here you might get a hint of why I’ve become fierce.)

This ask, by the way, was coming from a man who refers to his wife as “The Dish.” Would he have asked a man to tell someone on his staff everything he knew for free? I think it’s unlikely. The request was so preposterous to me I laughed out loud on the phone.

“An hour?” I said in astonishment.

“Yes,” he said.

“Sum up what I know in one hour!?” I repeated because I just couldn’t help myself. “She would have to have lived my entire life to have any understanding of how and why I do what I do!”

But that was lost on him. Of course, I said no.

For better or worse, the seeds of curiosity and risk-taking have always been inside me.

When I was in first grade, the school principal – a large man with a pleasant disposition – paid a visit to our classroom to remind us that whistling was not permitted in school. My teacher listened respectfully as he spoke, then resumed whatever it was she was teaching us after he left.

I waited a moment. And then I whistled. It was just a low whistle, not as loud as when I used two fingers in my mouth. But it was heard.

My teacher turned around from the blackboard and scanned her flock of six-year-olds in astonishment.

“Did someone just whistle?” she asked.

Silence.

“Who was it?!” she demanded.

I raised my hand. My teacher appeared genuinely shocked. Normally a quiet and well-behaved student, I may have been the last one she would have suspected.

She shook her head in disbelief, then promptly sent me to the principal’s office where I spent an interminable time, for a six-year-old, cooling my heels in the outer office, imagining there was a special machine for disobedient children inside, a sort of conveyer belt with paddles extending downwards to spank the bottoms of bad children. I was the kid of an airline executive, so I think there’s where that image came from. I can still see it in my mind – my little body just another piece of wayward baggage going around in circles on a moving black surface, getting disobedience spanked out of her.

To make matters worse, my mother was a teacher at the same school. I was sure she’d hear about this very soon.

To my great relief, there was no spanking machine in the principal’s office. And there were no repercussions at home that night, either. Just surprised looks and suppressed laughter around the dinner table when the story came out that I’d whistled just moments after the principal told us it was against the rules.

“Why did you do that?!” my brother asked me, laughing.

“I wanted to see what would happen,” I said.

Looking back, that little six-year old’s curiosity is still within me. It has, I realize, always been with me. What would happen, I once wondered, if I called a PBS station and offered to help them, even though I had no experience working in television. What would happen if I reached out to a stranger wearing nice shoes? What would happen if I asked to co-write and co-produce a half million-dollar documentary no one else wanted to work on? What would happen if I insisted a particular film be shot on location in Italy? What would happen if I lost my job and went into business for myself? What would happen if I took on one film project after another, despite qualms I was not qualified, or qualified enough? What would happen if I uprooted my kids and moved the three of us to Asheville? What would happen if I took them to Belize?

In his popular book, Save the Cat, screenwriter Blake Snyder wrote that films are “intricately made, emotional machines” – and I have responded to them as such, choosing to tease out ideas and suggestions I thought I saw in the films and documentaries that came my way in order to shape my own life. As a result, many problems and life issues were solved or resolved, often in surprising ways.

A Baryshnikov opened the door to freelance work, which in turn led to working at the documentary workshop, which led to an education in making documentaries along with unexpected international adventures and my name on a credit scroll. There have been scary times when I rode my fears and anger like rocket fuel, but mostly I followed the path the films seemed to lay out before me.

Had it not been for working at the documentary workshop, I wouldn’t have met my good friend Stephen, who uttered those famous words, “What about Asheville?” to me, thereby changing my life’s direction in a hundred unimaginable ways. I would have missed lessons on the craft of writing craft from Madeleine L’Engle. Had it not been for working as a freelancer for WNET in New York, I wouldn’t have worked on the Bill Moyers specials and would never have met the Magical Leprechaun of Capitol Hill, who was able to make my IRS troubles vanish. Had it not been for working with documentary films, I wouldn’t have met Bruce Norfleet and found the inspiration for my father’s last wonderful year. I was able to make peace with my sister’s untimely death from breast cancer thanks to John Kaplan’s uplifting film, A Pulitzer Prize-winning Photographer’s Journey Through Lymphoma and Patrick Norman’s Full Circle. Thanks to the storyboard of documentary films I’d worked on, I was already a digital nomad two decades before the global pandemic hit and work patterns changed. Most importantly, working with Bill Moyers series on the Joseph Campbell gave me permission to live in joy.

There have been hundreds of ‘what would happen’ moments throughout the past three decades. Not all of them have worked out, but a surprising and encouraging amount of them have.

A positive, emboldened change in tense – from using the conditional to using future tense – has blossomed inside my head. My thoughts are no longer what would happen if…. They have become what will happen if…? What will happen if I leave the world of documentary films and PBS station wrangling behind me and try something new?

For someone who’s inately curious, it feels like a good time to move on.

Kristin Fellows is a published writer, world traveler, and a well-seasoned documentary film consultant. When not writing, Kristin can often be found listening to someone’s story or behind the lens of one of her cameras.

More about Kristin @ kristinfellowswriter.com