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We had a terrific conversation with arts organizer, filmmaker, multi-media artists and writer Celeste Chan. We talked about The Queer Ancestors Project and the writing portion of the program for queer and trans youth that Celeste started this year. She had some great advice for them that works for us, too: normalize the blocks. “Sometimes is is just really hard,” she acknowledges. Strategies for dealing with this include breaking down the writing process, lowering your expectations, and Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Vertical Read, a very cool writing exercise for finding the fragments, phrases and words that “have some heat” in your work. In talking about the obstacles, Celeste noted that while we often struggle to write, story requires obstacles to function. We talked about her process in creating and screening her documentary in progress about Riot Grrl. That lead to talking about coming out into riot grrls, finging riot grrl at the library, becoming polticized, reading zines and getting schooled in her community arts organizing that continues to this day. We also talked about the challenges and pleasures of finding balance and inspiration between mentoring and creating. About audience–expanding and narrowing it, juggling the experimental with accessibility, resonating across generations, writing with intimacy, explaining and leaving things unexplained. And another terrific exercise from Celeste inspired by James Baldwin. Links in the bio and below.
Links Discussed:
Mini Nguyen’s Evolution of a Race Riot
or visit
http://475mimi.wixsite.com/mimithinguyen
Celeste Chan
Celeste Chan writes, makes films, performs, teaches, facilitates, and organizes cultural events. The child of a Chinese immigrant father and a Bronx Jewish mother, she came out queer as a teenager living in Seattle during the 1990’s. Inspired by riot grrrl, Celeste started making films at The Evergreen State College and earned her BA in International Feminism. Since that time, she’s joined film collectives (Shifting Narratives, Folsom St. Film Collective) and won several awards and fellowships (Hedgebrook, Lambda Literary, VONA, Soaring Gardens, and SF Arts Commission). Her recent films, Queer Historical Mixtape (with Irina Contreras), and ABSENCE: No Fats, No Femmes, No Asians have screened at screened at colleges & national/international festivals. She’s at work on a film, Art Heart. Her writing can be found in Ada, AWAY, Citron Review, cream city review, Feminist Wire, Hyphen, The Rumpus, and more. From 2008-2018, she co-directed Queer Rebels, a queer and trans people of color arts project. A lifelong student of alternative education, Celeste coordinates Writing Rainbow: QTPOC FREE School series and serves as Teaching Artist at the Queer Ancestors Project, where she facilitates free writing workshops for LGBTQ youth 18-24 years old. She’s a contributing editor for Foglifter. www.celestechan.com
Photo by Yuska Lutfi Tuanakotta
Story Makers is a podcast that features in-depth conversations with accomplished writers, filmmakers and industry experts about story craft, technique, habit and survival–everything you need to know to stay inspired, connect to your creativity, find others’ wonderful stories and your own success.
The hosts:
Elizabeth Stark is a published, agented novelist and distributed filmmaker who teaches and mentors writers at BookWritingWorld.com.
Angie Powers is a distributed filmmaker and published short story writer with an MFA in creative writing and a certificate in screenwriting from UCLA who teaches story structure at BookWritingWorld.com.