I’m a documentary filmmaker, and I don’t make films about myself. That said, I plan to write about my life on this substack.

When I was in high school, I taught myself HTML, and I made personal websites with manifestos and lists of my favorite music and films. I found penpals, shared my zine called Goat Dreams, and I joined an online community called Swank Army, where people wrote and designed experimental Live Journals. I continued blogging or creating my own archives in one form or another, but once social media took off, I stopped.

I’m always writing something. Usually a treatment for a film, or an essay now and then if somebody asks me to. But in the past year, I’ve been writing more in-depth about my experiences as a documentary filmmaker. I wrote about my interview methods, but I thought it would be too revealing for a future subject to read. I wrote an essay about a trip to meet a potential subject, who I discovered in a psychotic state. It didn’t feel right to share.

Then I read the author Mary Gaitskill’s substack, and I saw her working out creative ideas in a public way. She writes about herself, but in service of unpacking themes that appear in her work. There’s a part of me that’s embarrassed to write in the first person on this “blog.” Then there’s another part of me that’s not self-conscious at all. I’m putting on training wheels for a bigger writing project, and I’m here to tell stories in a different way.

Enjoy Polari For Dummies!