NOSTALGIA AS THEME, A DEFENSE

A couple weeks ago, somebody who has been close to the Everly Heights project since I started it said something that kinda bummed me out. They accused me of being obsessed with the past, using the nostalgic themes of Everly Heights as their primary evidence. Somehow, they got the impression that I worship nostalgia, or that I wrote these stories as “LOL REMEMBER THE 90s?”-level clickbait content.

That isn’t the case.

I play coy in the aftershows, since my audience is smart enough to come to their own conclusions about what I’m trying to say. I don’t feel I should have to come out and say what I really think: “Nostalgia keeps you stuck in the past by making it seem more important than it was, but if we don’t reflect on our past, we’ll keep making the same mistakes.” Too preachy, right? Too on-the-nose.

But that criticism makes me worried that I’m not coming across how I’d like. For the record, my college playwriting professor encouraged me to embrace nostalgia as a theme in my work twenty years ago after reading my final assignment “Death of the Pop Culture King,” a one-act play about a guy deciding if he should stay in his hometown to party with his friends or move on to something new. My professor thought that the self-aware criticism of “geek/nerd culture” made my work approachable to the exact people who my stories would resonate with. So, that’s what I’ve done in all my writing for the past twenty years.

If you’ve followed my work for any length of time, you’ll see that approach in everything from fan podcasts to novels to audio drama sketch comedy shows to incredibly long marketing e-mails. I’m not trying to hop on a 90s nostalgia trend here, which kinda fizzled out last year. I picked the 90s because that’s when I grew up so it saves me research, but these stories could just as easily be set in the 50s, the 1800s, or the far-away year of 2620. Danny Chance loving “Biker Mice From Mars” could just as easily be “Beany and Cecil” or “One Piece” if the time period changed. The point is that Danny Chance loves a crappy old show, and what does that say about him as a human, you know?

If this comes off as defensive, it is only because it is defensive. I’d hate to be misunderstood here. The stories I’ve written for Everly Heights are silly, serious, intentional, personal, and not me trying to cash in on 90s hype that stopped existing two years ago. If this was a cash grab project, I’d have a lot more cash. These are literally the stories and lessons of my life, with smiley faces along the margins written in blood and regret. Some of them are pretty funny too!

I’ll leave off today with two relevant quotes from one of my favorite authors, Stephen King:

“Stories are different from memories. Stories are things that we make… we take a few facts and a few feelings and we use them like a builder uses a few bricks and a few boards.” – Bag of Bones

“Fiction is the truth inside the lie. I’ve always felt that if you’re going to tell a story, you should tell the truth, even if the truth is that a man can fly or a ghost can haunt a house.” – On Writing