What Are the Chances?
I am writing this from Madeline Island, this sacred vortex that makes creativity inevitable.
I pick up the dog-eared copy of Rainer Maria Rilke's Letter to a Young Poet that I nibble through summer after summer and smile at the highlighted sections that still make me sigh.
This book was given to me at the beginning of my own creative journey as a gift from another young artist. She was a professional actress with her own TV show at fifteen, a writer, producer, and fearless creatrix. She was the first person who told me I was a good storyteller, and I trusted her because she seemed to devour books like a junkie. She was from New York and spoke Kerouac, Kandinsky, and Rilke, dropping poetry into our conversations the way some people add pauses. I was from Jersey and spoke Springsteen and cigarette smoke.
She was a rambler, a gambler, a comedian, and a con artist; pure moxie and magic, and when you meet someone like that, you must ensure their safety. Though you're never quite sure what you're protecting them from. At least, that's how I felt with Skye.
"To be an artist means: not to calculate and count; to grow and rippen like a tree..' Creative life contains its own temporality and the surest way to make it fail is to put on an external clock. Mechanical time makes haste, as it were, but haste dissolves in solitude. In solitude we feel 'as if eternity lay before' us." - Rilke
In this old cabin, I am visited by ghosts of summers past.
I met her in LA when I was twenty-one, and she was sixteen. But I felt like the kid sister.
Our manager set up this trip to LaLa Land for pilot season in hopes of adding a few TV credits to our acting resumes—six young actors in the Barham apartments in Burbank, ages sixteen to twenty-one. I, the oldest, was to act as a house mom, shuttling myself and these teenagers to auditions and jobs.
So we would be roommates for four weeks as she worked her magic, putting me through a cultural boot camp to get me up to speed on everything she was sure I needed to know.
Our friendship lasted ten years. And then, one day, she passed suddenly and unexpectedly.
If I could sum her up in two words, it would be creative flow.
A few years after Skye's death, I asked for a sign, as my father had taught me.
I came across a book at the library that made me think of her. It felt like something she would have read, something she would have written.
David Eggers's "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius"
I pulled it from the shelf and read about a man losing his mother, his pain and suffering, and his writing career. I take the book home and read more. And one night, tucked in bed, I turned the page, and there she was.
"Things finally seem aligned for us, with our rental situation stable.
And now our East Coast helper person, a 22-year-old actress/waitress named Skye Bassett, whom Lance has somehow roped into running around New York for us, doing meetings, planning an upcoming party, running errands.
"An actress?" we say
"Yeah, did you see Dangerous Minds? She was one of the kids in the class. It was a big role. She's on the box and everything."
I rent the movie soon after, and sure enough, amid the black and Latino kids at risk youth, there is a pretty white girl.
When she phones, she is manic and funny, with a husky voice. She is one of us."
I look up from the book. What are the chances?
I am honestly not sure what to think. So I read the passage several times, attempting to gather all the crumbs from the unexpected dessert.
Prompt: Write about an unlikely mentor.
Early on in the Hero's journey, after our Hero has heard the 'Call to Adventure', we meet a character known sometimes as the 'Mentor', which we can take as a highly relevant term in this instance. Classic examples of this character include Gandalf in Lord of the Rings, Dumbledore in Harry Potter, Obi Wan in Star Wars.
