I've been hesitant to write about the work lately.

Partly because I'm busy, and every day making a documentary is a different task; and partly because the work, in some ways, has gotten harder to talk about.

A day's work is emails, casting calls, research, scanning and logging receipts, planning a future shoot, getting release forms, transcoding footage, negotiating rights and sensitivities around filming in a place, saying hello to someone, reminding them you're making a film about them, finding out if there's an update.

Sometimes you're actually filming (less frequently than you’d think).
Sometimes zooming out and taking the big-picture look on a storyboard. Sometimes the funder wants to see clips of progress, so you edit those.
Sometimes you're folding laundry while listening to the interview you just did, just to hear it fresh.

Other times you're high on a person and their energy.
They're excited you're there to listen, to see their life. They welcome you in, introduce you to their families, feed you their family recipes, show you photos of themselves as kids. Honestly, most of the time if you get to the stage of filming someone, this is usually the reality.

Other times you’re low.
The people you’re filming aren’t really that into it and it feels like a relationship none of you should have entered; you try to go on in the most ethical way while they push you away or slip out of agreed-upon plans. They don't really want you in the space. So many things are off limits you feel like you're invading their privacy. You're not sure why you're there.

Sometimes people speak poorly about you in a language you don’t know (which you get translated later), or cancel on the filming plans after you've taken a flight out to document them.

Sometimes they call you names. Like when you ask them what chopped means because you're a millennial who hates the world of the internet and all the mean kids, and they tell you look in the mirror, and you know it's a joke because they're in their early 20s and being dumb, but you feel old and want to go home.

Over a decade ago, when I started making films, I don’t remember the assumptions that get made now.

Smartphones weren’t widespread, social media was slim, people were skeptical about the media, yes — when I was making Hollow in 2012 — but once they met me, they realized I wasn’t the boogey-woman Media. I was Elaine, and we put away the assumptions and met each other anew.

Now I observe more hostility and overplaying.

Checking if they did it “right.” Performance, because we live in a world that is performative. I don’t remember this kind of performing among common folks in 2012.

Some people were more comfortable than others, kids would be silly and look into the camera — but I don’t remember the group of people who didn’t want to be on camera, agreed anyway, and then were nervous or kinda rude the whole time.

Back then, they used to just say “no thanks.” I much prefer that.

Maybe it's also the landscape. A lot of the nonfiction people consume now is mostly about high-profile true crime cases, or famous people. Marie Claire's most-anticipated documentaries of 2026 list runs sixteen films — Marc Jacobs, Billie Eilish, Earth Wind & Fire, Louis Theroux, David Attenborough, the making of The Wizard of Oz, Elizabeth Smart, Lucy Letby, Star Trek, BTS…

The seven exceptions - one being an awesome film about a small Mississippi tourist town, and one being a very important film about AI…are truly exceptions.

If the documentary you've seen is mostly about people who are already public, of course you brace like a public person when the camera shows up.

And our social media presence has to play a role too, right? Everyone's been running their own little channel for years now. By the time an indie documentary camera shows up, the muscle memory is already there. People want final cut of their own lives.

I also notice that the younger generations — up through their early 40s — sometimes forget they aren’t on the internet, but instead they’re in a room with a real person. The defenses they’ve built for one don’t quite fit the other, and the camera is there to catch the mismatch.

And honestly, I get it.

Folks with cameras have abused their access and they’ve broken trust. The wariness isn’t unearned.

Documentary filmmakers don’t talk about this sea change enough.

Maybe because it sounds like failure, or like blaming the people we film. But I think it has to be said: the filmmaker-and-participant model needs to evolve. We are not documenting people who aren’t, in some way, also documenting themselves nearly daily. That hasn’t always been true.

So how do we respond?

While I usually write about the people I film with all the love in the world, because I usually do fall in love with parts of them, something feels different in today’s landscape.

I love humans and all their quirks. But meanness and performing-for-gain make me shut down. I have to catch myself. I want to disassemble the camera and walk away.

But the truth is, engaging with other people and their stories is my oxygen.

I’m not looking for sympathy, or to blame or complain; I’m looking for a conversation with other makers.

Are you seeing this too?

Alas…

I was carrying all of this when my neighbor - she’s a fellow storyteller, in her 70s and lived abroad for years and has since come home - said something like:

Can you imagine a richer life than getting to do what we do? Witnessing and asking people questions about the deepest, most personal moments of their lives.

We talked about how much we’ve learned - good and bad - from the people we’ve filmed and how enriching and valuable that has been.

I told her I used to be a closed-off and private person. Happy to hide behind the camera. This work has taught me to appreciate vulnerability and openness in a way I don’t think I would have found otherwise.

The Elaine of a decade ago would never have written a rambling piece like this — one that admits, out loud, that she has doubts, and doesn’t have answers.

No chance.

The work I’ve spent my life doing is harder than it used to be, and the world I’m doing it in is more allergic to it.

But my neighbor is right.

There isn’t a richer life than spending your days listening, observing, and reflecting back the lives that surround you.

And I have the people who I’ve filmed - even the ones who maybe decided they didn’t actually want me around - to thank for leading me here.

Did you know that scientists, engineers, energy developers, and big tech are trying to bottle the sun…with a big magnet?

This is what was circling my mind this morning while on a hike. I kept telling myself it was Saturday. A day off. But three weeks deep in an edit and my brain had not yet caught up with my body in the woods.

Which is to say: I needed to take a walk.

Then my husband removed his shoes on the trail. He is a known shoe hater.

Then my four-year-old, who thought it was novel and cool to be like dad.

Then the two-year-old, who seemed instantly more calm, grounded in a way I did not know to envy.

I said: Well. Now I have to take mine off or I’m the fully clothed nerd on the nude beach.

I removed them with resentment, and immediately it subsided.

The coolness of the earth. The wet leaves. The soft moss. The sharp sticks. The slick rocks. The squish of yesterday’s rain.

My whole body slowed to the age of the oaks. I did not care how far we went. We walked peacefully and gently and quietly - and it was wonderful.

Yes, I know what you’re thinking.

But as I get older, I realize I care less and less what you’re thinking. Not out of cruelty; out of something closer to clarity.

Public opinion changes. One day everyone hates AI, the next it’s in every sentence at dinner party - well I asked ChatGPT - and I feel like the last one standing on the ground. Literally.

After our walk, I saw a neighbor take in her No Data Center sign. I joked she’d bring out All Hail AI next. She didn’t. But it would be the ultimate signal of how quickly we move and how little we hold.

I have been filming for almost a year about energy.

Fuel agnostic, we call it. All forms. None labeled good or bad. It’s about the people. And the people are all types. All of them.

But being deep in this topic makes you prickly. You realize how little everyone knows about the thing they use every day - let’s be honest, abuse every day - and how ungrateful they are for it.

So a film about the people who provide seems very on-brand for me. A person who has tried to say, always, in the nicest and most creative way:

You are arrogant. You think you know. But you have no clue. And I am going to show you something you think you understand through the lives of people who DO know, because they are on the ground.

Pride is ugly. I don’t like it in other people or in myself.

Pride keeps our shoes on when the rest of the family goes barefoot because we’re thinking what will a passerby think?

Pride is ultimately useless and life-sucking.

And yet…

The people in the energy sector have a pride that is different. Not the life-sucking kind. The motivating kind. The kind that comes from being asked, constantly, by people who know very little, and act like they know everything.

So back to my original question…did you know that scientists, engineers, energy developers, and big tech are trying to bottle the sun…with a big magnet?

A magnetic bottle, they call it - holding superheated plasma in place, keeping it from touching the walls, so that hydrogen atoms can find each other, fuse into helium, and release something massive and clean.

That is what fusion power is (sorta). That is the promise - near-infinite energy, not hinged on natural resources, not borrowed from the earth we are already asking too much of.

Some say it will never happen.

Others present flashy materials: Yes. In fact. It will. See here this snazzy PowerPoint.

I am not smart enough to know who is right. But I pause.

The sun is unlike any other star. Its power would destroy us entirely if the atmosphere - and all the other complicated things of physics - were to change.

And yet here we are, trying to bottle a star.

So I pause.

Is it pride that makes us think we can hold the sun in a magnetic fist?

Or is it pride to say we can’t?

Today, I took my shoes off in the woods, and immediately my pride subsided.

The squish of yesterday’s rain beneath my feet was a reminder: we did not make the rain fall, and we cannot make the sun shine.

On a shoot last week, I had the opportunity to ask a clear-eyed teenager about AI.

She’s grown up on the hinge of something; between an analog childhood and an AI-saturated future. That space between is full of questions, and I find myself fascinated by what young people make of it.

She told me, “I’m really thankful to have grown up without the use of AI in daily life, and then see it start to become a bigger thing.”

That pause between eras has given her perspective. Like me, she remembers what it was like to learn without the shortcut. And while she’s watched the world bend toward convenience, she doesn’t sound convinced that’s always a good thing.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot: what do we lose when we gain efficiency?
If AI can write a song or paint a portrait faster than we can: what’s left for us?

So I asked her about this conundrum. She said, “Learning isn’t just learning the thing itself. You’re also learning how to work hard… how to put in effort.” (Side note: she speaks three languages and plays multiple instruments, so she knows something about learning.)

The skill is one outcome, yes. But it’s not the whole story. There’s pain, patience, discipline, and doubt in the process. And it seems to me, that’s where the real learning lives.

AI can be trained on all the world’s music, all the rules of grammar, all the structures of story. It can access information instantly, but does that mean it truly understands it?

In a world where machines can do the knowing for us…is learning more valuable than knowledge now? What happens to our sense of self when we outsource knowing?

“There’s no satisfaction internally,” she said, imagining a world where you could upload any skill instantly to your brain.

No trying.
No failing.
No 10,000 hours.

And while that sounds seductive on the surface (think of all the things we could do!), she called it what it is: “instant gratification.”

But here’s what haunts me: if you take away the learning, you take away the failure. And if you take away the failure, you take away the art. Right!?

So much of art (however you want to define it) comes from friction; from not getting it right the first (or hundredth) time. Struggle and iteration are the raw materials. They get shaped by heat and pressure into something reflective, something communicative. Art without that pressure feels cold to me (manufactured, not made).

So we return to this question: what makes something human?
If we can offload all the effort.
If we can sidestep the sweat.
Is what’s left still ours?

She pointed to language as a metaphor. Translation tools can give you the words, but not the weight. “You would have the knowledge of the language,” she said, “but you wouldn’t have the knowledge of the full experience.”

And maybe that’s what this all comes down to: experience.
The embodied, emotional, imperfect journey of learning, failing, being humbled, feeling weak, getting back up, and trying again.

We can build machines that perform, that mimic, that even move us. But they can’t feel the stakes of the process. They don’t get blisters on their fingers. They don’t cry in frustration or laugh when something finally clicks.

We do. And that struggle is not a glitch in the system. It is the system.

I’ve spent enough time in editing bays and field shoots to know that beauty rarely arrives on the first try. The work teaches us something the shortcut never could: how to care, how to know when to walk away, how to return, and how to stay with it when it gets hard.

And I wouldn’t trade that for perfection.

Would you?

This is a “documentary poem,” drawn from a real conversation on my walk today. I’m not sure where I’m going with this (probably nowhere). But if this ends up being the only one I write, I hope it offers something to you on this winter day.

—

This morning the birds called out.
I walked to the window to see—
Fat robins.
House sparrows.
I filled the feeders and sprinkled seed on the ground,
A trail to lead them.

I remember the time she told me
She didn’t want the bag of bird seed.
I could take it.
All she could attract were
Trash birds.

I learned later
She meant the cardinal,
The sparrow,
The grackle,
The crow,
The raven,
Maybe the mourning dove, too,
Those glorified pigeons.

But I will feed them.
They come from the same source,
Like all of us.
Some more beautiful than others,
But all hungry.

I met him on the steep hill.
I waved and said hello.
He turned in my direction,
Though didn’t wave right away.
He might’ve said hello,
But his mouth was too small under his large, white beard for me to see.

We journeyed together
Into the woods.

He told me he’d been tracing some footsteps
From my next-door neighbor’s house.
Feet smaller than his.

He showed me his ice clamp-ons,
The figure-eight they made.
Said his own tracks were easy to read—
But this one, this foot, was unfamiliar.

I stomped my shoe into the snowy earth
So he could see my print.
It was me he sought.

But all he said was,
“Those shoes will be good today in the woods,”
And carried on—
Talking about how the tracks led to this place
And that,
But ended at the pond.

The pond being not a pond,
But a dried-up muddle frozen over.

Still, he called it a pond
Because he once saw tadpoles there.
He wished them well—
But the sun did not.
It dried them into the earth,
Preserved and wrinkled.

He told me his wife had been taken out of hospice
And wanted to start canning again.
“She’s amazing,” he said, with admiration.

He told me he was rising dough at home
For sourdough cinnamon rolls.*
He had gathered figs, prunes, dates, and raisins,
Together with honey and cinnamon.

“How many in your home?” he asked.
“Four,” I said.
He said he’d bring me half a dozen.
I said that’s more than enough.

He told me there’s a woman—
A local teacher—
Who tracked the cerulean warbler
From this very spot
All the way to South America and back.

Said he had a book about it.**
He’d bring it to me,
Along with the cinnamon rolls.

I should read it, he said,
And await the warbler in the spring.

I return home
To see the trash birds eating their food.

I think of the woman
Who gave up feeding.
And the man
Who follows prints to nowhere.

I think of what we call worthy,
What we choose to keep and feed.

Footnotes:

*the cinnamon bread that was delivered along with a jar of “…cherry tomatoes this year cut in half then dehydrated. Rehydrate in tomato soup or stew.” feeling thankful for neighbors.

And his recipe below:

**the book he spoke of

This year, we moved. Not just our things, but our lives.

We moved through seasons and stories in our new place.

Winter blizzards sent us out to play in the snow - on sleds, cross country skis, and our backs, making snow angels.

We boiled maple syrup in early spring and hunted Easter eggs among blooming crocuses.

We swam in rivers and creeks all summer long, picked our own pumpkins and bowled butternut squash in the fall, and cut down our Christmas tree in the icy national forest.

We got sick - too many times. Antibiotics, steroids, sniffles, and an ER visit I hope never to repeat.

Still, there were so many gifts. This year was made possible by the generosity of family and friends (new and old).

Their care made it possible for Curren and I to do our work, for which I’m endlessly grateful.

We filmed for over 20 days across 7 states for our current documentary. We captured protests, solar farms, race cars, nuclear control rooms, wind turbines, the electrical grid, the lithium extraction process, a Sikh temple—and so much more.

These moments remind me why I love this work: I get to step inside other people’s lives, into places I have no business being, except the camera grants me permission. And then I come home and spend countless hours in the edit, stitching it all together.

Some other things we did…
I made a music video for
I spoke at Ole Miss and Dickinson College.
While in Mississippi, I visited William Faulkner’s home and I admired the handwritten storyboards on his walls.
I mentored fellow storytellers in-person and virtually.

I purged: toys, clothes, and old stuff.
I sold my CRV and got a Tacoma.
I started baking bread weekly - honestly, the best use of time I’ve found.
If you live local and want a sourdough starter, holler.
I grew a garden from seed.
We ate a cast-iron dinners, had porch conversations with neighbors and visitors from afar.

I backpacked through Cranberry backcountry with new friends.
We stressed over tick bites…so many ticks.
We gazed at full moons…so many full moons.
We attended weddings, funerals, Fasnacht, and too many parades to count.
We celebrated birthdays—40, 4, 2, 38.

I watched family start a regenerative farm.
I cried through Sigur Rós at the Orpheum Theatre.
I felt chills while singing canticles during an Advent service, incense thick in the air.
I lost my temper. I found my patience again.
I said goodbye to people I loved - David Isham, my Great Uncle Roy.

On Substack this year:

I wrote about moving away from industry validation and learning to trust the work more deeply.

I wrote about the quiet power of imagination, and why nurturing our inner dream machine might be the most human thing we do.

I wrote about what it really means to direct; how it’s less about control, and more about caring enough to decide in the unknown.

I wrote about raising kids who notice, and why choosing to care is a radical, hopeful act.

I wrote about why storytelling needs more soul, and how tension alone can never tell the whole truth of a life.

I’m grateful to everyone who walked alongside us in 2025. Here’s to another lap around the sun.

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and Happy New Year to all.
With love,
Elaine

My friend Penny Lane is on Substack now (subscribe!). She’s sharing some honest, necessary reflections, one of which included being transparent about her Sundance rejection. I admire her for that.

It made me think about my own history with that festival. I’ve been rejected by Sundance more times than I’ve been accepted. And yes, of course, it stings. I’ve felt that slow, sinking disappointment - especially when I believed in a project with my whole heart. But I moved on.

The trouble is, not everyone around me did.

After one of those rejections, the streamer we were working with insisted we go straight to their platform. As if... no other festival would do! I remember thinking how shortsighted that was, as if one institution’s validation (or lack thereof) determined the worth of the work. As if building an audience should happen overnight.

In 2023, I did get into Sundance with King Coal, and to be honest, I was kind of amazed. I remember standing at the Directors Brunch; a swanky affair, one of those “only if you’re invited” kinds of rooms. I turned to a Sundance programmer and said how honored I was that we were there. I mentioned how much the film had evolved since we submitted, which is incredibly normal. You submit in September, find out in November, and sprint to the finish line by December.

But the programmer looked at me and said, “That’s good, but I hope it’s not more fictional than it already was.”

I wasn’t sure how to take that. King Coal was always hard for some people to place. We blurred lines and we did that intentionally. Sundance programmed it in the NEXT section, not the documentary category, making it one of the few docs there and ineligible for most awards. This frustrated our publicist, but at the end of the day, we had the Sundance stamp of approval and went on our merry way.

We did a 50-screen theatrical tour and found our own audience. It wasn’t easy, but we did it (kudos to Mia Bruno for running that show).

A lot of people in my industry are freaking out right now, streamers have cut budgets, no one’s buying, no one’s selling. It’s a statement. And it’s awful. It’s also true.

But the real truth is: the system will never fully hold you.

It might support you here and there. It might throw you a bone or pull you into the spotlight for a minute. But it will never be your foundation. You have to build your own.

That’s what I’ve been doing, quietly and consistently.

I don’t play the game very well. I don’t have regular calls with my agent, though she’s a lovely human. I don’t use social media, and I have no regrets about that.

I don’t live in New York or LA. I live in a town of 6,000 in West Virginia. I don’t go to parties or attend festivals unless I have a film playing.

Speaking of: I’ve never loved the parties.

Too often, it feels like a bunch of people from nowhere, gathered in a nowhere-place, making work about everywhere. Too often, I’ve been distracted by how much money is being spent on the bar tab and hors d’oeuvres in a room full of underpaid, overworked filmmakers - many of whom are only there in hopes of meeting someone who might get them one step closer to a lousy couple-thousand-dollar grant.

I instantly feel more at home when I hear an accent float across the room - someone like Bill Ross, who sounds like they’re from somewhere.

To be sure, there are exceptions. More and more regional, international, and Southern filmmakers are breaking through—films popping up here and there and everywhere—and I do love many of the people in this field.

But I don’t always feel connected to them. And that’s okay.

The festival world often feel stiff. So serious. So...placeless.

So I spend less. Expect less. And run my own race.

And because of that, I mostly move through this world pretty peacefully.

Deleting social media helped a lot with that. I’m no longer in a daily comparison loop. And that’s made room for something else entirely: focus, clarity, and a quieter kind of confidence.

It’s funny, because I made King Coal in something of an isolation chamber, after deleting Instagram. I honestly don’t think I would’ve taken as many risks in that film if my brain had been cluttered with what all my peers were making. And I wouldn’t have made it through the process without the support of a steady, trusting team. So at screenings, when people ask, “What would you change? Are there parts you don’t like?” I know they’re asking because they don’t like something (usually the funeral scene). But if you think we’re burying a body and not a story, then it’s probably not for you. And that’s okay, too.

I don’t feel burdened by that question. I don’t feel pressured to answer it.

In many ways, it’s an odd question - one that shifts the focus away from the film itself and toward some imagined disappointment. A rich conversation, short-circuited - it feels like a social media comment, just said out loud.

Sure, things could have been different. But that’s true of every film.

That film came from a place I can’t replicate. It doesn’t make sense how it came together, so I don’t question it, and I don’t defend it as perfect.

The film was exactly what I needed to make to feel complete.And when people do get it, they really get it.

They rush up to me.
They hug me.
They tell me about their place.
They tell me about their king.
They cry.
They FaceTime their dad so he can meet me, because he’s a miner in Nova Scotia.

The system will say the film isn’t marketable. Too niche. Too regional. Too something.

But it’s a film only I could’ve made, alongside an exceptional team.

And with that, how could I have any regrets? Why would I hand over my confidence to a system that doesn’t share my values?

So if you’ve ever felt left out or left behind by the system, I hope you know: it’s not you. It’s the system.

You can still make your work.
You can still run your race.

Just make sure it’s yours - because you ain’t gonna get rich being an independent filmmaker, so you might as well enjoy the process.

My four-year-old fell asleep last night with a bowl beside his bed.

He was convinced that the candy he dreamed about would land in that bowl by morning, and that we’d be able to hand it out to the real-life trick-or-treaters.

I didn’t correct him. Instead, we went to the store and bought some real-life candy for the dream-candy bowl.

This morning, he walked down the stairs silently, bowl in hand.

He looked at me and said, “Mom, my dreams worked.”

Any piece of work (defined broadly) that you’re making, you likely see it in your mind, in your dreams, long before it ever becomes real.

This is true for much of life’s work: cooking, architecture, gardening, gift planning, choreography, quilt-making, songwriting, community organizing, sculpting, and even relationships.

I believe the more we attend to our dreams and treat them as real, the more likely they are to show up for us.

And I’m defining dreams widely: from the thoughts that drop in while you’re showering, to something you notice in the world that opens up a new idea, to the pictures that arrive in your mind at night.

Whether it’s during the day or the dark, if we allow our brain the space, it will dream. But we have to make room for that. It doesn’t happen when we overfeed it. Dreaming seems to awaken when the mind is hungry. It fills the void, rather than us scrambling to fill it. I don’t know how this works, but I know it’s been true in my experience.

I, too, had parents who fed my dreams with metaphorical candy. All those strange voices and characters I came up with that my mom helped me capture on VHS. All those notebooks filled with scribbles and stories they listened to me narrate from inside a cardboard box fashioned as a television. The Talkgirl they bought me, which I used to record their secret conversations (oh, how I wish I could find those tapes).

Now I feed my kids’ dreams, their ideas, the same way my parents fed mine. But I find myself wondering:

Were my parents’ dreams fed too?
And am I still feeding my adult dreams with the same care I give to my children’s?
Are you? If not, why?
Why do we so easily give up on that part of ourselves?

Is it because our dreams have let us down? I’ve been there - poured in the time, the attention, the work, and it just doesn’t pan out. Not always because of external factors (the usual suspects like no funding or no distribution), but sometimes because it just wasn’t that good. Or maybe it wasn’t time yet. What happens then? Do we lose hope and disconnect from our imagination?

Or is it because we come to believe that dreams are impractical, or a waste of time, or not profitable?

And while that may be true (dreams on their own won’t buy your groceries or pay your rent) even without external validation, the internal work of dreaming still feels essential.

Dreaming seems to me to be one of the most human ways we navigate the world.
It allows us to make something from nothing. And today, I think it’s more important than ever to reconnect with what it means to be human.

I worry that our modern world, increasingly shaped by algorithms that tell us what to care about, is dulling our ability to dream - to imagine what doesn’t yet exist.

A lot of people talk about the dangers of new technologies, but I don’t think it’s said enough that it’s also a profoundly boring way to go through life. I find much of it dull and lacking in variety, flattening us into sameness (same opinions, same experiences, same personalities). Sometimes it feels like there are more varieties of tomatoes than there are modern people.

And sadly, it’s not just about distraction, it’s also about control. It’s convenient, after all, for both corporations and governments to manage what we’re exposed to, what we purchase, what we fear, what we think about, even what we dream about.

I know that sounds dark. But I have to say, as someone who doesn’t use social media, I often find conversations about what friends and colleagues are absorbing through reels and updates to be deeply depressing. Not because I think we should bury our heads in the sand and pretend the world is simple. It’s not.

But I do think the internet, and social media in particular, has tricked many of us into believing that distant empathy and digital grief are forms of action.
They’re not.
Should you care? Absolutely. But care should lead somewhere.
It should move you to act, not just spiral.

Otherwise, we become hooked to machines that run on outrage, and we forget how to build anything real.

I recently read that AI isn’t like us humans because it’s only made entirely of what’s on the internet, and I agree that’s not real life. Not in the full-bodied, five-sense, deeply human way we experience emotion.

But let’s be honest: humans have spent the last two decades doing free labor for Meta and every other tech giant, uploading their most intimate moments (births, deaths, heartbreaks, confessions, dreams) for the machine to feed on.

So yes, AI is trained on what’s online. But how much of your life have you already put there?

It’s not enough to say that the difference between us and machines is feeling. Because we’ve given them plenty of our feelings too. Maybe not in full, but enough.

I do believe that AI will dream one day. There are already models that “want” autonomy or imagine new realities. But I want my kid to know his dream machine, the one inside him, is just as real as the world he wakes up to. And he needs to hold onto it. We all do.

Because the world being built around us is happening fast.

These words came out of me the other day, I’ll put them here as I have no other place for them:

What are we really making?
And what will it mean for the land beneath us,
to the people beside us?

Will these machines speak for us,
or simply louder than us?

Are we living in the beginning of something,
or the middle of something we didn’t notice starting?

Will it all matter,
when memory is outsourced,
and decisions are made
before we’ve had the chance
to ask the right questions?

And when we tell the story of this chapter -
this trillion-dollar boom
fueled by circuits and national security -
what will we say we believed in?

What, if anything,
will we say
we understood?

Some days, I think the bowl beside the bed is just a bowl.

But other days, I think it’s the beginning of everything.

Two recent events led me to write this.

First, I was mentoring a group of young filmmakers and realized there’s still a lot of confusion around what a documentary director actually does. After all, it’s not like we’re working from a script we’re trying to execute scene-by-scene. It’s a far more spontaneous process - one that, from the outside looking in, might not even seem creative. But inherently, it is.

Second, I just got back from a production trip where what was happening in front of us diverged from the call sheet. Participants started dropping out, and we had to think quickly, making decisions on the fly. We only had three days in the field. I’m proud of the choices we made as a team, but I won’t pretend there wasn’t a mix of panic and frustration; especially when the bottom falls out and the team is looking at you, asking, What now?

And just to be clear: you should expect the bottom to fall out. It’s a fool’s errand to think your call sheet will ever come to full fruition.

The thoughts below mostly pertain to nonfiction filmmaking, but I think they apply to the role of a director across mediums (or directing your own life).

Directing, at its core, is a series of decisions made in the moment.
You turn left. You turn right.
You wait for the cow to leave the frame.
You run to get ahead of the cow.
You put down the camera and help your participants make dinner because they are fresh out of high school, and don’t know how to chop vegetables; because you’re losing light, and the whole crew is tired and needs a break.
Then you pick the camera back up and film them eating said dinner.

You follow the plan until the plan no longer serves the story - then you let it go.

If you don’t make those decisions, someone else will. The person you’re filming, likely. Your crew will too, out of desperation. The situation itself can start determining the direction. And often, that means the moment won’t work - not for the people involved, not for the film, and not for you.

People are looking to you to lead. That doesn’t mean you have to know everything (you won’t). It means you have to care enough to decide. It means you’re willing to hold the weight of the unknown and still move forward.

There’s always room for collaboration. In fact, a good director listens closely. They adjust. They ask questions.

But a good director also decides. There’s no timeline where you can opt out of that part.

And directing is not just pointing a camera or calling the shots on set. It’s leading a group of people (sometimes strangers, sometimes collaborators) through a real-life moment. Honestly, sometimes that moment is a letdown, and it’s up to you to figure out a better way forward. But your job is not just to capture the information in front of you. It’s to capture the essence.

What does it feel like to be here, in this room, at this time?

Is it quiet? Tense? Hopeful? Boring?

Do you want the boredom to stay in the frame? How might that impact how wide or tight your shot is?
Do you want the energy to shift? How might that impact the movement of the frame?
Do you want the light to feel natural or intentional? How might that impact how long you hold the shot?

These are not cosmetic choices. They’re emotional ones. They help shape how the audience feels and not just what they learn. And you are the one who has to make them. Not perfectly. Not always correctly. But intentionally and collaboratively.

Because the right decision in one scene is the wrong one in another.
There is no formula.
There is no universal “correct.”
There is only your decision.

So if you’re still developing that confidence? Fake it for now. Not in a performative way, but in the sense that you understand someone has to steer the ship, and right now, that’s you.

Let your choices evolve. Let yourself change your mind. Let your ideas be built on by other great ideas from your crew. But don’t let indecision run the shoot.

People - on and off camera - can feel when no one’s leading. The energy dips. The tension builds. You’ll see it in the footage later, and you’ll wish you’d spoken up.

So direct.

Even when you don’t feel like one yet.
Especially then.

It’s not about being the most confident person in the room. It’s about caring enough to shape what’s unfolding, and trusting that you’re not there by accident.

You’re the director.
Act like it.

“Mom, you remember that day we saw kids killing nature?”

That’s what my 4-year-old said before breakfast this morning, his voice calm and clear. He was asking a real question, about something we saw a few days ago.
Something that clearly hasn’t left him.

We were at the park, just after enjoying a hike.
It was one of those late summer afternoons where everything feels a little softer.
The breeze carried a hint of fall - and also a zapping sound from across the way.

I looked, and there they were: three teenagers waving those electric fly swatters.
The kind shaped like tennis rackets, with batteries that zap anything they touch.

They were outside. In a park. Swinging at bugs. Laughing. Hunting for anything that moved.

Curren and I were appalled. We looked around for some parents.
There they were: sitting in their air-conditioned, still-running cars, watching, saying nothing.

I couldn’t make sense of it. Why hand a kid essentially a weapon (because that’s what it is, even if it looks like a toy) and send them into a living ecosystem?

Sure, I get it. Flies in your home are annoying. But outside, bugs are just… being. That’s their home.

We didn’t say anything directly to the kids or the parents, but we spoke loud enough to ourselves that our frustration hung in the air - frustration that, apparently, gripped our 4-year-old.

And now, days later, he’s still asking about it.

“Killing nature,” he called it.
And he isn’t wrong.

I hesitate to call myself overly sensitive.
I am, in some ways. I feel a lot.
Partly because I live my life without blinders.
I don’t usually turn away from the “ugly.”

I remember being seven months pregnant and feeling physically ill seeing how many people were sleeping on the streets of San Francisco.
I remember the nausea of knowing I couldn’t help a single one of them.
That powerlessness did not sit well with me.

I guess that makes me an empath.
But I’m not glorifying that, at all.

I say it because I’m also very direct. Critical. Harsh, even.
I call out nonsense when I see it.
I’m not always polite or patient, though I try to come toward truth in a way someone can actually hear.

I think it’s important to know yourself as a human if you’re a storyteller.
Not to glorify your best traits, but to recognize your shortcomings, too. In accepting your own, you can accept others flaws more readily.

As an Enneagram 1, I’m well-acquainted with my worst tendencies.
I’m my own worst critic. And one of my biggest insecurities is the very thing I’m most drawn to: the stories I can’t let go of. Stories that many find difficult.

A friend watched my latest film the other day and noted, “Another devastating film.” He’s right. It is. It’s heartbreaking.

Although I try to understand my orientation in the world, I still struggle to explain why and how I want to tell stories of brokenness.

There could be many reasons. But hear me out when I wonder: maybe it’s because I am actually deeply hopeful.

Not naive. Not hopeless. Just hopeful (and also realistic).

I often feel a little silly caring about moments like the bug zapper, and stories like this, when the world feels like it’s upside down.

But I also know (deeply, stubbornly) that the world is and always has been upside down.

History proves it.
There have always been wars, injustice, heartbreak, failure.
The house is always on fire.

And still:
People love.
They build.
They make music.
They tell stories.

Maybe it’s wise to remember that making something (and telling a story) is a form of resistance. A small act of rebellion.

So I try to engage in the ways I know how. I teach my kids right from wrong. I volunteer and give when I can. And I make work that gives hope - not false hope, not tidy resolutions - but something that breathes in uncertainty and keeps breathing anyway.

Anne Lamott writes:

“Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don’t give up.”

I return to that often.

Because hope is not a mood.
It’s not passive optimism.
It’s not pretending you’re not scared.

It’s a practice.

Hope is showing up anyway.
Hope is knowing your art, your advocacy, your love might not change everything
but it might change something.

Hope isn’t certainty. But it’s not nothing.

It might be the most important something we have.

So I remind myself: Just do the next right thing, just tell the next story.

And maybe part of that hope - the durable kind - comes not just from protecting nature, but from learning to accept our own.

To stop trying to kill off the parts of ourselves that feel too much, care too loudly, question too deeply.

To stop killing our own nature.

Maybe my work is, in part, learning to let those parts live. Learning to teach my kids how to let their full selves live, too.

Because if we’re going to raise children who notice when someone is killing nature, we have to raise them to recognize and honor their own.

Tomas and I first connected through Substack.

Both of us are filmmakers who also are looking for ways to put language to our messy process. We share a desire to talk about nonfiction filmmaking in a way that feels curious, and not overly certain.

Talking with Tomas is fun and grounding for me. He’s a great listener who has the ability to reflects things back with care. We may continue these exchanges—or simply keep encouraging each other to share more in-progress thinking.

You can read the second half over on Tomas’ Little Scraps of Filmmaking.

Tomas Leach: Why don't I ask you about your website?

Elaine Sheldon: Sure, we could! I knew the audience for this website. I should preface by saying the point of that website wasn’t necessarily to explain the film I want to make. It was more about dispelling assumptions about what the film is or isn’t. I'm working in a space - energy - that's highly politically charged, and when people hear “documentary”—regardless of what side of the energy debate they’re on—they assume one thing or another.

So I thought, how do I make this website not just a film website, but a call to tell stories that sit outside the current binary of “good” and “bad” energy? That’s the point of the site. I don’t know how illuminating it is as a traditional film website—it’s more of a calling card for the people I’m trying to recruit to go on this journey with me.

Tomas: I've never done that. It's really a casting call. When did you decide that you needed something like that to reach people?

Elaine: I don’t think I would’ve even thought about it, but my friend Penny Lane made a website for a film she’s working on about Flaco—the owl who escaped from the Central Park Zoo in 2023 and survived for nearly a year in Manhattan. She’s been crowdsourcing images and stories people captured of him while he was flying free. I thought, the intention of my project is to gather countrywide stories from every region. I'm going to need help—it’s a recruitment and casting tool. That’s why we created the survey where people can tell us about themselves.

The reason the images (on the homepage) move quickly, by the way, is that same intention: I don’t want this film to be perceived as any one thing. If you think this film is about people in rural places, I’ll show you someone in a city. If you think it’s about old people, I’ll show you a kid jumping into a lake.

Elaine: I’m trying to confuse expectations because I want the film to be surprising. Those images are from other films. The site is almost like a campaign saying: we’re not here to push an agenda—we’re here to listen. I also made sure to name every type of energy across the site so that people can see themselves reflected. That felt really important. This is about trust. It’s saying: we’re not going to be irresponsible with you or your story, no matter where you fall on the spectrum of this conversation.

Tomas: Is it only speaking to people who might be in it, or has it crossed over and been any use for anything else?

Elaine: It’s really only speaking directly to potential participants. “Do you work on a wind turbine? Do you have a story? We want to hear from you.” It’s aimed at the worker, their family, their employer, the startup founder—whoever has a story to share.

Tomas: Because the imagery is pretty sophisticated. There's Rust and Bone in there, or No Country for Old Men. It's very beautiful, widescreen. It's not only saying you can trust us—it’s saying, this is the lush film it's going to be.

Elaine: Yeah. I like to make beautiful things. I appreciate beautiful things. And I think this story is gritty, individual, collective, and layered. Those image references also give me scene ideas. If we shoot 20 different people having dinner, with the same overhead composition—how can we cut between those? There's a shot from The Nutty Professor in there where people are reaching in to eat. Once I get someone on the phone after they’ve seen the site, I start giving them tangible examples of what I want to film. One of those is a family dinner. And how it’s shot is something I start communicating in those second and third calls.

This is very different from my previous films. In the past, I followed four men over 18 months, and what happened is what happened. But with this film, we’re making something together. It requires more participation from the person being filmed.

So I’ll ask: what do you do that falls in this category? Because we’re also filming a version of this in California, and I want the pieces to stitch together into a unified story of the country. We (myself and my DP Curren Sheldon) have to be intentional about the frames. They inspire ideas—like using power lines or other visuals to link people’s stories, so it feels like one interconnected universe. I want this to feel like a massive, overwhelming thing we’re all contributing to: energy production and consumption.

Tomas: I think that's why I was interested in the website is because it not only is a call for people to come and tell their stories, but it informs in the language and in the visual language. It's communicating the way you're going to be telling the stories. That collaborative way of making something. I think that's where I saw the commonality and where I saw similarities in the way I'm making my film. I'm talking to the people in it about what I'm after and what it might be and how we might create that together. So there's less of that just turning up and filming. It's more, could we go and do this together? And I'm relying on them to reveal what that might be with some creative thought themselves.And I think that the images on your site start planting the seed for anyone who might respond because they're thinking about it in a visual language that is precise in terms of tonality.

Elaine: This is the first time I’ve come to people for a feature film and said, “Let’s create this together.” Part of it was my anxiety around how the industry still tends to operate. Even when done ethically, there's often this dynamic of coming in with an idea, filming, and then leaving. I’ve had this sneaking suspicion that if it continues that way...continue reading the conversation on Little Scraps of Filmmaking - also consider subscribing while you’re there!

It was a humid Friday evening, and we’d gathered with family to celebrate my nephew’s birthday. After the celebration, the adults drifted toward the screened porch. But I lingered in the kitchen, where my teenage niece stood at the counter, slicing herself another piece of cake.

“I have permission,” she said quickly, without turning. “Mom and Dad said it’s okay.”

“I’m not your parent. Do your thing,” I shrugged. I was eyeing seconds myself.

She grinned and relaxed. She’s the eldest of eleven grandkids, by a long shot, and caught in that liminal space between kid and adult. She’s curious, self-assured, and ready to be included. I don’t get much time alone with her, but I like our conversations. She’s sharp and funny and has opinions about everything.

She started in quickly, talking about the books and movies she’s into. I learned about the latest live-action Snow White. I got excited when she told me she was watching a series about high school cheerleaders.

“It’s a documentary?” I asked.

“No, it’s definitely not a documentary,” she said, smirking a little at my eagerness.

Then she launched into a passionate breakdown of a book turned movie. The short of it: she loved the book, but loathed the movie.

“The book,” she said, “is layered.” Funny. Complicated. Slow, and yes, scary. “But the movie is just all scary.”

She noticed that some of the scariest scenes in the film don’t even exist in the book—they were added, she said, to heighten the tension. “I get it. The scary is the substance,” she reflected.

But what she said next stuck with me: that the funny and the mundane parts of the book—the little details left out in the film version—were, in her words, the soul. And without them, the movie felt hollow.

That idea hit me in the way we think about representing real people’s stories. I’m not against the scary, the crises, the drama. I’m not against tension or conflict—it’s often what makes a story hold. Conflict is human, but it’s not the whole human. It shouldn’t be the only frame we use to define someone, especially in nonfiction. Yes, we need stakes. Yes, we need structure. But where is the soul?

Where do we find the parts that make a person feel real? Humor. Relief. Relaxation. Misunderstandings. Small mishaps. Simple frustrations. A glance, a laugh. Tripping on an uneven sidewalk and the reaction that follows. These aren’t distractions from the story—they are the soul of the story. They’re how we see a person in their fullness.

What my niece was pointing to is the same instinct I’ve seen in our industry, and in our culture more broadly. Entertainment doesn’t always value characters outside their crisis. And lately, I’ve noticed my niece isn’t the only one raising this kind of concern (which by the way could be said about many book to movie adaptations).

There’s a growing critique of shows like The Bear, where the spectacle of tension starts to crowd out the story’s deeper emotional core.

One reviewer put it plainly:

“We’re just supposed to infer that Carmy has been building internally toward a decision...through the many scenes he spends wistfully staring off into space, soundtracked by maudlin dad rock.”

The Bear prioritizes scenes to heighten the drama, without doing the narrative work of showing us who these characters really are - the soul has been left on the cutting room floor.

And I’d take that a step further: we tend to look at our own lives the same way. Our lives are not starved for tension; we’re starved for wholeness.

We live in a culture obsessed with problems. We glorify the challenge. We over-identify with the struggle. While we go around looking for problems to call out, companies profit from our fears. Every flaw becomes a sales funnel. Have an issue? Great. Here’s a product to fix it.

It’s everywhere. Just the other day I read a Substack post about how to grow your audience. It told me I needed to focus on “pain points” and offer “problem-solving value.” I’m so over this advice. Why have we become so arrogant to believe we have the solution for anyone else’s problems? I write because I need to; it helps me process my own life. And maybe a few people in the world—maybe you—find it helpful or just worth sitting with for a minute.

But I think that’s the trap: this belief that everything we do must be useful in the most capitalist sense of the word. Must produce an outcome to an external conflict. That you’re only helping if you’re producing outward results. If you’re not working on yourself, you’re working on others. And either way, you’re working…constantly.

But real care, and real storytelling, isn’t always productive. Sometimes it looks like standing beside someone and not making sense of it.

There’s a pattern in how we talk about problems, and it bleeds into how we talk about people. Especially in documentary film, there’s an unspoken formula: find the issue, name the crisis, build a character arc around it.

When applying for grants, we’re expected to define the urgency in clinical terms in what is called a “topic summary,” which lays bare the stakes, the trauma, the devastation. The more broken it sounds, the more worthy of attention.

It often feels like a competition for misery. A quiet film without obvious stakes or villains around every corner is harder to sell. On the opposite end of the spectrum are feel-good films—films about people and their animal friends or quaint little farms. But I don’t always want to tell stories about what’s broken, or solely focus on the happiness. And maybe neither do you.

In the editing room, I’ve received notes mid-stream from funders asking, “Where is the story?”—but what they’re really asking for is the problem. The drama. The conflict that fits within a particular arc. I get it. I do. But can’t drama also be understated, unsaid, beneath the surface? Can’t it be a quiet look, a pause, a silence? Isn’t that actually more nonfiction—more like life—than the spectacle of scare?

To my niece’s point, I keep thinking: Where is the soul in our stories of tragedies writ large?

I think that’s part of why I’ve grown tired—not of storytelling itself, but of the performance of impact in nonfiction. Of the expectation that every film must map neatly onto a known crisis. That every scene must justify itself in terms of utility.

So no, I don’t always want to just tell (or watch) stories about what’s broken or scary—because even if that’s part of the story, it’s not the whole story. Sometimes I want to tell stories about who and what is still standing in the face of the conflict.

Speaking of problem-solving (haha)… I’m currently trying to figure out the future of this Substack.

I originally started it to help me write a book — and it’s definitely been helpful for me. But I’m not totally sure how helpful I’ve been to you in this space.

So! I’d love to hear your thoughts in this very brief (and anonymous) survey. It’ll take 2–3 minutes tops.

Your feedback will help shape where this project goes next. Thank you 💛

Take The Survey

Hi!

You’re a founding member of this little creative corner, and I just want to say: thank you.

Your support means more than I can express in a newsletter. It’s what allows me to keep going, keep experimenting, and keep digging into the slow work of telling stories that matter.

As part of your founding mem…

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We all have working philosophies as storytellers. They guide our choices, our relationships, and how we spend our creative time. But our films also have working philosophies, whether we’re conscious of them or not.

In documentary, especially in the early stages, it can be hard to define what you want. There are honestly too many choices. Too many stories, too much research. And when you start filming, too much footage, with too many ways it could be edited.

Maybe you haven’t shot anything yet for your next project.
Maybe you’re already deep in post.
Maybe you’re just stuck.

In any case, a useful place to begin is with what you don’t want. For me, clarity starts with elimination.

Recently, while trying to get access for my latest film, I’ve received questions from potential participants that I can’t answer.

Questions like: What will the tone be? (I literally have no clue. I don’t know the story yet.) What is the ending or conclusion? (Maybe the most frustrating question of all because I’m making a documentary…I have no script.) How many people will see this? (Especially maddening, given the state of the industry, where docs aren’t being bought.)

I understand these questions. Every company, and honestly every person, has become their own brand. A brand with a reputation to protect and promote. It’s a weird time to make nonfiction. There are so many gatekeepers to stories. Less trust of the camera and more documentation of self from individuals.

Even though I dislike getting these questions, I do appreciate the pressure they put on me to answer what I do know. Sometimes you don’t have to name the exact film you’re making, but it helps to say: “I’m not making that kind of film.”

Saying no makes space for decisions. It creates a clearer picture for you, the director, for your team, and for the participant - the person gauging whether to jump on board.

Your list shouldn’t be about being clever or rebellious. It’s a boundary. Any time you get lost, you can go back to it. Even if you're unsure of the “yes,” a strong “no” gives you something to work against.

Knowing what you don’t want means watching what has been made. When we were making Recovery Boys, sensational reports were coming out every week; stories told quickly, often by parachute journalists. You need to know the field. You can’t operate in a vacuum. Your film doesn’t exist in isolation; it’s in conversation with what’s already out there.

The philosophy for Recovery Boys became clear in post-production. Our editor, Penny Falk, put together early cuts of scenes. Watching those helped me realize what I didn’t want this film to be.

Out of a reaction to a cut of my film that felt unfamiliar, like something I didn’t recognize as mine, I wrote a working film philosophy. A list of what we would do, and what we would not do. It wasn’t a manifesto, and it wasn’t a way to passively state things that should be said out loud. It was a practical tool. For the whole team. For me.

Below is part of that list, along with a few questions to ask yourself if you feel like you’re floating in the fog of documentary indecision.

Recovery Boys Philosophy:

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—

Good morning.

It’s an honor to be here. Thank you to SDF for creating a space where we can reflect on the stories that matter to us.

I’d like to talk about the evolving role of nonfiction—especially stories rooted in place and imagination.

For over a decade, I’ve been listening and learning from my Appalachian community—not just to document, but to understand. And in that process, I’ve learned a lot. Every film has changed me.

Any filmmaker in this room knows: if you hang around long enough with your camera, you realize that stories don’t follow tidy arcs. 

They meander. They contradict themselves. They resist closure.

And yet—it’s in that tension, that truth reveals itself…and I keep dreaming for another chance to tell another story.

It might be an understatement to say this year has been one of upheaval. But it has.

The upheaval in some places, has meant deportations, family trauma, or book bans. In many, a tightening—budgets cut, schools shuttered, healthcare stripped away, housing harder to afford, lives harder to live.

Upheaval doesn’t always come in the form of breaking news. Sometimes it arrives as a slow burn. A family packing their car. A library cutting hours. A missing bus route.

I’ve felt the upheaval in our field too—especially in the spaces where storytelling and public good intersect. Higher ed, nonprofits, public broadcasting—many of the institutions that champion storytellers are being downsized, defunded, or dismantled.

These are the places that helped my work—and the work of so many others—exist in the first place. 

I live in a small town in West Virginia, a place built around the Monongahela National Forest. Nearly half of our county is national forest land—held in trust. My neighbors depend on the forest—not just for jobs, though many work as foresters, scientists, or trail builders—but for a sense of belonging.

So when federal layoffs and cuts began, I saw something I’ll never forget:
People stepped up.

Some took second jobs. Some started apprenticeships as plumbers and electricians—doing the kind of work we forget how much we rely on. Some hosted neighborhood meetings where people could just let out their tears. Some took advantage of a city program that gives away fruit trees to start building backyard food forests. Some rallied at the courthouse, singing protest songs loud enough to compete with the roar of logging trucks barreling through town. Others got serious about starting their garden seeds indoors. I heard young folks talking to old timers at the hardware store about canning and harvest schedules before the last frost had even passed. A few families made the hard choice to leave for work elsewhere. 

And then—there was the soup.

Every year, the town hosts a free soup night. Main Street is closed off. Restaurants, churches, and local businesses all make a pot of something warm. Tables lined the street, and anyone can walk up and fill their bowl - and go back for seconds.

I don’t tell the story of free soup to romanticize resilience. I’m tired of resilience being the only story told about rural places. We shouldn’t have to be so good at surviving systems that forget us over and over.

But I share it because learning how to wire a house, plant a tree, share soup, start a garden—that was imagination. It was people working with what they had. Reaching back for older ways. Coming up with new ones.

It was community—not as a slogan, but as a lived reality. And it’s happening everywhere, if you know how to look.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about what it actually means to look. To really see.

In a world where we’re saturated with images—of ourselves, of others. Where the image often replaces the person. Where the headline becomes the truth. Where livestreams turn into performance. 

Some say we document to preserve. To collect data. To inform. 

But I think we document not because we know, but because we don’t.
Because memory is slippery. Because time is short. Because we want to sit with something longer.

The world of documentary is changing. Platforms and algorithms shape what gets seen. Streamers with ballooning budgets are serving up increasingly degraded forms of nonfiction—celebrity confessionals, true crime frenzies, trauma as entertainment. 

Even as I’ve grown skeptical of the industry—of what gets rewarded and who gets left behind—I’ve never stopped making work. I’ve just had to change how I make it. And that’s when I started looking to my own imagination.

A viewer once told me she was surprised by how hopeful King Coal felt. She commended me for finding that hope in a story of destruction and bitterness. I responded—almost without thinking—“Hope is sometimes hard to see. I found it most when I closed my eyes.”

That moment stayed with me. After all, I make documentaries…films about real people today. So how did I find hope with my eyes closed?

I think I realized that my role wasn’t just to seek answers—but to ask different questions. Questions that give us a set of ideas we haven’t yet considered. And that requires imagination.

Our lives, like our places, are layered with what lies beneath—minerals, rivers, memories, myths. Often, the most important stories aren’t visible. They’re felt. Which is why they require more listening—and more dreaming—than explanation.

So with King Coal I began asking: What if coal wasn’t just industry, but mythology? What if the pageants and parades were rituals in a fading kingdom?

That question opened a new way of seeing—and storytelling.

While King Coal started as a film about an industry and the culture that surrounds it, it quickly became a film about imagination. About ritual. About the emotional inheritance of people who’ve been told their best days are behind them.

That was the narrative I wanted to challenge. Because when the rest of the world sees darkness, storytellers often see a crack. And it’s our job to make that light visible.

So I went looking for inspiration - outside of traditional nonfiction. I sought out the poets, the fables, the performance artists. To ask - how can I expand my notion of what nonfiction can do?

Because I truly believe we don’t just need stories about what’s been lost. We need stories that make room—for healing, for new beginnings.

And that starts with asking better questions:

Alright so let’s start here - turn to the next person and ask one of these questions:

• Ask if they slept well—and if they didn’t, ask why?

• Ask who they turn to when they cry.

GO AHEAD

…

When we ask questions we need to remember to leave room for silence.
To let the quiet gather weight.

When you don’t know what to ask, ask the question you wish someone would ask you.

Ask not because you know—but because you don’t.
Ask like someone who still believes people can surprise you.

All of this—this curiosity, attention, care—must not be lost in our age of machines and algorithms. 

We’re not just living through political and ecological upheaval. We are living through a technological shift that will change our role entirely.

If you haven’t seen Google’s Veo 3—its AI video generator—it’s getting good. And it’s coming for anyone who works with language, image, memory, meaning.

To be sure, there is good in technology - in the highways and planes that brought you here, and medicine that keeps us alive, and so much more. But I don’t believe this AI race will lift all of us up. Not without cost.

The other day I was served a YouTube ad that said:
“The AI revolution is here. You can either cry about it, or cash out.”

That about sums it up.

The tools we once built to serve us are now trying to become us. They mine our data—our films, faces, voices—to train themselves. They build a humming mirror, always reflecting back what they’ve learned from us.

But who is this technology for? What purpose does it serve?

It certainly wasn’t built for rural and southern communities—unless we’re talking about the minerals and land being extracted to power these hungry systems.

We used to say: knowledge is power.
But now we know, and assume everything.
We learn very little.
Machines learn for us, remember for us, speak for us, organize us.

In outsourcing all that knowing, we risk forgetting what makes us worth remembering in the first place.

So what’s our role—as storytellers in 2025?

It’s not just to entertain. Or preserve. Or even inform.
It’s to be deeply, undeniably human.

Machines can mimic memory—but not meaning.
They can generate content—but not context.
They can remix the past—but they cannot long for the future.
At least yet…

To dream is to want something we've never known.
To dream is to be vulnerable, illogical, flawed, and deeply human.

In a world that automates our desires, dreaming is resistance. Imagination becomes a radical act.

We resist by slowing down.
By telling stories that don’t trend—but stay.
That are rooted in place—and still dare to imagine beyond it.

Place should be more than backdrop.
It’s our greatest teacher, our greatest challenge.

Place is what I return to—it keeps me honest. 

Place can also become a crutch, something we rely on when we’re unsure what else to say. 

There’s a danger in using a place—The South, Appalachia—without interrogating it. In turning it into a costume.

But when handled with care, place isn’t a pitch or aesthetic—it’s soil.
Soil that demands tending.

And the soil we stand on is complicated—with songs, joy, stories, violence, memories, persistence and struggle. With dreams realized and many lost. With traditions rooted not in performance or commerce, but in connection.

And that connection—that soil—is perhaps our greatest offering.
The thing that needs our attention more than the machines.

So let’s aim to make stories that aren’t perfect.
That aren’t polished.
That aren’t efficient.
But that are deeply felt.

Because in a world obsessed with speed and spectacle, to tell a place-based story is an act of quiet revolution.

Stories remind us we belong to each other.
That we’re still learning, changing.
That we’re still alive.

Thank you.

There is a scene that makes you feel. No words. Just light falling through trees, a person’s back as they walk away, a mother’s hand folding a shirt that no longer fits. You don’t know why your chest gets tight, but it does. And that’s the point.

There is a scene where you are looking. Where you’re not told what to feel or how. You are watching someone brush their hair. Slice apples. Feed the goats. You watch the steam rise from a bowl of beans. You learn to sit still.

There is a scene where you are learning. Not in the textbook sense—but a redefinition. The kind of learning that shifts you slightly, so you’re never quite the same again.

There is a scene that makes you mad. It shows injustice without fanfare. It reveals systems with no need for villains. The cruelty is casual. Bureaucratic. Quiet. You clench your jaw. You want to do something. The scene sits there, saying nothing. And that silence is the accusation.

There is a scene where you laugh. Not to lighten the load—but because life is funny, even when it’s not. The kind of laugh that surprises you. That lets in breath. That reminds you these people are not caricatures. They are whole.

There is a scene where you are sad. Not manipulated, but invited. A goodbye. An empty house with the lights still on. A hand resting on a hospital bed. You feel the ache of something passing.

And then—there are the scenes that don’t fit in any category. The ones that live between the edits, in the glances, the hesitations, the half-said things.

Not all scenes speak. But all of them are saying something.

—

I’ll be in Durham, N.C. this weekend for the Southern Documentary Convening—screening King Coal and delivering the keynote. If you’re coming through, I’d love to see you there.

When I was teaching in the school of art, I’d often get students crossing over from the journalism program. They’d come in with two things: an interview, and what they called “B-roll.”

That’s how they framed their work:
Short film = interview (quotes) + b-roll (filler)

I would try to break them of this formula. Because once you’ve learned that storytelling is just a series of talking heads cut with relevant visuals, it’s hard to see your film as anything else. It becomes law.

In this model, everything has to explain something. The shot of the coal mine has to come after the line about coal. It all has to be referential and literal. A film of closed-loops.

And honestly? That makes for boring films.

These films rarely consider mood. They don’t ask what it feels like to be in the room. There’s no patience. No curiosity. Just illustration. The kind of storytelling that points, instead of wanders.

And worse than boring, this approach teaches students—and filmmakers more broadly—that images are only useful when they support a thesis. That a shot only matters if it’s reinforcing what someone already said aloud.

But documentary is not just a delivery system for facts. It’s not just a visual aid for a predetermined idea. It’s cinema. It’s time and light and texture. It’s movement and stillness and rhythm. And sometimes, it’s everything you don’t say that makes a scene work.

Let’s talk about the term itself.

B-roll—the supplemental footage.

The stuff you use to paper over an edit. The non-essential. The name comes from early Hollywood, when you had your A-roll (the main action) and your B-roll (the cutaways that helped with continuity). And somehow, that language stuck. As if we’re still editing on tape decks.

But in the kind of work I make—and the kind of work I love—there is no background. There is only world. And every shot should be treated with the same level of intention and care as your “main” content.

There’s no such thing as filler. Everything should be A-roll.

Because what we often call “B-roll” is doing some of the heaviest lifting in nonfiction film. It’s setting tone. It’s suggesting metaphor. It’s inviting the audience to feel something they haven’t yet articulated.

A train disappearing into fog. A child brushing her teeth in silence. A plastic bag stuck in a chain-link fence. These images don’t explain. They evoke. And that’s the work.

I don’t want every shot to tell me something I already know. I want it to show me something I didn’t know I needed to feel.

Be bold enough to hold your shots.

We hold this shot (above) in Recovery Boys longer than most people would.

It’s Adam, alone, eating cereal in front of a small fire. The room is unfinished. The moment is quiet—unremarkable, maybe, to some. You could call it “coverage,” a visual beat in a morning routine montage. And yes, it does function that way in the edit.

But it’s also more than that.

It’s a moment that holds stillness—not just as a pacing choice, but as an emotional truth. Loneliness. Reinvention. The slowness of recovery. The quiet, daily grind of becoming someone new. All of that lives in this one image.

The decision to hold it wasn’t just mine. It was built in collaboration—with Curren Sheldon (cinematographer), who had to be a patient observer. With Penny Falk (editor), who had to believe in the power of a single image to carry meaning without dialogue.

This kind of moment doesn’t announce itself. It has no climax. But it sits with you.

I’d often push students:
What would happen if you let the shot breathe for one more second?
What happens if the audience sits with it long enough to wonder—not just recognize?

Sometimes they’d push back:
“But I was taught to always keep it moving. People will get bored.”

Sure. But pacing isn’t the same as rushing. And momentum doesn’t require noise.

Stillness has its own kind of propulsion. A held breath can be just as powerful as a loud exhale.

In my own work, the shots that stay with people aren’t the ones where someone says the line just right. It’s the look before the line. The pause that lands heavier than the words.

So no, I don’t ascribe to B-roll as a category with a hierarchy.

I believe in images that speak independent to words. That do their own kind of storytelling—quietly, atmospherically, patiently.

Call it visual poetry. Call it world-building. Call it A-roll, all of it.

Just don’t call your B-roll - filler.

I’ve been thinking a lot about unpredictability and what it demands of us. What it reveals and what it strips away.

As storytellers, we’re told to embrace it. To learn to ride its waves. And for the most part, I’ve tried. I have a larger appetite for unpredictability than I once did. But still, I crave the illusion of control.

Most of us do. We want cause and effect. Effort and reward. Sleep schedules that stick. Travel plans that don’t derail. A world that makes sense.

But unpredictability resists sense-making. And that’s what makes it so fertile. So alive.

Maybe the real work is to stay present, even when things fall apart. Not to numb ourselves or default to distraction. But to respond, rather than react. Maybe our response in those moments—when nothing goes to plan, when the script fails—is the truest form of creativity.

Still, I notice how often we try to avoid it. There’s an entire industry now (tech, AI, automation) that’s built around eliminating surprise. I heard someone recently say the goal of AI is for 5,000 bots to produce the same result from different inputs. That’s framed as success. Consistency.

But when I think of 5,000 humans experiencing the same event, I think of 5,000 stories. That is what makes us human: our responses. Our perceptions. Our contradictions.

When people talk about making AI “more human,” I think we’re forgetting what an essential part of being human is: unpredictability.

It’s 2 a.m. Both of my kids are screaming. I did everything “right.” Bedtime routines. Milk. Three books. A white noise machine. All the things. But they’re not code to be executed. They’re human. Dreams interrupt. Fears wake them. And still, I pray for predictability. I have a 4:45 a.m. alarm and a flight to catch.

By 5:45 I’m in the airport. There’s a strange calm. A hush before the day begins.

On one screen: flight updates.

On another: animation loops. I seem to be the only one watching. Everyone else is staring into their personal screens. I feel awake—not rested, but alert.

The animation loops are absurd but draw me in:

A green house appears.
Snow falls on it.
Then a globe is plopped on top—
like it’s been sent down a factory line.

A robot dances.
A gorilla dances.
Same choreography.

An orange ball travels down a tube,
spins through a slide.
Then a green ball follows.
Then red.
Again.
The slide changes—green and white now.
A machine of endless arrivals.

Over and over. The screens are meant to soothe. To gently sedate. It’s all simulation. Motion without meaning.

I Google the company—Form TV. It’s used in gyms, airports, laundromats, waiting rooms.

Their slogan: “Everything you need to effortlessly entertain.” What a terrifying promise.

Atmosphere TV (the parent of Form TV) boasts that it offers “engaging stories that are fun without the need for audio.” But let’s be clear—these aren’t stories. They’re predictable bites of content designed to require no attention. No ears, no context. They work best when you’re tired, anxious, waiting… like I am. They’re engineered to passively slip into the background, like airport lighting or elevator music. Still, I find myself wondering: what does it mean that we call these stories?

I resist the impulse to check out. I wonder what we lose when we move through the world half-awake. But even so, I am drawn back in.

Now there’s a plant—or so it seems—
until its colors shift.
It’s water.
Then ice.
Then flower.
Then plant again.

Now, a shape—
something like a seashell—
spins slowly.
It grows closer,
lines extending from its edges.
Then it flattens.
And becomes the whole world.

Next, three boxes.
Equal in size,
each pulsing with a different animation.

Outside, the moon is waning. A red morning sky—a sailor’s warning. The fog rolls through the mountains, as if even the earth is trying to hide.

Inside, a man in cowboy boots breaks the loop. Literally. His boots click across the terminal. His voice fills the quiet. “Oh my goodness,” he says to someone across the room. “What in the world are you doing here?”

He’s wide awake. Loud. Unbothered by the etiquette of early mornings. I listen to him talk about ROTC, training in ankle-deep mud, the zoo. I learn that a polar bear recently drowned in front of a crowd at the Calgary Zoo. A tragic accident—unexpected, surreal.

His friend tells him about it while pulling up photos on her phone. The man responds, “How do they even get polar bears to the zoo?” She laughs. “Probably shoot ’em with a dart and say, ‘You’re coming home with me.’”

Tranquilization, a form of controlling unpredictability. We wrangle wildness, we contain chaos.

The loops resume and so does my attention.

The screen fills with cookies.
chocolate chip cookies.
they spin.

Then a glow-in-the-dark being shifts forms.
It begins as a person,
then stretches into a snake
covered in a maze pattern.
I don’t know what I’m looking at.
But I keep watching.

Now we’re underwater.
A fish swims to the center,
makes eye contact with me
looks panicked,
and darts away.

Across the room, a vending machine delivers a Coke with the elegance of a magic trick to a woman wearing spandex rainbow pants. And I’m still here—still watching.

The only other person not on a screen is a man whose oversized glasses—magnifying his eyeballs—give away his curiosity. We exchange no words, but I feel a quiet camaraderie. Two noticers in a world of loops.

Right before my plane boards, the final loop grabs my attention.

A magician appears,
removes his hat.
and reveals a bunny underneath.

Later, from the sky, I see suburban roads that loop and curl like the animations. Orderly. Repetitive. Familiar. Predictable. And still, the fog hovers.

When I arrive at my destination, I request an Uber. The app asks if it can send real-time updates. It says the car is a black Toyota and is six minutes away. I watch its predictable path winding toward me at the airport. A black Toyota arrives in exactly six minutes.

My Uber driver tells me about the freeway we’re on. How it used to be a taxi lane. How the airport used to be Bass Pro. How the airlines kept merging until the small got eaten by the big. He tells me about the buffalo herds nearby. About the wolves that were reintroduced to fix a broken ecosystem. “Everything’s outta whack,” he says. “Too many elk, too many deer, too many coyotes. No predators.” Then he sighs.

He tells me he’s “banana-peeling away” from this city. It’s gotten too expensive. Too crowded. Too unpredictable. And yet, it’s clear he still loves it.

I think unpredictability forces us to get honest. With our expectations. With our illusions of control. With our hunger for comfort. It asks us to participate—not just observe. To change course. To make eye contact.

And maybe that’s all it takes—to resist the loop.
To look up.
To stay alive in it, even when it doesn’t go the way you planned.
To be the cowboy in the terminal.

A while back, I sent a rough cut of a film I wasn’t all that happy with to a couple friends.

One of them said, “You need to finish it.”
The other said, “It’s not working... but maybe it could work for something else?”
They mused: “Maybe a music video.”

Fast forward a few weeks: I was driving around with a 3-year-old in the back seat, blaring Fire Sign by . He loves the repetition—Who'll put the fire out? Who'll put the fire out?—and sings along, loudly.

As soon as it ends, he says, play it again, and I oblige.

Then S.G. released Satellite, which stirred me even more. I’ve been anticipating this album for a while. So, as a fan, I randomly wrote S.G. here on Substack and basically said: Hey, if you ever want a video, I have some footage.

I didn’t expect to hear back. It was a random action on a slow day—just an obscure, strange, not-so-well-crafted message. But somehow, it landed in the hands of S.G.’s wonderful manager, Jay Steele. I spent the next week bringing this video to life with the guidance of S.G. and Jay.

The footage I originally had in mind—the flawed film I had shared with my friends—was what I thought might become the concept for the music video.

That was the first idea.

But once I heard the album tracks, I realized it wasn’t quite right. We explored other options before landing on this: kids dancing around a fire.

What we found in the archive

While making King Coal, we did a lot of test shoots—just playing around with lenses and visual concepts, not taking anything too seriously. This video was one of those experiments, filmed in the fall of 2020 in Nicholas County, West Virginia, with my cousins’ kids.

We built a fire, dressed the kids in random thrift store costumes, and projected archival footage from West Virginia coal camps—some of which actually made it into the final film. Curren Sheldon shot it, Molly Born produced, and I directed.

Everyone was just having fun, leaning into the randomness of the moment. You might even recognize some of these same kids from the Summer’s End music video we made for John Prine back in 2018.

Giving the archive new context

Making this video meant learning how to let the footage breathe—how to let it settle naturally into the world of the song. I didn’t want to literally translate S.G.’s lyrics, but I did want to find visual and emotional elements that overlapped with the storytelling and the song’s quiet magic.

In the edit, I made a few key moves that ended up guiding the entire process.

The first was deciding that Riley—the young girl on the motorbike—would serve as a kind of hypothetical narrator. The story would open with the lyric: When you're a farm kid in a small town, you drive before the legal age.

Riley would be the one “telling” us this story.

Nevaeh—the girl featured as the video’s thumbnail—would embody LeAnna, as described in the lyrics:
LeAnn, thoughts go back again to LeAnna
Eighteen became a mother
LeAnn, thoughts go back again to LeAnna
Already raised her little brother
…
LeAnn once spent a summer in Paris
Paris, Tennessee
The only Paris LeAnn would ever meet
We talked about it all on a bleacher seat

Visually and narratively, this felt right. I’ve filmed both of Riley and Nevaeh several times over the past decade, and they have very different styles in front of the camera.

Riley plays it cool. Nevaeh is a direct force.

Riley just does her thing, while Nevaeh looks straight into the lens—breaking through that pretend world where people are supposed to ignore the camera.

She’s mouthing at the camera, WHAT ARE YOU DOING? at 1:43 in the music video—questioning the gaze that’s upon her. That intensity felt right for the emotional weight of LeAnna’s character.

Later in the video the archival loop repeats over and over during the refrain:
“Ooo, small town is where my mind gets stuck...”

It’s meant to reflect that cyclical, stuck feeling the lyrics evoke—something felt in both content and rhythm.

Filmmaking often leads you down unexpected rabbit holes—and this one came complete with a literal rabbit mask (no idea where that idea came from). But I’m glad this footage resurfaced and found its way into Snapping Turtle.

As filmmakers, it’s easy to see the footage that doesn’t make the cut as a kind of failure—“killing our darlings,” as they say—but sometimes those darlings get resurrected.

Keep filming and keep your files organized - you never know what might crawl back out of the archive and catch fire one day.

Soak up the magic of ’s Snapping Turtle and read the behind the scenes on the song’s lyrics here.

This is what I saw this morning. I hope you enjoy the absurdity of our lives.

It’s 6:30 a.m., and the man seated in first class orders a tequila.

The woman in 13E stares at looping reels of chicken and waffles—syrup dripping, butter melting, fried batter crunching again and again. She’s in basic economy, alone. Her boyfriend sits a few rows up in Comfort Plus. She tried to join him (it was an empty seat) but she was told to move. A seat, apparently, is better left vacant than filled with a basic person. She orders the free snack mix and keeps watching reels of food she can’t touch.

Beside me, a man toggles between ESPN and Twitter threads. At first, it’s harmless; and, to be honest, boring. But then his feed shifts. Down, down, down into a world of foot fetishes and something that might technically be classified as porn. He watches casually. Like he’s alone. But of course, he’s not.

In the seat in front of me, FOX News is on. Trump is calling for renaming the Persian Gulf. Lawmakers debate trans athletes and the sanctity of the Gulf of Mexico. It's 7:12 a.m. and already the house is on fire.

I get off the plane and sit at a restaurant with no server. I’m told to scan a QR code to order. The first four sections of the menu are cocktails. It’s 10 a.m. I smile at the woman who brings me water. She never looks up. I thank her anyway. Still nothing. Champagne pops.

At the bar, five TVs play at once.
On one: a rerun of Charmed. Paige is transported back to high school, desperate for her parents' love. Her parents won’t make eye contact. They talk about feeding the cat instead; Paige frowns.
On another screen: TikToks loop; girls doing the same dance, again and again.
On another: a pharmaceutical ad lists 50 seconds of side effects for a drug I don’t remember the name of.

A 40-something waiter complains to another: “She sent me a birthday card with no money in it. Don’t waste a stamp if there’s no $25 gift card inside.”

An older man orders cheesecake and flips through a real newspaper with a headline about the race to build gas power plants. He has to ask his server for help placing his order. He’s not too pleased to be doing this at a sit-down restaurant, and neither is she.

A child named Lou crawls into my personal space. He’s 20 months old and loves ketchup. I pepper him with questions. He’s delighted to answer. His mother watches with relief. Finally, someone who doesn’t find her child annoying.

The managers sit at the bar with spreadsheets, calculating whether their human-to-machine ratio is generating enough profit this month.

At the bar, two people sit side by side for an hour. Never look up. Never speak.

The woman in front of me orders a Bloody Mary. She stares, stone-faced, at her computer. In fact, I notice all of us humans wear the same scowl when staring into our laptop screens; like all our work is so serious. Then her face changes. It’s time to livestream. Eyebrows lift. Eyes widen. A smile appears. For thirty seconds, she performs. She reviews the clip, then drops back into that same downward gaze. The light goes out.

The waiter who hates cards also hates his job. His bosses ask for anonymous comments to make things “better,” but he sees through it. “They want feedback? I’ll give it to them. I’ll write how I really feel.”

The food arrives. It looks real. But it tastes like simulation.

I wander into the airport’s Interfaith Chapel. It’s empty. Prayer rugs rest neatly on benches, waiting.

Outside, on the airport’s terrace, jets roar overhead. The air is warm and full of fuel and movement. A few people come out to take selfies, then leave. Most others stay glued to their phones with sloppy sandwiches in hand. A group of employees joins them on break. One announces, “I have arrived!” and the others nod while staring down at their screens.

I imagine the architects who designed this space pictured something different: shared air, shared pause. Instead, it’s just another holding pen.

We know what human connection looks like, so we perform it.
We know what food should look like, so we stage it.
We know what birthday celebrations, restaurants, marriages, friendship should feel like, so we simulate them.

We speak through glass.
We order without speaking.
We sit beside people we love and forget to look at their faces.

But I can’t stop noticing. Maybe it’s the curse of the documentarian.

In Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott writes about the moment she realized she could make the story happen. She could take something insignificant—a hallway encounter, a classroom blowup, a party that veered into chaos—and turn it into something vivid. Mythic, even.

She says, “The other kids always wanted me to tell them stories of what had happened, even—or especially—when they had been there.”

They wanted to hear it again, reimagined and retold. It made it more alive to hear it the second time around.

It makes me wonder—is this the power of storytelling?

That we can make small things big, and quiet moments loud. That we can give something that almost slipped away another chance to live. A story well told can stretch time. Collapse it. Slow down a moment, or speed it up. It can remix the past with the present, and nudge the present toward the future. It can transform the ordinary into something that sticks. A look. A line. A silence that, in the retelling, becomes almost deafening.

When I think of this skill—to tell a story well—I realize these are actually the people I seek for my films. The ones who can not only let you in to show you what’s going on, but reflect on it and spin it back—colorfully, or succinctly, or directly—proving they have a grasp of their own reality and this wonderful art of telling. When you find someone who’s great at it, you know they’ll make a wonderful documentary participant.

But are we—those of us living our lives off-camera—still telling stories this way?

I don’t mean performances. Or pre-scripted monologues. I mean to each other. In the kitchen. On a walk. Driving down the road. The kind of story you tell someone when you’re sitting together, half-laughing, half-pausing, trying to get the shape of it just right.

Songwriters, though written and rehearsed, continue to be some of the most inspirational oral storytellers. They weave personal memories, present experiences, and future uncertainties into lyrical forms that not only move us through melody, but through narrative.

It’s not just music—it’s storytelling with emotional architecture. I think about the way recent albums like The Killers’ Pressure Machine, Youth Lagoon’s Heaven Is a Junkyard, Lucy Dacus’ Home Video, or even ’s The Way I Talk unfold like short stories—each with a beginning, middle, and emotional turn.

And her brother's back at home tending to her daddy's land
He's farming for the businessman
Who takes the profit from his hand
With calculation to the dollar of a chemical demand
No, not in years took from a man
Will you try hard to comprehend

And her mother heard the devil on the midday radio
She listened to him tell her she should have some more to show
But he blamed it on her neighbor at the local dollar store
A tale as old as time to turn the poor against the poor

I worry—outside of entertainment—we’ve replaced the kind of everyday storytelling that Lamott describes with something flatter, faster, and a bit more shallow.

I worry that we’re outsourcing this very human way of connecting—telling one another—to corporations telling stories to us. That this passive form has changed the way we experience stories in our own lives.

Because too many conversations now begin with vague or secondhand sources like:
“I saw on [so-and-so’s] wall…”
“Someone posted…”
“This lady on TikTok said…”
“I was listening to a podcast…”
“I was watching YouTube…”

Rarely:
“I felt it myself…”

The stories we repeat are often borrowed from platforms, not drawn from our own lived lives. They’re curated—not shaped over time in our own mouths, but shared instantly, before we’ve even figured out what we really think about them.

Influencers like Jenny Hoyos tell you “The Secret to Telling a Great Story” is to make your stories shocking, viral—and all in under 60 seconds. That’s her golden rule: you have one minute to get in, get attention, and get out.

She recommends starting with a question—one that “people can’t stop listening to”—then adding conflict, building tension, and finally delivering a satisfying resolution. All in under a minute.

Let’s be honest: she’s not teaching you how to tell a great story. She’s teaching you how to hijack attention. How to manipulate the brain’s reward system—dopamine, anticipation, payoff. It’s not about meaning or connection. It’s about metrics. It’s about generating the kind of content that earns 45 million views.

I’m not against the structure, but it’s not something Jenny has originated. Using questions to frame a story, planting roadblocks, building stakes—these are ancient tools. The bones of oral tradition, epic poetry, campfire myths. They’ve shaped human storytelling for thousands of years.

But Hoyos and her kind have hollowed these tools out. What’s left is a skeleton of story—built not to nourish or move us, but to perform for the algorithm, and to send us looking for more. We’re no longer being invited into a shared moment; we’re being baited. The goal isn’t resonance—it’s reach.

And that matters. Because when we reduce storytelling to a formula that maximizes clicks rather than connection, we’re not just changing how we tell stories. We’re changing how we experience them—and, by extension, each other.

I’m not here to knock the internet, the tool I’m literally using to speak to you. I’ve learned plenty from strangers with iPhones and captions. But I am wondering: where are we exercising our own storytelling muscles?

Maybe the issue is this: to tell good stories, you actually have to live life. I know I sound like I’m 90—but I will die on this hill.

Curren and I were eating ice cream outside the other day when a car of teenagers pulled up. They got out silently, dragging their half-asleep bodies into the ice cream shop, faces buried in their phones. One by one, they emerged with their cones, climbed back into the car, and closed the doors behind them. Still no talking. No music. Just...nothing. It was eerie.

Curren remembered being a jackass as a teenager—blasting music, laughing too loudly, riding around with your friends like you owned the town. It was chaotic and annoying, sure, but at least it was alive.

What we witnessed that day was not alive. It was muted. Numb.

And I honestly thought: What stories do these teens even have to tell?
They weren’t aware of their surroundings. We were openly staring at them, and they didn’t even notice. There was no scene unfolding. Just a transaction—scroll, sugar, silence.

How can we expect anyone to have a deep, funny, awkward, or moving experience off-screen if they’re never fully present for one?

And it’s not just teens. All ages. Boomers might be the worst when it comes to starting conversations with: “I read somewhere—wait, let me find it…”

We're outsourcing life to the feed. We're reporting back not from our experiences, but from someone else’s post about theirs.

Maybe good stories require discomfort. Boredom. Embarrassment. Surprise. Maybe they require being there.

And if no one’s truly there anymore… what happens to the stories?

So I ask again:

Are we still telling stories, longer than 60 seconds, out loud?
Are we still sharing memories and making them more colorful each time?
Are we still building mythology from the mundane?
Are we still making each other laugh with the same story we’ve told ten times, but still add a new detail—just for effect?

I hope so. And if we’re not, let’s try.

Because that’s where some of our deepest connection happens. In those spaces where a person is not just consuming a story, but receiving it.

Where they feel seen inside it. Where they say, “Tell me again.”