In Pursuit of the Story
Riding around with James V. Hart, the writer of Dracula (starring Gary Oldman), in the middle of Iowa was not how I anticipated my August of 2023. I graduated some two months earlier with my MFA in screenwriting which—by all accounts—was never on my Bingo card of life. When I finished my bachelor’s in 2012 I saw the path split between wanting to be a professional writer and wanting to be a professor; Graduating on the coattails of my mother’s death nudged me towards the starving artist route, and I wrote my little heart out. Hindsight 20/20, I just wanted to be heard rather than tell a story.
“This reads like a trainwreck.” Catharine Stimpson, Dodie to me, flipped through a folder of papers that I had sent her about a month earlier. As a scholar and dean emerita at NYU, and my best friend’s grandmother, I took her criticisms very seriously (It was also the first real moment as an adult where I met my ego). I sat across from her at the Studio Cafe, a small restaurant attached to the Whitney Museum at the top of West Village. Looking back on it now, I think she bought me lunch to soften the blows of her truth.
“I’m sorry.” I took a bite out of my chicken thigh dish, one I still think about today. She shook her head.
“Don’t be. Let me ask you this—” Dodie picked up her fork. “Let me try that first.” She reached across the table and took a satisfied bite of the chicken. “Very good. Good choice. Now,” she began, “do you want to be a writer? Or do you want to just be someone who writes things down?”
Later that afternoon, Dodie left me on the top floor of the Whitney somewhere between Georgia O’Keefe and Andy Warhol. She had a meeting to get back to at the NYU campus a few blocks away. I stood there staring at Summer Days, 1936, wondering what made the art, art. To this day, I don’t think she ever realized how those two questions changed my outlook on what a writer was, and what I could do to get there. I lingered in the museum; She kept my train wreck for herself.
Fast forward seven years, multiple read-throughs of Catching the Big Fish, one friend-turned producer commenting, “You should turn your World War Two IP into a movie,” and a chance application I submitted while home recovering from having my wisdom teeth removed. I learned the structure of a screenplay, became accustomed to the red pen, and graduated with my MFA as someone who considered herself fluent in telling a story. My IP war project sold as a narrative series the year before and ran for 35 weeks prior to graduation. The Kaitlin of 2016 would have done backflips.
Yet there I was on the eve of the summer’s blue Supermoon, burnt out from a week and a half of coordinating an experience for residency students who were rightfully unaware to all of the various pulleys and work that went on behind the big red curtain of the David Lynch MFA program next to Jim Hart, a goliath of a writer and the man who helped mold my formative years with Dracula and Muppet Treasure Island. He had spent the morning covering the importance of the opening scenes in Get Out, when Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) hits a deer that is not-quite dead. Later that evening, the students and Jim had a casual mid-week screening of Eraserhead because, when in Lynch-land right, and I was driving Jim back to his hotel—the AmericInn—one part Midwest charm and two parts The Shining. Neither of us had much to say, and I’m not complaining; I grew up on a potato farm at the very end of Long Island and was fortunate enough to sit beside the face whose hands were greatly responsible for placing Hook in front of my eyes. I was also too shy—intimidated, even—to speak. In the same way Warhol and O’Keefe found their ways into the Whitney, I wanted to ask him how he found his way in front of people like Coppola and Spielberg. Was it a combination of who you know and who you are? Does the pursuit of the story simply open the doors? What could I say?
“Almost there,” is what I was able to squeak out. He nodded politely and looked back down at his phone as I remained laser-focused on the unlit highway. I chose to allow the silence of the drive to peacefully coat us, grateful for the experience and resolved to accept that’s all it is sometimes. The quiet remained for about a minute until my eyes were met with a deer that casually strolled into the lane. As the only car on the road at the time, the action felt diabolically intentional.
My ass went up into my chest, my heart to my throat, my identity to the trunk, and I abused the brakes. Whether premonition or just good timing, my boyfriend changed my brakes and rotors the day before I left for Iowa two weeks earlier, and to my great fortune he did it correctly. I saw Jim’s hand in the corner of my eye reach out as he exclaimed, “Oh-oh-oh!”
Iowa highways don’t have shoulders, per se. Rather, they are equipped with a stretch of gravel followed by a ditch. The realization quickly sunk in that, if I veered to the right, I would miss the deer but run through gravel, hit the metal sign for the exit, and plummet into a ditch at 50 miles per hour. If I veered left, I’d hit the deer and risk venison blowing through the driver’s side windshield. Suddenly, Jim wasn’t an intimidating famous person who I couldn’t get the guts to talk to, but a dad. A grandfather maybe? I didn’t know, but it didn’t matter. In a flash I saw my own grandfather. I saw my dad whom I still love, even if we no longer speak. I banked left, still riding my brakes, then cut right and broadsided the deer. My window of opportunity to ask the mysteries of the writing world was gone, but at least my windshield was intact.
What followed was a cacophony of shit, shit, fuck, I’m sorry, it’s okay, shit, are you okay, it’s okay, I’m sorry, fuck. I couldn’t look at him, prepared for an onslaught of ridicule, because that’s what my father would have done. I already criticized myself in my mind, that I should have been more careful, how could I do that, what was I thinking… Instead, Jim went into full-blown dad mode and told me to stay in the car. He jumped out and called back to me that he was dialing 9-1-1, and I listened, partly frozen, partly waiting for the other shoe to drop and him to tell me I was an idiot. I tried to collect myself, having never hit a deer before, only to catch sight of the poor animal in my rearview, dragging its body into the ditch. I could make out flashes of pain in between my hazard lights. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, racked around in my mind. Was it to Jim, or the deer?
“I just taught this today, who’d believe it?” I snapped to attention and caught Jim as he threw up his hands in disbelief (a little amusement, maybe?) and dialed the police. I admired his coolness. Not carefree, but down to business. He pulled his tiny notepad from his breast pocket and a pen from somewhere else; I concluded from this day that a man with many pockets is always well-prepared to handle emergencies. Jim disappeared from view and when he returned to the car, he only poked his head in, not quite ready to seat himself. “Excellent driving skills. You saved my life, and yours.” The other shoe never dropped.
We assessed my car and continued the almost comically short remainder of our drive to the hotel. In those moments, Jim and I quietly and excitedly reflected on how close of a call that was. Who’d believe it? Taken out in the middle of Iowa. I later imagined the newspaper article: David Lynch MFA Alumni Chooses Deer Over World-Renowned Screenwriter James V Hart. A dad, a mentor.
“Come.” Jim waved me on in the hotel parking lot with his continuation of all business, all dad-mode. I stood at the hood of my car, the bumper hanging like a broken jaw smattered with fur and poop. He shut the passenger door and affixed his tiny notepad back into the breast pocket of his shirt. “I think you need a glass of wine now.”
