Guest post: Asia Nichols on her SFFILM Djerassi Fellowship experience

Each year, the SFFILM Makers team selects a filmmaker from the pool of applicants for our Rainin and Westridge narrative feature grants to participate in a unique fellowship retreat in partnership with the Djerassi Resident Artists Program. The SFFILM Djerassi Fellowship supports screenwriters in any stage of their career with a one-month writing retreat in the Santa Cruz Mountains, providing uninterrupted time for work, reflection, and collegial interaction in a professionally supportive and inspirational environment.

Bay Area native screenwriter Asia Nichols was selected as the 2019 SFFILM Djerassi Fellow, to work on her project So Unfair. We asked her to tell us a bit about her experience during the retreat.

A DJERASSI ADVENTURE TALE: FOR THE GIRL WHO FELL FROM A TREE HOUSE
by Asia Nichols

There once was a girl who, at age seven, fell from her friend’s tree house, knocking her head good and hard on the bottom rung of the ladder. And when the other children asked if she was okay, the girl laid there feeling a warmness spread over her skin and said, “I’m fine. Totally fine. No pain whatsoever.” Thing is, the girl didn’t want to go home. She wanted to play. But that girl, like all girls, grew up.

Decades later, that little girl lives in me, urging me to fool around, take risks, wander off — all in the name of play. I’ve been living the nomadic life since 2011, writing stage plays and house sitting around the world. The day I received the invitation to be a resident writer at Djerassi for 30 days, that little girl jumped at the idea. “A new adventure!” But the grown-up me had loads of baggage, convinced it would be less like the fun of tree houses and overseas travel, and more like work. Work to impress people. Work to show I was literarily skilled. Work to prove I belonged there and didn’t just crash this perfectly respectable party of Real Artists.

Days leading up to the residency, I stuffed my backpack with Lion’s mane extract, passion flower pills and other nerve-calming supplements. I meditated the way a monk at a forested Buddhist temple in Thailand taught me. Focus on fallen tree leaves, he said. Leaves remind you of impermanence, he said. Okay, nothing ever lasts is basically the point, and one month in the Santa Cruz Mountains would be done before I had time to process all the things I didn’t get right.

“Yield to Whim” was Djerassi’s first prompt by way of an altered road sign I saw at the entrance. A little less terrified, I checked my insecurities at the door to my Middle Brook studio.

So, I get to the part where I meet the other ten residents — mind you, these were poets, puppeteers, filmmakers, painters, composers, playwrights — and felt no fear of being exposed as a fraud. Absolutely none. Or so I told myself as we hiked the Station trails, guided by the local environmentalist, who exposed nature’s secrets. Things like how webbing at the bottoms of tree trunks are like children passing notes in class. If one tree is sick, these cobwebs spread word to the collective. Or how, when exposed to high temperatures, pine cones crack open, exploding a new generation of trees on the forest floor.

Back in my private studio, I was feeling soothed in the awareness of Mother Earth at work and ready to work at my own creation: SO UNFAIR. This is an anthology film of five stories, inspired by fairytales, which show a black woman’s journey growing up in wildly absurd conditions a.k.a. Western culture. It mixes fantasy, satire and horror to explore everyday dealings with hair texture discrimination, colorism, addictions, religion, and body image.

With blacktail deer roaming the prairie outside my window and the Pacific on the horizon, the whole setup ASSURED me that things would just flow, you know, but nothing, I mean nothing, was coming out and seven suns later I was still studying a blank page —

Listen: I’m not used to this. I’m used to movement. When I’m not moving, I’m quiet. When I’m quiet, I feel. That studio got very hot. Stuffy. Claustrophobic. I tore the paper into squares and fanned them out on the desk, figuring if I pretend to work, maybe the magic of the mountains would spit out a crumb of compassion and not send me back on Bear Gulch Road empty-handed.

Whatever random images came to mind for my anthology stories, I drew…

• a dress shoe stuffed with a bird’s nest for “Elevator Shoes”
 • a mouth smoking a pine cone for “Pipe Dreams”
 • many faces in the shape of poison oak turning lighter in color for “Fade to White”

…and pinned this sad display of concept art on the wall — how the hell did I get here?

Moments later, a novelist knocked on my door. She invited me to her workspace, at which point I learned that sharing creative processes is a thing. Turns out, she was drawing, too. Visuals inspired by her book-in-progress. Others she drew for fun. This scenario recurred a few more times with different residents. Be it late-night karaoke and stargazing or day hikes to the Red Hot Salt Room, an interactive sauna-like sculpture using natural heat to inspire healing and written reflection. Whenever I felt stuck or unsure of myself, there was an invitation to come out and play. A call to partake in the enchantment and whimsy of this well-crafted creators playground.

In the 19th-century old barn, I played with shadows. Led by the brilliance of fellow Bay Arean Lisa Marie Rollins and the bewitching sculpture of Kathryn Cellerini Moore, we joined hands and forces to experiment with the many shapes of femininity. We laughed and cried and took up space on the wooden-planked walls with our silhouettes, altering frames and afros at whim and imagining what stories our shadows showed us. In the forest, I played a dancing Fool (for real). Face covered in moss, limbs casted in full cushion, I stood on a tree stump and swayed with the spirit of nature in a fantasy sketch conceptualized by performance and costume artist, Pat Oleszko, whose festive vision for a tribe borrowed our bodies and animations.

Over the next three weeks, as I feasted on the deliciousness of chef-made seafoods and chutneys, passing warm breads and wines down the dining table, I begun to understand something about myself: For the past seven years, I’d been immersed in so many countries and cultures, wandering on unmapped roads, taking “risks.” But in all of my traversing, I hadn’t dared plant my feet in a place long enough to feel what I was feeling in the company of these fantastically eclectic, imaginative — and rather human — beings: Community. Djerassi taught me to use the environment as a guide to creative friendships and sharing plates and processes is how we artists survive. It’s what keeps us from falling good and hard, and staying down.

And so that little girl, who was totally out of touch with pain or fear, passed the Yield to Whim road sign on departure day, no longer believing that outward vulnerability and adventure can’t coexist. Instead, she felt thrilled and exhilarated from me sharing honest emotions beyond the page, and celebrated how doing so has opened up a world of new ways to play as we journey on.

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To find out more about SFFILM’s artist development programs, visit sffilm.org/makers.