Today we’d like to introduce you to Ian Belknap.
Ian, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
When I was a kid, I was a visual artist of some skill – to this day, I can draw quite well. I was shy, anxious, quick to tears, so the meditative aspects of drawing quietly, self-contained, were soothing and helpful to me.
In high school, I got cast in some plays. I found acting – directed as it is outward – to be liberating and I pursued it for a long time after that – studied it in college in NY, founded a storefront theater company (Pillar Studio, dissolved long ago) with some college friends who are Chicago natives in ’92. Started to sour on acting as a discipline, for reasons that didn’t become clear until much later. Began doing standup in like ’98, I think, in a scene that was much smaller than it is today – there was the one club in town, and a handful of “alternative” rooms (The Elevated, Midnight Bible School, the still-mighty Lincoln Lodge). My affair with comedy was brief and torrid – through it, I got an agent which led me back to acting for a while – I booked a few things, couple commercials, couple guest spots on TV, couple sneeze-and-you’ll-miss-me roles in movies.
But we had a new baby, so I couldn’t travel, really, so I wasn’t going to be a road comic (which I doubt I could have done, anyhow, since my stuff was pretty dark and somewhat brainy-ish). I went out to LA for a pilot season (the annual TV feeding frenzy where new shows get made, and where midwesterners go to learn they are lumpy and dog-faced, based on the ludicrous standard of attractiveness that pertains out there,) and when I got back, my infant son, whom I’d been stay-at-home daddy before going out to pursue work I did not actually want, cringed away from me, into his mom’s shoulder, as I held my arms out to hold him. Not sure if I said it aloud or not, but I was like: “Never again.”
So, I settled into a routine of going on auditions here – mostly for commercials, which I found insulting, not just to me, but to the casting people, to the ad people who had to churn out this swill, to the clients drenched in flop sweat about whether this swill would play, to the culture overall, to language itself. When this is your view of the work you’re doing, your prospects for success, it goes without saying, are pretty severely limited.
So, I did what every other idiot does: in 2005, I wrote a solo show. It was called Wide Open Beaver Shot of My Heart: A Comedy With a Body Count, and was about the unsolved 1985 murder of my grandfather and my dad’s suicide the following year. And it was a piece of work that I not only did not find distasteful but which, even to this day, I’m actually proud of.
An unaccustomed feeling, this – being proud of my creative work. So, that set me on my current path, namely that I’m a writer, now, foremost to anything. It is the thing I wished to be doing all my life long, but which, unlike other art forms, felt so important, so, I don’t know, sustaining and true and enduring, that for the longest time I was afraid to even attempt it. So for the past decade-plus, I’ve been to varying maniacal degrees devoting myself to writing. In 2010, I founded a competitive reading series WRITE CLUB, a live show that’s Literature as Blood Sport, which over its life has had monthly chapters in Chicago, Atlanta, Toronto, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Denver, with more on the way. In 2011, I coined the term “Live Lit,” which I felt was a necessary counter to the still-dominant “storytelling,” since not all performed writing is narrative (WRITE CLUB is an essay show), and since “spoken word” has become associated pretty exclusively with poetry. In 2014, I co-edited Bare-Knuckled Lit: The Best of WRITE CLUB, and wrote/performed my solo show Bring Me the Head of James Franco, That I May Prepare a Savory Goulash in the Narrow and Misshapen Pot of His Skull. In the years since, I have had essays, opinion, and satire appear in The Chicago Reader, The Chicago Tribune, Crain’s Chicago Business, The Rumpus, Slackjaw, Story Club Magazine, Untoward, Bullshitist, The Hit Job, and elsewhere; I’ve performed in more live lit shows than I can name; I’ve done the solo shows Uncle Dad Is Ripshit, You Guys, and Terminal Ferocity. I publish lots of personal essays, cultural criticism, and humor on Medium.com.
I’ve started doing grownup writer things like submitting to journals and applying to residencies – which, if you’re a fan of thundering silence, are great pastimes.
This year, I’m pleased to have been named as a section editor of StoryNews, a journal devoted to the intersection between personal narrative and events in the news, which will launch on July 1, I am also co-founding with Janna Sobel (an amazing writer/performer and teacher) a storytelling academy called The Foundry. I am continuing to offer my own independent creative writing workshops – mostly memoir/personal narrative. Lastly, in the fall I am launching a new live lit show called Humanities Fair, which will take the form of a school science fair – presentation boards and a short speech, but will be devoted to branches of the humanities. And, this summer, I’ll be applying for a low-residency MFA program in creative writing.
Has it been a smooth road?
There are times, where it has felt like nothing but struggle. As welcome and exciting as the creative opportunities I’ve recently been given have been, this year has also been pretty brutal for me. Like lots of artists, my mental health is not always sound – I suffer from really severe depression, peppered with anxiety. These, as it is for lots of men (or American men, at any rate) most often express themselves as anger. And, given the gruesome political shit show we’ve handed ourselves in recent years, I find that my mental health coupled with current events result in my having something to be enraged about every waking moment of every day. Which, it will come as no surprise, is not easy to live with – for me, certainly, since I’m more or less always depleted and clenched, but for my family, especially. Living with a roman candle is a fire hazard – I’m not a violent person, but I do have the capacity to fill an airplane hangar with my blackening mood, so living in close quarters with me is no picnic. I’m working to improve, but progress, as with nearly anything that matters, is slow.
So, as you know, we’re impressed with WRITE CLUB, StoryNews, The Foundry – tell our readers more, for example, what you’re most proud of as a company and what sets you apart from others.
I have come to specialize in brainy entertainments of various sorts – WRITE CLUB is a raucously cerebral good time, much of my writing is (or at least attempts to be) blisteringly funny, my new show Humanities Fair promises to be a thoughtful hoot, and my teaching practice, whether in collaboration with my partner Janna, or independently, attempts always to bring about an incremental increase in the global supply of sharp writing and bracingly honest performance.
Let’s touch on your thoughts about our city – what do you like the most and least?
Having moved here from New York, I’m most impressed with how livable a city this remains – lots of green space, comparatively affordable rent, and a vast talent pool. The number of skilled artists here continues to impress me.
Politically and culturally, the segregation of Chicago prevents it from being a truly great city. For a metropolis of this size to remain in the grip of this fearful and mistrustful and hostile climate of its own devising precludes it from becoming the world-class city it aspires to be. Artistically, it is frustrating in the sense that in order to make a living, you need to leave – the capital that circulates in support of culture is consolidated on the coasts. There are encouraging signs, like the number of film and TV projects that started shooting here. But it remains tough for homegrown artists and producers to attract the kind of support and money that would lead to a professionalized class of culture-makers. I recently launched a Patreon page – both as an experiment in monetizing the stuff I write, and in forging a deeper, more direct connection with the folks who dig my stuff by offering fun perks (see links page).
Contact Info:
- Website: http://www.writeclubnation.com/ http://ianbelknap.com/ https://medium.com/@ian.belknap1
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iandamnbelknap/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/WRITECLUBChicago/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/writeclubrules
- Other: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=11160385
Image Credit:
Evan Hanover
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