Delaware State of the Arts Podcast
Delaware State of the Arts is a weekly podcast that presents interviews with arts organizations and leaders who contribute to the cultural vibrancy of communities throughout Delaware. Delaware State of the Arts is provided as a service of the Division of the Arts, in partnership with NEWSRADIO 1450 WILM and 1410 WDOV.
Delaware State of the Arts Podcast
S12 E42: Delaware State of the Arts - Arts Focus Delaware
Have you ever wondered how one can transition from a taxing job at a student loan company to becoming a celebrated fiction writer and filmmaker? Join us as we sit down with Jon McConnell, whose journey from computer engineering to creative writing is nothing short of inspiring. Jon sheds light on his initial struggles and how his acceptance into Emerson College's MFA program became a turning point in his life. You'll learn how this prestigious program honed his writing skills and expanded his career horizons, leading him to success in film and television acquisitions. Jon's story is a testament to the value of a creative writing degree and the power of effective communication skills across various fields.
In the second chapter, we shift our focus to the significance of artistic communities, especially those in Delaware. Through Jon's experiences, including his time at Penn State Behrend's BFA program, we explore the delicate balance between job training and nurturing one's artistic craft. We delve into the creation and growth of Art Focus Delaware, a unique community group that supports artists through committed work sessions on personal projects. This group's emphasis on long-term creative endeavors has fostered a thriving environment where artists feel a true sense of belonging. Tune in to discover the invaluable insights on the intersections of creativity, perseverance, and career development in the arts.
The Delaware Division of the Arts, a branch of the Delaware Department of State, is committed to supporting the arts and cultivating creativity to enhance the quality of life in Delaware. Together with its advisory body, the Delaware State Arts Council, the Division administers grants and programs that support arts programming, educate the public, increase awareness of the arts, and integrate the arts into all facets of Delaware life. Learn more at Arts.Delaware.Gov.
Delaware State of the Arts is a weekly podcast that presents interviews with arts organizations and leaders who contribute to the cultural vibrancy of communities throughout Delaware. Delaware State of the Arts is provided as a service of the Division of the Arts, in partnership with NEWSRADIO 1450 WILM and 1410 WDOV.
For Delaware State of the Arts, I'm Andy Truscott. My guest today is John McConnell, a prolific fiction writer and visionary filmmaker who calls the vibrant town of Newcastle his home. In 2021, he took the world by storm with his debut novel Thrum, an immersive work that garnered widespread acclaim. Beyond his prowess as a wordsmith, john boasts a remarkable career spanning over a decade in film and television acquisitions Locally, john's passion for nurturing the creative spirit led him to establish Arts Focus Delaware, a thriving meetup group that fosters creativity through an hour-long independent work session catering to writers and artists alike. John, thank you so much for joining me today, and, as we kick off here, I was wondering if you could talk to us a little bit about how you yourself got into writing as not only a career but as a passion, and where you think that's taken you over time yeah, thank you for having me.
Speaker 2:Um, yeah, I mean, writing for me has always been something that just kind of occupied, just my thoughts at all times, like I can't remember like times and dates or names or anything, because my mind is already always dedicated to whatever idea I'm working on. Um, I think the moment for me was I was actually I don't know if it's up there anymore but I was working at a student loan company, um, you know, the Concord mall. Um, and I was applying to uh, I was applying to grad schools for writing Cause I had gone to my undergraduate program originally for computer engineering and I was failing everything. I had like a 0.02 GPA. I had to retake like calculus three times it. Just like I wanted to be like a video game designer. What I didn't know, whatever in my minds was like what video game like people did I was. I didn't have really an idea of like what that was like. Oh, I have a. I like video games, I'm gonna try to do it. And I just didn't have the aptitude at all.
Speaker 2:I ended up switching after a. I was a very fearful call my parents about it and they were very cool about like, oh, I want to switch to creative writing because that was the one class that I felt like I really connected with the one and I've been able to keep in touch with my professor who said this. But there was like one workshop where a short story of mine I sent through and I was very deliberately being kind of weird about the story, like making the story weird, and in front of the class, the professor professor said this is either terrible or genius and that, just like that, uh, a compliment, I guess. Um really stuck with me. It's like that's exactly what I'm going for. Um, it's either incomprehensible nonsense or it's really good. Um, and that just took me. I switched my I. That professor ended up being my um, my thesis advisor. I'm still in touch with him, uh, to this day and that really just started off. My all right, I'm going to. This is my thing of like. This is really where my um again aptitude is is what I enjoyed doing.
Speaker 2:And so that moment working at the student loan company applying to grad schools, it was like a not, they didn't have a night shift, but it was like the late shift where I was getting home consistently at midnight. Um, I would have breakdowns in the car on the way home, just because it was I had to. It was a phone job, like a phone bank, and you had to kind of, you had to ask to go to the bathroom and they would say no, sometimes it was miserable, yeah, um. And when I got from emerson college the acceptance letter from my mfa, it was like all right, my short stories are not only the things I enjoy doing, but now they're starting to take me places and that was the I guess the moment for me was like I'm gonna to dedicate as much energy into this as I can and see where it takes me.
Speaker 2:And it ended up doing a lot. I met my wife in that program. It kind of got my job, my career path, my day jobs through that program. It was pretty transformative for being these weird little stories.
Speaker 1:For those that may not know what you know, a creative writing degree might take you in pathwise. Share with us a little bit about what it is you do in your day job, but also maybe some of your peers that were in that program maybe what they're also doing nowadays.
Speaker 2:Yeah, of course. So there's a lot like the creative writing degree itself because you don't need, of course. So there's a lot the creative writing degree itself because you don't need, of course you don't need a degree to go write novels and make a living off of doing that. If you have the work ethic and just the amount of ideas that can sustain that, which a lot of people do. I don't necessarily, so it was always like day job for me, so it was always like day job for me. My particular day job is I work in essentially the film industry. I'm an acquisitions person. I work for a streaming service at the moment where I'm the person who goes out and buys the film and TV for populating the service, for people to watch, and I've been doing that for about 10 years.
Speaker 2:The intersection, I guess, where the skill set translates, is just you have to really know how to not the most important thing, but you have to know how to craft an email because it's conversational. You have to build relationships with people, often digitally first, before you ever meet them in person, especially nowadays. You have to be able to communicate. It's like the old kind of. I guess it's almost like a more specific communication degree, where it's the same kind of skill sets. You have to be able to form a coherent thought and be able to explain concepts to people who may have, like, other skill sets or other sorts of knowledge bases. So that's really kind of carried me there.
Speaker 2:Emerson College specifically is both a it's kind of a film school, but then they also have their publishing department, which is where the creative writing degree is under. So a lot of my peers that I graduated with went on to careers in publishing, like working for publishing companies or agencies and things like that. I know people who work in law offices came out of administrative careers at colleges and universities and things like that. So it's pretty. I think a couple of people went into film as well, but the shared skill set between all those is, like, I think, the communication aspect of it.
Speaker 1:You've not only had a plethora of short stories, but you've also yourself worked in film. Share with us a little bit about, outside of just the acquisitions for a streaming service, kind of what, uh, creative writing for film looks like versus creative writing for short stories or even larger, longer stories this is something that more, I guess, within the past five-ish years.
Speaker 2:So not something I initially started off doing was was trying to write for film um, like writing my own shorts as well. As I got in my day job, I did get the opportunity to read and give feedback on films, on scripts that were coming through. So what it was is the difference. The main difference is, at least for me, for my fiction, I'm all about the language and the sound of the actual like. I truly treat it like the sentence, like the art of it for me is in the sentence and the sound of it and the rhythm of it.
Speaker 2:The almost the opposite is true for film Um where, unless you're really studying scripts to really dig into how they're done, very rarely are people outside the actual production going to be reading that. Of course, the people who are kind of making the gatekeeping decisions are reading those things. The production companies are reading it. There's a lot of people who will be reading it, but the general public really they're not meant to. It's just not for general consumption generally. It's just not for general consumption generally.
Speaker 2:So the difference ends up being it's almost like a blueprint where you're trying to transfer your thoughts as you're writing and your ideas and almost the order of things in a way that somebody else reading it would imagine and think about the film in the same way that you're thinking of it. So you're almost encoding your thoughts and having them decoded on the other end of it. So you think of it more as almost flashcards, where your image followed by image, followed by image. The language itself doesn't necessarily have to be the most elegant. It's more like a blueprint. Like I said, it's a translation device.
Speaker 1:More than it is an expression of you as a person or an artist or whatever you're trying to do, it's a communication tool, more, more so for a specific person on the other end of it as you've been out of grad school now for a number of years, talk to us about either what you might tell a younger you or a younger writer, as they're looking to wonder whether they should just start going for it, whether they should go back for a higher degree and maybe what you felt you got most out of your degree I hesitate a little bit, since I we heard in our mfa class at emerson that our year my year was a little bit of an outlier in how I guess close that we all were and continue to be we are.
Speaker 2:Just again, I'm not sure how true this is, because I didn't go to like every other school to research this, but we heard just from other years around us that we are unusually close in that aspect and unusually non-competitive. Okay, I think the general idea is that you're not there to make friends, but we kind of did, and then I think it's changed a lot too since I graduated in 2012. So I think there has been a lot of as in all academic stuff, there's been a lot of shift over the past decade plus. In general, though, I think if a young writer, as long as they know like at one, first do your best not to pay for it, try to get the scholarships and any funding that you can get.
Speaker 2:I made that mistake, and so student loans continue to weigh heavily, and just going in with the knowledge that this isn't unless you're going into teaching, this is not going to be like a job credential, it's more for the experience and the community of it. I'm always coming at it from the angle of community myself, where um, just because growing up in a rural area in pennsylvania, um didn't know that many other didn't, just didn't come across that many other people who are interested in spending their time like writing Um and so going into first my, my BFA, and then my MFA, and coming across these people and just feeling like, oh, this is where these people are doing the same thing that I'm doing and like I found my, my people kind of in a way, that aspect was really good for me.
Speaker 2:I guess a little bit of the going from the country into the big city kind of aspect was was helpful for me just in general. Um, the the day job aspects were kind of ancillary but they were real like it was. It was truly translating things into just real world career opportunities. And it's interesting at the at the bfa that I went to penn state uh barron's in erie, pennsylvania I'm involved in and it's interesting at the BFA that I went to Penn State Barron's in Erie, pennsylvania, I'm involved in. I guess it's almost like a review panel of former BFA students who can give feedback to the faculty and they can ask questions and ask us to kind of recount our experiences. And one of the things that came up was just the conflict between the job training aspect that a lot of people are kind of clamoring for in a creative like uh, just a fine arts degree, versus the uh actually focusing on your craft art part of it. That I think a lot of faculty and just a lot of like.
Speaker 2:I guess older souls are kind of lamenting as being lost a little bit. Where it comes up against again the student loan aspect of it I think is is an important and a very important decision to make and there's a reason that the commerce has been coming more into it. It's kind of about what you lack. If you don't need it, you'll kind of know, because there's plenty. Especially if you're in New York or LA already or something, you can kind of fall into those communities on accident almost. But if you don't have those, there is a lot of. At least for me there was a lot of value in going out and kind of finding those people and finding those communities, because it kind of builds yourself up to continue doing it, even if it has to be your like serious hobby on the side of your day job.
Speaker 1:It kind of builds your confidence essentially and if you need that it's worth it, I think I want to take just a minute here to remind our listeners that you're tuned into news radio 1450 wilm and 1410 wdov for delaware state of the arts. John, that was a great kind of segue into our second half here, talking a little bit more about Art Focus Delaware, which is currently hosted every other Saturday at the Route 9 Innovation Center Library. Talk to us about why it is you created the group and maybe just a little bit about the group first, before we dive a little deeper.
Speaker 2:The creation of the group came actually one of the, I guess, co-founding members, Adam, who's a poet in our group. We knew each other just on Twitter and I was living in LA at the time, moving back to the area into Delaware, and he was the only other writer who I found with Delaware, kind of in his bio, like oh, there's somebody else in the place that I'm going to. And so we connected on that aspect and we just kind of met and became friends and we're talking about what I wanted to kind of bring back or, I guess, the value of living in LA for me. I had gone to a similar writing group there. There was some key differences that we kind of incorporated into what this is.
Speaker 2:But the community aspect of it and especially in la it's a little bit. You can find a writer on every corner in la. In delaware it's a little bit tougher. You have to, you have to kind of build a, build it so they come kind of thing. Um, so we wanted to be very, we just wanted to build that community, especially as I think at the time Twitter was going through its weirdness, and so we wanted to kind of replicate and bring offline just the sense of community because writer Twitter was a big thing for me, especially the timing of it was right and we wanted to bring that into the real world because there were a lot of like real benefits to just feeling like you were a part of something this group specifically in person, not online, which, uh?
Speaker 1:we've seen a number of uh groups, not even just writer groups, but in essence, artistic kind of share groups that have flourished themselves online, uh, but not in person. Why do you think this has done so well in person?
Speaker 2:I think because of those, not rules for ourselves, but because of the guidelines that we wanted to bring on, like, like, why is this group going to be? What's going to make this group specific and like different from other uh groups, which was, uh, not having it be a workshop format, like just not just not having like the the sharing be the point, like people can share off if whatever they want and they do, um, but not having it be the point of the hour that we spend with each other, not having prompts, not having like speakers come through, just have it focused on the work which ends up meaning the people who go are people who are focused on it's like kind of more than a hobby for them. They're working on like a project, they're working on a book or they're working on um like a specific. There's some people working on uh social media stuff for their small businesses. In the group there's people working on textile projects that they're doing on a loom. They're literally weaving in the in the room with us.
Speaker 2:But the sense of like, literally the focus piece of it, of the title of the group being what it is, the people, it kind of filters for that dedication already. So it's the momentum starting to go towards oh I'm getting this thing done, that I've been meaning to get done. It carves out some time and everybody's busy schedules to do it, the people who end up kind of continuing it. It just it builds up that momentum like a snowball. It filters for people who are kind of not not to denigrate people who are just dabbling and stuff, but it kind of filters for that because the interest can be lost very easily if somebody's not taking it to that level of seriousness, and so the people who are kind of remaining are people who tend to be in it for the long haul.
Speaker 1:You bring up a good point there, which is that this is not just a writer's group but rather an arts holistic group, so you have people of all kinds of mediums there. Talk to us a little bit about some of the maybe more surprising mediums that you've seen in the group, and maybe what are some of the mediums that you wish that you would see more, as the group kind of uh morphs no, the loom was fun to somebody.
Speaker 2:Pull out a loom and start, uh, weaving in the room with us. Um, we have people working on needlepoint. Uh, we have people working on the kind of pod like podcast prep for their own podcast that they're doing. The initial idea to expand it just beyond writing was actually it was kind of prompted by someone who wanted to do sketching. Um, they just asked like, oh, is the the library okay with it? I I reached out and the answer was kind of just as long as you're not like practicing your trumpet, you can kind of do, or making a big mess with paints, you can kind of do what you want. So any of like the kind of quieter art forms are are welcome. But I was glad that they actually had suggested that. It kind of opened up a varied and welcoming space and it's been cool to see what people bring in.
Speaker 1:Do you find at all that sometimes there's cross-pollination, so maybe a writer sees a drawing and then starts writing something about said drawing or something like that.
Speaker 2:Not yet. It'd be cool if it did. I think what happens more is after the hour is done and we kind of just like all right, pencils down, everybody kind of relaxes and sits back in their chairs and just gets to talking about stuff. It ends up that those things are shared across all the mediums. So that part's cool, because it just kind of reinforces that everybody's on their own right path. Because no matter what you're working on, getting something done is the same, no matter what you're doing on getting something done is the same, no matter what you're doing.
Speaker 1:I can imagine outside of just the hour that you all are together. There's probably this desire for more from the group. Do you ever find that the group meets outside of this scheduled hour to kind of foster a sense of community?
Speaker 2:Yeah, we actually have started fairly recently. We actually have a we just call them Sunday sessions where maybe once a month one of our members very generously offered up their house in Wilmington for us to kind of get together. Now it's kind of morphed into this longer, several hour session where there's more kind of mingling in the beginning. We still have the hour in the middle where we get things done, but around it there's more, because we kind of we that's more invite only for people who like show up at least once to the normal Saturday sessions, that we can just see that you're a real person. So we have a discord group that we then, if somebody shows up to the group in person, they'll be like oh, come join our discord group, where the news or like just we can share things with them there and organize things, um, and then the Sunday sessions that, uh, are generally once a month.
Speaker 2:That's where that invite comes from and so that's more. I don't want to say casual, but you're not at the library, you're in someone's house, so it's very warm and more conversational. All the time people aren't at the library there's a time limit for booking the room, so people aren't necessarily rushing out. So those are fun, and then every now and then, when the timing works, that I'll try to set up a party, maybe a couple times a year, and that's just completely.
Speaker 1:Uh like, obviously nobody, nobody's going to bring their work to that, we just hang out you typically find that this is a group where, say, an individual can kind of come and go, meaning they might be there for a few weeks, maybe take a few weeks off, as they're either in between projects or just don't have the time to dedicate, but that it's still always welcome for them to come back to yeah, there's, that happens with me too.
Speaker 2:Um, and I'll using that, the discord group. I'll just kind of make it known like, oh, I'm gonna have to miss this one and or whatever it ends up being. But yeah, people, uh, just lives are busy. I think that was when we were initially setting up the group, adam and I. Having a change that we wanted to institute from the groups that I saw in LA was definitely having no kind of entrance fee or anything like that was very important to us. That's why we chose going to the Route 9 library in the first place, taking down those barriers to entry, just the entrance fee included, but also just the having it open enough to accept that, because we don't have any sort of structure beyond the time.
Speaker 1:Tell us where people who might be interested can learn more.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we have the main thing. The main place is the meetup page that we have. That was the first central organizing point. That's where all the events are posted for people to RSVP to, which is helpful for booking the different size rooms at the library, depending on how many people are coming. I think we generally get between six and 10 people on any given day, and then the Sunday sessions are generally more, just because there's more room and people, I guess, generally have more free time on Sundays. The meetup is the first point, I guess, point of contact. Then we also have our Instagram page where we post reminders of when Saturday sessions are coming up as well as we try to share as many kind of accomplishments or readings that our members also. The Instagram itself can function as just, I guess, publicity and getting the word out there.
Speaker 1:For those on Instagram, you'll find them at at Arts Focus Delaware and on Meetup meetupcom. Backslash arts-focusdelaware. John, thank you again so much.
