Artistic Statement
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Kerry Muir
Artistic Statement
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Not all of my writing pertains to children and teens trying to navigate a baffling and pernicious world—but the truth is: most of it does. I’m fascinated by the ways children and teens deploy fantasy, imagined experience, and even outright lies to cope in the face of extreme adversity. I’m fascinated with the subject of entrapment—both mental and physical—and the ways in which people seek to escape it via the imagination.
Obsessions that crop up with staggering regularity in my screenplays, stage plays, short films and literary nonfiction include: the surprise element of beauty within the grotesque. The surreal. The drunk and disorderly yearning for love, even for love gone bad. I’m prone to write characters who live on the margins, in severe isolation, who simply don’t belong.
My characters are those who are wildly damaged, appallingly alone, and violently ill-equipped to love—but who try, anyway. Many are not in their right minds, but—if that’s the case—there’s sure to be a touch of holiness in their derangement. The embodiment of Cioran’s "Failure on the move,” the characters in my head are, more often than not, headed for disaster. But while they may crash hard, they always do so while letting their imaginations unfurl, like splashy, multi-hued parachutes, to break the pain of the fall.
Movies that altered and affected me profoundly include: The Florida Project; Precious; Pan’s Labyrinth; Jesus’ Son; Laurie Collyer’s Sherrybaby; Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild; Casavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence; Visconti’s Bellissima; Fellini’s La Strada, and his Nights of Cabiria.
Literary works that honed and polished the lens through which I see: Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; Frank Baum’s Oz books; C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia; Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita; and Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son.
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Not all of my writing pertains to children and teens trying to navigate a baffling and pernicious world—but the truth is: most of it does. I’m fascinated by the ways children and teens deploy fantasy, imagined experience, and even outright lies to cope in the face of extreme adversity. I’m fascinated with the subject of entrapment—both mental and physical—and the ways in which people seek to escape it via the imagination.
Obsessions that crop up with staggering regularity in my screenplays, stage plays, short films and literary nonfiction include: the surprise element of beauty within the grotesque. The surreal. The drunk and disorderly yearning for love, even for love gone bad. I’m prone to write characters who live on the margins, in severe isolation, who simply don’t belong.
My characters are those who are wildly damaged, appallingly alone, and violently ill-equipped to love—but who try, anyway. Many are not in their right minds, but—if that’s the case—there’s sure to be a touch of holiness in their derangement. The embodiment of Cioran’s "Failure on the move,” the characters in my head are, more often than not, headed for disaster. But while they may crash hard, they always do so while letting their imaginations unfurl, like splashy, multi-hued parachutes, to break the pain of the fall.
Movies that altered and affected me profoundly include: The Florida Project; Precious; Pan’s Labyrinth; Jesus’ Son; Laurie Collyer’s Sherrybaby; Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild; Casavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence; Visconti’s Bellissima; Fellini’s La Strada, and his Nights of Cabiria.
Literary works that honed and polished the lens through which I see: Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; Frank Baum’s Oz books; C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia; Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita; and Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son.
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