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Dani Clifton
1968 was a perilous year: Martin Luther King was assassinated. Robert F. Kennedy was also gunned down. Nixon won the White House; students protested the Vietnam war...and I was born, so the year wa...view more1968 was a perilous year: Martin Luther King was assassinated. Robert F. Kennedy was also gunned down. Nixon won the White House; students protested the Vietnam war...and I was born, so the year wasn’t all bad. They brought me home to three (much) older siblings, all who did their best to convince me I was adopted. I was prone to believe them. It would explain so much.
As a kid I lived in my own little world. That was totally fine by me. They knew me there. For as long as I can recall, I’ve chased after answers to questions that have no answers, seeking to understand the ineffable. I existed on a steady diet of Scooby Doo cartoons, and Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators mystery novels. Summers were spent searching for clues in regard to the infamous D.B. Cooper, the more famous Bigfoot, and on occasion, red-hatted gnomes. I used a detecting kit I’d made from an old Sucrets throat lozenge tin in which I stowed a small plastic magnifying glass from a cereal box; a folded scrap of paper and a pencil for taking notes; a plastic 35mm. film canister filled with talcum powder, one of my mom’s old make-up brushes, and scotch tape for lifting finger prints. I learned to pee behind a tree (a valuable skill I still use today) so I didn’t have to interrupt my investigations by going indoors.
Admittedly, I was an odd child.
Then I started paying attention to what I called “The Voice”, a steady stream of narrative that flowed through my mind. These constant voice-overs were stories. Sometimes I was simply the observer, a listener entertained by those tales as if I’d tuned into an etheric radio program only I could hear. Other times they played like a film across the screen of my mind’s eye. On the rarer occasion, I was an active character in the adventure as it superimposed over my real-life moments, like physically occupying two places at once. A psychotherapists wet dream, yeah, I’m aware.
Then one day, in my early 20s, I had the ingenious idea to commit those snippets to paper – still not seeing myself as a writer. I got married. We had a family. We bought a house in the boonies. It wasn’t until, many years later, after starting a thriving and prosperous private practice as an alternative healer that the stories got louder, more vivid, and more demanding of attention. Then, the unforeseen happened.
I woke up one morning in 2001 with no sunshine in my world. I had never before that morning, nor for a single moment since, faced such a deep abyss of life-threatening depression. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t see how the next day would happen. I didn’t know if I wanted it to. I was drowning in my own suffering.
Then I threw myself a life-line.
That Voice that had always fed me stories was there, but in a different form. This wasn’t fun adventure time. This Voice was authoritative and gave no room for negotiating when it told me, “Get up! Go to the computer. Open a Word document, put your fingers on the keyboard. Close your eyes. Now...breathe.” I did just that. An hour later I opened my eyes to a screen filled with words. Death by Association was born that very night.
Yet, I still didn’t think of myself as a writer, or writing as a career. I swear I’ve given my Guardian Angel a drinking problem.
A daydream several years later showed me a film that I found rather intriguing. The Voice informed me that I made the film. Come again? I knew nothing of film-making, and had even less interest in making them! But the daydream-vision was so clear, so lucid, it would not be ignored. I had to make a decision – take the time and expense to explore this new avenue, or be a little more rational and focus on furthering my existing private practice?
So, I did what I always do when I have life-changing decisions to make: I retreated to the wilderness. I got myself lost (not really) in the 90,000 acres outside my back door, and started a conversation with the Powers That Be.
Me: Please send me a sign if film school is my next step.
PTB: (somewhat humored) And what kind of sign would you like?
Me: An elk antler! (I’m forever looking specifically for elk antlers but like arrowheads, I'd never found one.)
Three hours later, I turned for home. I cut through a grove of pine trees that would take me to the logging road, that would lead me to the trail home. Suddenly, as if grabbed by invisible hands, I found myself propelling down a barely-discernible game trail. My legs seemed to be on auto-pilot as I pushed through thickets of Oregon Grape, scrambled over a downed log - to step straight down onto a shed elk antler. It was early January, but the local herds don’t shed their antlers until March. The butt-end of the antler was bloody and not yet coagulated. The antler had fallen off moments before I found it.
For whatever reason, I was going to film school.
I enrolled at the NW Film Center School of Film and took my first class, Intro to Film Making. There was zero resonance. I didn’t yet panic. I enrolled in Screenwriting, taught by Roger Margolis. In that first half-hour of Roger’s class, in the midst of his so you want to make films, huh? opening remarks, Roger caught my eye and said directly, “It’s important to remember, most of the top-grossing films, ever, began their life as a novel.” Then he went on to address the rest of my classmates. I never took another film class after that. It had served its purpose. Now I write novels. And I finally get it. I am a writer. And I do what the Voice in my head tells me to do.view less