A dispatch from writing The Calphora
Art-making as spiritual path
About four years ago, in my mid-twenties and living with friends in an apartment in Oakland, I started working on a screenplay. I majored in Film Studies and wrote a couple screenplays in college. I spent a lot of my free time in high school watching movies and falling in love with the worlds of Edie Sedgwick and Andy Warhol in Factory Girl, Christopher McCandless abandoning society in Into the Wild, and Kate Hudson’s glamorous depiction of a high schooler turned roadie turned friend of rock stars in Almost Famous.
The screenwriting actually started long before all this. It started at the yellowish box PC in my bedroom when I was a kid. When I wasn’t busy transcribing lyrics to my favorite songs (Google’s search engine wasn’t the same back then), I was writing a feature-length screenplay called 6th Grade Going on Famous which was almost a direct replica of the movie Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen. I did not realize this at the time. I was in 4th grade, and I had strategically chosen the age of the main character so that it would give me some time to grow into the leading role by the time it got made.
The story was a perfect capsule of the dream that followed me throughout my entire childhood and adolescence: a simple, everyday girl from the suburbs gets discovered by a talent scout and fast-tracks to stardom. I’m telling you, this dream did not fade until my latter years of high school, and even now I can sometimes still hear the echoes of it in the caverns of my mind.
My creativity has taken many forms since these early days, but a common thread was that getting something to a finished state at all, let alone one where I felt comfortable sharing it with the world, was a rarity for me. Frankly, I think not finishing projects has been a vulnerability-avoidance strategy. By not finishing things, I get to hang out in the realm of imagination and fantasy where anything is possible and I never have to subject my work to judgment or scrutiny (my own or others).
The flip side of this is that I have always had a persistent desire to finish my work and to share it with the world. One of my oldest prayers is that my work will touch the hearts of many, many people.
My not finishing work is something I looked at as a flaw and a shortcoming of mine. Something not that I chose to not do, but that I was unable to do. I see now that finishing a piece of art is completely within my power — though it requires my willingness to surrender control over how it will be received, surrender perfectionism, and to release and even at times grieve any differences between the actual finished product and what my mind’s eye once imagined it could be.
By choosing not to finish work — and disguising this choice as a story of being victim to forces outside of me that hold me back — I’ve kept myself in a creative developmental holding pattern.
Today I specifically want to share with you about the piece of unfinished writing that started as a screenplay four years ago. Giving this story and aspects of the writing process the opportunity to see the light of day feels like a necessary remedy to help me continue to usher it forward. The story is called The Calphora.
In 2021, I was biking around North Oakland and found myself on a street I’d never been on before called Lowell. Where we live in Oakland is pretty close to the water of the bay, so a salty breeze wove itself through the air as my tires chomped stray gravel below. Lowell is one of my favorite streets - it’s less trafficked, is a bit wider than others, has intermittent sidewalks at best, and it’s lined with lots of low structures that appear to be former warehouses-turned-apartments or studio spaces. It has a funky, almost pre-apocalyptic feel to it unlike anywhere else in the area.
On this ride down Lowell, inspiration struck for a story. The story would be set in the distant future in a post-capitalist society facing deeper and deeper spirals of climate chaos. In this future, communities have survived by forming villages and subsisting off the land in a sharing economy with small amounts of additional currency-based trade. The human collective has evolved to a point where violence no longer exists. The urge to do harm to others or oneself has been completely rooted out as a result of a natural evolution of the human psyche and spirit, assisted by multi-layered shifts in culture, media narratives, education, and science.
I was interested in the question: What if the goodness of the human heart won out on a mass scale, but we were still left to deal with the aftermath of all the destruction caused to Earth’s climate in the 18th-21st centuries? What would the day-to-day look like? How would people relate to each other and the earth differently? How do they do conflict resolution? How do they relate to all their big feelings if not by acting out bad shit on each other? Would a person recognize the echoes and traces of violence, and if so, how would they deal with it when it showed up?
This story quickly became a playground for me to explore themes around healing and collective transformation that I was already immersed in studying. It gave me a portal to vision a future that feels more hopeful than the ones that the mainstream, rational culture of our present-day would have us believe we are hurdling towards.
As I deepened into this particular project, I was reminded of feelings I’d had in some of my favorite writing classes in college where my relationship to life shifted as a result of being in an active, ongoing creative practice. I observe and experience life more vividly when I am regularly writing, engaged in an almost mystical process of filtering the otherwise mundane everyday into art. I feel myself no longer just a consumer of art and media but a person in dialogue with the broader currents of culture — like I belong here and can play a role in shaping what unfolds.
About two years into the process of writing The Calphora, I was losing interest in making the leap over to the film industry. From the small handful of friends and family I knew pursuing filmmaking, it was clear that actually getting a movie made was a massive undertaking that took a lot of time, money, people, and a good dose of luck. The work ahead felt like a mountain I didn’t want to climb. I decided I wouldn’t continue pursing this story in the screenplay format. I would turn it into a novel.
I’ve been running with this for the last couple years, but even with the shift to novel form, this is an ambitious project for me. I’m still trying to wrap my arms around it and see what it’s meant to become. To put it straight, I am confronted. Here I am in winter of 2025, and the book doesn’t feel close to done. Yes, I can own that I’ve taken major strides: it has a title now, the main character has a name (thank God!), and I’ve got a 116 page outline. But it feels like there are still more questions than answers. It feels like it’s taking forever. It feels like I can’t do it alone — which must be why I am writing to you about it. I am trying to find my way forward.
The creative process around The Calphora has been one of expansion and contraction. In the moments of expansion: ideas, characters, plot points and paragraphs come pouring out of me. I am having fun. I am unattached to outcome. I am on the ride. I even find my way into the lives of the characters through music, letting their songs come through me, or finding my own medicine songs to help me be in a good way as I create.
A melody of the villagers of Aye as they grapple with a harm that’s been done:
And then a wave of contraction comes: I am stuck, overwhelmed and mired in self-doubt. The voices of “I don’t know how to write a novel” “I’ve bit off more than I can chew” “I don’t know how to tie all of this together” “I’m better off focusing on other things” chant through my head.
Then of course the competing voices of “You can’t give up” “You have to push through” “You’re just scared to make something bad” “Buck up and get it done” come in. It can really get to be an all-out brawl.
While I have never given birth, I feel like putting out a big project must be akin to going through labor. It is painful beyond painful in moments. It’ll make you wish for any escape. It will make you pissed and angry about being in this situation. You will truly not know how you’ll get through it. And you’ll lean on support from those beside you who are encouraging you on, reminding you to just - keep - breathing. You remember that you already love what is coming, and it will take as long as it takes to arrive.
I’m scared to even liken this project to labor because once you’re in labor, there’s no turning back - and if I’m completely honest, there’s a part of me that wants to hide out, to abandon ship, to let it die and not tell another soul that I’m working on this, because then maybe I can avoid the pain of facing all the parts of me that still resist the vulnerability of finishing my work. But my outline for the story is 116 pages for chrissake! I’ve spent hours world-building with my beloved, Nathan, who lends his magnificent skills as a Dungeons and Dragons DM. I’m in deep.
As much as it frightens me to admit it, I know that writing The Calphora is part of my spiritual path. It’s giving me an opportunity to heal something in me related to my creativity - and more specifically my writerhood - that I wouldn’t be able to otherwise. It’s this vulnerability thing. While the book occurs to me at times as a beast I’d rather lay to rest, I have to admit I like who I’m becoming as I write it. Choosing to honor and trust the path I’m on even when I can’t stand the experience I’m having in the present, even when my vision is shrouded in haze, is a good way for me.
I don’t know what will become of the story, but what I do know is that Arabella Star and her home village of Aye have a tale that wants to be told, and for whatever reason they have chosen me to tell it.
Because this is vulnerability as a point of practice, below you can find an excerpt of The Calphora.
Trigger warning: The excerpt of fiction below refers to wildfires. I’m sending blessings to all those who have been impacted by the recent fires in Los Angeles 💔 My aunt Wendy and cousins live in Topanga Canyon, and we’re so grateful their home is safe. Beloved friends and community-members of theirs lost their home in the devastating Palisades fires. Please consider donating to help Nadya and Shane recover if you have the means.
When I woke the next morning, it was still dark out. My shirt was soaked with sweat and clung to my body. I smelled campfire and felt an instinctual sense of panic form at the back of my gut. Someone wasn’t barbecuing in the middle of the night, were they? How recently had we cleared the underbrush? Could fire season be starting this early? I was still half in my dream and tried to orient myself by opening my eyes, but the task felt like it would take an entire troupe of lion tamers to accomplish. Something shook me and pulled me rightly into the waking world.
“Arabella!”
It was my brother. His eyes bore down at me like a barn owl’s. His intensity usually irritated me, but in this moment I got the feeling it was justified. “Listen,” he said. I craned my neck to get my bottom ear off the mattress. Then, I heard what he wanted me to hear – the low thrum of AC units coming to a stop. No air purifiers or humidifiers running. Everything yielded to an eerie quiet that felt as if it were always here, waiting for the right moment to swallow us whole. The power lines outside the window jumped with white light and released an electric screech, energy surging through them before they went limp. They repeated this again and again, performing an erratic dance. I noticed that dabs of Crayola red-orange blood—the color June would have selected to doodle a heart or a sunset—had marked my pillow. My nose had bled dry.
“It’s the fucking death rattle, Mateo,” I said. “The solar panels failed.” The hairs on my arms stood at attention like tiny soldiers (soldiers – a term I wouldn’t learn until about a year from now). Both being part of the healers unit, Mateo and I had heard an actual death rattle several times—the way the breath goes shaky and rattles like a baby’s maraca as a person takes their last ones. What we were hearing now struck me as the way a death rattle would sound coming from an entire village, not just a single human body.
My train of thought was cut off by the blaring sound of Aye’s alarm system coming online. It, too, carried a wheezing quality, having sat silent and untested for over a year. The sound penetrated to my core and shook any last webs of sleep off of me. I realized that Mateo was frozen in shock next to me, so I sprang into action and nearly collided with my parents as they appeared at the door. They wore harrowed expressions and explained that they were going to help put out a fire at the Parlim residence down the road but there were a half dozen more that had already been reported. My brother and I were to go to the healers clinic and begin receiving patients with Alma.
We biked from our family home toward the south side of Aye. Dry lightning cracked open the sky like a parched desert floor. I wanted to apply a salve and seal it up. Thunder slammed us with its heaving soundbody, annotating each flash in rapid succession. Ghostly visages hovered in front of homes as we rode—LED lanterns casting a glow on the faces of neighbors who had started to gather in panic. They’d also been woken up in the middle of the night, if not by the alarm then by the haunting quiet that preceded it or by the oppressive hand of the heat itself.