JTWO Welcomes Brynn Antaran

I’ve shelved most of my high school experiences, but there are a couple lucid moments that come back to me regularly.

The first day of playwriting class, sitting in the second row as our disheveled teacher paced back and forth in front of the white board, nodding and stuttering wildly: “ Real writers, y’know, the ones who are born to write, they never stop writing. Never. They’re seeing all these things around them and writing in their head, y’know, constantly .”

And then one of my summers at a musical theatre intensive, stretching on a stage amongst twenty other teens in jazz shoes, baking alive in an old church without air conditioning in the middle of June as the artistic director told us to think very seriously before pursuing a career in theatre or art because it would be an extremely difficult way to live. “I hate to break it to you kids,” she said in her lilted British meter, “but that’s the way it is.” We should only take this path only if we absolutely had to, only if we could truly do ​nothing​ else in this world but create.

I was still a young, doubtful creative–I didn’t understand how anything could feel so sure and natural. In college, though, I fell into filmmaking and everything clicked. Directing and writing makes everything else pale in comparison, I can never get enough of it. I have this quiet certainty in it; it is the only thing I want to do.