The Under Review - Issue 4 | Summer 2021

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known stories in college football. I think telling them from the perspective of a non-footballer, hopefully
gives an interesting perspective because of course I’m definitely more interested in the people. These are
players, they’re figures, they’re stats, but they’re human beings who were going through different things in
their lives and were very brave and noble. It has been incredibly daunting.
I would definitely say the amount of history and the amount of connecting threads has definitely been the
hardest part. And as a poet, truly, writing this much prose is intense. I’m not going to lie. Luckily I’m
passionate about the subject matter and I wrote the script for the film, but it’s definitely a new experience.
TH: Well, as a prose writer, [the idea of] writing poetry definitely terrifies me so I can understand the
heebie-jeebies that come with writing in a secondary form. On a similar note, you work in pretty much
every kind of artistic form that exists. It sounds like it was kind of a natural reaction for you to have at your
dad’s retirement party hearing all these great stories, to think, ‘this would make a great film,’ then as the
film got closer to think, ‘well, this would also make a great book.’ Do you usually have an ‘Aha!’ moment, or
do you have a process for determining whether an idea would be a great poem, or film, or theater, or
dance, or one of the many other things you do? I’m curious to hear the process for the appropriate form
for each idea.
MW: There’s sort of an initial, ‘Aha!’ Whitespace was literally a dream. In that moment as you’re awakening
in the morning and you hit the snooze button, but I saw it very clearly visually and it was literally a poet on
their way somewhere and it culminates in a poetry performance. That was it.
That sort of told me this is a short film. I can’t explain it. I don’t know why, but it was a short film. I think, as
an indie filmmaker, what seems to happen
is the other components seem to reveal
themselves as I move towards the target
of the initial project or container. I have
another narrative short film called Clear,
and that is about a woman reconnecting
with her family after a wrongful
conviction. So that idea came to be
because my friend and colleague, Tina
Ngata Barr, was in her PhD dissertation
process at the University of Minnesota.
When she showed me what she wanted to
do her dissertation on, which was re-entry
benefits and resources for exonerated people, she educated me on how challenging that is. I assume when
we see those news reports that someone’s been released from prison after 30 years for a crime they didn’t
commit, and you see their family crying, you imagine they go have this steak dinner and get a big bag of
money from the government, but unfortunately that is not the case. Many people fare worse than their
counterparts who may have been guilty of the crime they were convicted of, or who may have served a full
sentence and are eligible for certain re-entry resources. That was really fascinating to me.
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