What's the mission?
The Fall semester of my senior year of college held a lot of promise. I was going to be the first person ever in my family to graduate from a four-year university, which I did. I still hold a lot of pride in that fact, even though my pursuits were far more artistic than practical. That's always how I've operated, though, with no regard for what others want from me.
The second semester of my final year began and we were all making five-year plans, grand and idealistic plans for the future. Then, everything was cancelled, and a long period of isolation followed. Sometimes I feel like I'm still frozen in time, locked in my apartment in Boone. The first person in my family to graduate from college and my graduation was held online and I was alone and I never got to walk across a stage. Whatever, there are worse fates still.
Passively on my mind these last five years has been the five-year plan. We're coming up on that five-year plan, and I've achieved nothing on it. Sure, at one point, the five-year plan was everything, but over these same five years, my focus has shifted.
In 2020, I went to work, and I haven't stopped since. One 40-hour week after another. It's not novel by any means, but I'm only 27, and I feel like I'm dying. I've always had big ideas and lofty ambitions, a lot of want but not a lot of follow-through. Despite this, throughout my 27 years, I have needed to be a writer. This was a major tenet of the five-year plan; the one thing that remains. The weight of capitalism has crushed any want of creativity in me, but I can let it crush me no longer. During the five-year plan period, I learned more about where I come from and the people who helped shape the South. From the miners up on Blair Mountain to my brethren in the Appalachians who banded together to save each other during Helene, my home is beautiful and stronger than a majority of the world would give us credit for if only we could get out of our own way. The South has consistently been at the front of labor movements and is a bastion of self-reliance. My work is a love letter to the places and the people that have made me and educated me. There's no space for nepotism, capitalism, bigotry, or AI. I don't know how one 27-year-old's poetry and writing about entertainment will change that, but I'll be damned if I don't try. d'Arc is something completely my own, and I hope to share that one day in a space where no money ever changes hands.
I had a great professor tell me once, "To call yourself a writer, you have to write." Well, d'Arc is that, with no surrender. d'Arc is last-ditch writer's corner for me, a last ditch effort to call myself a writer and maybe save the state of film discourse as it stands (not everything needs to make sense).