NEWFANE-Moore Free Library presents writer, sculptor, cartoonist, and filmmaker Annie Weatherwax on Sunday, Oct. 5, at the Williamsville Hall.
The occasion is a screening of Weatherwax's Monster in a Dress, billed as "a story about family that will catch you off guard." The 25-minute short will be followed by an artist talk with the filmmaker - a part-time Newfane resident who describes herself for this project as a literary cartoonist - answering audience questions.
After earning a degree in sculpture from Rhode Island School of Design, Weatherwax tended bar and worked freelance for Hasbro, a toy manufacturing company, producing clay prototypes for their products. Soon, she was sculpting cartoon characters and superheroes for Nickelodeon, Pixar, and DC Comics.
Weatherwax candidly shares that she wrestled with dyslexia throughout her life.
"I think my dyslexia informs almost everything I do," she says, adding that she always wanted to be a writer but thought her reading issue would preclude that.
"I thought, 'Oh, if I could only write a book' - then you know, people would think I was smart. I wanted to be part of the smart crowd."
Weatherwax eventually did. "I focused a lot," and first wrote "a lot of short stories."
"And at some point, an editor reached out and asked me if I'd ever considered writing a novel, which, of course, seemed preposterous to me," she said.
Eventually, in 2014, she wrote a novel, All We Had, published by Simon & Schuster. In her 50s then, it helped her self concept "a little bit, but it wasn't the total solution."
All We Had looks at addiction and dysfunction through the lives of a loving - though perennially challenged - mother and her teenage daughter.
"My writing is extremely visual," Weatherwax says, "and so is easily translated into film. So it actually got optioned by Tribeca before the book was released."
The film adaptation, directed by and starring Katie Holmes (of Dawson's Creek fame), came out in 2016.
Winner of the Hamilton School Life Achievement Award and the Robert Olen Butler Prize for short fiction, Weatherwax's stories have appeared in The Sun, The Southern Review, and the Carolina Quarterly, among other publications, along with articles in The New York Times and Publishers Weekly, and in a monthly series for the literary journal Ploughshares.
'A short story with animated parts'
Tying into her past work and her natural language, which is visual, Weatherwax explains on her website that Monster in a Dress is a multimedia piece, "with drawings, sound effects, kinetic typography, animation, archival imagery, and live action clips. The elements have been orchestrated not only to entertain, but also to build empathy."
Weatherwax narrates the semi-autobiographical story "about coming of age in a large Middle Eastern family" in Glastonbury, Connecticut: It's a story based on her "journey with gender, identity, and personhood," her site says.
"It's about basically my struggle with gender identity and sexuality. But it's actually a film about family," she writes.
She started working on Monster in a Dress during the pandemic.
"It started off as a series of drawings," Weatherwax continues. "Sketches of people that kind of just came out of my head. When I laid them all out, I realized that they were a version of my extended family. They all looked very Lebanese. Which makes sense, because I grew up with those faces," she adds, noting her Lebanese background on her mother's side.
Weatherwax says the spine of the film is "about intergenerational trauma within the LGBTQ community." She's quick to add, though, "the thing I did very consciously is I left any labels out because I find that when you label something like 'this is a queer film,' it automatically sort of excludes people."
The film is about a young girl "who doesn't act like a girl. She acts like a boy," she says. The story includes various family members, including the protagonist's grandmother.
Of her style, Weatherwax says, "I think the dyslexia was an advantage in a way, because it's like a process of translation for me. I have to visualize it and then translate it into words, but the image in my head always comes first: I need that" in order to articulate characters and settings.
"Monster," she clarifies, "is a short story with animated parts. So it's not traditional animation. The drawings kind of move in and out. None of the characters actually speak."
Weatherwax created the film with a variety of applications on her iPad and her computer, and then used Apple's presentation software, Keynote (similar to Microsoft PowerPoint) to generate the final film.
But "the only reason I would consider it a film is because it's now in a film file," she says. "Really, though, it's a short story with moving parts."
With an original score composed by Debra Barsha, Monster in a Dress has had numerous screenings with more to come, information about which is found on Weatherwax's website.
Up next for Weatherwax: maybe another film, "and I just completed a book of character sketches with very, very short stories, some of which have appeared in Ploughshares," she says.
The collection, Oddballs and Relationships of Erstwhile, CT, is a series of literary cartoons "fashioned after some of the people I grew up with," she says.
The screening and artist talk is Sunday, Oct. 5, 3 to 4:30 p.m., at Williamsville Hall, 35 Dover Rd. Free admission. For more information, contact Moore Free Library Board President Susan Ahl at 207-752-6799 and/or Annie Weatherwax at annie@annieweatherwax.com.
This Arts item by Annie Landenberger was written for The Commons.