Detroit writer and filmmaker Perry Janes visited Bookends & Beginnings on Monday to discuss his debut poetry collection “Find Me When You’re Ready: Poems,” which he published in September.
Sam Bailey, an Emmy-nominated writer and director from Chicago best known for the web series “You’re So Talented,” joined Janes in conversation.
According to Molly Hart, Bookends & Beginnings’ events and marketing coordinator, the bookstore was “excited” to host the event, which was a collaboration with Northwestern University Press — the publisher of Janes’ debut collection.
“Perry is really dynamic,” she said. “He has a lot of interesting experience in film and writing, and it was really great to see how those two intersect in some of his work.”
Around 10 people attended the event, where Janes and Bailey spoke about the thematic strands apparent in Janes’ collection, as well as their experiences navigating the film industry.
Janes said his book is “auto-fictional.” While it doesn’t capture his absolute lived experience, its contents are tied to his background as it traces the contours of his journey from Detroit to Los Angeles, where he now lives.
Janes said that the book is heavily connected to his family’s experience in working-class Detroit.
“Without realizing it, working class communities and stories have had a tremendous impact on how I think about myself as a writer moving through the world, but also the stories that interest me, the stories that I want to tell,” Janes said.
Janes’ move to Los Angeles has been similarly impactful on his recent work, he said. By his account, Hollywood can be creatively stifling, “exhilarating” and incredibly “opaque” at the same time, and requires a tremendous learning curve to navigate.
Janes said he came to think of poetry and screenwriting in Hollywood as antithetical but with overlap — two different creative outlets that, for him, function in tandem.
“I sometimes joke, and it’s not such a joke, that I run screaming from one to the other,” Janes said. “When I am absolutely tired of and burned out with the scripts, I’ll absolutely pivot and find myself writing more and more poems or fiction, and then every once in a while, I’ll find myself just absolutely banging my head against a poem or a story, and I’ll think, ‘Wow, that sounds really great to go back to, neat, tidy structure.’”
This interplay between poetry and film manifests in his new collection, which was born of the intersection between his life as a screenwriter and a poet.
The collection follows the five-act structure, which divides a story into the exposition, rising action, climax, falling action and resolution. Janes said that using this structure was a way of referencing popular coming-of-age movies and stories.
Throughout the rest of their talk, Janes and Bailey touched on the influence of love on Janes’ work and played a game of “Buy, Borrow (and) Donate” — a riff on the popular “Kiss, Marry (and) Kill”— with a “laundry list” of Janes’ influences.
One audience member asked how the writers transformed personal narrative into fictionalized narrative.
“There almost is no disconnect for me to even care about a character and write deeply about (them),” Bailey said. “I have to feel like they are a version of me.”
Before opening the discussion for questions, Janes read a poem from the collection called “The Cookout,” a reflection on friendship over the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Although it is already sundown in the world of this poem,” Janes read. “Although the doors are opening, the guests again making excuses, streaming in a dark I am no longer certain we will ever step out from, here are their dishes, here is the water, dirty with signs of their living.”
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