We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Harker Jones a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Harker, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

All my projects — whether poetry, a rom-com or a slasher movie — express serious themes and messages. This applies well to my first script, a satire about a woman who sues a pop star for lip syncing, igniting a firestorm of controversy that threatens her friendships, her love life and her career. It presents questions like, What are we if we celebrate athletes who cheat, people who do absolutely nothing on television, and singers who can’t sing? How empty, how lost, how broken are we? But those questions in “Green Means Go!” are presented in a candy-colored world with sassy bons mots and catchy pop songs. It’s the spoonful-of-sugar approach. People don’t want to be lectured; they want to be entertained. I aim to entertain and make people think, as well, and with “Green Means Go!” being my first script, in some ways it’s the most meaningful script, too.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I started writing when I was 13 and essentially never stopped. That said, I have taken breaks when the muses stopped whispering to me, but there’s always something bubbling underneath. I’m inspired all the time but also know how to focus on a project through to completion before jumping to another. I have a lot of balls in the air, but you have to have an understanding of your agility or they’re all going to clatter to the floor. I started writing poetry, then fan fic, then novels, then screenplays, then children’s books, and, finally, recently, like two months ago recently, song lyrics. It helped that I had a jumping-off point with my pop music satire “Green Means Go!” that I mentioned because I had already created some choruses for that!

The project I’m most attached to is my love story, “Until September.” I came of age while I was writing the first draft (not that we’re not all coming of age throughout our lives) so it was a special time. But while it is a fairly bleak drama and I get readers who are eager for what I write next, I’m not nearly as serious in my life as the book would lead you to believe. The next things I wrote were a raucous comedy and a slasher movie, which I’m sure readers of the book would not expect. But it’s all me. I know many people want artists to, in so many words, stay in one lane (“You’re a country singer, you can’t record a dance song!”), I find most artists are into many different media. My writing spans different genres and varieties because the truths I’m trying to express can’t always be expressed in the same way. Which makes it sound oh-so lofty, when in reality it’s mostly just fun. I mean, if an artist isn’t having fun with their work, it’s just work!

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

When something you’ve created really resonates with another human being, that is a connection like no other. That thing—that book, that poem, that essay—didn’t exist until I created it out of the ether, and for it to move someone—to laughter, to heartbreak, to introspection—is priceless. When I get letters from readers it blows my mind every time. When is the last time you sat down and wrote to an author? Something in my novel moved them enough that they sought me out to express their feelings about the love story and how it affected them. They’ve been profoundly moved and that’s profoundly moving to me.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

My goal is to reach as broad an audience as possible with my works. While it’s not about money—which is also important, of course!—I think audiences will be entertained by my projects and I hope they’ll also learn something, about the world, possibly themselves.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @harker_j
• Facebook: Facebook.com/UntilSeptemberBook/
• Twitter: @HarkerJones