Today we’d like to introduce you to Scot Moir.
Hi Scot, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
How I got started and where I am today… I admit, I sort of laughed at myself when I read that, because really I’m still just in start-up mode when it comes to actually working as a writer and storyteller. I began the serious effort of writing publicly about two years ago now, so to this point the CV could still probably fit on a post-it note! But at the same time, stepping back and looking at what’s happened in such a short a period of time, I’m so grateful for the opportunities I’ve had, and excited to be able to say there are still projects on the go, and seem to be for well into the foreseeable future. If I could have told myself that even two years ago, I don’t know that I would have believed it. At least not easily.
Deep down, I’ve always wanted to be a storyteller. I wrote and wrote and wrote as a child. Stories and poems and scripts. And I read. Really it was a love of reading which made me want to write in the first place. I think that’s probably always how it happens. But, common story, life, “real life”, maturity, all these grey grown-up vibes roll in and cloud out the clean brightness of childhood. So I relegated creative projects to the realm of hobby and pursued proper, grown-up goals. But even when I was dedicating a lot of time and effort (and money, ahem, degree!) to other things, things I thought would be better career choices, the itch to create still really burned me all the time. I think it helped a great deal that I married an actress, someone as beautifully and wonderfully mad and daring and alive as they come. And then I remember listening to the sublime storyteller and mythologist Dr. Matin Shaw on a podcast one day. He outlined a similar journey: Creative childhood bashed out of him to make room for a proper adult life. Staring out over the factory floor he worked on one day, looking down the barrel of respectability and safety and all the values of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, he suddenly just said, “F that.” And that was a really liberating moment for me. That you could just say that, set it all aside, and return to the serious business we all understand as children of living in the real world. Not the fake one we compose as adults, but living in the world as it really is, wild and free and beautiful. I wanted to spend my life telling stories. So, whatever I needed to do to make that a reality, I would.
The first serious opportunity rolled my way when my wife’s theatre company suddenly found themselves looking for a script on the fly. The rights to a show they had been prepping for months suddenly fell through, and they needed a show… fast! I pitched them a play I had partially drafted called “Dietrich and Maria,” a WW2 love story, and happily they fell in love with the idea. That show went on to be a success for the company, and so I was commissioned to write two others, and adaption of “Treasure Island” which is currently running, and another which is still in development and I’m not allowed to talk about publicly yet. Slowly, other opportunities have come along. I’m spending a lot of time with some wonderfully creative people, some Robin Hood stories, and a great Dostoevsky biography lately, so stay tuned!
Finally, in addition to these projects with others, I’ve set out in a bit of a new direction personally. Exploring some philosophical questions which have nagged me for a long time about the act of story itself, I have decided to begin practicing the ancient art of live oral storytelling. Gathering a group of people together in a theatre or by a fire, and telling the great myths, legends, and sacred stories of old. Not reading them, not reciting them, but telling them, in the moment, off the dome, yielding entirely to the moment at hand, hostage only to fortune and story. We held the first of these, which we’re calling Dreamtime Theatre, on December 6th at the local Arts Council, with a wonderful response. You can stay updated on the next Dreamtime events here: https://www.lookingglasstheatre.ca/dreamtime-theatre. Being a writer by nature, of course I’ve felt the need to document the whole thing in a series of journal article style reflections, which can be found (for free!) by subscribing to my personal Substack, The Mundus Imaginalis Press, https://scotnmoir.substack.com
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Oh no. Never smooth. For all the opportunities that have come in the last two years, I certainly don’t want to give the impression that I have in any way ‘made it.’ Nothing like that! I work a day job as a cleaner, scrubbing people’s toilets in order to pay the bills. You’ve got to be willing to work, and work hard, if you want to be vocationally creative. Because the sad fact of the matter is, people really do think beauty is an optional thing in society. A frill around the edge of necessity. It isn’t, it really, really isn’t. Beauty, in Dostoevsky’s phrase, is what will save the world. Without it, things go badly very quickly for humanity at large. But it’s often difficult to convince people of that. It’s a hard sell to tell someone that theatre and music and storytelling is just as essential for a society as are plumbers, electricians, and farmers. You need both, don’t get me wrong. But you do genuinely need both. But we’re a pretty utilitarian people, and so you really have to be willing to put in the effort and create your own opportunities to work. That probably means doing what you have to do financially in order to do what you have to do artistically.
But here’s the secret:
Self definition by ‘success’ is really limiting, and will drive you nuts if you give in to it. If you create art, you are an artist, whether or not anyone pays you anything for it. If you create the art you want to see, if you execute the vision which you uniquely have, you are a successful artist. Period. There’s a lot of garbage on display at national stages and galleries, and a lot of glory hidden in sketchbooks and off, off, off Broadway productions. Just keep going. Keep creating what you have to create. Keep letting the art escape into the world through you. Whether or not people are willing to recognize it, the world is a better place because you’ve allowed your unique beauty into it. It really, really is.
Here’s one other thing: People don’t respond to what you think they want to see or experience. That’s what the gatekeepers, the people who have money at stake in film or TV or theatre think is a safe bet, but it’s always wrong. People respond to passion. So maybe your great passion project is an arcane absurdist play about the life of Simone Weil. A producer is probably not going to buy that to readily, nor an agent frontline it. But if your heart and soul is in it, find a way to make it happen. People will respond. People will always respond to passion translated into beauty.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
It’s always difficult to say what makes your own work ‘unique.’ That’s a probably a question better put to others around me. As a writer I think I am probably known (at least by the actors I’ve worked with) as someone with an intense focus on character. Because the scale of productions I’ve worked on have all been quite small, character is often all you really have. But I revel in that. People have and will always be the most interesting thing to me. So when you’ve got a scene (or a whole play in the case of “Dietrich and Maria”) where it’s just two people, two human beings going back and forth, getting down into the nitty gritty of life in this world, that’s my favourite thing. That’s when a piece comes to life. And I’ve been completely spoiled so far by the casts which have worked on my stuff, because really a script is just a pelt until someone with the skill to bring it to life comes along and turns it into a wild animal.
I’ve always been really interested in philosophy, the meaning of life, the psychological and spiritual world. That’s probably why my favourite authors are who they are (Dostoevsky, Joyce, Shaw, Moriarty) and why my favourite playwrights are who they are (Beckett, Camus). I’m really not interested in working on fluffy pieces, things with no depth to them. Those can be great, we all need to chill out with a sitcom here and there, but for my own work, there’s got to be something to sink my teeth into. Some question I’m circling around. Really, in some sense, my writing is a form of very public therapy. I use the particular story I’m working on as a chance to explore the questions I’m wrestling with at that time from the vantage points of characters both like and unlike myself.
We all have a different way of looking at and defining success. How do you define success?
Success in art is executing your vision for your piece. That’s really it. Everything else, praise, recognition, money (while all super nice!) are ephemeral. It could come or go, you’ve got no control over that, but at the end of the day you’ve got your soul. And your soul knows whether or not you’ve ‘got it.’
I think all art is probably incomplete in some sense. I think it was George Lucas who said, “Films aren’t completed; they escape.” Artists, if that’s what they truly are at heart, are always going to be pushing on into what’s next, what’s new, what’s deeper. So I think ‘success’ probably lies in a tension somewhere between those two points: You give everything to the work at hand, executing your vision and no one else’s (or no one else’s outside the team you are working with if it’s a collaborative art like theatre), and you never stop to sit back and atrophy. You’re always pushing into deeper and deeper places.
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