I first became aware of Jesse Andrews in June 2015 at the Nantucket Film Festival. Ellen and I were visiting our niece and nephew on the island and we had heard some great buzz about the film Me and Earl and Dying Girl. We adored the film at the Festival screening and afterwards there was a Q & A with the New York Times bestselling author and film's screenwriter Jesse Andrews. Love at first sight (or first hear!) Ellen and I almost immediately birthed the idea of having a screenwriter come to the residency at Cassilhaus. Our initial overtures were spurned by a flippant, if adorable, auto-email reply about being in a remote Chilean fishing village that suggested contacting his publisher if we really had something interesting to talk about. We had moved on when about 15 months later out of the blue an excited and slightly contrite Jesse contacted us about coming to the remote writing village of Chapel Hill at the beginning of 2017 to complete his latest novel--he was over the moon about his first draft and his publisher had a large gun to his head and the stars were ripe for alignment.
The initial timing was not going to work as I was just about to embark on my sabbatical journey but I moved things around a bit and we had our first-ever artist in January. Jesse is both a novelist and screenwriter and writes primarily YA (Young Adult) Fiction--a category I didn't even know existed until his arrival. He comes with a lot of YA energy! He was super focused and disciplined while he was here and a marvel to watch. I had never had the pleasure to watch a novelist work up close in real time and I was just flabbergasted to see Jesse bound over to our side of the house literally jumping up and down exclaiming something on the order of "you won't believe what just happened at the end of the chapter. You just won't believe it! I never could have imagined he would do that" Like some third party observer he was watching the characters HE created shock and surprise him. It was raw joy.
Jesse was so generous with the community while he was here. When we invite an artist in a new medium to Cassilhaus we are always astonished at the new constituencies that we discover and engage. We had no idea of how robust the screenwriting community was in the Triangle and Jesse was open to working with a number of the local screenwriting classes. We made the acquaintance of well know screen writer Gary Hawkins who was right under our nose teaching at The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke and he agreed to moderate a discussing around adapting a novel for the screen following a screening of Me and Earl and the Dying Girl at the Full Frame Theater.
I don't think I've even know someone who was almost unable to speak without their hands. Talking is a full body sport for Jesse.
The novel Jesse came to finish is called MUNMUN and it was published last April. MUNMUN takes place in an alternate reality a lot like our own, except everyone is proportional in size to how much money they have. Warner and his sister Prayer have none, and so they're about the size of rats, which is not just demeaning, but dangerous: day and night they face mortal dangers that bigger richer people don’t ever have to think about. Warner and Prayer know their only hope is to scale up, but how can two littlepoors survive in a world built against them? Read the first few pages here!
Just before he left Jesse asked if he could do a reading from his book for a small group of friends and it was a wonderful intimate evening. It was the first time he had read from the new book in public.
Many of our visiting artists bond with our cats Jaco and Joni but Jesse had a particularly tight connection with Jaco. This is one of my favorite photos from his time with us having an existential conversation with Cassilkitty #1.
Thank you Jesse for opening up your world to us. It was a really fun ride.
If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.
—Elmore Leonard
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