Try Hard
Mood Board #20
Last year I had a goal to submit my writing for publication at least 52 times — one for every week of the year. I made it to 44 rejections and 0 approvals until I ran out of steam. Exhausted from the labor of writing with the hope of publication, trying so hard, and then facing continuous rejection, I took a break for my various creative practices.
This year, my goals are different and less focused on my image of success and more focused on building the foundation that will allow creative expression — community, connection, and joy.
The world is falling apart, but for the sake of my children, I need to be at least somewhat sane and joyful. Funny movies, podcasts, artwork, and karaoke have been a staple for me so far in 2026, and it has greatly improved my mental health.
After the passing of Catherine O’Hara, a shock that brought me to tears in the breakroom, I began to reminisce about how I fell in love with comedy in high school, watching movies with my friends, dressing up in costumes, and coming up with characters and storylines. We loved Christopher Guest’s mockumentaries which often featured the same cast of improvisers, and our favorite of these was the 1996 masterpiece “Waiting for Guffman”.
I rewatched this recently, and my goodness it’s just so good. The characters care so deeply about what they are creating that you kind of forget that what they’re creating is a low-budget musical about their small town’s history. The film plays out as a high stakes documentary drama about something that is, decidedly, low stakes and certainly not something that is going to impact the creative careers of these individuals living in rural Missouri, even if they believe it will.
The main characters believe so earnestly in their project. This is THEATER this is ART and as Corky says in his iconic speech to the city council, “This is my life we’re talking about, we’re not talking about something else, we’re talking about my life!”
They have delusions of grandeur, but it’s charming. You find yourself laughing at how ridiculous these people are, but never in a malicious way, and all the while you’re falling in love with them. During my re-watch, I started feeling misty eyed about the bewitching nature of the creative process — the vulnerable courage it takes to make something that others may not fully understand.
I thought, for the first time in many months…
I think I’m going to go to an open mic tonight.
***
The first time I ever tried stand up as an adult was in 2018. I had just started going to therapy where I confessed that I didn’t know if I liked making visual artwork. I felt like a failure and was incredibly embarrassed to realize that after thousands of dollars spent on a Bachelor of Fine Arts, I was uninspired and unhappy with my nearly nonexistent creative practice. We began delving into my childhood, identifying that, perhaps, I wasn’t in touch with who I really was, what I wanted, or what I enjoyed doing. I was having a very hard time making work that felt authentic to me.
My therapist encouraged me to think about moments of joy in my childhood, and I discovered that nearly all of them had to do with performing. Growing up, I was a theater kid raised by theater majors, and I realized that I longed for my hammy days of high school musicals, speech competitions, and theater camps.
My first time doing stand-up was at a comedy camp for teens run by the staff at Second City Chicago. The workshop was only a few hours long and was taught by a big man with a big voice who gave a quick rundown of what a setup and punchline are and then put all of us in line to perform one minute of comedy for him and then he would give each of us feedback immediately after our minute was up.
This is a brutal way to introduce any child to an art form, though it was an incredibly real and appropriate first taste of the constant, jarring failure of the medium.
There were about 30 of us in line and all of us vied for the back spots so that we had time to figure out what we wanted to say. When it was my turn, I was overwhelmed with joy to make the man laugh when I told a story about my elementary school aged brother. This was my first experience on stage making someone laugh with my own words and it was exhilarating.
The instructor gave me very generous feedback and asked where I was going to school. When I told him that I would be attending Belmont in Nashville, TN he was appalled and told me I should be moving to Chicago.
But I didn’t want to move to Chicago because… well I’m not exactly sure. My teenage Catholic (OCD) self was obsessed with the idea of fate and God-led superstition, and I had got it into my head that I was meant to move to Nashville. Also, I didn’t understand how to read graphs and therefore bus schedules, maps, and other things that required the right side of my brain.
For my school talent show that year I courageously and stupidly decided to do a stand-up routine. While on stage, I felt the rush of an audience of people laughing at my jokes and my stories. I dreamed of the next time I’d be on stage again, but when I started college, it felt impossible to be that vulnerable again. Art school was humiliating and I couldn’t stand the idea of adding more kinds of embarrassment and failure to my life.
So, after spending a silly amount of money discussing this in therapy, my therapist suggested that I try a comedy open mic.
My first night at The East Room my name was miraculously drawn out of the bucket and added to the list. While on stage, my words started spilling out of my mouth, and I quickly realized that none of the things I was saying were jokes — a horrible realization when you’re holding a microphone on a stage. The audience stared blankly at me while my friends who were there to support me laughed with enthusiasm. My friend Tony, a journalist, recorded the audio of the set and sent it to me. I have never listened to it.
But for some reason when I got off the stage, I wanted to do it again… and again… and again.
I’ve been lucky to become friends with some truly hilarious people, some of whom have made great strides in their careers, released albums, moved to bigger cities, and tour nationally. For a while I felt sad that I wasn’t progressing, and likely never will progress because of my lack of consistency. When I go to open mics, fresh comics often introduce themselves to me and give me advice about the scene.
But I always let them give me the advice because these people are in it and I’m not. And that’s okay! I’m not going to a mic every night, not hanging out at The Lab to hear if my name gets called, or wiggling my way into green rooms, and I’m definitely not making crowd work clips. And, you know what… I don’t want to.
I know who I am now.
I’m a writer and a curator.
I was right all those years ago about my exhaustion with making visual artwork, and I finally feel free of that. My curatorial practice has become my main focus, with my writing being my most beloved mode of creative expression. I have poured myself into these creative efforts, trying and failing, getting a little better every time I get up.
I give daily tours of our art galleries, and I love ardently telling the stories of our featured artists and the work that they create. I love attending writing events like Freehand and Tenx9 where I get to read my work aloud, to hear the immediate reaction of the audience, which I consider to be the best gift the audience gives to you. It’s like having thirty people read your work all at one time, and it is riveting, and sometimes brutal. Performing is an important part of my creative practice, and stand-up is a fantastic complement to that.
I’ve been taking small steps to build the foundation I need to have a healthy and joyful creative practice, and one of those steps has been to attend open mics again.
At these mics I get to talk to other writers, watch them work on their craft, and sometimes I get to go up too. But I am often gob smacked by what people say on stage — sometimes because it’s good, sometimes because it’s bad, but mostly because they thought of it with their weird brain and said it out loud. And they say it again and again and again. I stare with my mouth wide open, beaming at this singular human experience.
Sitting in the front row, I nod my head like a proud mother listening to her kid say, “hey, mom! Watch this!”
In a time where it seems like everyone is afraid to look like they are trying, these comics really are.
Please, always remember, be a Corky St. Clair.
Put your whole self into something and believe in what you say, do, and make.
try hard.
I promise that it’s worth it.
Mood Board #20
Featuring Christopher Guest as Corky St. Clair in Waiting for Guffman, 1996The Cast of Waiting for Guffman, (from left to right) Eugine Levy, Parker Posey, Christopher Guest, Catherine O’Hara, Fred Willard, 1996