BETA Member Drive: Jen Spyra, Brian Broome, Joshua Rofé

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• Jen Spyra Shifts From Colbert To Comedic Short Stories

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  If you watch “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” then you’re familiar with the voice of Jen Spyra. She’s the show’s announcer and a former staff writer.

  Comedic writing comes naturally to Spyra, who has also written for the satirical publication The Onion. Moving onto satirical short stories, Spyra recently released her debut collection “Big Time.”

  “Big Time” features a variety of comical characters, including Mister Mittlebury, a millennial pig who performs improv; a time-travelling starlet from the 1940s who tries to make her mark in contemporary Hollywood; and the world’s very first influencer — a prehistoric cavewoman named Oola.

  Many of Spyra’s stories parody entire literary genres.

  “I love playing with genre because genre has defined guideposts and rules, and so if you know them, you can subvert them and tell a different story,” Spyra told WPR’s “BETA.” “So I only play with the ones that I have a deep affinity for. As for writers, there’s a bit of a shortcut happening. The audience already knows the world in terms of world building. I just need to hew to the rules, but I’m not starting something new.”

  Spyra says she’s especially proud of the book’s title story in terms of how much she subverted the genre to tell a different kind of story.

  “‘Big Time’ is a Hollywood rags to riches memoir. And I’m deconstructing that genre, the Hollywood rags to riches memoir, but telling a real story at the same time,” Spyra said.

  She said it was the most challenging story to write because of its length — a novella clocking in at just under 100 pages.

  “I kept pushing myself and breaking past what I’d done before,” she said. “Basically, the trick there was OK, I want to deconstruct this genre. So I get to play with all of the genre stuff, but it’s so freaking long. I have to also tell an emotionally gripping story that the reader cares about, you know. So with the short stuff, you can get by on style and jokes. But when you’re asking someone to hang out for that long, it also has to be absorbing on a more fundamental story level.“

  The novella “Big Time” is clearly influenced by classic noir films and fiction. The protagonist Ruby Russell delivers first-person hard-boiled dialogue, which is only fitting since she’s a starlet living in the 1940s whose early years were no picnic. Ruby makes this very clear in the novella’s opening lines: “Look, I’m not gonna sugarcoat it for you. Hollywood is like a big fat man with a snarl on his face and a knife in his hand.”

  “She ends up through a sort of supernatural happenstance, getting flung into the future and wakes up on the beach in Venice, in modern day L.A., in the middle of a bikini boot camp class, and has to kind of find her bearings and figure it out and claw her way to the top,” Spyra explained.

  Spyra says she was partly inspired by Victoria Wilson’s massive 1,000-page biography of Barbara Stanwyck, which only covers the first 33 years of the legendary movie star’s life.

  “It talks about her early life and her rise to the top in Hollywood. And it’s such a brutal, traumatizing story. And I thought it would be really, really fun to tell a story like that comedically.”

  Another influence was Stanwyck’s 1933 film, “Baby Face,” which was made the year before Hollywood implemented the Hays Code which served as a method of self-censorship.

  “It’s so shockingly obscene,” Spyra says of “Baby Face.”

  “Of course they don’t actually show things, but what they’re referencing is so dark and essentially it’s not a Hollywood rags to riches story. It’s just a woman’s rags to riches story. It’s an incredibly ambitious, ruthless young woman who will really do anything to get ahead. And what she ends up doing in that movie is sleeping her way to the top. It felt like a very rich fish out of water premise that I could play with.”

  One of the recurring motifs Spyra uses to great effect is to take something contemporary and set it in a different time period to create one of comedy’s greatest concepts: the clash of context. The best example is “The First Influencer.”

  “‘The First Influencer’ is a story about a friendship between two cavewomen. And I’m always interested in the idea of the first, the very first time someone said a cliché, the very first time someone said a sarcastic comment,” she said. “And just as I was thinking about that, it did occur to me what was the very first time someone was cool, you know, like the first cool person. And I just thought of, ‘Oh, it’s funny to think of cool people.’ Back when there were only eight people, you know, that’s where that came from. I lurk a lot on Instagram and so lurking and being obsessed with cool people gave me the idea for the story.”

• Writer Brian Broome Shares His Experiences With Blackness, Masculinity And Addiction

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  Reading Brian Broome’s memoir, “Punch Me Up to the Gods,” may make you feel like you’re reading his diary. It’s an incredibly intimate experience. At times, you may feel like you’re invading his privacy.

  But fortunately, Broome had the courage to share his life story. In the book, he revisits his childhood and his formative years growing up in rural Ohio. Along the way, Broome reveals heartbreaking stories about his status as an outsider trying to become part of the “in” crowd. We learn about his efforts to soothe his soul with random sexual encounters, alcohol and drugs. We also learn why he named his memoir, “Punch Me Up to the Gods.”

  “Basically, it’s a rewording of something that my father used to say, but I think sometimes a lot of Black parents say, like, ‘I brought you into this world and I’ll take you out,’” Broome told WPR’s “BETA.” “My father used to say that he would punch you so hard that you would go back up to God to be remade and reborn so that you were made correctly.”

  Broome said that he knew his father would use these words as a threat, but they were spoken to him so often that he didn’t really have any emotional reaction.

  But in his memoir, Broome does not shy away from sharing the most heartbreaking details about his life.

  “It could get really difficult at times, like sitting alone in a room and trying to really get at the emotion that you were feeling at that time. Whether it be embarrassment or shame or sadness, you want to tap into those emotions,” he recalled. “So I would have to get really deep into the memory and try to feel the same way that I felt then, so at times that was pretty difficult to do.”

  But Broome said writing “Punch Me Up to the Gods” was cathartic.

  “I don’t feel like I have any more secrets. Since the book has come out, I’ve had to explain a lot of things to people in my life who are still in my life about my past, things that I didn’t tell them. They’re reading them for the first time and they have questions.”

  He admitted that he struggled with whether or not he was obligated to provide answers for the people in his life. Broome hopes that the book takes care of that.

  “But for me, it’s been revelatory. I feel a little bit freer in the world,” Broome said.

  When he began writing the book, Broome really wanted to connect with young Black boys and men. He wanted to be a messenger, telling them that they do not have to be this thing that the world keeps telling them they are.

  “Whether that message comes from Black people or white people or anybody, you don’t have to be this paragon of masculinity,” he said. “You don’t have to be this tough guy. You can be anything you want. You know, This is your life and you are entitled to all the experiences of the human condition.“

  Since publication, Broome has been hearing from many different kinds of people who have said they feel as if the world was trying to put them into a box they don’t fit into.

  “I’m hearing from a lot of people who grew up with shame the same way that I did,” he said. “So I’m hoping that now the book can reach people who maybe they feel this way in their own life, or maybe they know somebody who might feel trapped in their own life.”

  Broome said that his parents were very stoic and that they didn’t really interact unless it was to deal with household concerns, like keeping the lights and gas on.

  “So it was kind of like a business. And, you know, I was watching TV at the time. And I saw these parents on TV who were super loving and kind and jokey with their kids. I didn’t have that kind of relationship with my parents,” he said.

  One of the major themes in “Punch Me Up to the Gods” is Broome’s incisive exploration of the intersection between his identity as a gay man and the concept of Black masculinity.

  “I think that I have grown up with a terror of being perceived as effeminate, because any sort of behavior that was considered feminine when I was growing up was just basically beat out of you or shamed out of you because there’s a stereotype — ubermasculine, cool, athletic, strong and stoic man,” he explained.

  As a result, Broome believes there are things in his life that he’s wanted to do but has avoided because he was worried about being perceived as feminine. He says that one of those things was writing.

  Broome said he avoided writing for a long time because it was characterized as unmasculine by his cousin.

  “I think I probably would have written something much sooner had I not had that implanted in my brain at a very young age,” he said.

  Near the end of “Punch Me Up to the Gods,” Broome includes the following quotation from James Baldwin’s 1963 non-fiction book, “The Fire Next Time“:

  “The details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what people say about you. Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear.”

  “I think that, unfortunately, one of the functions of this idea of white people and Black people is to ensure that white people always can feel better about themselves no matter what — ‘at least I am better than Black people,’” Broome said of the quote. “This is something that I grew up with … going to a predominantly white school. And I think that somebody once said — he was a white man who said — and I’m paraphrasing here, ‘This idea is to make even the lowest white man still feel better than the highest Black man.’”

  “I think a lot of things that we’re told about ourselves as Black people in this country are profoundly untrue,” Broome continued. “We grow up under the idea that we are this other form of human being, that we’re a different species, and a lower species at that. A lot of things in America systemically are constructed to keep us feeling that way and to make sure that white people still feel good about themselves and superior at all times.”

  Broome said he hopes the release of “Punch Me Up to the Gods” marks a turning point in his life going forward. “I do think that this book being in the world has broken something in me that needed to be broken. I just feel like now I’m living more than I have been ever before in my life.”

• 'Sasquatch' Explores 'Monsters Among Us'

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  Director Joshua Rofé remembers exactly how he became the director of the new Hulu docuseries, “Sasquatch.”

  In February 2018, a friend told him about a podcast that he thought Rofé should listen to. The podcast, “Sasquatch Chronicles“, features people sharing stories about their encounters with the legendary creature also known as Bigfoot.

  “To be honest with you, I wasn’t interested when he mentioned that. But he pushed. And so I listened to an episode,” Rofé told WPR’s “BETA.” “And then cut to four days later, and I’d listened to 11 episodes.”

  Rofé was really struck by the “authentic, visceral fear that was being expressed and experienced by these people who were calling in with their Sasquatch encounter stories.” Over the next week, he had a conversation with himself in which he decided his next project was “going to be Sasquatch-centric in some way.”

  But while Bigfoot documentaries are pretty standard TV fare, Rofé thought that if he could add another angle, he might be onto something special. So he reached out to his friend, gonzo investigative journalist David Holthouse.

  “He’s the guy to reach out to if you’re looking for a wild story,” Rofé explained. “So I sent him a text and the text literally said, ‘Hey, this is the craziest text I’m going to send you for the next five years. I want to find a murder mystery that is somehow wrapped up in a Sasquatch story. And if it exists, pursue it as the next project.’ And he wrote me right back and he said, ‘I love it. I got one. I’ll call you in five.’”

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  “And so when David got there, he thought he was going to be arriving at a pretty mellow, relaxing location to let things calm down for a week,” Rofé explained.

  “It was a terrifying energy that was in the air from the moment he arrived and on David’s second night there, he was in an A-frame cabin that was owned by this cannabis farm owner. And there was a phone call.”

  The conversation was a little tense. About 15 minutes later, a truck’s headlights shone into the cabin. Two men entered; they were wet and covered in mud. One of them was talking very fast. As Holthouse says in the documentary, “his eyes are like the eyes of a panicked horse, you know, they’re rolling around. I was sketched out enough by this guy’s presence that I was just kind of trying to become one with the couch.”

  The terrified men explained that further on up the mountain, three men had been murdered and all of the witness accounts matched up. These three men had been mangled and torn apart by a Sasquatch.

  One area that’s especially steeped in the Sasquatch myth is Northern California’s Emerald Triangle — the three counties of Humboldt, Trinity and Mendocino. It also happens to be the region where most of the United States’ cannabis is grown. What is it about this area that keeps the legend of Sasquatch alive?

  “I think it’s the woods out there,” Rofé said. “When you’re out in those woods, it feels prehistoric. And you get a few miles deep in those woods and you forget what life is like back in the city or the suburbs. And so I think if you’re out in the woods and you want to find something, that’s a place where you can really sort of lose yourself. Everything about that setting lends itself to the folklore.”

  Rofé explained that the criminal element is very pervasive in these deep, dense, dark forests.

  “It’s pretty lawless, there are not enough police officers, law enforcement agents to corral or control what’s going on out there,” he said. “It’s the Wild West, it really is. And there’s nobody to keep the peace. It’s the locals who lay down what the law is. And if somebody feels that you’ve crossed them in any way or done something that is not acceptable according to the way things work up there, you’re going to get killed and nobody’s even going to know where to look for you.“

  Rofé admitted that he, his crew and Holthouse were often concerned for their safety while they were filming in the Emerald Triangle. The only exception was when they were filming with people from the Sasquatch community or people who had previously lived in that area in an effort to leave the grid and get back to the land.

  “Filming with all those folks was totally safe,” Rofé said. “And they were all really wonderful, warm, welcoming people. But when we were exploring this sort of backwoods underworld, we were constantly aware of the fact that we were not safe and that we were already overstaying our welcome just by way of setting foot there.”

  By exploring that danger alongside the omnipresent specter of a legendary monster deep in the woods, Rofé and Holthouse have created a blend of true crime and ghost story.

  “If you dig at a ghost story for long enough, you might actually get to something that is even scarier and wilder than you anticipated,” Rofé said. “And I know that’s what our experience was making this. And so I hope that people can have of half of that experience watching it.”