Shelley Gustavson

Experience Crafter. Emotions Navigator.

A tangled mess: of Greeks, guns, and revisions

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Mr. Lord of the Flies at an earlier timeThis past summer, my eldest finally cracked the bike riding nut.  He’s on the tall side, so gangly foal-like legs and a weaving, high-center of gravity have worked against him from day one.

But, when his legs keep a steady cadence, churning down the street in front of me, I’m beaming. I grin despite the fact he’s nearly abreast an alley that, like many in our neighborhood, bisects the block.

Yes, horrific scenarios flash across my brain: a sideswipe from a speeding neighbor… a teenager cutting through to get back in time from lunch—but  all I can do is ask him to slow down, look, and carry on.

He also walked into First Grade this week, alone; so carrying on and letting go have been large, stewing gorillas stalking my maternal brain.


For the past several months a screenplay dealing with school shootings, maternal grief, and warring concepts of boyhood has been on my laptop (and those of my kind, patient peers), robbing me of my sleep, my sanity, and my confidence as a writer.

Long before Sandy Hook I knew I was going to create this adaptation. However, the past few years and months with our nation’s horrific habits have made the need more pressing. There’s too much disgusting relevance in my work—where a steep data curve in my mental cultural graph starts at Heathers, ticks upwards at Falling Down, and escalates to a vertical climb since We Need To Talk About Kevin.  Now it’s waiting for the next one. Is it mine? So far lost teenage boys muted-out of emotional articulation, women stripped of their rights, and African American children in hoodies stripped of their lives have haunted me. I hate that our society has so much tragedy to mine.

Yes, I have other tales with fewer characters and more strongly demarcated roles—but this one? I revisit it, reshape it; as it won’t let me alone. There are stories you figure out, then write. There are stories you figure out as you write.

This is one of those.


In Euripides’ The Bacchae, Dionysus (Bacchus) travels to Thebes to seek vengeance on a family that ostracized his mother and refused to recognize his divinity. Dionysus drives the women of Thebes mad, gathering them into a collective of worshippers who take the hills in primordial abandon. He then sets his sights on the king, his cousin Pentheus. Generations spar over what is “proper,” women shun “traditional” roles as they abandon all to join the worshipping hordes, and a young man is led to the slaughter when in a hallucinatory rage his own mother tears him to shreds.

Calm descends, and all are shunned for their horrific crimes.

Yes, I know; warm and fuzzy stuff.

While the details of his life are unclear, The Bacchae was Euripides’ last piece in a body of work that represented a shift in Athenian performance: from a pure entertaining distraction, to one of actively pushing the audience to examine their contemporary lives through the lens of a mythical past.

One theory is that he wrote this in exile during his last days—mourning his home, and a way of life tragically cut short during the Peloponnesian War.

Or, it may have been a final act of spiteful bridge-burning.

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Image of Greek mask: Alexey Biryukov & Shutterstock.com

The Bacchae is not a story of fickle gods and tragic human loss. Nor is it the infallibility of the divine and human error. It is about the dangers of extremities of position. Hatred. Cold, unfeeling isolation. Unwavering judgement. Orgiastic chaos.

This text always resonated for its open-ended ambiguity; for a divine, devilish pro/antagonist who sought to destroy the destroyers.  It prompted thoughts about cycles of violence, and the hamstrung post-mortem conversations we avoid after tragedies such as mass shootings. Where violence and loss result in self-reflection, but the access point is too horrific itself to digest—like a discarded band aid found on a sidewalk. (A pause, that ripple of revulsion, the hollow cylindrical ghost of a child’s finger… empathy yes, but mostly a desire to Lysol the shit out of your surroundings.)


So, out of these thoughts, I created Don—a “man” who has lived so long he can recount the movements of the stars and the evolution of the beasts, but desires nothing more than human connection.

… And Abbie, a woman who long ago cut herself off from others in her small Iowa town, and must rise to the occasion when she is the only one left with her senses.

And now I am in the heart of revisions.

I often draw from the toolbox of my other careers when writing—subtle observations of human interactions gone bad, backstory. But for all the staccato moments and images I had created, they’re jumbled gems of bricks in a narrative—or a flat string of pearls tossed on a dresser.

Touching, visually stunning, but just “there,” lacking narrative movement.

The first act has changed more than my youngest’s diapers. So, as I struggle to sand, sand, and smooth-away confusion—those structural choices that trip-up the eye and trouble the brain—I know I am circling back to a story about a man who wanted more, and a woman who never admitted that she did as well.

A world where generations of backstory hang on the inhabitants of a community like a patina; where the emotional drives of my characters tumble toward an inevitable conclusion.  Where the women of Winter’s Bone are tossed into Pan’s Labyrinth.


It is my populace/navel gazing writing exercise. It is my indie artsy-smartsy bullshit. It is my diary, my ancestors’ tale, my fearful maternal urge to shape a young man before he’s shoved out into the real world.

(Yes, I do have a strong position concerning firearms, their place, and the management of their ownership—but this screenplay was never about logic and legalese. In response to that, I recommend you read Sarah Clements’ touching letter here.)

Pete swing and pond

Emotions are powerful. They give birth to love and destruction—the tools we humans employ with relish when crafting or excusing-away tragedy. So, as I watch my son wobbling into boyhood I can only hope that one day, if he must smack up against life, he knows enough of himself to decide when to hit back, when to walk away, and when to respect the swirling mass of feelings thrown at him by this maddening world.

We must simply know how to identify, funnel, and coach these emotions through life as safely as we can.

We can only teach, watch, and let go.

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