The Tale of Brian and the House Painter Mervyn

Here is a fable about what happens

-when young Brian with a mysterious illness is confined to a white White WHITE room four flights up in his family's Goodly Home to avoid all excitement until a cure is found...

-when Brian cries in grief for everything he has lost- the Sun and Moon, the White Sea-Dragon who curls from the Sea-fogs on the cliffs at night, the Sea, Great White-peaked Mountain, and the ancient but modern and madly eccentric town of Sandstone-by-the-Sea...

-when his father Moab hires the always angry Mervyn, a mere House Painter, to paint Brian's walls with views of everything he misses- for no artist will paint things just as they are- and who paints it all so well it is a New World to explore and run free in and abandon the Old, as does Brian...

-when the Village goes mad, and Moab goes mad, for Brian is lost, and the Tourists are mad to find Mervyn and to get something Realer than Real, and all other businesses collapse...

-when Mervyn finds a solution no one expects..

My poems, stories and articles have appeared widely in both American and English journals. Books of poetry include Wrestling With The Angel (1990), Becoming Human (2001), Human/Nature (2006), Seasons of Defiance (2010), which placed as a finalist in the 8th. National USA Book Awards, Transformations combining art and poetry (2013), and Homecomings (2015). Elemental Natures, selected lyrics, sequences, and prose, appeared in 2020. I am a recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and various other scholarships. Among plays, Rasputin and Gambits were produced at the Eugene O'Neill National Playwrights Conference. Time's Up and Fox, Hound, and Huntress were premiered in Los Angeles; publications include Time's Up; Fox, Hound & Huntress; and Time's Up and Other Plays. I founded graduate playwrighting and the graduate screenwriting programs at USC and California State University, Northridge, respectively. I have published a screenwriting textbook, The Understructure of Writing for Film & Television, and A Poetics for Screenwriters, as well as The Death and Life of Drama, reflections on writing and human nature. My works also include a novel, Second Chances (2001). A children's novel, Orpheus Rising (2021), and a shorter children's book, The Tale of Brian and the House Painter Mervyn (spring, 2022). My family is split between Los Angeles, where I helped establish the California State Park System in the Santa Monica Mountains, and London, where a married daughter lives in Crouch End, the family seat for generations on my wife's side.

Meilo So was born in Hong Kong and now lives in the Shetland Islands with her husband, the fellow noted artist Ron Sandford, and her daughter, two cats, a cockerel, and two hens...