Pull up a chair and tell me your memory.
Why does it matter to you?
I want to hear your story, your point of view.
Tell me what happened to you.
Hi and welcome back to Tell Me What Happened, the podcast that features folks from all walks of life,
telling us one true childhood story and how that experience, that event, has impacted who they are today as an adult.
I'm your host, Jay Rehak, and like all of you out there, I've had my share of childhood experiences.
Some of them were enjoyable, some of them were painful, some of them were actually traumatic.
But I'd like to think that everything that's ever happened to me has made me a better person.
Now, I know I've said this every time, but I know a lot of my friends would probably tell you that's not true,
but that's what I'd like to think.
All right, today I have as my guest, Alex Kingsley.
Alex is a writer, playwright, and game designer whose debut science fiction novel, Empress of Dust, comes out October 15th,
which if I time this right is today.
Welcome to the show, Alex Kingsley.
Hello, thank you so much for having me, Jay.
Hey, Alex, I got to add, I forgot to add that we actually just recently met through the Playwrights Playground,
which is an organization of like 144 playwrights around the country that write plays together, etc.
They don't write them together, but we write them at the same time and submit them, etc.
Anyway, we just got a chance to meet.
I'm really looking forward to reading some of your work, Empress of Dust, of course.
Also, the play that you've just recently written, what's the name of it, by the way?
The play is called America's Most Trusted.
Perfect.
All right, Alex, well, listen, I'm going to mute myself and get out of the way of your story.
Are you ready to tell it?
I sure am.
All right, well, at the end, I'm going to ask a question or two about how you think that event, that experience has impacted your life.
So my story takes place when I was in third grade.
And for context, I was a very weird kid.
A lot of people were very weird kids.
I think that's part of being a child.
But I, well, first of all, was very neurodivergent in a time when that was not a term that was really used.
So I didn't really understand my peers and felt that my peers didn't really understand me.
And I also had a pretty strange relationship with gender as a kid.
I didn't feel that I fit into either social group as a boy or a girl, and I called myself a mixed gender creature.
And this was all in third grade.
I was very young, but I still had the sense that I was alienated from my peers.
But then I joined this extracurricular group called Destination Imagination.
Now Destination Imagination is a global program that I believe is still running in which children have challenges.
They're presented with a set of challenges.
They pick one of these challenges and then present a solution to that challenge in the form of an eight minute skit.
And the students have the whole school year to come up with their solution to the challenge to refine it, to rehearse their presentation, all of that.
And then at the end of the school year, there's this big tournament where they all come together.
They all get to see each other's presentations and they get to perform their own.
And then points are awarded.
There's an award ceremony at the end.
Whoever wins gets to move on to the state level and whoever wins from the state level gets to move on to the global level.
And right away, I really took to this for a few reasons.
One, I was always thinking of weird solutions to problems.
Like I always felt that I wanted to find the solution that no one else would think of.
So I got really excited about the fact that we were presented with these challenges that actively wanted us to think outside the box.
But there were also a lot of rules or really guidelines that really stuck with me.
For instance, the main challenge was like the main thing that you did, but there was also something called an instant challenge where you go into a room and you get a sheet of paper with the challenge that you're seeing for the first time.
And then you have a certain amount of time to find a solution to that challenge.
So there's no real in preparation you can do. You don't know what it's going to be, but you're judged not only on your solution, but also on your collaboration.
So there are a few key rules that they would put into place for these.
One was if it doesn't say you can't, you can.
So if you can find some kind of loophole in the challenge or something that they didn't specify you can't do, that's probably what they want you to do and you should try it.
But also that you shouldn't say no to your teammates. And keep in mind these are third graders.
So these are very young kids who love to, you know, be mean to each other and have their ideas heard and they want to speak over each other.
So getting kids that age to not say no to each other and instead say things like, good idea.
However, what about this? What if we did this instead? I like this idea, but what if we added this?
That level of positivity is really hard to cultivate in a kid that age.
And this is not to say that my team in third grade did that really well, but to have that lesson put the kids at such a young age, I think really influenced me going forward.
I dreamed of getting to the global level.
Third grade was the first time that I did DI fourth grade was the second time. And our challenge was about creating a vehicle.
We were supposed to create a vehicle with a propulsion source and we got to choose our propulsion source.
And we thought it would be very creative if our propulsion source was gravity.
We thought no one is probably going to choose that. So what if our vehicle is just a marble.
And we have the marble go through a really long ramp and it uses the energy from that ramp to go through a series of obstacles.
And that is our solution to the challenge. And we created a whole narrative that went along with this marble and obstacle course about like an alien car wash.
I don't really remember, but we were super excited about the solution and we worked all year on it.
And then when we got to the tournament, we got disqualified because apparently gravity did not count as a propulsion source.
Now, if I worked on something all year as an adult, only to find out that it didn't mean anything in the end, I would be devastated.
So to have that happen in fourth grade was extremely devastating when you're in fourth grade, like your whole school year, that is it.
That is a major fraction of your whole life to be told in one day by adults.
Actually, that doesn't count.
But I still try to get next year. I still continued and went back because I loved it so much.
And I was like, you know what, last year didn't work. I'm in fifth grade now. Things are different. I'm basically an adult.
So we did it again. And this time our challenge was about animals and animal communication. It was called instinct messaging.
And I wanted to pick an animal that no one else would choose. So I was really excited about doing the cockroach.
No one else on my team was interested in the cockroach. We ended up compromising on the European honeybee.
And I was so committed. I did so much research on the European honeybee. I learned everything there was about the European honeybee.
And I was the only one in my group that really wanted to write the script.
So the script I ended up writing about the European honeybee was, I guess, the first play I ever wrote.
I mean, I would not want anyone to see it now because I was in fifth grade and still figuring out what is a joke?
What is good dialogue? What is pacing? All of that.
But from my perspective, I was just incredibly proud to have written a whole eight minutes of show.
And this time we put it on and we did manage to get to the global level, which was what to me at that age, that was like life dream.
I didn't have a concept of what my dreams would be as an adult. All I knew was that I wanted to get to the global level and DI.
And we did. And showing up to the global competition and seeing this place where everyone was dressing up in weird costumes every day and creativity was so embraced and being weird was so embraced.
It was really the first time that I felt, oh, it's not that there's something wrong with me.
It's just that I need to find people who will accept me and all of my weirdness.
One of the major events at the global competition was the duct tape ball where you make outfits out of duct tape.
And in fifth grade, I was really committed to doing it and doing it completely on my own.
And I made a whole outfit for myself out of duct tape and wore it to this event.
It was the first time I ever made my own article of clothing.
And again, I was in fifth grade. It wasn't good. But it showed me that I could make something that could be useful.
And I think that was really foundational.
And then in the end, we ended up getting fourth place in the world.
So that was a pretty wild experience for an 11-year-old to have.
And that is my story.
I love it. I love happy stories. I don't get too many of them on this show.
And it started off a little low because you got rejected.
I think gravity sounds like a force. I don't know. I don't get that.
Disqualification makes no sense to me, but it all is well that ends well, I suppose.
I mean, you know how it goes.
And so what's the name of that program? One more time.
I really want to kind of encourage people to look into it because it sounds great.
Yeah, it's called destination imagination.
Love it. Yeah, I do think I think creative people sometimes take abuse from being too creative.
Everybody's just supposed to, you know, wear the same clothes or similar clothes.
You step out of line and wear something a little unusual.
People are like, what's up with that, et cetera. So I do know that feeling a little bit.
So I don't want to talk about me. I want to talk about you. So how do you think?
Those experiences have impacted who you are today.
In a lot of ways, I think that participating in this program was super foundational to not only my personality, but my life philosophy.
I mean, I find myself collaborating in a lot of situations as a playwright, as a director, as a person in the world, as a friend, you know, there are all these instances of collaboration.
And I think that having the foundation of not saying no to people, of listening to people, of finding a compromise, all of these things are hard for adults to do.
And I will often see adults struggling with this. And I think to myself, they didn't do GI as a kid.
I still think of it when I hear an idea that I don't like and I hold myself back from being like, well, instead of saying no, it would be more productive if I said, you know, what about this?
And I think that has been really useful to me.
But also this emphasis on, you know, like you said, creativity and not being afraid to be different.
Because and it sounds like such a simple thing to not be afraid to be different.
But we, as a society, we really struggle with it. And I struggle with it as a person with anxiety.
I am very afraid to do something that will not be accepted or that people look at me weird, all of that.
But to have this lesson at a young age that not only is it OK, but it is exciting to deviate from the norm.
And especially as someone who deviated from the norm without meaning to, who didn't think like other kids, who didn't look like other kids, who didn't express themselves like other kids.
And I think that's really important not to only know that I could choose to be different, but that if I already was just because of the nature of who I am, that that was more than OK.
That was that was really, really important to me.
And then the last thing that I think it really did was it showed me that I was capable.
I believed that I could make something that was worth other people's time.
I could have written a script that people enjoyed seeing.
I mean, given that those people were the parents of everyone on my on my team.
But you know, I could have written a script that even the parents didn't enjoy and that would have been really bad.
But I got laughs.
And that was huge for me.
That was that was really big.
And I made something with my own two hands.
I made a duct tape outfit that I could wear.
That act of agency and being able to say, hey, I can create on my own or with other people.
I think is what made me feel confident enough to go ahead and write my own stories, to write my own plays, to produce my own plays, to make my own podcast.
All of these things.
I don't know that I would have had the confidence in myself to do those things if I hadn't learned very young that I am capable of putting work out there.
And I said that was the last thing, but I missed a thing.
And that this is the last thing.
Okay.
Getting disqualified in fourth grade was a huge rejection. And as a writer, I face a ton of rejection every day.
I received, you know, in the process of getting this novel out, I had like a year of rejection when I was trying to find someone, you know, I was trying to sell it to people.
I ended up with my publisher, but I think that the rejection would have been a lot more difficult if I had not had an experience with rejection at a young age and had the experience of picking myself up and starting again,
because that is exactly the energy that you need to have as a writer. And I'm really thankful that I had that opportunity to learn all those lessons and to embrace my own difference and creativity.
That's brilliant. You're way too young to be so smart.
You're way too young to be so, so wise, I guess, because that really is great wisdom. We are running out of time. I loved everything you said. I do want to ask you very quickly because I am running out of time.
What is Empress of Dust about only because I think the audience would be interested in reading something of yours and now we know we've got something we can read.
So tell us about that just for a minute or so.
Yeah, absolutely. Empress of Dust takes place in a future in which most species on Earth have evolved into giant crab creatures.
Earth is a sparing wasteland and there's only one human city left and this boy named Harvard gets lost in the desert and has to befriend the crab creatures to survive.
All right. Well, that sounds very interesting. I look forward to it coming out. It's going to be available on Amazon, etc., etc.
Yeah, absolutely.
Love it. Well, I really enjoyed talking with you, Alex, and hearing your story. You and I will be, I don't know if we'll be collaborating, but we'll be in communication in the next year.
We're part of this playwrights program. Shout out to all those playwrights that I'll be listening in and anybody who's creative. I want them to be as encouraged by what you've said as I was and am because as a person, I try to create every day of my life, but I still can't stand rejection.
I'm 68. I still can't stand rejection and listening to you. Maybe I wish I'd had a destination imagination.
Got in the fourth grade rejection might have helped me a little bit, but anyway, I'll leave that alone. I do appreciate you coming on the show.
Thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed being on the show.
All right, again, thank you, Alex Kingsley, major writer, creator, podcaster, all the different creative aspects. Great to have you on the show. I'd like to thank our sponsors, sidelining, publishing, publishers of quality books.
So until next time, this is Jay Rehack asking you all to please stay safe out there and try not to hurt anybody.
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