BONUS - Topher Payne Full Interview

Transcript:

Hi, everyone, it's Jeremy. I recently interviewed Topher Payne for part of our episode "Bodies Part two" Because of time and content relevance, I could only include a short portion of it in the episode, but the conversation we had was so enjoyable and when so many places that I decided to release the full interview as a bonus episode, Topher is an Atlanta based playwright, screenwriter, actor, director, and educator, and he currently has a play entitled "Gifted", a socially distant comedy that has been produced by Queens Theater and is available to watch in three installments being released this month at queenstheater.org. So now here's my full conversation with Topher Payne. Enjoy.

Jeremy: Hello.

Topher Payne: Well, good morning.

Jeremy: Good morning, nice to meet you. You sound great.

T.P.: Oh, wonderful. Good. That was my first concern. Sorry, I've got a kitten crawling all over. This is Suzy, by the way.

Jeremy: Suzy. Nice to meet you, Suzy. She looks like a young one.

T.P.: Yeah, she's just seven weeks and I have two options, which is either close the office door and listen to her pawing at the office door, or occasionally just you'll see her run across my shoulders in the course of our conversation.

Jeremy: It does not bother me at all.

T.P.: It is so great to meet you. Thank you so much for asking me to do this.

Jeremy: Thank you so much for being here. And also, thank you for this morning interview. I have been doing all these interviews for my podcast, mostly in the evening when my kids go to bed, and I'm like fried by that time of day. And I love being up and working in the morning, but I just don't get to do it anymore because I have young kids and that's the time of day when everything is starting.

T.P.: How old are your kids?

Jeremy: They are three and five. Well, almost four and almost six, actually.

T.P.: Ooohhh. How is your quarantine going?

Jeremy: Oh, it's a lot of different things. We've been doing OK. We've been doing virtual school and my five-year-old is in first grade. He's the kind of kid who doesn't really thrive in a classroom, sitting at a desk and doing worksheets. So to be at home, it's given us some flexibility, it's given us a chance to have asides when his teacher says something that's maybe suspect on the Google meet and so it's actually been really good in that in that respect. And the three-year-old is right there with him. He wants to learn all his letter sounds and numbers and stuff like that, so it's been pretty good.

T.P.: Oh, well, that's a relief to hear.

Jeremy: Yeah. My wife works from home. She's a public school teacher and she's teaching virtually, so the balance of when does she work? Where does she work? Where do I work? How do we trade all this stuff off?..has been a little tricky.

T.P.: Oh, exciting and suspenseful.

Jeremy: Yeah, absolutely. Every every day is like, "Are they going to bust into the room while she's on a Google meet with students and with no clothes on and like running naked in the back of the meeting?" You know what I mean?

T.P.: It's like, well, at this point, I think all of us with as much screen time as we're doing, just the the hope that you don't have anything happens that turns you into a meme, right? Then it's like, "OK, then I'm living my best life." If I'm not a meme in 2020 then I'm doing well.

Jeremy: Yeah. You are in Atlanta. You didn't grow up there, though. You grew up in Mississippi?

T.P.: Yeah, I grew up in a town called Kosciusko, Mississippi, about 4000 people and moved to Atlanta when I was 19.

Jeremy: Oh, wow. Why did you choose Atlanta? Was it because it was close or what attracted you?

T.P.: Yeah. I mean, growing up in Mississippi, the Atlanta—. As a creative, as a writer, as somebody working in theater, I showed up on the doorstep of the only professional theater in Mississippi when I was 17 and just kind of refused to leave. And so I started working in the scene shop for them and then learned stage management and costumes and scenic painting. And so after two years of doing that, I had a decent enough resume and a decent enough skill set to feel like, "All right, I'm going to the big time." And Atlanta, at that time, was really seen as a transition city for people building either a film resumé or a theater resumé because there wasn't an expansive industry for either. And I moved here at just the right time. It was right before the Georgia film industry started and so there was work here. And so my transition city just became, "No, no, I'm staying right here."

Jeremy: Yeah. And had you initially planned or thought to transition to somewhere else, New York, or DC, or L.A. or something like that?

T.P.: I think that was the assumption, that I would probably end up in New York. And then I had enough friends that went up there that I started visiting New York. And if for no other reason than knowing what I paid in rent versus what they paid in rent and I had the ability, in Atlanta, it was feasible to be able to create a space for myself where I didn't have to wait tables in order to make sure that my bills were paid. And my experience with my friends in New York and L.A. is even though they moved there for the creative side of their careers, so much of their time was spent just sustaining an existence. And Atlanta, again, at the time, afforded me the possibility of just being able to concentrate on my creative career full time.

Jeremy: Did you have some jobs when you first arrived or how was that?

T.P.: Oh, hell yeah! Oh, my gosh.

Jeremy: What did you do?

T.P.: I—so when I first moved to town, I was part of an educational tour that was the community outreach of Kaiser Permanente, called "Professor Bodywise and the Travelling Menagerie" .

Jeremy: Do not tell me you were Professor Bodywise.

T.P.: I was a menagerie of puppets that taught kids the importance of buckling your seatbelt and brushing your teeth.

Jeremy: Wait, was this a walking tour?

T.P.: No, we went into schools. And so we would be in a van every morning at five a.m., traveling all around the great state of Georgia to bring the traveling menagerie to their cafetorium. And I did that for a year. Then I ran a summer camp and I ran a daycare center at an upscale gym and then worked at a bookstore for a few years, worked in graphic design and finally went full-time in 2016. 2016 was the first year that I was able to tell the IRS, "I am a writer."

Jeremy: Did that feel good?

T.P.: That was a good year. Oh yeah! Everything that I picked up within my profession, I didn't pull from a classroom. I just learned from the mentorship of others. And to reach a point where I was able to, in a lot of ways, move into the position of serving as a mentor to the next generation of writers, that was really—. When I went full time as a writer, the most significant thing that struck me with that was the responsibility of it, of "Oh, you're one of those full time writers you used to look up to."

Jeremy: Right. Did you have mentors like that when you were growing up, when you were a kid? How did you discover that writing was something that you wanted to do? I guess that's a two-part question. I guess I should have led with the first one.

T.P.: I didn't have writers, but I spent every summer in the library. And to the extent that I was one of those weird kids that had adult friends, at least in my mind.

Jeremy: Who were like 22?

T.P.: No, who were like 70. So the librarians at the Attala County Library, the retired women in our neighborhood. I grew up in the kind of town where a kid could just jump on a bicycle and the requirement was to be back when the streetlights come on.

Jeremy: That's amazing. I grew up kind of like that, too. It was a wonderful way to live as a kid.

T.P.: Where did you grow up?

Jeremy: Upstate New York, like in the Adirondacks, so like pretty rural.

T.P.: My husband is from Hyde Park.

Jeremy: Oh, no kidding? OK, yeah. My family is a little further north than that, but it's pretty rural

T.P.: And we share that background of the expectation of a certain degree of autonomy that I guess, now, just feels very 1980s. But through my church, I grew up. Our family was very active in the Methodist church and the town was already so small, so there was a degree of familiarity and exchange with kind of everybody you ran across. My father worked at the post office, so he was pretty famous.

Jeremy: I mean, that's a connection to literally the entire community. Absolutely.

T.P.: Exactly. And there was a love of reading that was instilled and so consistently reinforced. And that exploration and appreciation for storytelling, combined with growing up in the Methodist Church where our entire way of being was communicated via parable, it was the foundation of our faith. And storytelling was simply how I understood the world to work. It's how you convey what is important to you. You do not lecture. You tell a compelling story. And I started telling my own just acting out with my stuffed animals when I was probably five or six and have just been on a very lengthy trajectory of trying to get good at it.

Jeremy: Yeah. I'm curious. You mentioned, as a kid, you had friends who were adults and older folks. Do you feel like being around them and hearing them talk informed you learning how those voices work and then translating that into the way that you write?

T.P.: Absolutely, absolutely. My mother loves to tell the story of when I was like 11 or 12. She's the youngest of four sisters. They would gather around the dining room table in cold months and the patio table in warm months. And I would unapologetically eavesdrop on those exchanges. And I wrote a story that included a pretty baffling spelling of the word hysterectomy without the slightest understanding of what it was because kids are a sponge, they will soak up whatever surrounds them. And so I was using language in my storytelling that I didn't even have a frame of reference for at that point. It was just what I was hearing and what I was processing. And I just knew hysterectomy was a thing that women in their 40s talked about and so I put it in a story

Jeremy: And it just rolls off the tongue.

T.P.: And it does when you have no context. It sounds very pretty. But that informed so much of the work that I was doing with young people later, the understanding of when you think they're not listening, especially when you think they're not listening is when they're really soaking up every single thing you say. Which can be a very powerful means of communicating and empowering a young person, but there is absolutely the weight of responsibility on that.

Jeremy: Yeah. And let me use that to transition to talking a little bit about "Topher Fixed It."

T.P.: Nice segue, Jeremy. That was lovely.

Jeremy: Thank you. Because one of those books, The Giving Tree of course, I grew up with. I think we all grew up with that book. And then—are the other two books that you knew from your childhood? The Rainbow Fish and Love You Forever?

T.P.: Love You Forever was one I knew from my childhood because my mother, in particular, hates that book. The Rainbow Fish was not introduced to me until I was teaching and I was assigned to doing a stage adaptation with four and five year olds. And so I read the book and it was going along so nicely, and then it took a turn and I had sincere concerns about the messaging. And I wish I'd spoken up more then, but when I started working on "Topher Fixed It," my laser sights set on Rainbow Fish pretty quick.

Jeremy: Yeah. I became aware of that book last spring when my five-year-old started school and his teacher sent it as like a read-aloud for the kids. And so we were going along, she was reading it aloud to them over Zoom or whatever, and we were going along and going along. At that exact moment that you described, I was like, "Whoa, what? What is this? What is this thing that that we're telling kids right now?" And so after the thing, we had a talk about it. I had to talk with my five-year-old about it. And then to see your parody of it, it just really struck. It just really resonated and I read your version to him as well over the summer after discovering it. And I think it's a remarkable thing to do. I'm curious, was it a thing partly that you did for yourself as sort of a reflection or healing exercise?

T.P.: Certainly with the giving tree, because I got that book from one of my cousins when I was a kid and I distinctly remember the conversation that followed between my—I want to say both parents were there. Both of my parents read to me, but rarely together. But I remember Mama and Daddy both talking about how the tree got shafted and so my memory of the book is kind of intrinsically tied with the life lesson that my parents offered up immediately after reading. Which, if every adult that is reading that book to a child uses it as a springboard to a conversation, then I think that's a fantastic thing. But that's not how The Giving Tree is usually received, in my experience. It's used as this lesson on the beauty of self-sacrifice and they'll say it's a metaphor for parenting or a Christ metaphor. There are churches that use it as an example of how to be a submissive wife and I find that infuriating. And I think there is such beauty in Silverstein's work. I don't think every book aimed at young audiences has to be relentlessly happy but I do think it's important that, if you're reading something to a child where the behavior that's being modeled is not addressed in the text, then the onus is on the adult reading the book to the child to address the behavior. And if you don't, what message are you sending? So when we started doing this story time in Atlanta and from all of the various kids in my life, I've got a pretty decent selection of children's books I've picked up over the years and I started going through my shelf to see what I could do for story time. I went "The Giving Tree. Ugh, well, not that one." And then that sparked the idea.

Jeremy: Ok. Do you have others that are sort of on the docket or that you plan to do?

T.P.: Yeah, I am working on The Pout-Pout Fish right now

Jeremy: Okay, that's one I don't know.

T.P.: It's about this fish that's just going about his business, not bothering anybody, and he's kind of got a resting grouchy face. And everywhere he goes, people tell him to smile more and they explain, "It's the reason you don't have friends. It's the reason nobody likes you. It's because you don't smile enough." And eventually, he learns the valuable lesson of when he smiles, everyone likes him better. And I'm like, "No, no. OK, we're addressing that one." With all of the alternate endings, it's usually just changing the last three pages. This one, I only get like three pages in before I have to generate new content.

Jeremy: Well, I'm excited for that. I want to go back to your parents for a second because it strikes me as a little bit unique to have people of their and my parents' generation talking in that way about boundaries and self care and self-centeredness as a positive attribute or a positive thing to aspire to. Self-centeredness as contrasted with selfishness. So it sounds to me like like they were really a little bit ahead of many parents of their generation. Was that across the board for them?

T.P.: You know, my mother is one of those southern Baby Boomer women who would never describe herself as a feminist and yet ascribes to every single feminist principle. She's a feminist in the Dolly Parton mold.

Jeremy: Which is a great mold to be.

T.P.: Yeah. And my father, the thing my father always reinforced with my sister and I, is how clever our mother is. "Yes, mama is beautiful. Yes, Mama is loving. Mama is clever. Mama is sharp." And my sister talks a lot about that now—she's the mother of two boys—and how grateful she is that she was raised by a father who kept reinforcing that the best thing a woman could be is sharp. And so as the mother of boys, she's able to convey that onto them in what they look for in friends or possibly romantic partners later in life. The older you get, Jeremy, the more you realize just how firmly ingrained things are so much earlier than you gave it credit for.

Jeremy: Yes. I think about that all the time. When I'm talking to my kids and I'm wondering, it's made me self-reflect so much raising young kids. Self-reflect about the things that I'm saying; and not just the things that I'm saying to them, but the way that they see me talking to my wife, the way that they see me talking and interacting with everyone. And it's really been a journey of unlearning, and, like I said, just self-reflection because it reminds me of what I was like when I was three, four, or five. The few very concrete memories I have from that time are so strong and I can trace them all the way up through habits and things that I still hold. And so I think your point is very well taken on that.

T.P.: Daniel, my husband, and I—the space we occupy is as special guest stars in the lives of many children, and particularly with our goddaughter Raymi and with my nephews, who are now teenagers and have no interest in me or need for me at all. But the responsibility that we carry as part of the community-supporting parents is, "What are we reinforcing? What alternative points of view are we offering?" It's important, I believe, to engage children with the idea that your parents have very, very smart ideas and they have the way things work in your house. And that does not mean that that is how the entire world works. My sister went through this in sending her boys to Catholic school because they'd grown up their entire lives with a gay uncle and they were about to be told something in school that did not match what they are told in their home. And how do you reinforce a child's respect for an authority figure while saying that this authority figure is going to tell you something we disagree with? And that's a really complex concept for us to wrap our brains around as adults. Clearly. I mean, look at the world right now. People aren't too great with offering respect to divergent points of view.

Jeremy: To put it gently.

T.P.: And so how do you impose that on a child? My sister and I had a really, really great conversation about it. And her husband is a wonderful father to those boys, but was raised devout Catholic and had his own journey on the full community that would be surrounding his sons. And I told her that there are people whose religious beliefs do not allow you to eat red meat on Fridays. Their beliefs may not allow drinking of alcohol at all. There are absolute specifics that are part of your spiritual life that do not interfere with the right of other people to make a different decision. And so, eventually, when conversations in Catholic school would come up on what marriage is, what they would be receiving is what this spiritual belief believes about their concept of marriage, which has nothing to do with people's rights. And because that concept was introduced to them so early, I feel like not only those boys, but that generation, has a far more nuanced understanding of how the world operates than I did at their age. And they're growing up in a small southern town, just like I did, but they see the world so much more expansively.

Jeremy: Yeah, this has been something that's been coming up in interviews, is talking about this generation of folks who are teenagers now or coming into the teenage years now. And I'm seeing it, too. I have teenage cousins who are 15, 16, 17, and the amount of implicit openness and acceptance of things that took our generation and our parents' generation a lot of work to, number one, wrap our heads around and number two, to normalize and celebrate. Like these kids in this upcoming generation, it's just there. It's just a part—

T.P.: Yeah, they just get it.

Jeremy: And it's so encouraging to me to see. My cousin, who's 17, just worked really hard all of last year to start a GSA chapter at her Catholic high school. And she met with resistance from her administration and from her teachers but she and her friends were just like, "No, this is something that we're not going to take no for an answer for. And so to see these kids standing up for things, knowing, seeing other people in a way that—I don't want to say that it was hard for me—but that took me some learning from growing up in a conservative Christian community and then moving to New York and realizing, "Oh, oh, shit, I've been being told certain things that are just not real." But to see them having these implicit attitudes is really, really encouraging.

T.P.: And it's so interesting. My coming out process was very difficult for my family. It's sometimes hard to believe that, at the age that I am now and the strength of the relationship that we have now, that there was this very fraught period of time. This is when I move into the category of "And yet, I am not a parent." And because I am not a parent, I do not know the lived experience of everything that you project onto your child in your hopes and expectations for the life they're going to live. But I have solid lived experience being someone's child and being on the receiving end of those expectations. I don't know—and I hope you talk to people who are far more informed than me on the subject—I don't know how you prepare the parents of young children because the early years are when these things are ingrained. They're when the expectations are ingrained of what gender roles are, of what beliefs are considered valid. If you think those are conversations that you're having with them with they're 12, no. You did the work on that eight years ago and the foundations are already laid and what it is, it is.

Jeremy: Well, this is the literal, actual, entire concept for this podcast is to take the idea of these teenage years, like talks that have to happen about sex, about death, about drugs, about gender, about skin color, all these things, and flip that on its head and say, "How can we eliminate the need for those during the teenage years by creating healthy, open, candid conversation just from the time our kids can understand us?" That's literally the entire conceit for this entire podcast, so I'm happy that you just gave me some validation there. I'm only a few episodes in and so far I've been able to talk to some wonderful, wonderful folks and I'm learning a lot. And I'm talking to a lot of parents and I'm talking to a lot of people like yourself who, maybe aren't parents, but have a certain perspective. Each episode has an All Caps topic and we have one on gender, we have one on money. We doing twelve episodes that I'm hoping will light that fire under people to just get them thinking about just what you said; the work that you're doing when your kids are one, two, five, six, that's where these real foundations are laid.

T.P.: Yeah, yeah. I had very, very attentive and wonderful parents and I tell my mother all the time, "You got so much right." And I was raised in a community of faith that was supportive and loving and in safe neighborhoods where I could ride my bicycle. They got so many things right, both within their control and without. They did not prepare for the concept of me being queer.

Jeremy: They did not prepare themselves, you're saying?

T.P.: Yeah. Nor did they prepare me. Because what I was becoming was an anathema to their spiritual teachings and therefore they did not prepare me. And their response, when it entered into the conversation was fear and confusion and disappointment. And the point of frustration that I look back on that now with is, and of course, hindsight being what it is, no one modeled for me what a loving and positive relationship was going to look like in my life. There are a lot of things that I learned from observing my parents' marriage that has absolutely held true in my own. But when we talk about that concept of bodily autonomy, no one taught me what consent was. So when scenarios arrived, both with people taking advantage of my lack of knowledge or people genuinely having a positive mutual expression of attraction, I didn't know the language for it. I didn't know the rules for it and I was pretty adrift out there. No one told me what consent looks like between two men. And when everything was so shame-based. And this core expression of who I am, who you love, is such a fundamental part of who you are, and I was flying blind. The only thing I knew for certain was that it was wrong. And so I didn't have control or power over my own body because no one had ever given me permission to find joy in that expression.

Jeremy: Yeah, there were no examples of it and the things you heard about it were expressly—

T.P.: Uniformly negative, yeah.

Jeremy: So where did you eventually find yourself growing into healthy relationships with those thoughts and with those concepts?

T.P.: Well, like many of us, the first step is to get it wrong repeatedly. When I came to Atlanta, finally in my early 20s, I started developing friendships with other gay men that were just purely friendships and particularly, once again, following my own pattern, they were all about 20 years older than me. Sure. My desire to seek out mentorship has just always been a driving force in my life and so seeing that behavior modeled, particularly because the generation of men who were offering me the benefit of their lived experience were men who had survived a plague. And that became a very tight-knit community. And so what I saw was a group that led with positivity, with celebration of self, and also, a lot of people that did not have any relationship whatsoever with their family of origin. That had been cut off years and years before. And the most valuable lesson that I learned from that community is: It is their problem, not yours. You do not have to receive their hurt while they are working through it. And you could establish a boundary of no contact until they come out on the other side of it.

Jeremy: Did you do that with your family for a period?

T.P.: I did, I did. To this day, one of the hardest things I've ever done is, "I am not going to listen to your disappointment about this anymore."

Jeremy: Yeah. So that lasted for a good period of time with your family?

T.P.: The better part of a year. And I was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma during that period, which is what compelled my parents toward realizing that there are things that are more important, that what we were discussing before was not a matter of life and death but this is, so then they wanted to come to Atlanta and be present for me and be a support system for me. And I told them, no. I said, "You don't get to make up with me because you feel guilty because I'm sick." So my sister came and my sister was present for me during that period. And I also said, "I'm dealing a lot right now in my own healing process and I can't take that on, too." But a crisis doesn't suddenly make everything better.

Jeremy: Absolutely. Do they understand? Do your parents understand that now? The decision that you made to ask them to stay?

T.P.: Took them about 15 years, but yeah. Even long after our relationship was repaired, they still felt betrayed by that decision that I could not make space for them.

Jeremy: It was too little too late, folks, at that moment, yeah.

T.P.: Yeah! I already had a community of support that had been present for me every day. So they were willing to step up and they could drive me to treatment and they could change my sheets and everything that I needed while I was going through chemo and radiation. And as much as I understood my mama's desire to mama and I wanted her there so much, but if I had allowed them in in that moment, it would have been taking a break from our disagreement to face this, rather than me focusing on the life that I'm fighting for right now. It's this life and you have not proven to me that you value this life.

Jeremy: You've just answered this question, but I was going to ask, in that time, if there was a part of you that really did want them to come and you just answered that question. But I'm curious if you have a sense for where you got or found the inner kind of strength to create that boundary that you knew you needed, even though there was a desire for them to come and be there with you.

T.P.: I think, at the end of the day, whoever the most powerful influences were on your upbringing, your parents, grandparents, an aunt or an uncle, whatever it is, even if that relationship, upon reflection, was really toxic, you still have that innate desire for the people who influenced your upbringing, you still have that impulse. And the wonderful thing that I learned from men and women who had not had contact with their families for 20 or 30 years, which I absolutely did not want, was that they were thriving in a community of choice, they were thriving. And I knew every single one of them still had that piece of them that would crave Daddy's approval, or Mama's affection, or whatever it was they were denied that they had a memory of before they failed to live up to an expectation. And so I didn't have that example of anything other than a cis gender, heterosexual, Protestant household. I had no examples of that in my own childhood. But at the crucial moment when I needed to see what that life looked like, I was able to seek out the mentorship of others. But I know now my mother did, and always has, had gay friends. Always. Her entire life since high school. I didn't know my mother had gay friends. I didn't know there were gay people in Mississippi.

Jeremy: I didn't either until this moment, actually.

T.P.: I wish so fervently, and it is not a critique of their choices in the slightest, but I wish we had lived in a time, in the 80s and early 90s when I was coming up, that the concept of presenting a life that is different from your own, but equally authentic and worthy of celebration— I wish we had lived in a time when that was available to kids my age. But when I was growing up, Rosie O'Donnell was heterosexual and Ellen was heterosexual. There were no gay people playing gay people. And it just was a smaller and more cloistered world. And the opportunity to those, both who are parenting children, and those who exist in the community that surrounds and embraces those parenting children. Being part of that community is one of the greatest honors of my life. I have the chance to provide a positive example for what a happy life looks like and it may not look like your mom and dad, or mom and mom, or dad and dad, or mom or dad is offering in your own household. And that's the point. Look at this beautiful patchwork quilt of happy homes and authentic lives.

Jeremy: Have you written, specifically and expressly for children, plays, or anything for kids as original work?

T.P.: I did one called "Steam Team", which toured schools here in Georgia. It was a kind of Encyclopedia Brown-esque kids adventure, solving crimes and mysteries and primarily focusing on an anti-bullying message, but then in a larger spectrum, teaching kids about the core concepts of STEM or STEAM because, dang-it, you got to include the arts. And so I've written that, but other than that, no, I haven't written expressly for kids. It almost feels like I'm not qualified, which gets me really scared of it.

Jeremy: Yeah. That's an interesting point. And I think that what I'm learning with my kids and what I'm trying to embrace is that they can understand things that sometimes I wouldn't initially give them credit for understanding, you know what I mean? And I wonder and I kind of hope, personally, that doing these these "Topher Fixed It" has given you a little bit of thought about doing that in a way. Writing more for kids because, yes, you have to engage them, you have to keep them there. But I think the things you have to say are things that are important for kids to hear and know and understand, and especially kids who, like you, maybe didn't grow up in environments where those certain things or experiences were visible or nurtured in a way that that maybe you wish they had been,

T.P.: You know, with Love You Forever—. After doing the first two Fixed-It's and then I take on Love You Forever, and I showed my husband the first pass and he said, "This one doesn't really feel like it's directed at kids."

Jeremy: This is exactly how I felt about all of these, too.

T.P.: And I said, "Well, with Love You Forever, the problem is the book was never appropriate for children in the first place." But with Giving Tree and Rainbow Fish, they were designed for storytime. They were designed for this Zoom audience of children and directly speaking to kids but it's directly speaking to kids the way I speak to kids. Which is basically just the way I speak to adults with a little more explaining and a little bit of cleaned-up language.

Jeremy: Well, I love that because it shows that you do understand that kids are worth having substantive conversations with.

T.P.: Yeah. If I can teach a young person in the "Fixed It" ending of Rainbow Fish that you should never diminish yourself for the comfort of others. That was my entire lived experience of being a queer kid. "Tone it down." To "make other people comfortable." Screw that. No! There are times when you need to turn your volume down depending upon the location that you're in, but that's just being polite and understanding the environment you're in. But the fire and energy of who you are, don't you dare turn that down. People will adjust, people will make space for you when you make clear how much space you need.

Jeremy: Well, with that, I want to say thank you. This has been a wonderful conversation. I'm so happy to be able to talk to you. And a number two, just that you're on my radar now, I'm going to keep tabs on what you're doing. I do want to know, though, during covid, what are you doing with yourself? No, but because writing for theater, you're always working on getting things produced and you have projects in various stages of production. And what have you been doing?

T.P.: I have been planting things in the yard a lot. Trying to find mostly self-sustaining plants that, after the first year, can basically take over for themselves, like Crepe Myrtles and Evergreen Green Arborvitaes and things that you provide care in the beginning and then sort of take on an attitude of benign neglect,

Jeremy: Like a child.

T.P.: Because my goal with the gardening that I've been doing is I want to plant things that require the care that I can provide while I have time. And hopefully 18 months from now when everything has taken root, I will be back to something that feels a little more familiar and we will reap the benefits of the care and attention that I gave during the time that I had it. So I've been playing outside a lot, which keeps me sane. It makes me feel like I'm going places. And then I have a script that is in preproduction with the Hallmark Channel. It's my fifth movie for them and we're just waiting to find out what the circumstances look like. And I wrote a project for Queens Theater in New York which is coming up in the last week of November. It's a three-episode holiday series about a couple spending their first Christmas together in quarantine, trying to honor each other's family traditions, which requires a lot of Zoom and FaceTime calls within each other's families. And then the families start talking to each other, and then everything just gets as beautifully intertwined and messy as family and Christmas tends to do. I'm very excited about that. So it's called Gifted with Queens Theater and that drops the last week of November.

Jeremy: Awesome. And that's being produced fully online?

T.P.: Fully online, yeah.

Jeremy: I watched a couple of monologues of yours on YouTube, but I'm not really familiar with your work, but I feel like I would like your work just from you describing that. So I hope I get to see and read some of your plays soon.

T.P.: Thank you. I really look forward to everyone being able to see plays soon.

Jeremy: Yeah, likewise. Thank you so much. This has been a wonderful conversation for me.

T.P.: Thank you. It's a pleasure meeting you.

Jeremy: Likewise.

I hope you've enjoyed this conversation with Topher Payne. You can find out more about Topher and his work at Topherpayne.com and on Instagram at @TopherWrites. Thanks for listening to "The Talk". You can find us on Instagram and Facebook at TheTalkThePodcast. And if you'd like to support us, you can do so by visiting Thetalkthepodcast.com/donate. Goodbye.