Pay It Forward

By Natalia

In high school, I loved theater. But my friend Tatiana, she loved mathematics and literature. She knew that I was always writing something, usually some kind of nonsense. One day, she invited me to a literary workshop run by her father, who was a poet. She went there because she was friends with the group and wrote poetry herself. I went out of curiosity. I didn’t connect my life with writing in any serious way. I was planning to become a theater director.

At that first meeting, I saw young poets for the first time. Some were my age, some older. They were all strange, very different from theater kids. There was a large table in the room, and everyone sat around it. One by one, they read their new poems. Tatiana’s father, V.A. Leykin, sat at the head of the table with his arms crossed and his head lowered. Sometimes he closed his eyes. Sometimes he covered them with his hand. He listened very carefully. Afterward, he spoke about the poems, pointed to specific lines, and said what he liked.

At the end, I expected him to assign homework or explain something. Instead, he read the newest poems he’d written. Then, his students would speak about his poems, too. He was a teacher and an authority, and at the same time, simply one of them. A poet among poets. Young enough to be their father, but not separated from them.

I didn’t dare read anything of my own. Their poems were serious and deep. I was writing funny sketches, small absurd plays. I felt like a stranger in this world of poetry. But I was enchanted. I just kept coming to listen.

I read all of Leykin’s poetry and fell deeply in love with it. I still remember much of it by heart. Later, I learned that he also wrote screenplays, so I watched his films, too. They were completely different from his poems, as if written by another person. For me, this opened up an entirely new world.

Then, the place where we met was shut down. Leykin told us that if we ever had something to share, we should come to his studio, a small rented room where he wrote poems and screenplays.

By then, I had finished school, was studying at a theater academy, and had begun writing more. I had almost completed a large play, several small ones, fragments of stories and dialogue. And I was writing something else entirely, one-page monologues, spoken by incomprehensible characters, ending with an unexpected turn. I didn’t know what they were. But I needed someone to listen.

Gathering my courage, and relieved that there would be no poets this time, I began coming to V.A.Leykin studio, terribly ashamed of interrupting his work. And he would stop. He would interrupt his thinking, his writing, his silence; for me, and for others like me. He would sit on a chair, fold his arms, lower his head, and listen as I read aloud.

Each time when I read these one-page monologues, he asked sincerely, “What is it that you’re writing?”
“I don’t know,” I said. It was something that appeared on its own.
“Write a book of short stories,” he suggested.
“I’ll try,” I said, and knew I wouldn’t. It felt pointless to me.

We talked. We analyzed things. He gave advice. But the most important thing was this: he listened. He heard me. He spoke to me honestly.

When I was twenty, over three days, carried by some strange momentum, I wrote a screenplay for a children’s feature film. It wasn’t revolutionary. It was very much of its time. But it was complete, lively, and funny. Two years  later, a studio bought it. After that, I wrote screenplays. And he read everything I wrote.

Would I have become a writer without him? Probably. Or maybe not. But at a time when I didn’t understand who I was, what I was writing, or what I should do next, Leykin was my guide. My protection. My reason to finish things. Because of him, I wasn’t afraid of being alone with this strange process unfolding in my head. I had someone I could call. Someone who understood me, because he himself was the same.

Now, from where I am in life today, his willingness to stop his own work and simply give us his time seems almost unbelievable. None of us promised success or money. He himself was not a wealthy man, poetry never paid for that. He did it out of love. For us. For poetry. For literature. I was grateful to him then, and I remain grateful now. His poems, and the poems of those young poets, are forever part of my world.

Leykin is eighty-nine now. I know he is surrounded by the love of those whose mentor he was. And I send him love across the ocean. Passing on what he gave us, that is what I want to do. Pay it forward.

© Natalia Nightingale-Grey. 2025.  All rights reserved. Reposting or quoting is allowed only with proper credit and a link to the original.

Theater

By Natalia

We all love the theater as audience members. The music, the craft of the actors and directors, the lighting, the spell of language. It all comes together to create a growing sense of something extraordinary, something you can’t quite touch or explain. A true kind of miracle, alive and unfolding right in front of you.

             But when you work in a professional theater, everything is there except the miracle. Theater is deeply physical, relentlessly practical. A building. Utilities. Wires. Sets being assembled. Costumes, wigs. Carpets that need vacuuming. For all of this to come together, it takes someone to set everything in motion, to bring the whole machine to life: a producer. Only then can something intangible, imagined by the authors, become real and turn into a miracle for the audience. Yes, all art is the creation of a miracle… and the selling of tickets.

             I studied at a theater academy, then worked in theater in various roles, and loved theater and theater people with all my heart. However, with time I realized that I don’t like being in the spotlight, and that this is not the art I am meant to pursue. My relatives breathed a sigh of relief: now I would finally find a “normal” job. After all, everyone knows that choosing a creative profession is the worst possible decision. But I had a different plan. I wanted to keep creating miracles, just in a different way.

             When I started writing, I was given the chance to deal only with miracles. My imagination was richer than any play or film, even life itself. It was freer. Better. I was no longer bound by censorship or industry trends, and I loved what I did unconditionally.

             But the moment I finished my first screenplay, the miracle ended. What had been a world of invisible images, seen only by me, turned into a stack of written pages, and once again, the practical side of things appeared before me. I had to do something with it, but no one could help me. Now it was my responsibility to deal with reality. I had to do both: create the miracle and sell the tickets. 

             And in that moment, the producer inside me came to life. I bravely began moving forward because I stubbornly believed that a screenplay does not exist on its own. If there is a script, a film must be made from it. Just as a play and its actors require a theater, a screenplay requires a production team. That conviction pushed me to keep going and to search for opportunities.

             For writers, people who mostly live inside their own imagination, producing is difficult. The pitching, the negotiations, the endless hours spent in futile conversations with directors and producers, the conflicts, the disappointments, the networking - all of it consumes far more time and energy than the writing itself. And for me, that is where most of the negative emotions live.

             With my first screenplay, getting it produced took two years. After that, it became easier. I began to find professionals who were on the same wavelength as me. I met talented people, and the time we spent creating together became a kind of absolute happiness. And when we managed to achieve a result, it felt deeply rewarding. Not because I stepped into the spotlight (writers and screenwriters rarely do), but because I saw how many people watched my films, read audience reviews about how they connected with the characters I created, and observed the faces of people in the theater as they watched the stage and felt that same sense of something extraordinary, something they couldn’t quite touch or explain.

             In those moments, any professional feels pure joy, not only from the result of hard work, but also a quiet sense of self-respect: for not giving up, for seeing the work through to the end, for being not only the author but also the producer of yourself, even when it’s incredibly hard.

             Just like in my beloved theater, where difficulty is constant, endurance matters above all, and the elevated intertwined with the grounded: music, text, light. The commute from New Jersey and back. Artistry. Transformation.Eight shows a week. Bad weather. An old building. Inspiration. Catharsis. Dressing rooms that smell. Cramped spaces. Rapture. The trembling edge of emotions. The bills paid for water and electricity. The full spectrum of human experience, so that the miracle can happen. 

            Do we, as writers and self-producers, have the strength to take on this complexity and go the distance? I believe we do.

© Natalia Nightingale-Grey. 2025. All rights reserved. Reposting or quoting is allowed only with proper credit and a link to the original.

About Cakes

By Natalia

I’m going to allow myself a metaphor and compare screenplays and novels to cakes. It is not a beautiful metaphor a writer would be proud of, cakes simply occupy a special place in my life.

In the past, people had religious visions: saints appeared to them. I, however, have visions of cakes. Quite seriously. A slice of three-layer cake suddenly appears before my eyes, hovering there, insistently, and demands that I aspire to it. And I do aspire. But I cannot allow myself to eat cake every time I dream of it.

So I have reached a compromise: I study them. In shops. In cafés. I look at them very carefully, trying to guess their taste just by sight, which, as you know, is very close to writing.

Cakes are brave and infinitely diverse. Every culture and every era has had a hand in them. The layers can be vanilla, chocolate, nut, coffee, honey, green tea, or something else entirely. The batter can be based on whipped eggs, sour cream, or butter. There are endless kinds of frostings and toppings, and some simply refuse to get along with certain types of cake layers. The layers are soaked with syrups to keep them moist. Alcohol is often added to those syrups, which I consider one of the great achievements of civilization.

And then there is an entirely separate universe: making the cake look good. There are countless videos online where cakes are made perfectly even, like little towers. Special tools are used to decorate these towers with colored icings and glazes, caramel, sugar figurines. Somehow they even transfer photographs onto cakes. At this point, the cake begins to resemble a small architectural project.

The cakes available to my study in cafés and pastry shops are, for the most part, rather predictable. If my visions grow too insistent, and the cake that appears to me possesses some particularly extraordinary quality, I occasionally attempt to make it myself. But my God, how difficult it is. A layer may refuse to rise, or rise crooked, making it impossible to cut into three even parts. The cream may turn out too runny, or there may simply not be enough of it. Half an hour in, there is not a single clean dish left. And there is no way of knowing whether it tastes good until the entire thing has been assembled and left to soak for several hours.

If you have ever made a cake yourself, you know what I am talking about. A three-layer cake with full decoration is monstrously difficult to execute well. Usually, my cakes taste wonderful but look dreadful, yet my family loves them and insists that I am a real cake maker. Oh, thank you, but I am not. In cake-making, I am an amateur. A beginner.

But imagine that as an amateur pastry maker, I decided to start selling cakes, and like any reasonable person, I Googled how to do it. I would immediately be buried under advertisements. Various organizations and individuals would eagerly offer, for a modest fee:

• Someone would revise my cake so it could finally meet professional standards.

• Someone would teach me how to write a proper letter to a pastry agent, in case my cake wished to be represented.

• Someone would coach me on how to pitch my cake to the owner of an established pastry shop, in under thirty seconds, with confidence and clarity.

• Someone would reveal which cakes are currently trending, and how mine might be adjusted to fit the market.

• Someone would train me to perfect the first bite, those crucial opening seconds that determine whether anyone will commit to the rest of the cake.

• Someone would help me discover the true voice of my cake and remain faithful to it.

• Someone would guide me through my “pastry block,” should I find myself staring helplessly at my food processor, unable to begin.

No, thank you, people. I will not pay for this.

If this is work, then in order to sell cakes, I would have to go and work in a pastry shop and make, and make, and make cakes. Every day. For many days in a row. And I do not want that.

Quite selfishly, I would prefer that someone else suffer, mastering the craft of pastry, spending endless hours making and remaking, while I simply enjoy the result. Because I love cakes, and I need them for happiness.

I would only ask that this pastry chef, who sacrifices their life in pursuit of the perfect cake, and has probably long since stopped loving sweets, make them delicious and beautiful, use good ingredients, and allow themselves imagination. That there be many pastry chefs, and many cakes, of every possible kind, for every taste, including, perhaps, the impossible: not sweet cakes without calories, which I sometimes dream of.

And while they struggle, making cakes for me, I will struggle, writing and rewriting series for them. Our work, after all, is nearly the same: endless practice, and the desire to make something… delicious.

But the pastry chef has one great advantage over me.

If at a party you say, “My cousin will be here soon. She’s a pastry chef, and she’s bringing her signature cake,” everyone is delighted. If you say, “My cousin will be here. She’s a writer, and she will read us chapters from her new book,” no one is.

This, perhaps, is the moment when my original metaphor, about books, films, and cakes, reveals its limits.

© Natalia Nightingale-Grey. 2025. All rights reserved. Reposting or quoting is allowed only with proper credit and a link to the original.

The Rose is Always Redder

By Natalia

In Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Alice sees a beautiful garden through a small door. It’s the loveliest. She wants in. Really wants in. But she can’t figure it out. No one explains how much you’re supposed to eat or drink to become the right size. No rules. No system. Just vibes and self-blame. But Alice still wants in. So she does what everyone does when they don’t fit and don’t understand the rules:

1. Cries. A lot. Fully dysregulated.

2. Hangs out with a traumatized pest who rejects empathy

3. Obeys an authoritarian relic obsessed with an outdated system

4. Tries to keep up with an anxious character with ADHD who thinks she’s his assistant

5. Builds a connection with a character who smokes and talks in riddles and is completely fine, by the way

6. Wanders into the territory of a jealous bird who calls her a snake

7. Gets handed a baby by an unpleasant privileged character and instantly becomes unpaid childcare

8. Meets a charming ghost friend who shows up like an amateur but disappears like a professional

9. Follows etiquette at a dinner where everyone is clearly insane

At some point she adapts. Of course she does. She learns to be not too big, not too small. Just right. So she gets in. Oh, this is the loveliest garden you ever saw where roses are painted and everything is fake!  Chaos, noise, and insane games of cards and croquet. People get their heads chopped off constantly, or at least are threatened with that. No one is good enough. Anyone can be guilty at any moment. Does Alice like it there? No. No one does. And she wants out more than she ever wanted in.

Now take that door and write on it, “The Industry,”and go back to the beginning.

© Natalia Nightingale-Grey. 2025.  All rights reserved. Reposting or quoting is allowed only with proper credit and a link to the original.

The Art of Food Making

By Natalia

“At the end of the day, we’re all food makers. Food making is in our DNA. It’s part of what makes us human.”

What do food makers think about their art and craft?

A mom of toddlers: I heat up dino nuggets or mac and cheese in the microwave, and sometimes they eat pizza.
A Michelin-starred chef: Black caviar in a butter emulsion is served with butterfly-shaped sugar crisps.
A conveyor belt operator: we produce 60,000 portions of frozen meals a day.
A line cook in a restaurant: we go through up to 30 liters of oil every night, and everything cooks in under three minutes.
A factory line operator: this baloney contains sodium nitrite, sodium erythorbate, sodium phosphates, monosodium glutamate, and artificial colors like Red 40, Yellow 5, and Blue 1.
A molecular gastronomy specialist: we can turn anything into liquid, gel, or foam.

And all of them are food makers. Good thing we, narrative builders, word shapers, meaning jugglers, fame seekers, and motherfuckers, don’t use such broad terms for ourselves.

© Natalia Nightingale-Grey. 2025. All rights reserved. Reposting or quoting is allowed only with proper credit and a link to the original.