Jacob Ethington

Everyone wants to be a storyteller.

At some basic level, storytelling is imbued into our DNA. Our ancestors were so desperate to maintain this legacy that they would pass them down verbally before written language was around to transcribe them. Whether our jobs have us working construction, coding a computer program, or serving a table at a restaurant, there’s a part our day where we sit down to talk to our friends and tell stories.

But some of us take this impulse farther. We want to tell stories that go beyond our everyday lives and into something bigger and stranger then reality can encapsulate. These are the stories that I want to tell.

Over the years I’ve developed a strange set of writing skills. I started playwriting back in high school as part of a competition hosted by Michigan State University called The Young Playwright’s Festival. I made it to the final circle of playwrights not once, not twice, but three times throughout my high school career. And then there’s college.

During my college career I built up the skills to write films but also continued to build my playwriting skills. And now, I’ve arrived in a specific place in my work that I can confidently say what it is I’m doing and what I want to do. I want to tell human stories out of supernatural elements.

I have a hard time writing “normal” stories, in the sense that they’re completely rooted to reality. I’ve always liked the idea that ghosts, monsters, aliens, or other forces exist just on the periphery of our lives, and the idea I’ve always loved is that you could take those forces and incorporate them into deeply human stories. Why not put a possessed set of deer bones in a story about a college student dealing with loneliness? Or have the ghost of a suicidal individual hang out with men who drink by the side of the highway?

I’ve made it my mission to tell these strange stories and chip away basic human stories in the process. And strange they will be.