Jac Cron is a filmmaker born in New York and based in Los Angeles whose debut feature, Chestnut, starring Natalia Dyer, Rachel Keller, Danny Ramirez, opens in theaters June 21 through Utopia. She graduated from Drexel University where she studied Film, Finance and Astrophysics. She creates films centered around human connection, particularly in the LGBTQ+ community. She aims to tell stories about diverse characters, not solely about, but parallel to their identity. Her short House Sit screened at film festivals nationally and internationally, including SF Independent, Philadelphia Film Festival, and won best director at BELIFF. Her other interests include playing instruments: guitar, piano, clarinet, and cello; taking 35mm film photography, and writing poetry. She is conversational in Hindi and French.
When I was in 5th grade, I won a poetry contest at my school. I think my poem was about God or something and I remember I was embarrassed because I wasn’t actually religious, and I didn’t want anyone to think that was what I cared about. At that age, I think I assumed that was what poetry was about – religion or love – and I didn’t know anything about love yet.
Throughout high school and pretty much all of college, I hated poetry. I continued to write often and read a lot of books, but I never returned to poetry. I think it had to do with the way it was taught in school — it was all about how shrouded in mystery poems could be and how to decipher them. All the poems I was forced to read were confusing, coded riddles that mocked me for not understanding. They also mostly rhymed, just as an extra laugh in my face, as if it were a nursery rhyme that even a kid could figure out. So, like anything I wasn’t immediately good at, I decided to hate it.
Fast forward to college and my voraciousness for reading had gradually been overshadowed by my love for film. I was consumed by learning as much as I could about cinema and how to make movies that everything else took a back seat. In my senior year, I met a girl who was studying to be a writer. We quickly became close, a different kind of close, and I found myself yearning for more. I reconnected to reading, wanting to understand the works she loved, some of which also included poetry. Nothing like young love to make you see something in a new light. She was the first girl I allowed myself to like in a romantic way and there was a moment where it felt returned, but just briefly. I had been in a few relationships with men in college – all of them lovely, gentle, and formative for how I wanted to be loved, but this short bond mattered more to me than all of them. Maybe because I felt there was more of me on the line, a truer me. This unrequited “love,” coinciding with accepting my sexuality, felt impossibly overwhelming – too many beginnings and endings all at once. My therapist at the time suggested journaling to get my feelings out, but every time I started to write, I found it daunting to sort through everything in my head quickly enough. Instead, I started jotting down quick thoughts, line by line … and eventually had a poem. It was both healing and masochistic, in a way, since she had gotten me into poetry in the first place. It was something that felt bad-good; something that made me get over her while still being able to hold on.
When you’re young, everything feels so intense because you’re going through it for the first time. Your feelings are amplified to the point where it feels like no one’s felt this way before and it’ll never end because you haven’t survived something like this yet. That all comes through in the art you make at that time. This wide-eyed and pre-pubescent time brings a kind of emotional rawness and fervor that I’m not sure I’ve ever been able to recreate. It’s a very fine line, writing about love. We all want to bring our own personal story to it, but we also must have the ability to recognize that it’s a not a singular experience – we can put our spin on things while also avoiding solipsism. Back then, I wasn’t yet at a point where I realized that everyone had or will eventually feel the way I was feeling, because it was brand new to me. That is the power and pitfall of art –we can all relate to each other and the things we feel. That gives us connection, but also makes it harder to bring a unique perspective.
In these beginnings of my artistic and emotional union, I would search for the most complex words I could find as synonyms for the novel emotions I was feeling – “happy” or “sad” didn’t quite cut it, but no one needs to use “quixotic” twice in one poem. I’m too embarrassed to share a poem from that time, but let’s just say it was a lot of me waxing on about what love is — using big words to match big feelings. As much as I cringe when I look back at my old poetry, I also wrote what I needed to say and what I needed to hear at that time. Artists’ works are often a representation of how they were experiencing the world at a brief moment in time and also a timeline of growth, showing the starting point and then how one’s tastes and minds change with experience. I spent most of my young adulthood trying to find books, music and movies that I saw myself in to prove that I wasn’t completely alone and that someone else out there felt the way I did. All of my work now circles around the concept of What did I wish I could’ve seen when I was younger? What would I, or people like me, want to see now?
In my movie, Chestnut, the protagonist, Annie, writes poetry. It was a real struggle for me to write the poem that she was going to read aloud. I went back and forth about what I wanted that piece to reflect. I wanted it to feel authentic to where she was in both her personal life (a 22-year-old who just graduated college and experiencing young love) and in her creative journey. But I also wanted it to be representative of me as a writer. These two things kind of clashed; I was making a movie about someone in a much earlier place in their life than I was and it felt hard for me to use a poem that felt more juvenile – or God forbid, a little cringey – than I felt I could write now. I ultimately decided that it was more important for me to show something that would be true to what Annie would have written at the time and in that, accept both her and my own early works. They’re early for a reason.
Here is the poem I put in the movie:
I don’t ask because we already know.
Our fumbly morning words
that never really say what
we want them to,
this dance around each other maybe
you don’t see.
I guess that’s the hard part,
wondering if they feel it too
because if it’s just you
then it just sits
all wrapped up,
a gift under the folds
of nothing words.
But if they feel it too
if they feel it too
lucky you.
Not long now.
It’s a poem that I want to pick apart and dissect as to why it doesn’t quite feel graduated, but I also want to protect it like a younger version of myself who is just trying to feel and doesn’t know anything else. That poem is for me then, not for me now.
Around the time I was making Chestnut, I delved deeper into poetry and writing. I was going through another heartbreak and poetry was one of the only things that kept me grounded. It’s actually something I now recommend to all of my friends going through hard relationship things or breakups: write poetry about it. No one has to see it, it’s just for you. The more I wrote, the simpler things became, including my writing. I stripped away any of the words that didn’t say exactly what I meant— I wasn’t trying to tell something, I just focused on saying something. I found that what came out was more honest and truer to my heart. I gravitated to poetry that spoke succinctly and candidly, learning that it was actually harder to be poetic in a straightforward way than being poetic in a flowery way. I slowly realized that poetry didn’t have to be grandiose and enigmatic, it could be simple and beautiful and heartbreakingly small. We all want to see ourselves reflected back at us in art and sometimes just saying how lonely we feel can hit more than trying to be overly descriptive about that pain.
Even though I have probably spent more time writing poems than any other type of writing, I still wouldn’t call myself a poet. Poetry is a medium that brings me peace and helps me understand my feelings. As May Sarton wrote in Journal of a Solitude, “I have written every poem for the same purpose – to find out what I think, to know where I stand. The poem is primarily a dialogue with the self and the novel a dialogue with others. I suppose I have written novels to find out what I thought about something and poems to find out what I felt about something.” Nothing could be truer for me. Looking back through my old poems is like a roadmap to feeling the best and worst moments of my life all over again. I can tell exactly how I felt then, not only by what I wrote, but by the way I wrote them. I am grateful for what poetry has brought into my life and the intersection of it, my queerness, and my filmmaking. I will continue to write and give grace to younger me, writing about a god I may have needed or a love I was trying to understand. For now, I will conclude this with a recent poem of mine that I’m sure I’ll look back and want to tweak, but as I’m learning, it is an artist’s job to fight the urge for perfection.
Next Time
I played with a girl’s hair
in the back of a car ride
home, after the bar,
drunk, she laid her head
on my shoulder and told me
how she hasn’t cuddled
with anyone in years
“but this feels nice”,
she said as I closed my eyes
pretending it was you
and we were back in New York
just one stop after
splitting a bottle of chilled red—
why do our bodies fit so well
after a few too many?
my nose so close to you that
I smell the metal
from your chain
on the back of your neck
so close I forget
I haven’t slept at home
in a week and I think about
how we cuddle in the morning
and read each other poems that
almost give away how we feel
and now I think about
how there are so many poems
I wanted to read with you
before you left
and we stopped talking like
we were ever that close.
The car stops at her’s
and she asks if I want
to come in for one
even though we were
never meant for just one stop
so I tell her “next time”
as if I were saying it to you.
