Megan McDonough :: Quarantine Dreams and New Openings for Storytelling
If news media and journalism were a swiftly shifting landscape prior to the pandemic, it’s no question that the past year of pandemic life and social transformation we’re all living begs for “other kinds of stories,” as Donna Haraway would say.
I recently had the chance to catch up with Brooklyn-based documentary filmmaker, journalist, and friend Meghan McDonough on new openings for storytelling in the face of the pandemic and post-pandemic life. After her employer, news giant Quartz, made major budget slashes, Meghan was forced to pivot and get creative as a freelancer—a pivot which lead to unforeseen openings. Meghan’s fascinating documentary short on pandemic dreams was recently featured in the New Yorker and she has also created a global storytelling platform for queer/nonbinary folx, among other exciting projects.
What unfolded between us is a beautiful conversation about storytelling, change, the elusive balance between order and chaos, and queerness as liminal space. Enjoy!
Your documentary "Invisible Monsters and Tomato Soup", recently published in The New Yorker, depicts the uncanny and eclectic universe of peoples' pandemic dreams. Can you tell us a bit more about the genesis of/ inspiration for this project? What, if anything, surprised you about the dreams you chronicled?
In April 2020, about a month after lockdowns began in New York, I started seeing articles about this phenomenon of “quarandreams." My first thought was that I’d want to see my friend Marcie animate them. Around that time, we had a video call with our friend Stevie, who helped turn the idea into a concrete plan with deadlines. After more research and brainstorming, we began interviewing family, friends, and respondents to a survey we posted on social media and Reddit. We narrowed over 80 responses down to the dreams that felt most visually immersive and raw.
As part of our process, we also interviewed Deirdre Barrett, a dream researcher at Harvard who’s collected thousands of dreams since the start of COVID-19 lockdowns– this gave us a sense for the threads that would be representative of pandemic dreams on the whole. We did expect anxious ones, but we didn’t know what form they would take. We were super intrigued by Barrett’s comment that, since it’s difficult to visualize a virus particle, the threat comes through in metaphor. She calls these representations “invisible monsters,” which for our dreamers ranged from oily oceans and sourdough supervisors. We were surprised to find that many people were comforted by their dreams as well, whether in the form of grandmother figures, ambiguous lovers, or tomato soup. Our title emerged from this unexpected emotional arc, similar to the stages of grief.
In addition to the documentary, you also recently created a global storytelling community for queer women and trans/non-Binary folx called Dear Queerantine. It seems that the pandemic has inspired quite a bit of your recent work, so I'm curious to know: in what ways would you say the past year has influenced your creative work, and how do you see it shaping the trajectory of your journalism / filmmaking career moving forward?
Thank you for asking this! I co-created Dear Queerantine this year because writing is one of the best ways I know to feel grounded, and the uncertainty of this pandemic only intensified that need. Storytelling has always been my way of trying to understand the world and my role in it. Several people who wrote letters on Dear Queerantine told us that they'd never before taken the time to put words to their experience in this way, and that the experience was cathartic. Sometimes you just need someone to build a container for those words, which is why I really love the prompts you have in The Liminal and also these questions!
On a similar note, I think creativity needs breathing room. This past year, working from home and switching to freelance has enabled me to finish projects on the backburner and start new ones. At the same time, there was a several-month period when I really struggled to come up with story ideas. I think the reason is that, while I do need breathing room to be creative, I also need a little chaos. I found myself missing pre-pandemic rush hour on the subway and the snippets of conversation I’d hear everywhere I went. It’s hard to find inspiration in a controlled environment, and that even applies to the predictable way I navigate the internet. I think both Invisible Monsters and Tomato Soup and Dear Queerantine came from a real need to connect with other people and receive spontaneous input that way. I think I’m still searching for the right balance of order and chaos, but affirming collaborations definitely help with both.
Do you have any predictions (or hopes) for shifts in the nature or form of storytelling in light of what we've individually and collectively experienced during the pandemic? What role(s) do you think stories will play as we attempt to represent / make sense of this chapter in human history?
Still from Meghan’s film, “What Makes a Voice Human?” (Scientific American 2020)
I think this past year has underscored the importance of access to reliable and accurate information, and I hope we’ll collectively value journalism more as a result. I think every journalist knows several others who were laid off this year as companies slashed budgets (my whole team at Quartz was, along with half the organization). For those who can afford it, we should pay for our news. And all forms of art that have helped us feel connected to other people in a year that was so isolating for so many.
What's been bringing inspiration to your daily life / art lately?
I mentioned earlier that I’m trying to find a balance between order and chaos, so I’ll share some ideas for each.
To find order, I’m a big fan of ritual. I try to move outside at least once a day, whether to run, bike, or walk. When I’m ready to work, I either always make coffee (French press is my go-to) or mate, a tea I became obsessed with while living in Argentina. You drink it with a metal straw called a bombilla and can order everything you need online. I also like to burn a candle, palo santo, or incense (since I’ve been in New Mexico, I got a sampler pack with cedar, juniper, and piñon). I think smell is a sense we often ignore, but it can have a powerful effect on our mood.
These days, I’ve been finding the good kind of chaos in books, which open me to worlds I don’t even know I don’t know about. I keep whatever I’m reading on my bedside table, so I chip away at night. I just finished The Soul of an Octopus by Sy Montgomery, which my sister recommended to me and was a joy to read. I’ve also been dogsitting for family this year, and I’ve come to appreciate that dogs are so similar to us emotionally but also playful and erratic in ways that get me out of my own head. AKA they embody the cutest form of chaos.
I want to stress that none of these things inspire me if I haven’t been sleeping enough, eating well, and exercising– these are the fundamentals I can’t even function without.
Can you tell us about a "liminal" moment or period that has defined you, your life, your identity, your work?
I think my queerness is the most liminal thing about me. About ten years ago, the first time I had unignorable feelings for a woman, I tried to ignore them. I knew what I wanted but spent months in this limbo because I believed the mainstream narrative I grew up with, that I had to be either gay or straight or, at best, a fixed point on a spectrum. For me, what started as a positive pull turned into a crisis only because I thought that if I followed my instincts with this one person, everything would change. So, for a time, I turned inward and became invisible even to myself.
Though I now view sexuality as fluid, I’m deeply grateful for this period of my life because it forced me to reconsider so many things I thought I knew about myself and the world. I came across this passage recently by the ecologist and writer Robin Wall Kimmerer that speaks beautifully to how language itself can be limiting: “When we put names on things, when we trap them in sentences, do we stop listening? Do we stop feeling? Do we rely so much on words to capture what is that we think that’s all there is?” She tells her students instead to get down on their hands and knees, to smell and touch and fully engage with the plants they’re studying until they come up with their own names for them.
To me, the word “queer” is the equivalent of exploring and coming up with your own name for the thing. It embodies a kind of expansive liminality, as opposed to the claustrophobic liminal space of the closet. Queerness means what you want it to mean and is meant to be lived out in the world.
Before this period of my life, liminal spaces made me deeply uncomfortable– I still have a negative recurring dream in which I’m half on/half off the athletic team I played on in college, I think because the decision to leave after my sophomore year was one I agonized over for months. I still sometimes agonize for fear of committing to one thing over the other. But I’ve had enough life experience since then to know that the change itself doesn’t matter so much as leaning into it to find new openings.
A note to T H E | L I M I N A L readers from Meghan: I’d love to collaborate with others in the community and am also always looking for story/project ideas, so please get in touch! meghanemcdonough@gmail.com . And you can find my work at www.meghanemcdonough.com :)
Take a wander through Meghan’s other 2020 films, “What is Home?” and “What Makes a Voice Human?” (her reaction to hearing her own synthetic voice for the first time), below.
Thank you, Meghan!
Meghan’s September 2020 film, “What is Home?”, featured in Atlas Obscura
Meghan’s December 2020 film for Scientific American on synthetic voice: “What Makes a Voice Human?”