A Conversation Between Jamilah Araf and Clio Contogenis

JAMILAH ARAF: I love the piece, “All the Best Strangers Have Mommy Issues.” It’s amazing. Very impactful and also for some reason hits very close. Just because the setting is almost exactly like my apartment building. I was just interested because I don’t usually write memoirs. I usually find them too vulnerable. So I’m curious why you write memoirs and what you like about them? 

CLIO CONTOGENIS: They are so vulnerable; that’s so true. I think part of it came from the fact that I was maybe a little bit obsessed with my own issues when I was writing those things, but I think ultimately I find it really interesting to try and make sense of my life by writing about it. So, like, things, events, emotions—all of those things that have a strong impact on me, it helps me deal with it to write about it and figure out where there is an interesting story there. Or if there’s an arc, or if there’s something that I or other people could learn from it. 

I guess I’m comfortable being vulnerable in that way. I think this has to do with being an actor as well. It’s a lot of being eager to be emotionally vulnerable. 

JA: When it comes to these personal stories, do you journal about them right away or do you like to sit down at a certain time to reflect? Or is it like in the moment, you would write it down?

CC: I guess it varies a little bit based on the story. It always tends to be in a moment when I really want to create something and there are just moments or sort of emotions or events that kind of stick with me and gets kind of clogged in my system and a way to try and work through that or understand it for me has always been to try and write about it and so I’ll do a little bit of thinking or talking out loud. I talk to myself out loud a lot and little bit of journaling about it and then, usually, I’ll try and write a piece about it. I’ll write a very, very bad first draft, and then be like, okay, so now that I’ve exercised those demons, what is it that I’m actually trying to say with this piece? Or is there some, you know, is there something like a nugget of truth or some arc that I can pick out to reframe it around? And then I will go back and try and make something actually readable as opposed to just my anxiety. 

JA: Well, this was definitely readable. It was super enjoyable to read, I really loved it. Do you know for this piece – what was the nugget? Because I kind of interpreted as making assumptions, but I wonder if there’s something you were struggling with that you wanted to convey. 

CC: Yeah, it totally was. It came through! It’s funny because I haven’t thought about this piece in fifteen years but that’s exactly the thing that I was stuck on. My whole childhood, encountering this man. I had been intimidated by him and sort of bothered by him because there was some darkness and some unfriendliness in him that I reacted to as a child and didn’t try to understand at all and I just thought ‘oh it must mean that he is just like that. He’s just sort of this dark unlikeable human being’ and I made no effort to understand him, or why he might be like that at all or have any grasp of his interior life and then I found out reasons why he might act that way. I just found out more information about him and it gave me this sense of his humanity, and I was so struck by the difference between my first impressions of him and the reality of his entire human emotional life. I’d made assumptions, and I was wrong and it was uncharitable of me to make these judgments about this person whose existence I didn’t know anything about. That was exactly what was sort of stuck in my craw, and that’s what stuck with me about that story and that’s why I had to write it. 

JA: Do you still often write? Do you keep that up? 

CC: I do! I do keep it up. I wrote a short story, like, fictional story, wildly enough, last year. You know how sometimes you get sort of, like, possessed by some weird idea and then just this story comes out of you without you really seeming to have any influence on it? So I did that, and I wrote this short story. And so right now, a friend of mine and I are working on developing it into a short film as well. 

JA: That’s so cool. Has writing become more of a hobby or is it equal to the acting that you do professionally in your eyes? 

CC: Equal to acting? It certainly is. How does one define a hobby? I guess, if we’re talking about what my job is, when I get paid to do—I get paid to act and teach, but I think writing is still a hugely important part of my life. I still journal all the time because I feel like writing—and I say this all the time, writing helps me make sense of myself and the world. And I find reading a hugely important part of that too. And I still write. I’m not as productive of a writer as I was fifteen years ago but I do still write. I’m also working on a novel with my dad, so yeah, I still write all the time!

JA: What drew you to acting? Was it something you always wanted to do? Or did you kind of veer off a different path? 

I have a very visceral reaction to the power of storytelling. I find that acting is a way that I can really be a part of that. And I think it’s sort of what makes humans human. 

Clio Contogenis

CC: I was doing school Shakespeare plays when I was nine. That was the first time I ever did anything acting-related. Which, I mean, think about the teacher who was like ‘I’m going to teach a bunch of nine-year-old’s how to do Shakespeare and put on a play’ —like this man is…his courage lives in my heart forever. I think my love of acting is in a lot of ways connected to my love of writing because it’s all a love of how language can move through a person and affect change, and influence feelings, emotions, opinions, and all about the power of stories. I had this experience when I was doing this little version of The Tempest, when I was nine, and I was realizing that the language was transforming me and I was feeling all these things that allowed me to do things that I didn’t think I could do before, and then it was being very immediately transferred to this audience, who was feeling it as well and reacting to it. And it’s, again, it’s very similar to what writing does. I have a very visceral reaction to the power of storytelling. I find that acting is a way that I can really be a part of that. And I think it’s sort of what makes humans human. 

Storytelling is a lot of where we contain the higher ways of thinking and feeling. Like the way that the story of Romeo and Juliet met each other and fell in love, and then they were ripped apart and they died. The way that the story can reach and affect, emotionally, everybody on the whole planet – the way that storytelling gets us back to what is most essentially human about everyone. The way that we all have these same reactions, these same emotions that we feel based on a narrative, and we all are able to feel empathy for these characters and learn from their decisions. I think that that is part of what makes humans, it’s part of how we learn, it’s part of how we grow, it’s part of how we get back to what is good about being human.

JA: It’s interesting. I mean, I’m kind of in a writer’s slump. So I kind of feel that when I read other people’s work. I’m like, ’oh my God, how did you write this?!’ And then I try to sit down and I’m like, ‘what the hell? This sounds like it’s been written before.’ Do you have any tips for writer’s block? 

CC: Yeah, if you find any great tips, pass them back onto me as well! If there were a magical solution to this problem, I think that all of us writers would be much less angsty people than we are. The way that I have tried to get out of writer’s block is ironically to just write a lot. And then not judge it and not read it for a little while. Because if I write something, I will find that if I read it right after reading it, I will think it’s absolute garbage and throw it away, but if I read it three weeks later, I’ll be like, ‘oh actually, now that I’m distanced from it, actually, oh, that sentence is pretty good.’ You’ll find getting some distance from whatever you sort of vomit out allows you to see the merit in it I think. And then I feel like creativity ignites more creativity. Once you start going…often I will write myself into good writing. I need to do twenty minutes of awful prose, throat-clearing before I’m actually able to express myself well. 

JA: Sometimes, I edit while I’m writing. I’ll be in the middle of it and I’ll be reading a sentence eight times being like, ‘This is not a good sentence. What am I trying to say here?’

CC: My inner critic is the most active little witch ever. The best way out of writer’s block is to try and ignore that creature and just try to get everything out. You know, just get it out now and you can critique it later. 

JA: That’s a smart tip! When you were writing this piece fifteen years ago, did you imagine yourself here now? Or did you imagine something completely different?

CC: Did I imagine that anybody would read that story fifteen years later and care about it at all? No. I was completely shocked. I thought that was somewhere like off in the ether, never to be spoken of again, but I’m very moved. I mean, this is the power of Storytelling! This is what I’m talking about. Something that I wrote and forgot about fifteen years ago and was like, that doesn’t matter – that it had an impact on you later? That’s part of why art and storytelling is so important to existing as fully-fledged human beings in the world. It makes me emotional. So, it’s very sweet. I did not imagine that I would be here. 

There are aspects of my life like that I dreamed of—that I would be able to continue existing as an adult as an artist. I didn’t know that was necessarily going to be possible. But it was always my hope that I would be able to be a writer or an actor when I grew up. And I accomplished that. I was always, like, with blinders on or not thinking about the other possibilities. But this is what I dreamed. And to some extent I’ve been able to accomplish that so that’s very exciting. 

JA: Yeah, I’m happy for you! That’s inspiring actually, because everyone makes it seem like art is such a difficult section to enter – like, you know, you can’t live off of that. That’s like a hobby or something you do in your free time. It’s not an actual career. But like, you’re doing it.

CC: I mean, it’s certainly hard, but everything is hard. Life is hard. But life is also great and rewarding.

JA: I know you had your experience as a nine-year-old acting, which I imagine was adorable, by the way. But did you have any plays or movies that kind of pushed you to writing? Something that was like, damn, I want to do that?

CC: Yeah, I got very into Shakespeare as a child. So that was one big one for me. Also, as I watched movies all the time; my parents had a little movie night on Fridays. So we would watch all of the classic films, the greatest films of all time. Watching as a child with my parents, I was like, ‘woah! How does this exist in my world? It’s all so much bigger than me.’ It was just very eye-opening. 

I had a thing as a kid where I read a lot, but I was always very frustrated because all of the protagonists in all the stories that I read were boys. And I was like, where is a story about me? So, I would often change the name of the protagonist and pretend that it was a girl. And then I read the His Dark Materials series by Philip Pullman. I found that when I was 7 or 8 years old, and it was about a little girl! And she was the hero and went on all these really intense adventures and was very brave and complex and would struggle with all the things that I would struggle with in that scenario, but knew how to overcome them. And reading that book and watching this gutsy little girl be thrown into a world that was much bigger than her and have the courage to take it on and to change the world – was formative for me. That story really inspired me a lot and made me believe that maybe I could have some impact on existence.