Jan. 21, 2024

Living the dream with former divorce mediator and family therapist turned prolific writer Jennifer Manichurian

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Dive into the multifaceted world of Jennifer Manichurian, a former divorce mediator and family therapist turned prolific writer, on and off Broadway producer, and screenwriter. In this captivating episode of the 'Living the Dream' podcast with Curveball, Jennifer shares the winding path of her career journey, the inspiration behind her novel 'Alphabet', and the intricate process of bringing stories to life on stage and screen. With a life as colorful as the characters she creates, Jennifer's tale is one of adaptation, creativity, and the enduring pursuit of passion.

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> Speaker A>Welcome, um, to the living the dream podcast with curveball. Um, if you believe you can achieve, cheat, cheat.

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> Speaker A>Welcome to the living a dream with curveball podcast, a ah, show where I and interview guests that teach, motivate, and inspire.

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> Speaker A>Today I am joined by someone with an extensive bio. Her name is Jennifer Manichurian. She is an author, she is a divorce mediator, a family therapist, on and off Broadway producer and screenwriter. She's done a lot of stuff, and we're going to be talking about her story and her book, Alphabet.

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> Speaker A>So, Jennifer, thank you so much for joining me today.

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> Speaker B>Thank you for the introduction, Curtis. I just have to modify it slightly at the moment. Um, my divorce mediation and family therapy was many years ago. Now my focus is more on writing, but it's in my head.

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> Speaker A>Absolutely. We'll start off by telling everybody a little bit about yourself.

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> Speaker B>Oh my goodness. Where did it begin?

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> Speaker B>Well, uh, in some way I am a product, I guess, of my generation of women who were, uh, somewhat educated, although I dropped out of college.

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> Speaker B>But then, um, at a time when women really, their expectation was never to have roles outside the home unless they had to. Very few people I knew were career oriented. When I was young, I can't think of anybody. And then the women's movement came along. At the time that happened, I was around in my late twenty s. I had four children at the time, and it kind of, um, made me want to add, to not take away anything from my life. I wanted to be the best wife and mother I could be, but I also wanted to have some kind of a role outside my family where I could be challenged and do something that was interesting to me. And so it's been a long time, and I've had a number of careers. I've been fortunate to be able to make the changes at a time when I felt like it was, for whatever reason, I was ready to move on to something different. I think of life as having chapters, and I've had many chapters in my life. Each one varied, quite different, each one great, uh, each one with different challenges, different, um, needs a lot of it, depending upon the ages of my children and the needs of my family.

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> Speaker B>So here I am, uh, in the latter. I don't know what period of my life. I don't know how much sand is left in, uh, that little glass above, um, the little egg thing where the timer is. But, um, I'm really at this moment into writing. I've written a novel this year. I produced, ah, um, film. I co produced. I mean, nothing I do is by myself. I produced a film that I also co wrote that's going to be heading into the festival circuit last year, and it's been, um, an amazing ride. I don't know if that gives you the story. I have five children.

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> Speaker B>I have 15 grandchildren, a couple of them married, a lot of them, uh, with partners at the time. I don't know where that'll wind up. So I have a very rich family life, and I have had a lot of different interesting careers that have each been satisfying in its own way and with challenges in its own way.

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> Speaker A>Well, tell us about your time as a screen producer and producing on Broadway, and tell us about that film that you just coposed.

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> Speaker B>Okay, well, I'll go back.

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> Speaker B>Um, at the time, I was a family therapist and divorce mediator. I was doing both of them at the same time, and I was working at an institute, and I was developing training for divorce mediation.

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> Speaker B>It's a strange thing to say at a time when I was really enjoying what I was doing and very, um, involved in it. But at that time, my youngest child had, um, my kids have a 14 year age range, so I've been through a long period of child raising, and between my fourth and my fifth child was seven years. And so all the kids were out of the home, but the youngest. And she had decided, uh, and we had decided she was going to go to a school in New York City, which meant we would get an apartment in the city.

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> Speaker B>And at the same time, I had an opportunity to get involved in theater. Was like. I don't know, it was like kind of a fantasy of mine, I guess, all my life to do something that I thought would be, I don't know, the entertainment business.

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> Speaker B>For whatever reasons, I'd always been drawn to it. So I made a decision to just kind of jump right in, and I got involved in theater. Mean, I'm still.

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> Speaker B>I don't know if I'm not doing anything right now, although I'm still a producer on, um, stomp, which is not, um, playing in New York right now, but it's playing across the country, and it's been an amazing success, and it's a lot of fun if nobody's seen it.

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> Speaker B>But I've spent many, many years in theater, and I've been basically in theater since then. But when Covid came along, uh, theater shut was, as we know, we were all kind of locked up in our homes. And during that time is, uh, when I wrote this novel. The novel wouldn't have been written without Covid, because I got to close my office in the city, and I was no longer commuting, so I had extra time every day, and I just committed myself to writing this. As far as the screenwriting is involved, while I was theater producing, a lot of it theater producing, I, uh, don't know for any of your audience who may be theater goers in New York and on Broadway when I first began, there were not a lot of people who would be above the title, um, theater producers. It was just a much smaller group. But particularly after 911, when people, uh, no longer. I mean, it put the theater into crisis as well as the world.

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> Speaker B>But, um, people would no longer book like a year in advance. Like, I'm going to come to New York and see Phantom of the Opera or something. There was so much uncertainty that it really impacted the theater financially and that people didn't buy ahead of time. And therefore, uh, it was much harder to know how a show was going to do. And I'm not saying this well at all, I apologize.

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> Speaker B>But the point is that you needed more and more people to produce a show in order to. Just to finance a show, because theater became so uncertain.

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> Speaker B>And, um, as more and more people got involved, it became less and less kind of fun.

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> Speaker B>There were too many people. I mean, there could be 30 people around the table at an advertising meeting.

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> Speaker B>And my creative needs, um, were kind of shouting, there's more I want to be doing.

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> Speaker B>So I started moonlighting, writing and stuff, and I wrote, um, a film with my son in the 90s.

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> Speaker B>It's, uh, called family Blues. It's on Amazon Prime Video. And that was quite an experience. It was like a trial by fire. We learned a lot. Um, uh, it was an amazing experience. But when you want to write something, you have to have this inspiration. There has to be something you really want to write and commit yourself to doing and to be doing well.

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> Speaker B>And, uh, it can be just, you can have this idea. A lot of people have an idea, oh, I have a movie in me, and it can be a one liner, which sounds wonderful, but then when you sit down and you have to write the whole thing and have to have the whole plot arc and all the character arcs, it's not quite so easy. In fact, it's hard. It's work. Um, but I kept at it and I kept writing. And there was a book I had optioned. There was a couple of books over the years, while I was still producing theater more actively, that I had optioned to write a screenplay for. One of them was done not long after, uh, John and I did the movie and it was a book, and it had a war theme, and I really worked hard on that, and I think I had a really good script. But unfortunately, when I tried to get this movie made, and it came very close to getting made, I think we were in the midst of the Iraq war, and it was almost impossible to finance a movie with a war theme. People just didn't want to see it at that time.

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> Speaker B>And, um, the option had expired, so I just had to walk away from that. But I figured it was a really good. I figured that was like my college training in film writing. I learned a lot doing it, and then I optioned another book around 2014, I believe, called closed doors.

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> Speaker B>I started writing the screenplay for it. The story took place in Scotland, uh, in a small island, and I felt that there was no reason why this particular story, it had to take place in a very small community where everybody knows each other and where the community know, uh, like the factory shut down and stuff. But there's plenty of places in the United States where that's the same story. So I kind of migrated the story to America and I wrote many, many drafts. And finally, when I felt it was ready, and I had a producer working with me who helped me push this along and also gave me notes on my screenplays, uh, we got a wonderful director, and that's the film we made in Minnesota, um, this year, in a little community called Ely. I don't know if you've ever been to Minnesota, it's a beautiful state, but that was a film we made, and it's a story of a family, uh, in crisis, kind of seen through the eyes of a twelve year old boy. And it's the effect of a trauma that happens with the mother and how it impacts the child, the family and the community. And, um, it's a moving story, but it's also a story about boyhood, and the boy in it is an amazing young actor, and he has a group of friends. You laugh and you cry, hopefully in this film.

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> Speaker B>But it's a film that anybody could see.

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> Speaker B>There's no violence, nothing ugly happens. It's about the reverberations of something that happens.

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> Speaker A>Well, yeah. So tell us about, uh, is that your musical? Because I know you wrote the book for two musicals that are streaming as well.

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> Speaker B>Um, no, there has a wonderful score by a wonderful composer who's french, but it is not exactly a musical. But I have collaborators who are composers, who I work with. Um, we've written a few musical. You see, this is why I just couldn't be, uh, just producing is where you're trying to finance and get a show up, and then it's really the business end of entertainment, um, business when you produce. And my creative needs were just too strong. And so I started writing, um, the book of musicals, and I have two collaborators, and we're actually working on a third musical now, but we're thinking of it in terms of a musical series for, um, a streaming series of six, rather than one long play.

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> Speaker B>But that's been a lot of fun. And one of them, which was called Mary Harry, and, uh, it can be streamed online. We did that in a couple of regional theaters, including one in New York called the York theater. And, um, we made a decision afterwards to see if we could make a hybrid film version of it where you could still see the bones of it as a theater piece, but it wasn't opened up as fully as a film might be. But it told the story in kind of a unique way where you see the cameras and stuff, there's part of it where you actually see how we're making it. Um, and that was an amazing experience because we did it just before COVID We filmed it like, I think it was in I don't remember how many days. It was a very small period of time where we shot it, uh, in a one huge room, which was our studio.

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> Speaker B>And then when we went to go into post production to put it together, Covid had come.

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> Speaker B>So the musicians all had to do it separately in their own homes or their own home studios. And then we had another little musical we had, ah, written at the time, which was, I think it's less than 15 minutes short musical, which we just wrote for fun. Um, and it only has three songs in it, but we filmed that during COVID which was an amazing experience because nobody could be together.

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> Speaker B>Ah, it's kind of a love story. It's a very quirky little love story. It's called cockroaches and cologne, and it wound up going into a bunch of festivals. And part of it is because the title, I think, makes people curious. Uh, but the way we filmed it, there was a couple in it, and we needed a couple who lived together. We were looking for the most talented two people we could find. Uh, we didn't care about gender or anything. We just were looking for the. Turned out we got a married couple, and, um, they were able to be together because we had to have scenes where they were together. But the man who was the, uh, director of photography, who was also our director, he wore a mask the whole time. He had this tiny little virtual studio in Harlem with a, uh, green screen, and all the backgrounds and stuff were put in graphically from somebody.

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> Speaker B>In mean, it was an amazing process, the way we did it. We saw it all being filmed on our own little home, virtual studios where we could see what they were doing. But anyway, that was a lot of fun. And, um, it was an amazing way of doing something where even the costumes, the hair, which if you were doing a regular show, you would have a costume, did the hair, and all different people. We interviewed the couple in their apartment on Zoom, and they showed us what clothing they had, and she showed us what hairdo she could come up with. So it was kind of a unique way of doing it. You couldn't do it that way today. There'd be too many unions involved. But it was the only way we could do it at that particular time.

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> Speaker B>So we were able to use Covid to do that and the fact that nobody could be together.

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> Speaker A>So let's talk about your writing process of your latest novel. Tell us, uh, do you feel like your careers help or hinder the process and why did they take so long, uh, to write?

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> Speaker B>Uh, good questions. Yes.

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> Speaker B>Everything in my life has, I think, when you. Nobody who writes cannot write. You can only write from what's in your own brain. Right?

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> Speaker B>Uh, it all has to be somehow your own observations or your own take on your own experiences or other people's experiences that you've watched. So it's personal to that degree, but it's not by any means autobiographical. But it's the story of a very old woman who wakes up one morning and makes a decision to give a dinner party that night for her small group of people who are still in her life, which is her daughter, her great granddaughter.

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> Speaker A>Um.

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> Speaker B>Uh, she, uh, has a homemade. Because she's in a wheelchair, and she has a housekeeper, and she has two neighbors.

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> Speaker B>So it's a very small group she invites to this party, along with the spouses of, like, her daughter. And the young granddaughter has a, ah, great granddaughter has a boyfriend.

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> Speaker B>So it's only a few people at the dinner table, but nobody knows what she has in mind, and they're mystified. And so during the day, you go through the day of this film and, uh, this Mooc book, and you find out about the lives of all these people, because all the chapters are told from the different points of view of the people. So you get to know them and what's happening during their day as well as whatever their lives you learn a lot about their own history and their relationships with one another.

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> Speaker B>And it all began.

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> Speaker B>I mean, it did take me a long time because it never, ever occurred to me I'd be writing a book.

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> Speaker B>I never, ever thought I had the ability to write a book. It began with my taking a short story writing class and just seeing if I could write a short story. Five pages, 500 words. I really didn't know if I had the ability to write in that form. And I really got into it. And I'm still in the same group. It's been wonderful. But out of it, I started developing characters. And more than in that group, a bunch of my writer friends and I, every summer we have a writing retreat together where we do nothing but write for about a week and talk about writing and do writing prompts, and it's amazing. And during a couple of those, I really started thinking about maybe I can somehow put together a book with these characters. And then Covid came along and, um, I was home a lot, or home all the time, actually. And I made a decision to just kind of figure out how to make it work. And it was very challenging because screenwriting is very different.

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> Speaker B>A lot of your dialogue tells the story, uh, well, the camera and what people are saying to each other, but you're not describing the scenery. You're seeing the scenery in a movie, in a, uh, book. You have to bring the reader with you. You have to take them into the room. You have to help them see the action. You don't have the camera as your best friend, so it's a very different process. And I only can say that if I didn't have my writing friends to work with, and we were often on Zoom a lot, where we would not necessarily even talk to each other at all, but we would just be there as a resource to each other if we needed it. And we also would send each other, uh, whatever books we were working on when we felt they were ready to be read and to get feedback, uh, on. So probably, uh, six or seven people I know, including my sisters, I had sent them drafts of this novel for their feedback. And I use feedback. And for people who think that you can do this all without perspective, maybe somebody can. But I generally think that when you get outside feedback, it informs you, uh, if you can be open to it and not kind of wet it to your words and put your ego aside, there's a lot of ways it can be useful to you to make what you're doing better.

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> Speaker B>Somebody will give me notes and I'll say, well, how did I miss that? Why didn't I see that? Well, you just don't see it all. Um, it's like a process.

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> Speaker B>It takes time before you can really see all the things that might be within that story that you may not have found at that time. So I worked closely with people, and I got feedback, and I went and did many, many drafts before I felt it was ready. And then when I thought it was gone as far as I could go, and that was maybe a couple of years, I hired a developmental editor, uh, who went through it and gave me copious notes, uh, but was extremely helpful to me in terms of finding ways to really make it whatever it is today. I'm not saying it's a grand opus, but it was certainly informed by all the people who helped me to get it to that shape. And so I'm one of these people who believes in collaboration.

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> Speaker B>Um, I'm sorry, go ahead.

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> Speaker A>You also collaborated with a hybrid publisher, so once you finish your thought, tell us why you decided to do that.

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> Speaker B>Well, all I was going to say is, I'm used to collaborating. I mean, when I wrote my musical with my collaborators, there were two of them, and we also work now we work with our director, too. So there's three of us and four of us in the room, and you have to collaborate, and, uh, you don't always agree, but you listen to what everybody says, and then you come up with what every. I mean, if.

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> Speaker B>If I were working with anybody who really didn't insistent upon always being right, then it would be impossible. But I love to collaborate.

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> Speaker B>It's much m more fun to work that way than to just work alone, as far as I'm concerned.

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> Speaker B>But why a hybrid? Well, part of why I did a hybrid. Well, there's a couple of reasons. One of them, uh, had to do with, um, control, because I know that when you, uh. Because everybody in my writing group, it's really funny, but we've all had something published this year, and, um, I'm the only one who's done it through a hybrid publisher, but they all did it more traditionally. But I saw the process of what it takes.

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> Speaker B>Sometimes you have input, but you don't have the final word on your title or your cover. And I thought that with nobody knowing who I am, it would be very important for me to have a striking cover and a really good title. And I didn't want to hand that over to somebody else, but that's a lesser part of it, I have to say. The main part of it had to do with my age, because I'm not young and I know it can take, um, two, three years or more to get something from the time a publisher, first you find an agent and that takes time. And then when you have find an agent, the agent may want to send your book out to a developmental editor and then you'll have a lot of work to do still. And then you'll find, maybe if the agent finds a publisher, that can also take time. The publisher may want you to do more changes and then it may not, uh, come out for another year or two. And that's a long time at my age. And I knew of other people. Somebody had told me, in fact, one time I was having lunch and I heard about a very well known person who without a doubt could get an agent in a second because of his name.

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> Speaker B>And uh, he was around my age and he had made the decision to self publish, which is not what I did. It's not self publishing the way some people do, but to go through a hybrid publisher because he wanted it to be done quickly. And from the time I started with the publisher I worked to the time I ended was six months. So it was really a matter of really very pragmatic choice, uh, on my part, because I think I could have gotten an agent if I had been really persistent about it. Um, but I went with the hybrid publishers. You can go to Amazon and I don't know, because I didn't pursue it, but I think you can just publish what you send them.

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> Speaker B>But I didn't do that. I went to uh, a hybrid publisher. They're much more selective. The group that I worked with, the Greenleaf book group, they say that they only, uh, accept 15% of the books that are submitted to them because they also have a take in the royalties. So they want to make sure your book has the potential of selling.

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> Speaker B>There was another publisher I had submitted to that's a very good publisher, and they also accepted my book. And they would have accepted, both of them accepted it without any changes. But I had already made a commitment to Greenleaf, so I stuck with Greenleaf and I was happy with, was just, I worked very closely with them on every aspect of it, from marketing to the COVID to the, they have copy editing where they do, where they correct all the grammatic things you may have done wrong. Um, so for me it was a satisfactory process, but you have to pay for it and so you can't do that if you can't afford to pay for it. Um, and generally speaking, they're not going to sell the way a book is going to sell. If you have, like, little brown in back of you, who's going to be marketing it for you.

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> Speaker B>Uh, it was choices that I made with my eyes wide open, and I don't regret it, but I've had to learn how to market this book, and I hadn't counted on that. This whole year has been like an education for me, both in filmmaking and in publishing a book. It's been pretty extraordinary. It's, um, more than I had bargained for.

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> Speaker A>Well, tell us about any current or upcoming projects that you're working on that we need to be aware of.

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> Speaker B>Okay, well, there's two things right now I'm working on. One of them is, uh, I'm doing a second novel.

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> Speaker B>I would say I have most of it in my head. I have maybe a quarter to a third of it written, and it's based on one of the characters in my other book, because she's a character that I love to write about. She's quite nasty. So it's about kind of figuring out her human, getting her to be more human. Um, but writing about somebody like that is fun, actually. And the story is going to go in quite different directions from the first. It won't be the multiple point of views like my other book. And it's a challenge, a different kind of a challenge. But I'm really excited about it and can't wait to really keep working on it. Um, the other one is this musical, uh, that I mentioned, the musical series we've been working on with my composers. We had started it before COVID and during COVID we all kind of put it aside to some degree. And after last, a few months ago, we got together with a bunch of. For four days, we got together with a bunch of, um, singers and actors and, um, listened to it, uh, and went through it very methodically to see what we had and was it worth continuing and just kind of really get reinvigorated about it and we feel like, good about it, and we're just trying to figure out the next step. But I have to say, with anybody who's listening, who's a writer, there's nothing more valuable than hearing your work, uh, read to you by others or performed in some way. Even though screenplays, uh, are harder to do, they don't come to life the way a play may when it's read, but when you get feedback from other people and you listen to it, and then you listen to the people who are the actors in it, and get their feedback as to what felt natural to them, how they felt about their character, what they might want to see differently.

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> Speaker B>It's very informative.

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> Speaker B>It's a very good practice for anybody who likes to write.

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> Speaker A>So throw out your contact information so people can keep up with everything that you're up to.

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> Speaker B>Okay, well, I have a website, um, and on the website it has my social media. I'm on Instagram, uh, LinkedIn and um, shoot Facebook. Of course I'm less on Twitter.

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> Speaker B>I don't know. I have a Twitter account, but I don't really use it. But I have my own website and it's just my name.

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> Speaker B>Jennifermaniturian. Net.

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> Speaker B>And uh, I don't know if that will be something that when this comes out, it'll be something written that people can see.

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> Speaker B>Or should I just spell out my name?

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> Speaker A>Yeah, go ahead and spell out your name because I'll throw it in the show notes.

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> Speaker B>Okay. Jennifermanmocherian.

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> Speaker B>Net there's no dot between first and last name for me and it's not www, but it's the HTTPs and then my name. Net. And so everything I have is on that. The different projects I have is on it, but mainly my book.

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> Speaker B>And the book, it has an audible version, uh, not a hardback, uh, paperback, um, and an e version.

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> Speaker B>And I hope maybe people will be curious and want to read it salutely.

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> Speaker A>Close us out with some final thoughts. Maybe if that was something I forgot to touch on, that you would like to talk about it. Just any final thoughts you have for the listeners?

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> Speaker B>Well, I wish everybody a happy new year and a, ah, peaceful world ahead of us as we go into this kind of interesting, challenging year of 2024.

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> Speaker B>I have many grandchildren and my wish for them is, um. Um, I grew up in a very different time, a safer time, a calmer time. I mean, listen, I was a very young child during World War II, but it wasn't on our land, so to speak, and I didn't feel it. I just grew up safe and happy and I just wish for a better future for everybody in our country, our divided country. Uh, that's really something that's very important to me and big on my mind. And I also am putting time and money into that.

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> Speaker A>Absolutely. Ladies and gentlemen, jennifermanitarian. Net. Please be sure to keep up with everything that she's up to. Check out her films, get the books, follow rate review share this episode to as many people as possible.

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> Speaker A>If you have any guests or suggestion topics.

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> Speaker A>Cjackson 102 uh@cox.net, is the place to send them. As always, thank you for listening. Jennifer, thank you so much for joining me.

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> Speaker B>Thank you, Curtis. You're a lovely host.

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> Speaker A>For more information on the living the Dream podcast, visit www.djcurveball.com.

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> Speaker A>Until next time, stay focused on living the dream. Dream.