Let's Talk Passion!

Christine Laskowski on her passion project—retelling a true Byzantine love story

“With how time consuming it will be to bring [a passion project] to fruition, I need to be excited about it because I will be in this world a lot. And this had it. It just did. So much was relatable and so much was strange.” —Christine Laskowski

Preview: Episode 94 Passion Projects: Committing to What Compels You

“It’s the year 516 AD in Constantinople. We’re in a theater. Entertainment was free. A young actress, 16? 17-years-old? Named Theodora appears onstage, essentially naked, and begins her show.” And such is the beginning of the trailer for T&J, a podcast on the epic love story of Theodora—basically an erotic and daring showgirl—and her husband, the emperor Justinian, in sixth-century Byzantium. Telling the story—and the story behind how the story is told, is Christine Laskowski, a Berlin-based, multimedia journalist with 15 years of reporting, music and storytelling experience from around the world. We last featured her in Episode 8 on collaboration, but for this passion project, Christine is all on her own. And what’s that like? She tells all about it!

Christine Laskowski’s video and audio work has appeared on CBS News, NPR, FiveThirtyEight, and Vox/Netflix. Two years ago, she pitched and then supervised the first TikTok news account for the German broadcaster, Deutsche Welle.

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What We’re Reading and Listening to:

Rosemerry:

• Speaking of love stories, I’ve been on a kick reading romances by Adrianna Herrera—she specializes in multi-cultural romance and I kinda love that she writes all across the spectrum of lovers—Finding Joy follows two men falling in love in Ethiopia, An Island Princess Starts a Scandal follows a Caribbean woman in the late 1800s falling in love with a Duchess in Paris, and the Dating in Dallas series follows contemporary hetero couples who fall in love in the workplace. I love that her characters are almost always involved in some kind of social justice work and I am a fan of happily ever after—a promise of the romance genre. Light reading for sure, but with some fabulous spice.  

• I’ve just finished Ice by David Keplinger—well, more appropriate to say I devoured this book of poems that weave together the stories of animals that have been preserved for over 40,000 years in ice (now melting) with stories of the heart as it “melts” and the memories, the loves, the many losses, that emerge. It’s a tender book of becoming—reckoning what was with what is. Both dark and luminous, these poems opened my heart.

Christie:

• My friend Sarah recommended I HATE TO LEAVE THIS BEAUTIFUL PLACE by Howard Norman. I absolutely loved this memoir told in a series of episodes from Norman’s life — his boyhood in Michigan (and first job working on a bookmobile!), his relationship with an older artist and her untimely death, his work in the Canadian Arctic transcribing Inuit stories (which is where the haunting title comes from), and the murder-suicide that takes place at his home while he and his family are away. I would not have though I’d want to read that last section, and yet it may have been the most powerful and affecting. He writes so movingly about the process of reclaiming ordinary life after this tragic event and does it in a way that’s somehow universally relatable. The book also features many scenes and beautiful images of birds. I was compelled to look for photos of the Western Oystercatcher after reading the book. It’s the kind of book I keep thinking about long after. 

• SMALL WORLD by Laura Zigman is a novel about about two sisters navigating their lives post-divorce and finally coming to terms with their difficult childhoods and family secrets. I was annoyed at times by some of the characters (I just couldn’t find it in me to not despise the upstairs neighbors) and didn’t like it as much as SEPARATION ANXIETY, and yet…it grew on me and was ultimately more satisfying than I expected. 

• When Ana Maria Spagna first hears about the Chelan Falls Massacre, an event in the late 1800s where Indigenous people murdered 300 Chinese miners on a high bluff over the Columbia River and then threw their bodies over the cliff, she’s intrigued. But as she falls down the rabbit hole of trying to find out what really happened and why she’d never heard about it, she discovers that the truth is hard to discern. Maybe the murderers weren’t really Indigenous people, but white settlers, and the number of victims are said to be anything from zero to hundreds. PUSHED: MINERS, A MERCHANT, AND (MAYBE) A MASSACRE, is Spagna’s memoir of her search to find out what really happened. Along the way, she learns a lot about the history of Chinese immigrants to the Columbia River area. I learned a lot!

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After Reading a Romance at Midnight

 For two hours, I am the woman
who works at the orphanage, the woman
who falls in love with a man from India
who is not who he says he is.
He and I make love for hours beneath a mirror,
twining our limbs in a sea of silk,
and he shows me the pleasure
of losing the stories I’ve told myself
about what is possible with love.
When, after many pages,
we arrive at happily ever after,
I find myself on the couch in my kitchen,
notice my own thick legs curled beneath me,
my own raw heart in my tired chest
doing its faithful work. I’m surprised
to return to my own story:
the woman who is grieving—
the woman alone
in the empty room who listens
for the voice that isn’t there,
who listens for footsteps that do not come.
For the last two hours, I had forgotten her,
had forgotten this woman
whose story I know as my own.
I had forgotten the ache she carries,
the constant throb. And though it cuts,
though it wounds,
I am so grateful to return to her life,
to her story—the story
of how she gave her everything
to someone she loved,
how she knows he loved her, too.
It’s not a story she had wanted to live,
but now that it’s hers
she would never give up a page
of their story. Not a single word.

—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

this poem has been published in ONE ART

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This week, Christine Laskowski shares about the realities of “schilling the dream,” how to balance a passion project with a full-time job and how a little time alone can go a looooong way. If you are not yet a paid subscriber, you can go now to our website, EmergingForm.substack.com, or by clicking the button below. Thank you!

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Two Questions:

(share your answers with us here on Substack or in our FB group)

1. How do you balance a full-time job and a passion project?

2. What are the plusses and minuses of working on a creative project alone?

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