We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Louie E. a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Louie, so many exciting things to discuss, we can’t wait. Thanks for joining us and we appreciate you sharing your wisdom with our readers. So, maybe we can start by discussing optimism and where your optimism comes from?
My optimism in storytelling is grounded in the idea of solidarity. I like the notion of storytelling as a communal activity, a group event that takes (lots of) people to come together to share and communicate. You have different audience members, you have different storytellers, you have diverse participants across that spectrum who participate while bringing those differences to the table to be together and hopefully help each other thrive. Whether it be theatre or film, at the stage of writing, producing, creating sets/costumes, or performing, I’ve seen folks that come together to help each other out.
A great example of where this optimism flourishes is in independent storytelling. Folkloric storytelling has a great history among workers in fields, among communities on the streets, and among kinfolk around the hearth. Not that this is particularly new thinking given the recent WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, but I think it’s important to ground storytellers’ dreaming in these areas. In my earliest experience of doing work on camera, I worked with a fantastic writer and director named Nick Naveda. He’s gone on to move our short films up into features, but it started, at least on my end of the collaborations, with a group of people dedicated to telling important stories about his life experiences. We didn’t have funding for his projects, but we wanted to be there for each other and bring certain stories to life with our participation. The same goes for collaborations I’ve had with other independent storytellers like Aiman Samat and Sarah Sawyer. They’re both folks who are coming up in the film industry who invite participants to affect the process of storytelling at every level. In each of these three cases, the filmmakers and their respective crews actively rely on each other and practice empathetic participation to get the job done. The appeal of these experiences, in part, is care in group participation. They apply models of collaboration that utilize consensus, collaboration, immanent value, and care–virtues that not only subvert top-down storytelling, but also make it possible for this storytelling to occur in the first place. This also takes place on top of burden of working other jobs to survive. The kind of organizing here occurs in opposition to those conditions. This is what makes me optimistic about storytelling. It’s the idea that people can support each other to do something despite their differences and the challenges that may come their way.
“Independent” refers of course to the status of being made and distributed outside major companies and corporations. But I like the irony of how that independence really relies on deep collaboration, mutuality, and, solidarity.
Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?
Something I care about doing is helping people make art and tell their stories, in any capacity. Whether it’s serving as an editor/reader on a draft, organizing food distribution for gatherings, or lifting things to make performance spaces, I want to help folks creatively communicate and entertain. One of my focuses in doing this work is promoting folks to reflect on how their work affects others and encouraging ethnographic communal authorship. Because independent storytellers are often limited by resources, it might be more manageable to put a message out and kind of portray the world from a singular perspective. But I believe there is power in community and collaboration. So, whenever I have the opportunity to collaborate on a project, I want to bring in more people who are implicated in a story but potentially overlooked in the process of telling it.
There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
1. Heed Others: pay attention to others and what they have to say. This is key to understanding their needs, accepting their wisdom, and working well collaboratively. This will not only help you make friends and build community, but it helps you check in to see how you can best be of service. Making this a practice among the whole group can also help reflexively analyze the dynamics at play and assess if anyone is being hurt by the process.
2. Set and Evolve Boundaries: this is important because, in any work capacity really, you need to take care of yourself and make sure that others don’t cross lines they shouldn’t. This will also help you consider and evolve who you are as well as your wants and needs.
3. Care About Everyone: caring about everyone, even those who may be adversarial to you, can help you develop empathy and community. This also helps to understand the perspectives of people you come into contact with and resolve conflicts.
How can folks who want to work with you connect?
I love collaborating with people who share the principles of mutuality, solidarity, and community. Among others, I want to support women, disabled people, poor people, queer people, indigenous folks, people of color, and people with refugee or immigrant status and the narratives they want to communicate. I want to support folks who don’t feel they have the means to get their stories out there and excite them into trying anyway.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: @louiehp7
- Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/louie-enriquez
Image Credits
I’m not sure how to list this here, but for the ones in the suits, (labeled A2, A3, and A4) those are taken by Aiman Samat. For the one with the one with the two people walking toward camera (A1), that is by Nick Naveda. For the one with three people in shadow and a little creature in the middle (A5), that is by Katie Anne Moy. For the one almost all in black with a white spooky creature person in the middle (A6), that is taken by Ryan Hopkins. The final photo with two guys in wigs (A7), I took that photo myself. And then the photo I provided for the main I.D. photograph, that is taken by Maria Vittoria Conti.
