Letter to Victor

Dear Mr. Nunez,

          I wanted to explain a little more about why I contacted you.  In our conversation, you had said that you are a “specific filmmaker”, which is exactly why I wanted to speak with you.  I saw "Ruby in Paradise" several years ago and was moved as much by the story you tell as your depiction of a setting that I know so well.   Having grown up in the panhandle, I have seen myself that same rural beach washed of its color in the winter, when gray has a beauty all its own.  As a writer, my focus has always been words,  more so than images.  Yet in watching your films, I feel the way I do sometimes when I read literature (any one of Joyce’s stories from “Dubliner’s”, for example), where the line between reality and creation seems so unsentimentally dimmed, in the transposing of life (humanity)  into art (the representation of humanity).  In other words (and I have no idea why),  watching your films “feels” as though I am reading a wonderful piece of writing.

I am contacting you to ask if you would be interested in considering my work for one of your film projects.  I have recently completed my first novel called "Crossing the Rainbow Bridge", which was my graduate thesis project for my M.A. at Florida Atlantic University.  It is a story about a Navy family living in Key West in 1970.  The story is centered around a young girl who must learn to come to terms with the sudden death of her mother. I suppose the impetus for my novel began with the single question: What happens to a young girl (on the cusp of self-discovery) when she loses suddenly and unexpectedly the very source from which her identity had always been drawn?  My story is not plot-driven, but rather relies on the development of the characters, and the use of language.  It is mostly, though, a story about love-not only romantic love-but love in the fullest sense of the word-much in the same way that Iris Murdoch envisions it in her book, "Existentialists and Mystics” (whose epigraph I include in the first chapter).  Just as in some of your work, my story is equally informed by the setting, where the Key West I try to show, and the story which unfolds, can be seen as a reflective microcosm of the social and political changes that were going on in the early 1970's in the United States, with the focus as I mentioned earlier on the dynamics of a family's personal struggle with tragedy and change.

          I am including with this letter a short excerpt from my novel.  Thanks for taking the time to have returned my phone calls and for being gracious enough to receive this correspondence from me.  However unorthodox my approach might have been (and I did not mean to be intrusive), at least it allows me the chance to tell you how much I admire your work.   Thank you very much.

Sincerely,