Lately, I’ve been thinking about how long Skyward has been with me.
I don’t remember the exact moment I came up with the name Skyward Productions. I wish I did. There was probably no great ceremony involved. I was young, theater was consuming an enormous part of my life, and apparently I decided I needed a production company.
What I couldn’t have known was that I had named something I would still be carrying around nearly forty years later.
Around the same time, in the late 1980s, I created the Wynne Song Consort. I can place that one a little better. I was at Rider College, writing music, playing piano, working in the theater department, and trying to create opportunities for musicians to work together. Eventually, dozens of people were involved.
I was barely old enough to know what I was doing. There is something strange about looking back at that person now.
I don’t mean strange in a regretful way. I recognize him completely. He wanted to create things. More than that, he seemed to need a private, personal place in the world where imagination could become something tangible.
That need has followed me for most of my life.
I have spent nearly forty years living inside what I sometimes think of as a personal creative bubble. Music, theater, writing. Projects begun for reasons I could not always explain. Things created without knowing whether anyone would ever hear them, read them, see them, or care very much that they existed.
Most of adult life teaches us to connect effort with an outcome. We work because something needs to be accomplished. We build things because someone needs them. We measure whether something succeeded.
Creativity has never worked that way for me.
I rarely sit down at the piano because there is a piece of music the world is waiting for. I don’t write because there is an empty space on a bookshelf that only I can fill. Even when I was directing theater, there was no shortage of plays in Washington, DC, that could have existed perfectly well without me.
The impulse comes before the purpose. Something begins to form internally, and at some point it becomes uncomfortable to leave it there.
So I make it.
That may be the simplest explanation I have.
Creating has always been one way I understand what is happening inside me. Sometimes I know exactly what I am trying to say. Most often I don’t. A piece of music can begin before I understand the feeling behind it. Writing can lead me somewhere I did not know I was trying to go. Even theater, which depends on other people, gave me a way to take something imagined and make it briefly real.
There is a kind of privacy to all of that which I have come to value. Much of what I create begins in a place where nobody else is invited. There are no reviews there. No expectations. No questions about whether something will sell or whether anyone will understand it.
There is simply an idea and the possibility of following it.
Perhaps that is why I have protected this part of my life for so long. Not hidden it. Protected it.
There is a difference.
The years after Rider took me through Manhattan, Washington, theaters, rehearsal rooms, nightclubs, stages, and eventually into an entirely different professional life. Skyward came with me.
In Washington, it became the name under which I directed and produced theater. We staged productions at the DC Arts Center and spent long nights at Tavern Stage, the little theater we helped create in the basement of Kelly’s Irish Times, with beer occasionally dripping from the ceiling.
I remember the people more than I remember the productions.
I remember Paul and Alex and Edwin and Jeff. I remember the peculiar intensity that develops among people trying to make something with very little money and absolutely no assurance that anyone is waiting for it. But we did it anyway.
Eventually, theater receded from my life.
I don’t remember deciding to leave it behind. Life rarely announces those transitions while they are happening. One day something is central to who you are, and years later you realize you haven’t done it in a very long time.
Music stayed.
The Wynne Song Consort eventually became Tony Wynne Music. The organizational idea became less important as the music became more personal. I kept composing. I kept returning to the piano. Sometimes years passed between projects, but I never really stopped.
Then, much later, came writing.
Wynne Publishing was not part of some grand plan to build a creative enterprise or literary empire. I had books I wanted to write, so I needed somewhere for them to live.
That sounds suspiciously familiar.
A theater company. A music collective. A publishing imprint. A website.
I have been doing the same thing since I was nineteen years old, and it took me most of my life to see it. Whenever something started forming inside me, I built it an address. Before anyone asked for the work. Before there was any work at all, sometimes. I kept giving my imagination a place to receive mail.
I understand now that this was never about organization. It was a decision I was making over and over without noticing I was making it.
Forty years of naming things is forty years of refusing to call this a hobby.
That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should. A hobby is what you do with the parts of your life that are left over. Naming something says the opposite. It says this deserves architecture. It says I am not going to squeeze this into the evenings and hope it survives.
I don’t think I could have articulated that at nineteen. I’m not sure I could have articulated it at forty. But the young man who wrote Skyward Productions on something, probably a program, probably in a hurry, was doing something braver than he knew. He was building a room for a life he hadn’t lived yet.
And here is the part that surprises people when I try to explain any of this.
The room was never empty.
When I say private, people tend to hear solitary. They picture someone disappearing into a study and closing the door on the world. But dozens of people passed through the Consort. There were casts and crews and musicians and long nights in a basement theater. I have already told you I remember the people better than I remember the shows.
Making something with other people, with no money and no guarantee that anyone is waiting for it, strips away nearly everything social life normally runs on. There’s no status in it. No advantage. Nothing to be gained by being there except the thing itself. What’s left is a kind of attention people rarely give each other.
So the bubble was never a retreat from people. It was a different way in.
Not everything has lasted. Not everything was particularly good. Some things mattered enormously to me for a while and then quietly disappeared.
That is fine.
I think one of the gifts of getting older is becoming less interested in requiring every creative act to defend its existence. A song can exist because I needed to write it. An essay can exist because I needed to think through something. A project can matter deeply even if it matters to only a handful of people.
For a long time, I suspect I thought the finished thing was the point.
I’m less certain of that now.
The current version of Skyward Productions would probably be unrecognizable to the young man who first used the name. Theater is no longer at its center. Music and writing are. Wynne Publishing didn’t exist then. Neither did Tony Wynne Music, at least not by that name.
But I think he would understand it immediately.
He and I do not have much in common. Not a city. Not a profession. Not a body, and I’m not entirely sure we share a self. Almost everything he assumed about his life turned out to be different. If we met, I think we would run out of things to say fairly quickly.
Except for this.
Both of us stop when something stirs. Both of us follow it without knowing where it goes. Both of us feel compelled to build a place for the thing before we have any idea whether it’s worth building a place for.
That’s the whole overlap. That’s all of it.
Which means Skyward is not a company I’ve carried around for forty years. It’s evidence that someone has been continuous in here the entire time. Everything else about my life has been replaced at least once. The making is the only thing that runs the full length.
So when I say I need to create, I don’t mean it as a flourish, and I don’t mean it makes me unusual.
I mean it is how I have stayed a person I recognize.
Some people make things and immediately want to show them to everyone. I have always been more comfortable making them quietly, living with them for a while, and eventually opening the door.
Skyward is that door.
I should be honest about something. Writing this essay was not difficult. Publishing it is. I have spent forty years protecting a private room, and I have just spent several pages describing its contents, on a website that carries the name I gave it before I understood why I wanted it.
That turns out to be the actual work. Not the composing, not the writing, not the years of following an impulse toward some object nobody requested. Those were the easy parts. Those I would do regardless.
The hard part is the door.
At the time, I may have simply liked the sound of the name: Skyward. Nearly forty years later, I understand that I was naming the door and not the room, and that I must have known, even then, that a door is only worth building if you eventually intend to open it.