Nate Eckman

Coming back to the city starting this summer to start a masters at NYU! Can’t wait to show yall what kind of stories I bring to screen next.

Live anywhere for seven years and you’re bound to make plenty of memories and friends. But no one warned me that I was going to be given the best of both.

I’m forever grateful to you wild bunch. You know who you are. You gamblers and techies. Pole dancers and two steppers. Fly fishers and fitness enthusiasts. Entrepreneurs and local billiard stars. Rappers and pitbull mommies. Country singers and karaoke feins. Trans men and women. All you g**s - so many g**s. You loyal friends who celebrate things like a friendiversary. You readers who made my first book possible. Cinephiles who encouraged and helped me to make my first short film. Old lovers who mended my heart, just in time to meet my soul mate. You, Austinites, who beautifully excavated these seven years from a bleak and short line of time, and shaped them into something beautiful.

I’m not in Austin anymore. And I’d be lying if I said I knew what was next. At times thats been scary. But when I feel this fear or regret creep up I grasp to the memories of your inspiring lives and in that moment I’m no longer afraid, because I’m home again.

So I guess for now it’s so long and till next time, y’all.

Harold Bloom called it the Anxiety of Influence. I prefer to consider them a heaping of blessings. These are a few.

In writing his masterpiece Midnight’s Children six years after his castigated debut, Salman Rushdie taught me to embolden and nurture that shy, small, voice inside me still too timid to splay itself across the page. In Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka offered solace in navigating modernity’s estranging isolation. In Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84, I’d capitulated to the fact that one day I will look around and realize that nothing around me, not even me, will be what it seems; and from that point, all of life becomes a great adventure.

Jhumpa Lahiri’s stories — now translations from her own Italian — embody the pinnacle achievement of authorship in her perpetually evolving use of language. And to the one whose best works were among his last, Roth, oh filthy Philip Roth, whose Human Stain shook me with the most haunting epiphany that every person’s nature frolics beyond the constitution of words.

In these disparate iotas, denominating stories both magical and realistic, vestiges of my soul reawaken. In their pages life is both realized and re-imagined.