Ward Serrill is best known as a documentary filmmaker, popular around Port Townsend for bringing “The Bowmakers” to the screen.
And he’s returning to the …
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Ward Serrill is best known as a documentary filmmaker, popular around Port Townsend for bringing “The Bowmakers” to the screen.
And he’s returning to the cinema again later this month, but in a different capacity.
Forty lucky ticket holders will join Serrill in the Rose Theatre’s Starlight Room at 12:30 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 20 for, of all things, a book signing and on-stage interview.
Yes, a book signing.
Twenty years in the works, “To Crack the World Open” is a memoir that depicts what Serrill considers the seven most difficult years of his life.
“I’m a complete virgin” to the writing world, he said during a conversation last week, adding that the book really came together in the past five years.
Despite mixed feedback on its initial form, Serrill kept at it, determined to share the wisdom of his Zen master with the world, packaged in a yellow dog named “Woody.”
From cover to cover, the memoir is at times raw, soft, and downright heartbreaking. Against a backdrop of 1980s Alaska, it’s a wild adventure of self-discovery and coming of age, studded with the life and times of a man’s best friend.
Immediately, it’s easy to tell Serrill is used to capturing sounds with a camera. Written, they are slightly less-effective, but his imagery is often downright original: time drips “like a slow-leaking faucet”; clouds are “as thick as attic insulation”; and the skin of a character’s neck rolls over his collar “like a raspberry donut.” Life seems deceptively simplistic, almost ideal for Serrill, who describes the rural town of Saxman with a mixture of resilient delight and defeated resignation.
Through it all runs Woody, a pup the author took with him when he fled “Boxtown,” his moniker for Seattle, where he worked as an accountant.
Building a protective shield of numbers around himself had felt natural to him. He’d later learn that the children of many alcoholic parents tend toward technical and highly linear careers, but at the time he made the choice because it was “the furthest thing from my soul as I could get.”
During a recent conversation, the author described arriving in Alaska as a “burst of light through a cloud bank in my soul.”
The book follows his trials and triumphs of being green behind the ears in the wild, inhabiting abandoned buildings, finding himself lost in a fog bank, to discovering his voice on the local radio station.
If nature is the theatre of “To Crack the World Open,” then Serrill and Woody are two actors in a motley cast. Woody does his thing; explores, runs off, comes home, mates with another dog, and befriends an entire community.
“Woody was the most well-known dog in town,” Serrill said. “Everybody knew who he was.”
“Woody lived outside of time,” he writes. “It was all I needed really: a beer, music, the forest, and Woody.”
More than 30 years later, Serrill admits, “He’s the real teacher here, he’s the master here,” adding that only this dog could’ve given him the life-changing perspective his memoir breaks open.
A crack can be looked at as something dangerous, like a crevasse.
It can be a weakness, when it runs across a pane of glass. However, at its most redemptive, a crack allows for the access of something hidden, a seed to sprout, or to expose buttery nut meat.
Serrill guides his reader from the lowlands to the high country of his inscape, and everything in-between.
“I’d never done anything more vulnerable,” he realized after finishing his book.
Serrill marveled at the intimacy that is possible between creature and human.
“One of the reasons I wanted to write the book was to not apologize for the depth of that love,” he said.
A limited number of tickets for the event can be purchased for $18 each, which includes a copy of Serrill’s book, at rosetheatre.com/film/live-literary-event-book-signing-with-filmmaker-ward-serrill.
