In May of 2024 I got a package in the mail from a friend named Nick Edwards. I hadn't spoken with Nick in person since we were first years in a small two year film program in Chicago (2015). I transferred to CCS in Detroit, where I would end up graduating in 2018, so our friendship became long distance.
Nick and I had a habit of sending each other the art we were working on. We had bonded over poems and experimental film making when we were at school together. Having a shared sensibility let us treat each other as a trusted test audience. If he didn't like something I could be confident it wasn't due to not getting the vision. That's a really valuable thing to have as an artist and I hope he felt the same towards me.
That last time I remember speaking with him was spring 2020. I remember joking about how we will have so much time to work on projects during the pandemic. We joked about maybe working on a screenplay together. Then I never heard from him for years. I did end up making a film (you can find that on my Film page) but Nick never as much as floated an idea past me.
With that being the case I'm sure you can imagine my surprise when a physical box arrived at my door. Inside the box was a journal and a sketchbook. The journal is a little too intimate and personal for sharing but I quite liked what I found in the sketchbook. To my surprise, Nick had been working on something. The front cover of the book opens to a pen scribbling of "T.D.P" (I later figured out this means "The Dark Place") followed by "N.M.E" (Nick's initials.) and finally a '22. (assumedly the year he started working on this.)
I attempted to get into contact with Nick about this and tell him how much I liked it but he would not return any message, call, or email. Given that was almost two years ago now I think enough time has passed that I feel comfortable sharing this work. I am going to create a page (website) for each page (book) so that you can flip through it with me. I'll give you my reading of each page alongside the page itself. I feel I may have some unique insight into Nick's work as we had talked so much in the past.
A weird thing, in between a few pages he had printed out links to google docs. I expected some other thing he had been working on but it turns out they were links I had sent him. These were chapters from a book I had hoped to write, never did, and then kept the segments I liked for something later. I guess this is that something whether I like it or not. I will post those writings here in between the pages Nick had.
I scanned all the pages myself but my printer has some scratches on the scanner so I had to clean up some of the pages in photoshop. That is to say, while the images are "altered" they should reflect the physical pages to the best of my ability.