“Turning” Life Into Art at My Alma Mater’s Gay Straight Alliance
Today, I had the chance to head back to where it all began—Suffern High School—to give a short talk to the students of the Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA) club. I was inspired to do this presentation after finally releasing my audio drama, TURN. But I want to be clear: this wasn't a promotional tour. I didn't show up to ask the kids to download or listen to my project. Instead, I wanted to shine a semantic light on the title of the manuscript itself, and talk about what the word "turn" means to me in all its beautiful ambiguity. With only 30 minutes on the clock, I decided to zoom in on a singular message: what it actually looks like to turn your life into art.
Finding the Hero Within
I started by reminding them of a storytelling framework they’ve all analyzed to death in English class: The Hero’s Journey. While the script of my audio drama follows this model to some extent, I wanted to show them how it functions as a practical tool for building a personal narrative.
In school, we study this framework in relation to ancient literature and grand mythology. I invited them to flip the lens and consider how they are living that journey right now. I reminded them that they all inherently possess "main character energy." (Because if you aren't the hero of your own story, you're either the villain or a side character). I was surprised to see that none of them had ever looked at their own lives that way before.
The Monomyth wasn't just invented; it was identified. It exists in books because it exists in us. I truly believe an artist's understanding of their own world is destined to shine through their work. Artists "turn" life into art. I'm still working out the best ways to articulate this—and I hope to refine the message with future community talks—but sitting in that room, I could tell the kids knew exactly what I meant.
Thresholds, Elixirs, and Finding a Voice
In particular, we focused on two critical pivot points in the classic structure:
The Threshold: The moment we step out of safety and walk into an unknown world.
The Elixir: The wisdom or insight we rescue from that world and bring back with us.
I highlighted these because they represent the major "turns" of any human experience. During the discussion, one of the students dropped an absolute gem of an insight, saying: “A story without those turns is just description.” I thought that was incredibly profound.
We also tackled the concept of finding your voice. I shared how choosing to "write exactly as I speak" was a deliberate craft choice for the audio drama. Unlike rigid academic writing, which forces us into style guides and formal constraints to communicate data, authentic writing unlocks something else entirely. What do we uncover when we strip away the filters? What can we learn about ourselves when we write with unvarnished honesty?
The Real Payoff
It took me eight years of wrestling with this project to bring it across the finish line. But today, that decade of internal work allowed me to offer 30 minutes of new perspective—and maybe a little bit of inspiration—to a handful of students who look, think, and feel exactly like I did at their age. That is the real payoff.
Today was a great day. I hope to keep finding ways to give back to my communities by sharing this message of what it looks like to face your reflection, take your mess, and turn your life into art.
Paul Halley
Paul Halley is a writer, performer, producer, and multimodal artist. He graduated from SUNY Potsdam in 2017 with a bachelor's degree in English and currently studies in the MFA program in Creative Writing at Manhattanville University.
