Rising Stars: Meet Lindsey Beth Meyers

Today we’d like to introduce you to Lindsey Beth Meyers.

Hi Lindsey Beth, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
I started writing stories as soon as I could write my own name. I loved books, movies and TV — it only made sense to make my own. I knew I had a good bit on my hands if I made my parents laugh at dinner time. That was the ultimate test of worthiness. My siblings are much older than I am, so they were out of the house and well into their own lives by the time I started retaining memories. My parents and I started moving around the country an awful lot right around that time. I think writing was a way to fend off the loneliness. We spent summers in National Parks or tucked away in the woods, where I learned to ride a bike amongst hippies and Sturgis motorcycle enthusiasts. We eventually settled into a farmhouse in rural Texas, started operating a horse ranch and summer camp which I thought would be magical, but it turns out you can’t work for your classmates on Sunday then play tag with them at recess on Monday. Country music and curly hair were not cool in middle school, so I was three strikes and out on the social scene.

At home, an August: Osage County amount of family tumult was bubbling over, so I kept my focus on school and ended up writing a melodramatic little novel in between vocabulary tests. It was about a horse — of course — and a little girl who escaped their war-torn village and wander the desert in search of an oasis. I have no idea what that story could possibly symbolize. My mother must have picked up on the fact that I was becoming more reclusive and socially awkward by the hour, so she encouraged me to take up acting. I signed up for my school’s theater club, and that was it. For the next eleven years, theater had me in an absolute white-knuckle chokehold. I performed in every school play, and when I didn’t get the role I wanted, I wrote my own lines (petty or ingenious?). I joined a community theater where I discovered the cult of musical theater and late-night diner outings. My eighth-grade drama teacher, sensing my budding obsession, recommended that I apply for Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, a magnet school in the heart of Dallas. I got in, and a whirlwind four years later, I graduated with a focus in acting and playwriting as well as a scholarship to a university in New York City.

College was unimportant. I think I expected to be more put together by the time I was living on my own, more charming and better looking. I was, instead, terribly angry, bitter and broke. I had my father’s temper and none of his common sense. I couldn’t make enough money, my art the way I wanted, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that being alive really shouldn’t be so damn difficult. I fell in love quickly and easily with someone who was easy to love. Everything I wrote at that time can be traced back to him, as well as to my fear that I might mess it up. And I did. But we were young. Chances are it would’ve been messed up somehow, some way.

After graduation, I nabbed a job as a swanky production company with a Nespresso machine in the conference room. I started wearing silk blouses and hemmed trousers. I answered phones and developed a stellar customer service voice that even panicking agents couldn’t shake. My Texan accent was a fading memory; bye-bye horse girl, hello corporate America. I had been working at the front desk for about six months when I was let go with no explanation other than the front desk flowers were droopy, and that just wasn’t very becoming. I had never been fired before, and suddenly was standing on the New York sidewalk gripping my Conan O’Brien coffee mug and severance package with nothing on which to spend my time. I decided to risk it: Go freelance. My writing had improved leaps and bounds since graduation; my network was strong. Nothing was standing in my way from pursuing my real passion now.

Fateful last words. The COVID-19 pandemic swept across the world and New York City only weeks later. Suddenly I was unemployed in a studio apartment I could no longer afford. Someone I was seeing at the time started talking about moving back to his hometown, Buffalo. I’d visited once. It was cute enough, unimposing enough. Without any solid ties left in the city, I decided to move with him and we settled in Buffalo’s town center that summer. Desperate to get out of the house and contribute something — anything! — to the ailing world, I took a job at a skilled nursing facility half an hour away. I spent the next year caring for those most susceptible to the virus. It was heartbreaking and brutal, also a good lesson in laughing your way through agony. Eighty-year-old women have the mightiest pain tolerances on the planet. They are the reason we are the apex predator, make no mistake. All of that love and loss is mirrored in my writing.

I was a caring activity leader, but the medical environment aged me several decades. The smell of ammonium never became familiar or cozy, oddly enough. I wanted to get back to writing, so I applied for graduate school at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. It was a Hail Mary attempt, and Mary I got. I was accepted into the screen and television writing program and moved out to Los Angeles in the summer of 2021, a year and some change after being fired for droopy flowers.

That brings me to the last two years. Taxing comes to mind. So does growth. My boyfriend and I broke up, not amicably. I became gravely ill and collapsed into a coma in the fall of 2022 from undiagnosed type 1 diabetes (another gift from COVID). I was seriously injured in a hit-and-run. Through all of that immense difficulty, I’ve never stopped writing. It’s chronic, an affliction as much as it is a form of expression. It’s fun — God is it fun — but it’s become as necessary and natural as eating and taking a long walk. I’ve written something every day since I was fourteen. I have an awful lot to say about an awful lot, and life’s been weird, so the stories come as quickly and as easily as first love.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Well, I was hit by a car a couple of weeks ago. The driver hit me, going thirty miles an hour, and then fled the scene. I had a major pitching event that I could not miss a couple of days later, so I showed up road rash, lacerations, broken foot and all. That is a pretty solid representation of my journey through this industry. Sometimes it feels like a mischievous little alien has his hand on the joystick of my life and he’s saying, “Oh, you think pitching your work is tough? Try doing it through a black eye and concussion on the heels of a major union strike, bitch.” And then I do, and my friends and I find a way to laugh about it.

Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I’m a screen and television writer specializing in dark comedy and dysfunctional family stories. All of my scripts take place before 1990 because I don’t want cellphones making my characters’ lives easier. I’m drawn to salt-of-the-earth ensembles, lonely embittered people who do their best but, goshdarnit, they just can’t figure this contraption out. Imagine a cowboy in a crowded European museum. That’s what my writing, at least the bulk of it, feels like. My life experience sets me apart. Being Lindsey Beth Meyers was a weird and wonderful turn of luck. Or un-luck. Or both.

How do you define success?
Being able to do the thing you love as much as you want to do it and keeping your phone on silent. Immediacy is a hungry young person’s philosophy. I want to get to you when I get to you.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.lindseybethmeyers.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lindseybethmeyers/?hl=en
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lindseybethmeyers/ 

Image Credits
Kevin Wiesinger