Lessons from Dolly Parton and Robert Rodriguez

When I think of Dolly Parton, who left us this week, I think of the day she knelt on my office floor. I was an executive at Paramount. Dolly came in with her manager, Sandy Gallin, to pitch a movie they wanted to produce. I had never met her. She was so petite! No more than five feet tall, and a high topping of blonde. Her waist seemed about the diameter of a pencil. She caught me looking and beat me to the punch: “I know, I know. I look like Barbie. It’s just too much, I know.” I couldn’t help but be charmed by her self-effacement.

Dolly wanted me to hear a song she had written for the movie. I fiddled with the cassette player and got nowhere. “Oh, those cassettes can be fussy,” she said. She kicked off her heels, walked barefoot across the office carpet, knelt in front of the machine, and instantly made it sing. The contraption had refused the standing, suited executive and surrendered to the kneeling woman. With a smile, Dolly patted the floor so I would join her. I did. Like kids around a campfire, we sat through the whole song, she sang along with herself, all joy and play. I do not recall what became of the song or the project. Some called Dolly an angel. I remember her barefoot, on her knees, lit from someplace else.

I think, too, of a young Robert Rodriguez, twenty-three years old, six feet two, fresh off the first airplane ride of his life. Paramount flew him in from Texas because we wanted an overall deal with him. He had just made a brilliant little film called El Mariachi (later remade as Desperado) for seven thousand dollars, money he famously raised by selling his blood.

When he spotted the video deck in my office, Rodriguez hit the floor, too. He opened his saddle bag and played me tapes of his nine little brothers and sisters in funny situations. He called these little snippets “Bedhead.” Again, he asked me to join him on the floor. I did. He told me how his family of twelve, poor as could be, would pile into one hotel room at a Howard Johnson’s for an overnight vacation. The pool and the slide were free all day, and to the ten kids that was heaven. Now the studio had given him a room of his own. Just him! He couldn’t believe how much space he had! He could not stop smiling.

The love for film and the love for his family filled the room. Like Dolly, Robert pushed my buttons. He later wrote in his memoir, Rebel Without a Crew: “conceivably I could develop the script for Bedhead with Kirkpatrick.” In the end he made his deal with another studio. Somehow that never mattered.

Twice in my career, two of the most gifted people on the planet got down on their knees on the office floor. Both times, the floor felt like the best seat in the house. There was a holiness to the two of them. They were a wealth of feeling. They could take you by the hand and pull you down into exultation before the modern altar which played-back human voice and human motion. Maya Angelou loved to say that people will forget what you said and forget what you did, but they will never forget how you made them feel. She was right. The song is gone. The deals went elsewhere. The Bedheads grew up to become Spy Kids. But, the feeling stayed through the decades.

It strikes me that the real ones know their gifts were given, not earned. There is no vanity in them. Bowing comes naturally. Carl Jung tells the story best, in Man and His Symbols: “Christians often ask why God does not speak to them, as he is believed to have done in former days. When I hear such questions, it always makes me think of the rabbi who was asked how it could be that God often showed himself to people in the olden days whereas nowadays nobody ever sees him. The rabbi replied: ‘Nowadays there is no longer anybody who can bow low enough.’”

Dolly could bow low enough. Five feet tall, barefoot, down on her knees, and closer to heaven than anyone in the whole studio that day.

Please note: I am reprinting this press release from Julie Gammack’s Substack column

Former Paramount Pictures President and Disney Production Chief David Kirkpatrick to Headline 2026 Okoboji Writers’ & Songwriters’ Retreat

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SPIRIT LAKE, Iowa — For the first time in its history, the Okoboji Writers’ & Songwriters’ Retreat will welcome a former president of a major Hollywood studio to its faculty.

David Paul Kirkpatrick, former President of Paramount Pictures Motion Picture Group, former Production Chief of Walt Disney Studios, and founder of the internationally respected Story Summit, will join the faculty of the sixth annual Okoboji Writers’ & Songwriters’ Retreat, September 27–30, at Lakeside Laboratory on the shores of West Okoboji Lake.

Kirkpatrick’s Hollywood career spans more than four decades and includes leadership of some of the film industry’s most celebrated productions and franchises. During his tenure, he oversaw or helped shepherd more than 200 motion pictures, including Top Gun, Indiana Jones, Star Trek, Beverly Hills Cop, Witness, The Little Mermaid, Dead Poets Society, and Pretty Woman. He is widely recognized as one of Hollywood’s most influential champions of story and creative talent.

Today, Kirkpatrick is the founder of Story Summit, a global storytelling organization that brings together bestselling authors, Academy Award-winning filmmakers, screenwriters, producers, literary agents, publishers, and emerging creatives from around the world. Through Story Summit, he has become a sought-after mentor whose mission is to help storytellers create work that is not only commercially successful but also meaningful and transformative.

“David’s career is extraordinary, but what excites me most is who he is today,” said Julie Gammack, founder of the Okoboji Writers’ & Songwriters’ Retreat. “He has dedicated his life to helping writers, filmmakers, and artists discover the deeper purpose of their stories. That commitment to lifting others is exactly what the Okoboji retreat is all about.”

Kirkpatrick will present keynote sessions on cinematic storytelling, story development, creativity, and the business of entertainment. Throughout the retreat, participants will also have opportunities to engage with him in workshops, conversations, and informal gatherings designed to encourage collaboration and lasting creative relationships.

Now entering its sixth year, the Okoboji Writers’ & Songwriters’ Retreat has earned a national reputation for bringing together accomplished professionals and emerging creators in an intimate, collaborative setting. Writers, songwriters, filmmakers, journalists, podcasters, and artists travel from across the country to participate in workshops, receive personal mentoring, and build relationships that often lead to publishing contracts, film projects, musical collaborations, and lifelong friendships.

Kirkpatrick joins one of the retreat’s strongest faculties to date, alongside nationally recognized authors, literary agents, journalists, musicians, memoirists, filmmakers, and publishing professionals.

Registration remains open, with attendees already registered from numerous states across the country.

About David Paul Kirkpatrick

David Paul Kirkpatrick is the founder of Story Summit and a former President of Paramount Pictures Motion Picture Group. Earlier in his career, he served as Production Chief for Walt Disney Studios, overseeing both Walt Disney Pictures and Touchstone Pictures. His Hollywood career includes executive leadership on more than 200 feature films and decades of mentoring storytellers around the world through Story Summit’s conferences, workshops, and educational initiatives.

About the Okoboji Writers’ & Songwriters’ Retreat

Founded by journalist and author Julie Gammack, the Okoboji Writers’ & Songwriters’ Retreat is an immersive four-day gathering that brings nationally recognized authors, literary agents, filmmakers, journalists, musicians, and creative professionals together with writers and artists from across the United States. The retreat is built on the belief that courage is contagious, stories change lives, and meaningful relationships are among the most valuable outcomes of any creative endeavor.

About Story Summit

Story Summit is a year-round writing school and creative community for writers of fiction, screenplays, television, memoir, and nonfiction. Its digital and onsite classes are taught live — not by academics — but by working professionals: writers, producers, editors, showrunners, and publishing experts who are actively engaged in the fields they teach.

Story Summit’s speakers and instructors have included award-winning storytellers whose work has been recognized with Pulitzer Prizes, Emmy Awards, Academy Awards, and other major honors.

At its heart, Story Summit helps writers build craft, confidence, community, and a sustainable creative life.

Media Contact:

Julie Gammack
Founder, Okoboji Writers’ & Songwriters’ Retreat

Email: juliegammack@mac.com
Phone: 443–223–0865
Website: https://okobojiwritersretreat.com

No one’s talking about this, but Russia is in serious trouble

Putin’s Victory Day parade last month was the shortest in modern history — 45 minutes, no tanks, no missiles, no military vehicles for the first time in nearly two decades. Russia’s official explanation? Ukrainian drones have grown so capable they can’t safely display hardware in their own capital. It’s a symbolic admission of how utterly defenceless they are.

The toll of the war against Ukraine is staggering. Since February 2022, Russia has suffered nearly 1.2 MILLION BATTLEFIELD CASUALTIES — killed, wounded, and captured. In 2025 alone: roughly 415,000. That’s 35,000 casualties a month and accelerating.

The money tells the same story. Russia is spending an enormous $2.7 BILLION PER WEEK on this war. Military and security NOW CONSUME 40% OF THEIR ENTIRE NATIONAL BUDGET — up from 24% in 2021. THEY ARE BURNING DOWN THEIR COUNTRY.

The real question: if Russia is this hollowed out, what does American deference to Putin say about us? Trump’s bow is its own symbolic admission — not of Russia’s strength, but of our own leadership’s weakness and doddering confusion.

Tomorrow night, Trump celebrates his 80th birthday with cage fights on the White House lawn. Russia is burning. We’re throwing a party for the man who genuflects to another man standing at attention to an empty parade.

My prayer for our 250th celebration is that we Americans wake up from this nightmarish mesmeria — and remember who we are.

SOURCES:

1. SIPRI (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute) — “A Budget for a Fifth Year of War: Military Spending in Russia’s Budget for 2026” (2026)

2. CSIS (Center for Strategic and International Studies) — “Russia’s Grinding War in Ukraine” — casualty and battlefield loss analysis (2025)

Everyone should have one

I started training for my 100,000 steps this week. Day 1 was Wednesday. So far, so good. As you can see from my iphone data (through the heart chart): my lax steps got a real boost when I started on Wednesday. I have pledged from now to the big day, I will walk at least 10,000 steps.

BUT Today is a push day: 20,000 steps.
In May, I’ll stretch to 40,000.
By early June, 60,000.

Push days build endurance — and, just as importantly, reteach the body how to recover… especially as I’m about to turn 75.

I’m not only training for 100,000 steps.
I’m training to arrive on the big day without breaking. Here are my Push Day results:

And one more thing — this week, someone sent me a portable watercolor set. So today, somewhere along those 20,000 steps, I’ll stop and paint again.

A doctor once told me, “You can live a very long time without getting old.” I’m not resisting time — I’m learning how to meet it differently.

UPDATE: Having successfully finished my first “push,” I came to a realization. It’s not the hard days that wear us down. It’s the easy ones we repeat without thinking. Habit becomes comfort. Comfort becomes quiet stagnation.

Push Day breaks the spell. And suddenly — vitality.

I’m Walking 100000 Steps in 1 Day on my 75th Birthday.

Because the real danger isn’t aging. It’s the story you’re already done.

Today, I begin 75 days of training for my 75th birthday challenge: 100,000 steps in a single day.

The plan is simple. The body may disagree. LOL.

I’ll be walking at least 10,000 steps a day, building up to 20,000 this Saturday, April 18, 40,000 on May 16, 75,000 on June 13, and finally 100,000 steps on June 29. By then, I’m hoping recovery is measured in hours… not days.

We shall see.

This isn’t my first time attempting something like this. Nine years ago, I completed a 100,000-step day and wrote about it afterward. What I didn’t realize then was that the walk itself was only half the story.

How to Walk 100,000 Steps in One Day

The other half was what it revealed.

In that earlier article, I wrote:

“I have seen it happen again and again. The weight of fear and potential illness topples people before their time. As they focus their energies on fearing old age, they become old through their own dreadful prophecy.”

That still feels true to me. Perhaps even more so now. BTW, that quote was highlit by 40 other Medium readers. You can check it out here:

How to Walk 100,000 Steps in One Day

We live in a culture that trains us, almost gently, to expect decline. To brace for it. To talk about it. To measure it. To prepare for the narrowing of life rather than its expansion.

And over time, something subtle happens.

We begin to live as if that future has already arrived.

This walk, for me, is not really about steps. It’s about resisting that quiet agreement.

It’s about asking a different question: What if vitality is, in part, a decision?

Not a denial of reality. Not a rejection of the body’s limits. But a refusal to surrender to them before their time.

I don’t say that lightly. The body keeps its own counsel. There are mornings when it speaks clearly, and not always kindly. There are aches that were not there before. Recovery takes longer. Sleep matters more. Stretching is no longer optional.

But there is also something else. There is a kind of aliveness that comes from choosing to engage anyway. From saying, “Not yet.”

So over the next 75 days, I’ll be training. Walking daily. Building endurance. Paying attention to what I eat, how I stretch, how I recover. I’ll be following a 90% plant-based diet, tracking my weight, and sharing weekly updates here on Medium for anyone who might want to follow along.

For my fellow silver panthers out there. Yes, we’re still in the wild.

And here’s the other truth.

I’m not doing this because I’m certain I can. I’m doing it because the attempt itself matters.

There’s something clarifying about setting a goal that your body may not fully agree with. It forces a conversation. It asks you to listen more closely. To adjust. To persist. To respect the limits without becoming defined by them.

Nine years ago, I crossed the 100,000-step mark. This time, I’ll find out who I am at 75.

And just to keep myself honest, I’m planning to do it again at 80.

Either way, the question remains. How far are we willing to go before we decide we’re done?

If you would like to contribute to the walk, you can do so here.

“Story Summit is proud to welcome four extraordinary memoirists to our Beginning Memoir Workshop: Shaping Your Life Into Story,” says Debra Engle, executive director of Story Summit and #1 bestselling author. “Each of these writers brings not only a powerful body of work, but a deep understanding of what it means to shape lived experience into story.” Bestselling author, Debra Engle, will also be facilitating the workshop.

The Beginning Memoir Workshop: Shaping Your Life Into Story begins Tuesday, March 31. You can learn more here.

In this six-month intensive, you’ll learn the essential structure of memoir while developing your own work within a supportive, encouraging community. Whether you’re just beginning or already underway, this course will help you discover the heart of your story and shape it into a compelling narrative.

Here are the four guest memoirists joining the workshop:

Jocelyn Jones is the author of Artist: Awakening the Spirit Within, a visionary memoir that blends personal storytelling with a practical path toward creative and spiritual awakening.

A lifelong artist raised in a vibrant creative community along the Hudson River, Jones grew up surrounded by actors, writers, and painters — an upbringing that shaped her deep understanding of the artistic psyche and the inner life required to sustain it.

Over the past three decades, she has become a renowned acting teacher and creative mentor, guiding everyone from emerging artists to established performers toward greater authenticity, confidence, and creative freedom.

In Artist, Jones turns inward, offering a hybrid memoir and guidebook that explores her own journey through isolation, self-discovery, and ultimately, connection to what she calls the “Artist within” — a deeper intelligence capable of shaping both art and life. The book has been praised as “a visionary hybrid of memoir and self-help” and a “practical and uplifting guide to living a creative life.”

Her work speaks to writers, performers, and seekers alike — anyone called to create not just from skill, but from soul.

Ryan Benz is the author of Wander: A Memoir of Letting Go and Walking 2,000 Miles to a Meaningful Life, a deeply personal account of transformation, presence, and the courage to step away from a life that no longer feels true.

After building a successful, outwardly enviable life, Benz found himself facing burnout, anxiety, and a growing sense of disconnection — an inner fracture that ultimately led him to leave it all behind and walk the length of the Appalachian Trail.

In Wander, he chronicles that 2,000-mile journey not as an escape, but as a return — to clarity, to purpose, and to the quieter truths that emerge when distraction falls away. Told with honesty, humour, and hard-won insight, the memoir blends adventure with introspection, offering readers a path toward living a life that feels meaningful rather than merely impressive.

Now a speaker and guide for those navigating their own turning points, Benz writes for anyone standing at the edge of change — reminding us that sometimes the only way forward is to walk through your past, and begin fresh.

Meredith May is the author of The Honey Bus: A Memoir of Loss, Courage and a Girl Saved by Bees, an international bestselling memoir that transforms a difficult childhood into a luminous story of healing through nature.

A former award-winning journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle, May spent more than a decade reporting on the human condition — work that earned her numerous honours, including the PEN USA Literary Award for Journalism and a Pulitzer Prize shortlist.

In The Honey Bus, she turns her lens inward, recounting how her grandfather — a beekeeper in Big Sur — became her unexpected guide through chaos, teaching her life’s deepest lessons through the intricate, ordered world of honeybees. The memoir weaves together personal narrative, natural science, and quiet wisdom, revealing how even in the midst of hardship, there are systems of care and meaning waiting to be discovered.

A fifth-generation beekeeper herself, May brings a rare authority to her storytelling — writing not only from memory, but from lived practice. Her work speaks to writers and seekers alike, offering a reminder that the path to understanding often lies not in escape, but in paying closer attention to the life already around us.

Reyna Grande is the author of The Distance Between Us, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist memoir that has become a defining work of contemporary American writing — giving voice to the emotional realities of immigration, family separation, and the search for belonging.

An American Book Award–winning author, Grande writes from lived experience, transforming memory into narrative with clarity, restraint, and deep emotional power. In The Distance Between Us, she renders the story of a childhood shaped by distance — not only between countries, but between parents and children, language and identity, longing and survival.

Her work moves beyond the political into the profoundly human, illuminating what it means to come of age between worlds — and what it takes to claim a voice of one’s own within that divide.

Grande writes for those who have known separation in any form, reminding us that memoir is not only an act of remembrance, but an act of reclamation.

Every life holds a story worth shaping.

If now feels like the moment to begin, we invite you to step forward and join us for the Beginning Memoir Workshop: Shaping Your Life Into Story. The workshop has limited participation so please make sure you sign up now. There are also payment plans.

Reserve your place today.

Anthropic has drawn a line in the sand, declining to provide expanded access to its AI systems for autonomous weapons control under the administration of Donald Trump. That is not a small thing. History will not remember who built the fastest model. It will remember who refused to hand machines the authority to decide who lives and who dies.

Autonomous weapons remove human conscience from the battlefield. They compress moral weight into code. They elevate efficiency above discernment. And in a time when political leadership across our institutions feels increasingly volatile, placing lethal autonomy into code would only amplify that volatility. Restraint, in this moment, is wisdom.

Those of us who are elders remember something. We read Animal Farm and 1984 in grade school for a reason. We were taught early that power untethered from conscience drifts toward control. That language can be manipulated. That technology, in the wrong hands, can outpace wisdom. We were not given those stories as entertainment. We were being prepared. We were born for times like these.

I have particular respect for Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, the creator of Claude. In just a few short years, Amodei has helped build Anthropic from zero into one of the most significant AI companies in the world — reportedly valued in the tens of billions.

That kind of growth is impressive, BUT choosing restraint at the frontier of power is far rarer. Anthropic’s stance reminds us of something simple and essential: Just because something can be built does not mean it should be deployed. The future will not be shaped by speed alone.
It will be shaped by those willing to draw a line. And sometimes the most heroic act in technology is this:

To say no.

As the Celtic elders by the hearth might have spoken:
May old wisdom walk beside new inventions.
May iron never outrun the spirit, nor code forget the conscience from which it came. And may we stand in these times as we were meant to — keepers of the flame, guardians of the eternal soul.

The French Revolution wasn’t born from constant misery. It emerged from a rising ideal of dignity. The Renaissance didn’t come from obsessing over the plague. It came from a renewed vision of what it meant to be human.

Every true turning in history begins this way. Not with fixation on the collapse, but with attention turning toward what has life.

We are living inside one of those moments now.

An old order — built on separation, control, and unbridled appetite — is revealing itself daily. The news will keep showing you its unraveling. That doesn’t mean it deserves your devotion.

What’s being asked of us instead is trust. Trust in the love that binds us, and in the quiet intelligence of life itself. Choose music that lifts you. Art that reminds you who you are.
Conversations that feel awake, alive. Stay with the elevated.

This is not denial. It’s participation in a deeper shift, one in which the old ways fall apart of their own weight. Stay clear of the spectacle. Stay elevated.

Call them angels, guides, ancestors, or simply love carried forward through time. Those who came before us are not gone. They are among us now, steadying the ground as something new takes shape.

History has always turned toward those who knew when to look up and see the dignity and beauty of humankind. Some traditions call this February the “Month of Miracles.” The coming days may feel fast and intense, but for those who seek higher ground, it is already beneath your feet. Let what no longer serves fall away.

Here are two videos worth watching regarding this cosmic shift occurring in the last two weeks of February, 2026: