Episode # 12 - Castaway: Eric Poulin

Eric Poulin was born in Lewiston, Maine.  He was afforded the privileges of being born to a comfortable -- if newly -- middle class and uncommonly loving and supportive family.  In many ways his childhood was idyllic: he grew up on a small town dead-end street in a nuclear family, with his best childhood friend living next door.  By the time middle school came around, a series of medical issues and repeated hospitalizations and surgeries that continued through high school began to broaden Eric's perspective and imbue him with a profound appreciation for the fragility of the human condition and the temporal nature of life.  The repeated failures of the institutions and authority figures in his life to effectively shepherd him through these crises also provided him with a deep skepticism, an abiding and pervasive sense of doubt when confronted by apparent certainty, and empathy for the struggle of survival everyone is engaged in, some more visibly than others.  This, in short, is largely how he became a bleeding heart liberal.

After high school, Eric initially eschewed the prosaic trappings of the collegiate life in favor of what he hoped would be the more bohemian, transient, excessively beer-drinking ways of his idol, Jack Kerouac.  Writing had always been important to Eric, but like so many before him, when he found the Beats, and Kerouac in particular, he found a style filled with vigor and exhilaration that spoke to that fleeting nature of life and man’s fallibility that he’d discovered at a young age.  What’s more, the reason Kerouac resonated so much with Eric wasn’t only the acknowledgment of our flaws, or the feigned bravado and occasional machismo that came in response, it was the duality and coexistence of both, and moreover, the celebration of the entire mess of it!  In Kerouac, Eric found a supremely sensitive soul, one who’d clearly experienced great pain, loss and trauma in his life, and used that pain to drive him to great heights of thoroughly un-self-conscious compassion, love and empathy.  …And, of course, was an occasional jerk.  Nevertheless, Jack Kerouac was and remains an inspiration to Eric, who likes to think himself capable of moments of great compassion, but in all likelihood is also occasionally a prick. 

Along with writing, music always factored prominently in Eric’s life.  And ultimately, music is what brought Eric back to school after a year and half off of directionless drinking, loafing and many wretched attempts at poetry and prose writing.  Having grown up with musician parents and surrounded by music from a very early age, Eric found his instrument in middle school when he began playing the drums.  He briefly returned to college to study jazz performance at the Berklee College of Music in Boston and then the University of Maine at Augusta, but decided music was not his calling and switched his major to the more writing focused Media Studies, where he could develop his growing interest in play and screenwriting.  Upon graduation, Eric pursued this interest to Chicago where he co-founded The Broken Compass theatre company with a group of talented actor/writer friends of his from the University of Chicago.   He co-wrote and produced The Broken Compass’ critically acclaimed debut production, The Bloody Romantic, a contemporized homage of sorts to the Screwball Comedy, one of Eric’s favorite film genres. 

Eric briefly parlayed this success into a few minimally successful ventures into screenwriting, including some noteworthy placements in a couple international competitions, but frustrated by the inability to make much headway in the field, Eric’s focus has shifted to politics and business over the past few years.  The core driving force behind his impetus to write, or play music, or to create, the reason he values art so highly in general is its ability to communicate something of the struggles and joys of life in a way that transcends more common modes of communication, and in-so-doing hopefully alleviate some of the existential isolation and anxiety that accompanies those struggles and joys.  That same recognition of people’s struggles, or everyone’s “hard battle” as Plato put it, and the oft-ignored need for kindness in the face of such difficulty, is what now draws him to the world of politics.  Volunteering for the League of Young Voters’ Elections Committee, he hopes to play a part in holding politicians somewhat accountable and helping to voice the concerns of average citizens in a way that might inch us back toward the semblance of a legitimately representative democracy, rather than one so disproportionately beholden to moneyed and corporate interests, and one that actively works to relieve people’s considerable burdens as they labor to achieve happiness or contentment through family and work and art and community.