People fall into careers for a variety of reasons: convenience, the desire to work within a particular field or motivating factors related to the field. What’s less common is to find your way into a career and really feel as though it is what you are meant to be doing. Writer Jeffrey Overstreet is one of those lucky ones whose desire and passion allowed him to establish a career within the field he always knew was meant for him.
Today, Overstreet’s name is ever growing as a movie reviewer, fantasy author and contributing editor for a magazine at Seattle Pacific University. Growing up, though, Overstreet was just a kid writing to express his own creative side.
“When I started writing, I’d rewrite fairy tales in my own way,” Overstreet said. “Eventually, I started writing my own stories and reached the point where I needed to create something to feel it’d been a full day.”
The young writer found meaning in the creative processes of movies, but his background wasn’t always encouraging of it.
“[I] came from a conservative Christian background that frowned on secular art,” he said.
This spurred him to begin writing critically, as a way to defend the meaning he saw in secular art. The decision to develop his critical writing would ultimately serve to set Overstreet on his path toward becoming the writer he is today.
Overstreet credits one of his high school teachers with inspiring him to pursue a career in writing.
“He told me it’s rare that someone can write critically about art and create art—and do both successfully,” Overstreet said. Since then, he’s taken to heart the fact that he could do both.
Overstreet is no longer a kid just writing about the movies he sees, but is instead a recognized movie reviewer writing for his own site (http://lookingcloser.com), a Christian film site (www.ChristianityTodayMovies.com) and two weekly reviews for Image Journal. While there are countless movie reviewers, Overstreet stands out from the rest thanks to the approach he takes with his reviews. In his movie viewing, Overstreet watches attentively for the symbolism and spiritual questions addressed in the film.
However, Overstreet doesn’t consider himself to be looking for particularly religious themes.
“There are people who try to start with a religious theme and it ends up feeling like propaganda,” Overstreet said.
Instead, Overstreet seeks to uncover the artist’s creative process, and finds things the artist may not have even realized he/she was revealing.
“If an artist is trying to find something true, that’s definitely a spiritual experience,” Overstreet said.
Thanks to his movie reviews, Overstreet has made his way into the area of writing in which he feels most comfortable: the creative side. Overstreet has had two fantasy novels published, and a third in the series is set to come out later this month. According to the author, he was able to get the ball rolling with his novels after one of his reviews gained notice, and he was asked about other writing he had done. When asked about his own creative process, it’s clear that the spiritual and deeper questions of life are as important to Overstreet in his own work as they are in the work he reviews.
“Art takes us out of that already combustible context in which we live … and gives us a safe place to sit down and discuss issues non-confrontationally,” Overstreet said.       Consequently, Overstreet strives to make his stories thought provoking, but is adamant about never letting it seem like he is trying too hard to make a point. Instead, he prefers to write through the eyes of his characters, focusing on what those characters might do in a given situation.
There’s no question that the man is passionate about what he does.
“I love sharing stories … At times it feels like I’m in various stages of imbalance,” Overstreet said. “But the rewards of the relationships I’ve developed working as a writer are far more precious than any royalty checks.”
Overstreet can be found on Twitter and Facebook. He says that he’s “really enjoying conversations with readers,” and invites fans to track him down.