Jeremy Chase interviews Tim Young, creator of Flash Meridian and local Grand Marais artist.

Q: I think a good place to start would be, where did you come up with the idea for Flash Meridian?

A: I was born on July 20th, which, in 1969 was the day the first man walked on the moon. I remember that summer really distinctly, and I have a cousin who is a few hours older than me, and I was staying with them that summer because my parents were overseas. We were really into the whole space thing, and went to car dealerships and got maps of the moon and the solar system, and my cousin and I decided we wanted to be missionaries to Pluto. So we started taking really cold baths at night to acclimate ourselves.

Q: Wow, it sounds like you’ve been into the space thing for a really long time.

A: Yeah. But I think the thing that really spurred this was that there is a woman who comes up from the Cities a couple times a year named Kris Sorensen, who is a video mentor. She taught me about video and also how to use Photoshop. The first picture I ever did was me flying through space. I was wearing just a suit and tie, and I had these rocket shoes on. That was really the first thing, and I started playing with that space boy character until he finally got a name, Flash Meridian.

Q: Great, so that’s where it started.

A: Yep.

Q: What inspires the story line for it?

A: Well, I guess when we introduce a new character, a person comes in and we decide on a name, and they just start doing something. When we added Sarah, we just needed someone to rescue these guys and she ended up being a space girl who goes to a space school. That opens another huge can of worms, but we didn’t worry about that. When I’m writing the episodes, though, I go back and I look at what they did last, and then in my mind, I watch them do things. Like what would Gravity do in this situation. What would P. J. Raygun do? It’s like when you get to know a person, you can guess what is in character for that person. That’s how I see it. Letting the characters act the way they would act, and see what happens. You also want to keep the story open. You want Gravity to be able to keep doing things as Gravity, so she needs to be pretty well defined. To have Sarah Vaughn playing two characters who are identical twins, Crystal and Gravity would act very differently in almost any situation. Even though it’s the same person writing them and the same person portraying them, they act very differently. They have distinct personalities, which are represented by their names, even.

Q: Yeah, that’s true. You’ve really gotten a lot of press coverage.

A: Yeah, I like that.

Q: Tell us how you feel about that.

A: I think that when the media gets behind you and deems your product worthy of reporting on, it gives me credibility… to know that what I am doing is interesting to somebody other than me. It feels really good. More people get to see it.

Q: Would you say it builds your confidence?

A: It definitely builds my confidence. I can go to other people and present it, or send out press releases, and show them what other people have said about it. It keeps me going. If I didn’t have an outlet for this stuff, it wouldn’t be very interesting.

The first newspaper article was done by the Cook County Star here in Grand Marais, which is a small paper, but after that, the Duluth News Tribune did a huge spread. Right before that, I had decided to end the story… you know, tie up all the characters and write epilogues for them.

Q: Really?

A: And then I got the call from the Tribune and they wanted to do the story, so I thought, OK, I’ve got to write another episode and keep it going, and get everyone motivated to get into their space clothes again and go tromping around town. Then for quite a while there wasn’t any more press other than a couple things in local press, and I had decided once again to end it and move on to my next project. Then I got a call from Jason Davis from ABC TV down in Minneapolis, and he wanted to do a story on Flash Meridian.

Q: So in a way the media helped to keep it alive.

A: Right, it has perpetuated the story.

Q: You’ve put out a lot of CDs. You’ve got all your episodes put out, and you’ve got a CD Rom and a fan club CD. So you’ve got an additional creative outlet.

A: Well, I see them as all the same thing. If you go to the website and read the episodes, the text on the website is the narration that is on the CD, so they are really one and the same. The difference is that on the internet you see the pictures, and on the audio CD, you hear the music. I think both of them leave your interpretation very open. It’s not like a movie where everything is spelled out for you. It’s more like comic book frames where you have this still image, and then a static image of something else, and your mind has to fill in everything else that happens. The audio CDs were just an natural progression from the writing. Because I enjoy working on the computer, I made most of the sound effects that you hear on the CD with my voice. The music was all locally produced… local musicians that I recorded, so the whole thing is original work all the way around. I take all the digital pictures and manipulate them in Photoshop. The CD Rom is basically the website on the disc, where you can view it all without an internet connection.

Q: Then you can put the CD in and listen to the music while you’re looking at the photos.

A: Right. All the audio is in mp3 format. In the mp3 format, you can fit over ten hours of audio on one CD, so we have room for all of the instrumental soundtrack, all the bonus tracks, all the narration, all the pictures, and a lot of the other related pages on the site, too.

Q: Sounds like CD ROM is the way to go.

A: Yes, well, I work on Macintosh computers, and this is my first attempt at a CD ROM, so I hope it works for everyone. I know it works on Mac, and technically it should work on PCs as well since it’s all JPEGs, html and mp3 which are all universally readable.

Q: The town has always known you as an artist. In fact they’ve known you as a bit of an eccentric artist. I think they are very entertained by you, and I think they treat you now as kind of a town mascot.

A: That’s better, I guess, than the jester. The town clown. I was kind of the class clown in High School, and now I’m the adult version of that.

Q: How do you feel, walking down the street and having people call you Flash Meridian?

A: A lot of people do that, or I’ll get out of my car and people will yell things like “Hey Spaceboy!” I just wave. I think it feels good because people know what I’m doing. They’re aware of it, whether they like it or not. Most of what I’m doing is not obtrusive. If you don’t like it, you just don’t see it, unless of course I’m wearing my silver space suit it public. You get the odd look every once in a while.

Q: How would you say this whole project has gotten so lifted off the ground? It’s gotten pretty big and pretty out there for such a spur of the moment and unusual creation.

A: It’s kind of like a birth in a way. One day you’re pregnant, and the next day you have a baby.

Q: Hopefully not that fast.

A: No, you know, there are a lot of things that lead up to the launch of a project, and it was something that I had thought a lot about.

Q: Looking at the show, your whole family, including your wife’s father, is involved in the show.

A: It’s true. An artist uses whatever tools he has at his disposal, so your immediate family becomes a really good pool of models, but not only that. When you think about a futuristic astronaut, it sounds like just pure fantasy. Actually, there is another level to the story, which is autobiographical. When you look at the story of Holly Gram who is played by my wife, she is Flash Meridian’s guardian angel, and that is really how I see my wife in a real sense. In a spiritual sense or in a real life sense. My step-daughter who is a senior in high school plays a student in a space school who is always ready for an adventure. That’s not too far off from Heather.

Q: Kind of ready to bust out of her shell if I recall.

A: Uh oh. My step-son who is going to college for computer programming plays a space traffic controller at NASA in the future, so that’s not far off from him either. And then my four year old daughter plays a very powerful little being who is not really well defined at this point in the story except that her episode, 34, came out just before Christmas, and she plays kind of a ghost of Christmas past character with P. J. Raygun. My father in law, as you mentioned, recorded the narration for the introduction on the Volume 2 CD. We all get involved. It’s basically all friends and family.

Most of the teenagers in this are people I’ve known most of their lives or that I’ve worked with in other areas. Most are musicians. Paul Ramey, who plays P. J. Raygun, is in a band called The Everlasting First. Rain Elfvin has been in a variety of bands, and he recorded all the songs that I wrote. The three original members of Vanguard are all in the story. My wife is a singer, and Sarah came into the whole thing because of Vanguard. The only person that really wasn’t cast by me in the story was Joy Saethre, who is a friend of mine in town, and we’ve worked a lot together through the Playhouse. She actually bought the character at a silent auction that was a Playhouse fundraiser, so that’s how that happened.

Speaking of which, Flash Meridian is more than just the story and the internet thing, but I do a lot of educational programs, I’ve been in a lot of classrooms doing space things and other art projects. I’ve gone to the library and done reading programs for preschoolers and elementary age kids in the summer. We also get involved in local parades and fundraisers. Wherever we seem to find a way to fit Flash Meridian in.

Q: It’s a good way to give back to the community.

A: Right. It’s fun. We serve a purpose with kids and with adults. It’s an entertaining thing.

Q: What is your favorite part of working on an episode?

A: I think my favorite part of putting an episode together is editing the pictures. It’s really hard to say, though, because I like all the aspects of it. I have this big red notebook that I carry around with me and write the episodes in. I really like that. I like the portability of it. I’ve written in the car, I’ve written on airplanes, I wrote in the hospital while my daughter was having surgery. I talked about the sterile surroundings of Flash’s spaceship while I was sitting in a hospital waiting room. And one night, we were at a Low concert in Duluth, and when I read the part that I wrote there, it takes me back to that concert, so I do like the writing, and I like the photography, because it’s always fun dressing up or having other people dress up and do all these odd poses. Especially Paul Ramey. I guess you could say he’s hyperactive. We photographed here in my office and he was jumping off couches and leaping all around the room. He’s very active, and his character is, too.

Editing the photographs is really fun because you take the raw picture and you can make it into something really surreal. Putting people into situations or surroundings that they’ve never been in. What the bodies look like in outer space is probably really different than what they would actually look like. For one thing, they’re not wearing space suits. A lot of them are just out there with skin exposed.

Q: Or they just have a visor down on their helmet.

A: Yeah, right. You can do it if you put the visor down.

Q: Like you always say about the technical problems, “suspend your disbelief.”

A: I have this car that serves as Flash Meridian’s spaceship. It’s a 1962 Chrysler station wagon. I call it the Trans-Neptunian Interloper. I had started putting my cars into space before I started Flash Meridian. Somebody once emailed me and said “how can you fly your car in space? You can’t do that.” And I said “well, on the older cars, you want to make sure your window seals are good, roll your window all the way up and turn the air on.”

Q: I remember you saying how your childhood had effected some of the episodes.

A: Yeah, that really came from the personal journey that I’ve been on in my life and turning forty this past summer was a real milestone for me, because I’ve always felt like a kid. Even at an adult age, I didn’t really think of myself as an adult, even though obviously, I am. Now that I’m forty years old, I’ve become more confident in making my own decisions about my own belief system, which at times is not far off from what I grew up with, but sometimes it is. I think it’s casting off the worry about expectation of what people think I should do or be, and trusting myself just to be confident with who I feel that I am for myself. I think I spent most of my childhood and my early adult life trying really hard to read everybody’s mind, and say what I thought they wanted to hear rather than what I really felt, which really didn’t do much of a service for me. Now I think I speak my mind more. I’m more confident with saying “I don’t feel that way.” And pay more attention to what I need and what I really feel.

I’m a unique person on this planet, as we all are, and I should follow my heart. I like to tell kids this especially, because I didn’t get a lot of those messages to believe in yourself. So I like to tell kids, there’s never been anyone like you, there never will be again, you’re unique in the entire scheme of our planet, or the universe, so don’t let anyone tell you what you can or can’t do. If you have it in your heart to do it, DO IT! I don’t really feel like I have much of an option, I feel compelled to do certain things, even if society tells me “who do you think you are to do that?”

Q: I’ve been pretty close to you through this whole process, and I’ve noticed a change in you since before you started Flash Meridian. Would you credit that to your self-discovery? It’s mostly about confidence.

A: That’s what I would say. That I feel much more confident. I can look back to any point in my life, for example, I just got an email from one of my friends in high school. I have kids now that are older than I was when I knew him. So I look back to him and say “Wow, I’m a completely different person than I was when I knew you.” In a sense, I am. I can look at any point in my life and say I’m completely different than I was when I got married. I’m coming up on my eleventh anniversary now. But then, in another sense, I can look back to much earlier childhood and say I haven’t really changed very much.

Q: Yeah, it’s true. It’s funny how that happens.

A: It is. It’s very strange. You just spend a lot of time on the planet, and things happen.

Q: Boy, that sounds like a real zen philosophy to me. If you had one message you would want to give to people, what would you want to say?

A: Do what you dream. Don’t sit back and wish you could do something. If there is something you really want, make it happen. Nobody else knows your heart the way you know your own heart, and what you really desire in life, so nobody else can meet those needs. You’re the only person who has the ability to do that. Everyone else is trying to make their own path, no one can make your path for you. It’s really a shame, I think, if you allow someone to dictate that. You can’t really tell someone to be confident. I mean, you can tell them, but it really doesn’t work that way.

Q: You’re going to have to get that for yourself.

A: I would like to have that kind of childhood confidence where I just never even consider the fact that someone might be criticizing me. Be oblivious to it.