Today we’d like to introduce you to Heather Jacks.
Hi Heather, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
I just turned 60, which is a milestone birthday. People might be thinking about retirement or bucket life items, but me? I’m making my first movie from a script I wrote: One Last Time to Boston. It’s a short film about a granddaughter who spent summers on a porch in Gold Hill, Oregon, listening to baseball games with her grandfather. When he dies unexpectedly, he leaves behind an envelope containing a photo of eleven smiling men holding hickory bats—revealing the minor league career he lost to the draft. Forty years later, she climbs into her VW bus with his memory for a 3,000-mile pilgrimage to Fenway Park to sit in the bleachers and listen to one last game with him. This short film will serve as a proof-of-concept for a feature that I am currently noodling, which will also be set in Southern Oregon, of course.
In 1982, when I was a 15-year-old sophomore at Mazama High School, I was accepted to be an experimental exchange student for a year in Australia. When I returned, my life became a rhythm of nomadic living and writing about it—first in the music industry (Beck, Marilyn Manson, Axl Rose, Zac Brown, Michael Franti, you get the idea) and eventually as a professional travel writer for Fodor’s, GoNomad, and ROVA Magazine. Though I’ve been blessed to travel the world by train, sailboat, semi-truck, skoolie, and currently my 1973 VW bus named Buster, Oregon has always held my heart.
In 2025, I randomly submitted my personal essays to three competitions. To my shock, I placed in all three: making the longlist for the Stockholm Writing Festival—selected from 1,126 blind global entries—and ranking 5th in that category, won a scholarship to the Colgate Writers Conference in New York to study under Kyle Bass, and earned a fellowship to study with Sundance Collab. That propelled me into screenwriting- something I had never done before- and I love it. My debut feature script, The King’s Basketball, was developed during that Colgate intensive, had a real table read in New York, and is now out in the world being read by top industry managers.
We are in active pre-production around Medford and Jacksonville, seeking local partners and collaborators as we gear up to shoot this Southern Oregon story in spring 2027.
If you have access to a rustic Southern Oregon porch, vintage 1970s vehicles, period wardrobe, or want to join as local crew or talent, we’d love to connect. You can view our full prop and location wishlist on my site.
Bringing this film to Southern Oregon is an homage to my roots and a love letter to the dirt that shaped the person I became.
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?
I’ve never been someone who sits around wishing I had done something or gone somewhere—I’m the person who builds the bridge as I’m crossing it and moves when the spirit says move. So my road hasn’t been blocked by regrets. But learning how to write screenplays and step into filmmaking at 60? That’s both the most awesome thing I’ve ever done and my biggest hurdle.
The struggle isn’t a lack of stories; it’s coming into this industry at this stage of life and feeling a little behind in the game. Yes, the placements got me in the door, but the room turned out to be harder than I expected. Screenwriting is a completely different monster from travel essays or music journalism. It’s wrestling a hundred moving parts—pacing, visual language, structural beats—and forcing them into something lean and coherent.
Catching up to that learning curve takes serious internal fortitude. It means being willing to embarrass yourself in front of people half your age, learning to ask how to meet this “Claude dude” without sounding completely out of the loop, and constantly resisting the urge to clarify that I’m Gen X, not a Boomer. You have to be okay with missing a plank, catching yourself, getting back up, and laughing at the absurdity of it all.
But there’s a quiet power in doing it now. I bring six decades of actual lived experience, nomadic survival, and hard-earned perspective to the page that I didn’t have in my twenties. It might be a steep climb, but I’m enjoying every step of building the bridge.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
Most filmmaker bios are packed with prestigious accolades, fancy fellowships, and long lists of credentials—but then again, most of those filmmakers came to the game a whole lot younger than me. Mine looks more like a roadside attraction—unconventional, a little wild, and impossible to miss.
Before stepping behind the camera at 60, my career was less of a straight line and more of a high-wire hustle through the human experience. I’ve sold hash to tourists in Holland, served as a personal assistant to rock stars (which is mostly high-stakes babysitting), and managed a Starbucks—an experience best described as trying to organize a room full of toddlers with hammers. I was a Seinfeld trivia champ, and yes, I was once the “Obama Condom Lady” in Times Square, hawking political novelties to self-fund an award-winning book about street musicians.
That trajectory is exactly what sets me apart. I specialize in character-driven stories rooted in real-world dirt and raw human connection—no studio fluff, just lean, visual narrative built on lived experience. And what am I most proud of? Betting on myself at 60.
I’ve never had a traditional corporate ladder to climb. Instead, I’ve spent my life gathering stories from the ground up—learning how to read a room, listen to people, and find the heart of a narrative in the most unexpected places. It turns out all those weird detours were just script research in disguise.
How do you think about happiness?
Driving my 1973 green VW bus, Buster. Period.
Buster is a rolling time machine, and driving him is the best dopamine hit on earth. It doesn’t matter who people are, what their politics look like, how much money they make, or where they come from—everybody loves Buster. People in flashy cars pull up next to us, kids working fast-food drive-thru windows lean out and shout proclamations of how cool he is, peace signs are flashed, and total strangers regale me with stories about the day Hendrix changed the world.
People see Buster, they get happy. Then they see me—gray hair, no apologies—and they get happier. People approach us assuming I’m an old hippie with a different set of sensibilities, and they’re not wrong. Buster has been my ticket into incredible places, secret parking spots, and amazing conversations, simply because people dig him.
And all I’m doing is driving around spreading effortless joy, which comes back to me a hundredfold. I’m taking Buster to my grave.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://meandthekiwi.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/simplyheatherjacks/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/heather.jacks
