“Earnest Drinker” is a new hybrid documentary film project by me, Scott Burton, and my team of collaborators.

A hybrid documentary can combine elements of traditional documentaries like interviews with experts, with creative stuff we see in narrative and fictional films like personal stories, dream sequences and animation.

Through my own 30-year relationship with alcohol, and through the stories of drinkers and medical providers, the film will offer space and a deeper vocabulary to explore society’s relationship with alcohol and sobriety. 

Topics will include why we drink, why we stop, why we maintain sobriety, the spectrum of alcohol use, the normalization of alcohol use, and the baggage and stigma attached to terms like alcoholic, sobriety, and recovery. “Earnest Drinker” will endeavor to take a creative, entertaining, and fair-minded look at relationships with drinking.

T’óok’ X̱oo Háni Alicia Maryott’s story, and original alcohol-free drinks, pair perfectly with the film’s work to show healthy alternatives to booze, and the fruits of alcohol-free living.

T’óok’ X̱oo Háni Alicia Maryott is Stó:lō and Lingít based in Dzántik’i Héeni, Lingít Aaní, a.k.a. Juneau, Alaska. She is an advocate, auntie, and lover of traditional plants and medicine. Her story, and original alcohol-free drinks, pair perfectly with the film’s work to show healthy alternatives to booze, and the fruits of alcohol-free living.

Anna Baylis is a Licensed Social Worker and Supervisory Behavioral Clinician at SeaView Community Services in Seward, Alaska. Baylis is also a person in long-term recovery, and is quick to point out that an alcohol use disorder is a progressive brain disease – that is, the disorder is often beyond our control and often worsens over time. Baylis shared a myriad of stories from lived experience, professional observations, and offered this analogy about alcohol as a lover:  

Baylis: It's not a matter of willpower. It's not a matter of strength. It's a matter of your reward. The chemistry in your brain has now found a new lover. And it likes it. It wants it because it makes me feel good. It makes me more fun. It makes me sexy. So I like this one better.

Burton: Your body found a new lover, which is alcohol, which is way more interesting than our cognitive brain [which tells we don’t need a third, double scotch]?

Baylis: That's right. That feels so much better. You know how it is when you first meet somebody that you're enchanted by and that spike, that romanticism. That adrenaline. It's speed in your brain. It's more epinephrine and some other neurotransmitters. And you don't get that back. After a while it wanes. The same thing with alcohol. At first it feels like the best thing since sliced bread. And then it starts to wane. You build tolerance. It doesn't work as well anymore. It's like you have to work in a relationship. It kind of goes away. And so we have to do some other things to make it work again. And oftentimes I find that the people that I work with, patients, clients, individuals, have a hard time breaking up with that relationship.

“The alcohol problem I have since identified in myself was that booze was preventing me from being fully present in my life. By which I mean, it was preventing me from knowing, in each and every moment of each and every day, what it really felt like to be ME — a “problem,” since it's only from this place of knowing, of presence, that I can choose which decisions to make and which next actions to take in service of my own highest good — in order to create a life that feels meaningful to me” (Sober Curious 19).

Shaaḵindustóow Ed Littlefield is an award-winning multi-instrumentalist, composer, and general rock star. We spent time in the studio creating a one-of-a-kind soundtrack.

In addition to drums, instruments included the detritus of my drinking life: empty kegs, empty wine and liquor bottles, an empty box o’ wine, and empty beer cans and wine glasses. Once we got through my 30 years of drinking, we pushed it aside, and brought out a Lingít gaaw to represent healing and the future.

Among other topics, Hall and I spoke about our relationships with alcohol, and how the substance affects our statewide community. After outlining some high and lowlights of my 30 years with alcohol – experiences that included drunk driving, stealing alcohol, breaking into a bar – I wondered why I had never been caught or reprimanded. Did it have to do with being a privileged white male?

“…what I know about social determinants of health, what I know about racism and colonization and various systems of oppression is that yes, privilege extends to the realm of alcohol. Whether it's white privilege, whether it's hetero-normative privilege, whether it's race, gender, sexual identity, all of the things, all of those privileges come here as well. Which is why earlier I mentioned that so many minoritized populations experience more harms of alcohol, although they don't drink more.”

Hall also pointed to the 2.4 billion dollars alcohol misuse costs our state yearly, and that Alaskans are dying at rates over twice as high as the national average.

Daaljíni and I began drinking to make connections with our teenage friends. Fittingly, when we both changed our relationships with alcohol, we lost connections with some people.

“It's kind of interesting when you make that shift from drinking, that there is a lot of people who you were, or thought you were, really, really close with. But then, like as that distance between you and alcohol starts getting further and further, so do those people, you know, like you don't have that commonality, that common bond anymore.”

When I turned 40, I told my medical provider Dana Richards PA that I was drinking one to three drinks a day. It was more like five to twenty five.

In medical training, Dana reports that instructors “cheekily say ‘multiply what a patient says [about alcohol] by three.’” If you averaged out my drinking on the “minor days” (Sunday through Wednesday, 3-7 drinks) with my weekend-warrior-style drinking on the “major days” (Thursday through Saturday, 9-25 drinks), that multiplier is pretty close.

In our May 14, 2022 interview (pictured), Dana also offered the concept of “mindful moderation” as a possibility if I want to explore drinking alcohol again. My grandpa, Don Burton, drank one small dram (1.5 ounces) of scotch at 4 p.m. in his later years.

In the spring of 2019 when I was 43, performing artist Allison Waid shared with me that she had stopped drinking.

I was shocked and could not understand why anyone would choose to live alcohol free. But I respected Allison, and her words stuck with me for the first time in my life as a drinker. A year later, I also chose to live alcohol free. In that sense, Allison watered the seed Dana planted, and provided a “turning point” in my relationship with alcohol. Both Allison and this theme of turning point will be featured in “Earnest Drinker.”

In addition to interviews with medical providers, drinkers, non-drinkers, and peer mentors, “Earnest Drinker” will include short, tragic and comic narrated cartoons of my 30 years as a drinker. They might include me at age 15 retrieving stolen beer from a mucky dumpster, heaving stolen beer off the three-story-high roof of a grocery store, a series of terrible fake IDs, a real fake ID from the DMV, breaking down a hotel room door for cold beer, breaking into a closed bar for a bottle of vodka, being hungover at work. The animations will appear episodically and propel the narrative through interviews with other drinkers and health professionals with lived experience. 

As a person who has been alcohol-free for three years, I want to know more about my relationship with alcohol. Am I an alcoholic? What is an alcoholic? Is that label useful? Am I a person with an alcohol use disorder? Will I choose to maintain sobriety?

“Earnest Drinker” is in the planning and fundraising phase and has begun production. A tentative release date is scheduled for the spring of 2024. 

A majority of the crew, associated artists, and interviewees will be from Alaska, which is home to some of the nation’s highest rates of alcohol-related abuses. Recover Alaska reports that alcohol overuse accounts for an approximate $2.4 billion dollar impact on our economy yearly.

I am honored and thankful to produce “Earnest Drinker” among the people, mountains, trees and waterways of Lingít Aaní. I am also thankful that Earnest Drinker is an official project in partnership with the Juneau Community Foundation and the Juneau Arts and Humanities Council.

The film will be my fourth documentary. As a hybrid doc, it utilizes my journalistic skills for the interviews, and challenges me as a creative writer and filmmaker to script and direct the animations and narrative.   

Press

January 4, 2023 interview with Casey Grove on Alaska Public Media’s Alaska News Nightly.

December 20, 2022 interview with Dano on KINY’s Capital Chat.

December 6, 2022 interview with Katie Bausler on KTOO Public Media’s Juneau Afternoon.