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Montpelier, Vermont

About Mark Lawler

I learned early that footage does not become a story simply because someone shot it. For thirty years, I have worked inside that gap between raw material and finished form: in television edit rooms; in chocolate and maple ventures where a recipe had to survive packaging, production, payroll, and the judgment of a customer; and now in adapting The Bostonians and building Chronos, the software that the work demanded.

The materials keep changing. The responsibility does not: understand what is really there, discover the form that can carry it, and make it hold up in the real world.

01 / Aesthetics

Beauty is part of how a thing works.

In an edit, aesthetic judgment lives in duration and relation. In a small theater, it lives in the distance between an actor's breath and the audience. In food, flavor has to come before the photograph. A package makes promises through weight, type, color, and the first touch. A software interface decides which relationships a person can see and which choices feel possible.

I care about proportion, rhythm, restraint, material honesty, and surprise. Polish can hide incoherence; ornament can make a lie easier to buy. A clean surface matters only when it tells the truth about what it contains.

02 / Play

Play is not the opposite of rigor.

Play is how I learn before competence hardens into habit. It is trying a cut that may fail, drawing a storyboard to feel the rhythm, building the story and package for a chocolate violin filled with elderflower caramel because music and taste might share a joke, or rebuilding a software model after discovering that the nouns were wrong.

I want enough command of a form to be responsible inside it and enough freedom to surprise myself. Learn, make, test, laugh, revise, begin again. That cycle is not preparation for the work. It is the work.

03 / The live room

I love the scale of a small theater.

The room is close enough for a breath to alter a sentence and for the audience to feel the instant an actor stops believing it. There is nowhere for false language to hide. Performance turns writing back into a physical event: bodies, distance, silence, timing, and attention shared with strangers.

That is one reason The Bostonians is being developed for stage as well as screen. Henry James's novel is crowded with people who hear a young woman's voice and immediately decide what it should mean. In a live room, possession and persuasion are not theories. They happen within reach.

Enter The Bostonians

04 / Place

Vermont is not a backdrop.

I live and work in Montpelier. The land I live on is part of the life from which the work comes: seasonal, physical, particular, and completely indifferent to abstraction. It has made me more attentive to scale - what one person can build, what a small room can hold, what a local promise requires, and how long living material actually takes.

Vermont is where I founded & Maple and where this period of writing, adaptation, software, and research has taken shape. The work is more independent here, closer to its materials, and less interested in separating a life into professional categories.

See Design & Ventures

05 / Philosophy

Ideas have to survive contact with life.

I return to questions of relation, time, authority, inheritance, continuity, and responsibility. What does a system admit? What does it exclude? Who gets to decide? Who bears the cost? What survives a change, and what are we tempted to pretend disappeared?

I do not trust a philosophy made pure by removing the life that enacted it. Nor do I believe inheritance excuses what was inherited. MELLOWS is the bounded analytical and philosophical framework I am developing to keep those questions explicit and answerable to evidence.

Read the writing & research

06 / Public record

The factual sequence

Mark Lawler began making community television at American Cable Systems in Hull, Massachusetts, in 1986, at twelve. After moving back to Somerville, he chose Arlington Community Television in 1989 and made original programs there. At D.C. Heath he developed interactive educational media during the CD-ROM transition. He then moved through regional broadcast and sports programming - including 120 episodes of Forever Baseball - before spending 2000-2007 in Los Angeles producing, editing, and supervising post-production for network and studio work.

From 2007 to 2011, he returned to educational and instructional media. From 2011 to 2018, he was the full-time caregiver for his two children. That work belongs in the chronology without apology or euphemism.

He later co-founded m cacao and served as its president and storyteller. He learned the chocolatier's craft to understand the company he was leading; its production chocolates were made by the company's chocolatiers. His own work centered on company story, retail build-out, packaging, customer experience, staffing, training, and operations. The company did not become the durable form its founders intended. In Vermont, he founded & Maple and built its products, identity, production workflow, packaging, photography, and retail language.

Current work

His present creative work centers on The Bostonians, a stage and screen adaptation with a complete July 2026 draft; Chronos, a working Mac application in active private use that keeps long-form source and screenplay connected without ML agents; and MELLOWS, the analytical and philosophical framework described above.

  1. 1986-1993

    Community television in Hull and Arlington; performance, reporting, production, and original programming.

  2. 1993-2000

    Interactive educational media, regional broadcast, and sports.

  3. 2000-2011

    Los Angeles production and post, followed by educational media.

  4. 2011-2018

    Full-time caregiver to two children.

  5. 2018-2020

    m cacao, followed by the move to Vermont.

  6. 2021-present

    & Maple, design, products, writing, and independent development.

  7. 2026-present

    The Bostonians, Chronos, and MELLOWS.

Ways in

Begin with the work that interests you.

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