Beautiful Day

After working on numerous things that don't have anything to do with my sabbatical but that have to be done for Parkside, I'm going to take my irritable self out for a long walk on this beautiful sunny day.

It has been heard to avoid the work of the department and some things have to be done by me.  It does feel sometimes like I haven't been able to concentrate as much as I'd like to on the work at hand, but I just need to suck it up and get there.  I have the draft of my article about half done and expect to have it done by the end of the week.  I can then re-work, add references, and create a viewable second draft for the editors next week.  (I hope.)

So, off to walk along the shores of beautiful Lake Michigan to be rejuvenated!

Now back from that beautiful walk.  It was great for my mood.  Here are some pictures of the Milwaukee lakeside on this beautiful, crisp day.

Started Writing An Article

It feels good to put the Mill Girls aside for a little while.  I think I'll be able to see the script with fresh eyes by doing that.  Of course, it also is scary.  I fear I may lose whatever momentum I have.

But I am embarking on a different project - one with a clear deadline - and I need to really focus on that for the next three weeks.  I'm writing an article on "Critique as a Signature Pedagogy in Theatre".  It is an article in a special journal on Arts and Humanities and it is based on a panel that I participated in at the ISSOTL (International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning) conference in Quebec in October.  I had written a previous book chapter on this a number of years ago and it is really interesting to revisit the subject.  I am also doing this as a project from colleagues I know and respect.  That raises the stakes which is good for me.

While it may be misplaced, I'm feeling pretty confident about this.  Academic writing doesn't come easy for me as I don't do it very often, but I know that I CAN do it so its is a matter of focus at this point.  I've done all the reading I needed to do and have outlined what I want to say.  I started the introduction yesterday and I feel good about getting into the meat of it today.  This is material I know from my own experience - as a student and a teacher - and while challenging to get it down on paper, I'm excited to do so!  Unlike the play, I know the beginning, middle, and end for this one.

I had the wonderful opportunity to see an amazing play, An Exaltation of Larks at the Kohler Center in Sheboygan.  It was developed by Sandglass Theatre's D-Generation which focuses on the creative potential of people living with late-stage dimension.

This play was based on stories written by groups of people with dementia who are played by puppets with three actors.  It was funny, sad, moving, and very creative.  My friend Sabrina, from college and New York, who went to the same grad school at a different time, invited me.  She was the lighting designer and is the Artistic Director of the KO Theatre in Amherst, MA which was involved in the development of the piece   I'm so glad that we went.  I loved the show and it was great to see Sabrina after.... 25 years?????

Wonderful work and it was another reminder about the stories we tell in the theatre and how much they connect to our lives and our understanding of the world...  Many reminders of my Mom as well.

Look at these puppets.  They are amazing!!!!!!

Sabrina Hamilton from Ko Theatre with me and one of these wonderful puppets

Correction

I stand corrected.  While looking through portraits of the Boston Associates, Lowell's founders, I realize that what appeared to be a portrait of Francis Cabot Lowell, is not him.  The portrait below is of  Patrick Tracy Jackson, another of the founders of Lowell.  There are, in fact, no portraits of Lowell in existence.

Oops

New Ideas

I had a great meeting with my dear friend Roseann today to talk about the script, my feelings about it, and how to move forward.  She was incredibly helpful and I'm feeling so much better today.  Despite the fact that I need to put this project on hold for awhile, I think I'm going to take tomorrow and do some free-writing to try to solidify those ideas into a thematic progression.

It was so helpful to talk about the overall project and get back to the reasons that this is so interesting to me - what it is about this time and these women that has really grabbed my heart and my mind.  I've been realizing, over the past few months, that the story that I really want to tell is much bigger than the one I thought I was telling.  The women are the heart of the story, but it is about so much more.  Roseann helped me to stop thinking about what I planned to do, and just pick up on things as they come up.  The true themes and conflicts are emerging through the writing, not as an intellectual process where I write what I've already planned.  I'm not sure if that will make sense to anyone else, but it definitely does to me.

I hope that by tomorrow, by engaging with the writing and the ideas in a new way, I'll be able to write here about some new avenues and ways that I'm moving things forward.  After all, I've just done a draft.  There will be many more to come and things will be cut and the need for new sections will, I assume, arise.

While I had been thinking about this, Roseann really encouraged me to have a reading of the script sooner then later.  I had thought about inviting people to read when the play was close to done.  But I think she is right.  I need to hear it sooner so I can see how these words come to life (or don't).  So... I have no idea who may be reading this but if you are local and interested, let me know.  Perhaps in May I will have an informal reading - not for anyone else to hear but for me to grab hold of where I am.

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This is Francis Cabot Lowell, he died prior to the founding of the city, but he was instrumental in the development of the mills and the city is named for him.

The poet Amy Lowell was a relative of his.  She was part of this early American family that had tremendous wealth.  They and their relatives were part of the Boston elite and, while Lowell was a brilliant mathematician and an innovator, his goal - and that of the other Boston Associates who invested in these mills - was to increase the wealth of the family, among other things.  

There was such disparity between the mill owners and the mill workers in terms of money and lifestyle.  This is no different from what we see today with the 1% and the dying middle class.

That being said, I found this poem of Amy Lowell's describing the luxurious surroundings she grew up with:

My grandpa lives in a wonderful house

With a great many windows and doors,

There are stairs that go up and stairs that go down

To such beautiful slippery floors.

A great difference from the workers who, in the early days, came from farms and later  (after the mill girls were long gone) came from immigrant tenements...

First Draft is Complete!

I have really been struggling but I believe I am done with the first draft.  It still needs a lot of cleaning up, a better ending, and more action, but I feel like I've accomplished a lot - although it took me twice as long as I expected
to get to this point.

Now I get to put this aside for a few weeks and start working on my critique article.

I find myself really struggling with this kind of writing.  I knew it would be hard, but I am amazed at how difficult it is to take my ideas and make them work dramatically.  It is almost as if the things I know about plays, dramaturgy, telling a story - are all separate from what I'm trying to do here.  That is enormously frustrating.  At some point I will need to refresh this and let someone else read it.  Even better, listen to it read out load.  I'm not ready for that yet, though.  I'm not brave enough.

I love these pictures.  I can't wait to take what I have and go back to Lowell to take more photographs AND to find more photos and more lithographs of the early days.  That is a summer project.

Thursday update

I started writing a bit of dialogue today to fit into some of the more narrative sections and break them up.  I know that things will need to be moved around, but I think that I should be doing more of this.  I am not the best dialogue writer, but it seems that it is needed.  I assume that I can pull together a number of students this spring or summer to read some of this so I can hear what works and what doesn't.

I have two more sections to go and then I think it is editing and moving things around to have this first draft done.  I'm hoping to get to that point by the end of the day on Monday so I can start to focus on two other pieces of writing that are hanging over my head.  Yikes!

I'm off to the library - first, because I have to leave as people are doing some work at home; second, so that I can be sure that I don't get distracted by anything at home...  It is amazing how the little household tasks can call to me when I want to be taken away from the pain of writing...

Discipline

There are always distractions from writing... and then there is the overwhelming distraction that comes from the weight of what I have to do.

I have spent my morning taking care of errands, bills, laundry, exercising... and now I'm going to vote.  When I come back, I'm trying a new approach.  I'm going to start keeping a 'schedule' of how long I will work and what I will try to accomplish.  By breaking it down into smaller pieces, I feel that I'll be able to be more disciplined.  So, today's job is to read through the whole thing and see what the shape really is, not what I think it is or hope it is.  From there I think I'll be able to focus on the sections that are working and clean those up and see how they fit into that overall shape.  At least, that is my hope.  By forcing myself to make these entries in the blog, I have accountability and that is a good thing at this stage.  I'm in that awful middle place and I need to get beyond where I am now.

This is a calico power loom.  I spent some time earlier looking at images of the machinery in the mills in those early days.  Look at all those wheels and pieces that have to work together in order to create the product.  It isn't terribly complicated compared to many modern machines, but still:  all those pieces need to fit together in just the right way.  That is today's metaphor for my writing - I need to see how all these pieces work together to create a viable product