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...