THE GOOD SWIMMER

Heidi Rodewald and I wrote a quick and dirty first draft of The Good Swimmer when we were artists-in-residence at the O’Neill Musical Theater Conference last summer. Stew has now joined us and he began by adding back-up vocals. Now we ask these questions: How do the vocals created as ‘back up,’ become the eerie soundtrack? How do they alter environment and time? How do we start once again?

We plan on recording some new songs in July, and have a workshop planned for February to hear this new beginning. I’ll be posting about both.

Another project is mostly rewrites but that process is also to begin again. My collaborator and I meet and we ask each other: “What if?” “What if” instead, we start with the image of a woman alone in the middle of a vast empty grassland, clutching a rifle to protect her sleeping children? “What if” we start with the sound of distant cowboys? “What if…” and “what” are the consequences of that ‘if.’

The questions we ask determine the answers we discover. Hopefully our experience and education have lent us a surfeit of answers. And ways of making new wheels. We are so often told, as writers, not to re-invent the wheel. I say, re-invent. Add new spokes, change the surface tread, add hub caps and chains.