The meeting yesterday at Muhlenberg went very well. We spoke for about two hours. I started by reading several passages from the different sources (car tapes, travel log, interviews) and received some good, honest feedback that helped me decide that I’m going to (for now) push forward with the music/interview project. The story about me will wait for later. We brainstormed different methods of approach, and figured the best “next step” would be to write a sample chapter on one of the cities. I told him I wanted to produce two totally different versions of the sample chapter. One version is going to take the interview and build a setting around it, edit it out into conversational prose and liven it up. It will be flushed out, to include background information about the person being interviewed, interspersed with different details about the person’s life or the city we’re in. The goal of course, is to constantly be asking myself, as I write, “does the reader feel like they are sitting at the table, taking part in this interview.” It’s a fairly simple concept really. The second sample chapter will be more creative, with less attention paid to the actual interview setting, with a focus on creating a series of vignettes using different styles and form and meter for each interview in a way that would attempt to recreate or reflect the person’s own artistic style. This one will be more difficult to produce, but if done correctly might be lightyears more interesting than straight prose.
The plan is to get started on this ASAP and meet with him again once I’ve finished the sample chapter(s). Once we’ve met again to decide which is better, the rest of the sections will fall in line at a much quicker pace.
Once we finished with business we talked about baseball for a few minutes and recounted memories of our first games as children, different things we’ve seen and people we’ve met. We traded roadtrip stories, his of course being way cooler because he hitch-hiked all across North America in college, so his tales extended into Mexico and… that other country.
At one point he said that a piece I wrote last year about my grandfather had popped into his head recently. We talked about it for a few minutes and he mentioned how at the end of the semester last year he’d wanted me to read it to some people and recalled my cutting 3/4’s of the story out because I was nervous about sharing my work. Then he said talking to me tonight was like talking to a different person, there wasn’t an ounce of self-consciousness or anxiety in my demeanor. That was nice to hear.
