Mary S., Mary W. and the pursuit of happiness
In Miranda Seymour's biography of Mary Shelley, I ran across an arresting quote from a novel by Mary's mother, the philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft.
Category: The Scrap Bag
Leftover scraps of research.
From texting gloves to tragedy in high society
In which the cute story I thought I’d tell is quickly reduced to insignificance.
A Strange Object of Nostalgia
In the mid-1990s, I spent some time temping as a legal document coder. Those were the days when it was so expensive to scan and OCR documents that it was cheaper to hire armies of temps to read documents and type the names in those documents into a database optimized for searching names. One of...
An animated time capsule
My husband recently unearthed and transcribed some flip-book animations I made a long time ago. I had forgotten all about them. Seeing them again makes me marvel that I ever had time to do something so exacting just for fun. But as it happens, I’ve been working on some visual art tasks recently, including building...
Cleo’s roses (and other flowers)
Lately I’ve been helping my mom go through some of her mother’s things. I’ve learned that Gramma liked to take pictures of flower arrangements. Sometimes the flowers have some context. This one is labeled “Cleo’s Birthday 1981 from Joy” (Gramma’s name was Cleo), and I recognize Gramma’s dining room furniture. Others are in places I...
Me and Sylvia, part 2
Minnesota Women’s Press asked me to write a squib for their “Acting Up” issue, about “the role of the arts in creating social change.” This seemed like a good occasion to revisit Sylvia Pankhurst. What’s the use of art? – Minnesota Women’s Press Anne Bertram is a playwright and executive director of Theatre Unbound, “The...
The Loud Words
In “For Worse,” beleaguered substitute teacher Michelle, called in the middle of the day to sub for a sub in a seventh-grade English class, gets out some of her frustration by asking the students to shout their vocabulary words as loud as they can. I got this idea from my ninth-grade English teacher, the late...
The Temporary Thesis
A scrap from Liability. In “Liability,” Emmett’s character description is “A Sumerologist, currently temping.” When I first started working on that script, I was fascinated by different writing systems, including Emmett’s specialty, Sumerian cuneiform. Early drafts probably had too much about Emmett’s specialty; at any rate, over time, many references to his work got trimmed...
The Missing Pankhurst(s)
A scrap from The Good Fight. In The Good Fight, I have two members of the Pankhurst family as characters: Emmeline and her daughter Christabel. Emmeline had two other daughters, Sylvia and Adela, also political activists. I struggled with whether or not to include them, too. In the end I opted to leave them out...
The Agonizing Jailbreak
A scrap from Frankenstein Incarnate. Caleb Williams is a novel by Mary Shelley’s father, William Godwin. One part of the story really stuck with me: Caleb’s corrupt employer unjustly accuses him of theft, which carries the death penalty. Caleb is put in prison to await trial. A month goes by. His friend Brightwel, a fellow-prisoner,...