Yesterday I went to see Tim Raphael talk, as part of a series David Gewanter has put together - the Georgetown Writers Series. Tim Raphael is a theatre director, and newly arrived in the Theatre Studies department at Georgetown. He said in the talk that he has never seen himself as a writer before, although some of his theatre work has involved him making adaptations of work that originally appeared in other forms (such as Michael Ondaatje's The Collected Works of Billy the Kid). Now he has co-written a "folk opera," based on Michael Lesy's book Wisconsin Death Trip, and this is what he was speaking about.

The book itself has been on his mind since 1980, when he encountered a copy of it in a log cabin in Vermont. In the early 90s he began the serious work of imagining a stage adaptation, in partnership with the musician Jeffrey Berkson. In bringing it to the stage, they have framed it as a visitation by ghosts, and Raphael described the musical setting as an eclectic mix of styles. He was interested to find that, rather than the homogenous community he expected to learned inhabited Wisconsin at that time, it was in fact a melting pot of different ethnicities - something that, he seemed to indicate, could be a reason for the musical eclecticism he described. Sometimes I worry about eclecticism: that creating too much of a hotchpotch works against creating an overall form for a work - at the same time, in the piece he played us, he cited influences of Native American rhythms that were a backdrop to the music, yet unless you knew you were looking for them, you would not hear them. I wonder if perhaps the eclecticism itself will turn out to be in some degree flattened, ordered. When I was writing music more diligently, I remember finding different frames all the time, to spur on the act of creation: but like when I write poems that morph between several different forms, there are other aspects of a work that can ground it in a single voice/vision.

Wisconsin Death Trip is premiering here next week. I'm going to be going to see one of the final performances on February 8 - his talk has made me fascinated to see the outcome. It's also made me want to look at the book - and at more of Lesy's work. I borrowed another of his works yesterday - Time Frames: The Meaning of Family Pictures. In the introduction he talks about the way looking at tens of thousands of photographs changes you. I feel that as a cultural historian he's working very intuitively, and I want to get acquainted with his ideas, his way of seeing.