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There is something deliciously incongruous about the fact that my writing mentor for the start of this project is a spiritual woman who has written about Pantheism (Russell) and lives on a nature preserve in New Mexico. When I first approached Sharman about working for a semester as my writing mentor, she became visibly skittish and described herself as a technologically inept person who can barely get a CD to play in her computer. Yet today here I sit, an urban woman in fast-paced, concrete-covered Los Angeles, writing on the bleeding edge of technology and literature, and Sharman, my first beta tester, experiencing my creation on a computer screen a thousand miles away sitting in slow-paced Thoreau land amidst the trills of birds and traversing of rivers, under a night sky with visible stars and oxygen-laden clean sweet air. Who better to keep me grounded, purposeful and on the artist’s path?
With Amy Beach and Me I am attempting to stretch and enhance the meaning, purpose and reality of biography through technology and a new media approach, but it is important to note that I use new media first and foremost in service to a story I need and want to tell.
Amy Beach did not have all the answers I sought. In many ways, she taught me that I was asking the wrong questions. She was not the role model I expected to find, but turned out to be a role model I needed. My study of her life and music has brought some big surprises, primary among them the fact of how hard she struggled, because of her gender, to make music. Amy Beach and Me will attempt to solve a mystery as to why Amy Beach lied on her deathbed about the huge impact her gender had on her life as a composer. Further I hope to contribute to my readers' greater appreciation of the struggles that lie ahead before this world can be a place where both genders know the joys of equality, self-actualization - and music.
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