irna and me: two authors in search of a character...

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It seems oddly fitting that this move from Red Room to Wattpad comes at such a pivotal moment in my writing life. While I began writing about soap opera in 1990, it wasn't until I joined Sam Ford's thesis committee at MIT in 2006 as an outside reader, than I began thinking seriously about soap opera -- what it had been, what it had become, and how the genre might evolve in the digital age.

When I began my Red Room blog in May 2008, it was the apotheosis of soap opera criticism. Mimi Torchin, founding editor of Soap Opera Weekly, and columnist Marlena De Lacroix, a.k.a. Connie Passalacqua Hayman, were online. Ed Martin provided thoughtful insights at Media Village. When the Writers Guild of America went on strike in late 2007, soap writers Tom Casiello and Sara Bibel began blogs. Other sites, We Love Soaps, Daytime Confidential, Serial Drama, and the late and much-lamented Snark Weighs In, to name but a few, provided not just news, commentary, and analysis, but links to the works of others. Patrick Erwin, who had been writing for Marlena, started his own blog, A Thousand Other Worlds. Forums at Television Without Pity and Media Domain, provided fans with a place to share their thoughts. Ideas percolated as we all read and commented on each others' work. Now, as the daytime soaps have downsized, just a handful of these sites remain, most simply passing along press releases with little, if any, commentary or analysis.

On 1 April 2009, CBS announced that after a record 72 years on the air (the first 15 on radio), Guiding Light would end come September; a month after the announcement, I marked my first anniversary at Red Room with "what would irna think...," a consideration of what the creator of soap opera, Irna Phillips, might have thought of the final iteration of GL, the show she created on radio in 1937, and brought to television in 1952. In that post, I mentioned that I would love to be able to turn to an American Masters documentary on Irna to know what she really thought, but that no such documentary existed and I wasn't holding my breath that it ever would. When Patrick Erwin suggested that I do the documentary myself, and an idea was born -- and has been evolving ever since.

Over the past five years, I've immersed myself in the life of Irna Phillips. I published a short piece in the January-February 2013 issue of Harvard Magazine; a much longer biographical essay, "the iconoclastic world irna created...," is the introduction to the ebook I released as a Kindle single in 2012, as the world stopped turning..., a collection of essays on the final years of As the World Turns. Neither piece fully captured the complexity and ambiguity of Irna's life; uncovering the "facts" of her life has proved challenging, to say the least; at times, it's felt downright daunting. So, a few months ago, I began work on a one-act play about the final night of Irna's life, "two authors in search of a character..."

For me, writing has always been as much about process as the finished product. So, after I repost a couple of relevant Red Room pieces, I'll begin sharing the story of Irna and me, past, present, and future. I should say here, for me, blog has always been a noun rather than a verb -- a place to post long form pieces (defined by LinkedIn as longer than three paragraphs:) -- so I can't promise how often I'll be posting. And, since I already have too many distractions keeping me from the work of writing, I don't tweet and I'm not on Facebook.

21 July 2014

© 2014 Lynn Liccardo

Limited Licensing: I, Lynn Liccardo, the copyright holder of this work, hereby publish it under the Creative Commons Attribution license, granting distribution of my copyrighted work without making changes, with mandatory attribution to Lynn Liccardo and for non-commercial purposes only.

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