For those who do not know, Marion has her own vivid narrative style, and she brings her subjects to life wonderfully well--I think what she really wants is information on how people find interesting old material--diaries, letters, and various other sorts of original narrative documents--

I am working right now on a performance piece based on children's accounts of bullying and abuse taken from investigator's reports(I know we share an interest in the the terrible, the horrible, the pathetic, and the just plain depressing), this is material that I was offered by the people who gathered it, because they had an interest in getting it out, and they knew that I liked working with this sort of thing--

Someone also has approached me with the idea of turning a diary that they came across in an old attic into some sort of theatrical piece--this stuff was offered because I make it a point of telling people what I am interested in--(though I must say that, even though we have had a lot of discussion about it, I have only been given excerpts from the diary)--

If I was had more time to work, I would poke around in old book shops, flea markets, and such places looking for old letters and diaries, and I would also make the odd trip out to find old court records(Maryland has a lot of the records of civil legal proceedings, back to colonial times, on line--mostly summaries and judgments, but many things that are really, really interesting and amusing)--he theory being that you sort of have to become a collector and grab up whatever looks interesting, knowing that a lot of it is not going to be directly useful, and that some of the most interesting stuff, for one reason or another, you are not going to be able to find a way to use--