Dirty Linen

This is an excerpt from the print edition of Dirty Linen #138 (October/November 2008).
The full article is in the magazine, available on newsstands, by subscription, and at the Dirty Linen webstore.

Author Scott Russell Sanders surrounded by songwriters Carrie Newcomer, Michael White,
Tom Roznowski, Tim Grimm, & Krista Detor

Wilderness Plots

A Songwriters' Challenge

by Kerry Dexter

Tim Grimm was intrigued by the small, almost pocket-sized book. He knew the author, Scott Russell Sanders, who is a professor at Indiana University and an award-winning author, but he'd never come across this book, which had been published in 1983 and was long out of print. "As a songwriter, I've always been drawn to telling a story," Grimm said. The chapters in the book he was holding, which is titled Wilderness Plots, are each just a page or two long. "I read one or two and thought immediately, 'These are folk tales, and they are about the real people who inhabited this part of the country. They could easily be folk songs.' "

Grimm decided to bring the book and the idea of turning the stories into songs to the group of songwriters with whom he regularly met. "I came into a session, and at the end of it I pulled out the book and said, 'Have any of you seen this?' Everybody knew Scott to varying degrees, but nobody had seen this book. I described my idea of taking these short stories and crafting songs out of them," Grimm said. "I read one of those short stories and people began to nod their head and say, 'Yeah, that could be interesting.' "

Tom Roznowski, Michael White, Carrie Newcomer, and Krista Detor were the other members of the group. "We give each other challenges," Newcomer explained. "Sometimes it might be about form: 'Come back next month and bring a song that has no chorus and make it work,' for example. Sometimes it's about ideas: 'Come back next month with a song from the stories in this little book.' That pushes you to use all the crayons in your box of crayons," she continued. "You have all these tools as songwriters, and when you step outside what you normally do, you have to think about it a little differently; you can't rely on the stuff you've been doing."

[cover #138]