The entire text of the left-hand field (Virginia Anderson): 11/23 Do you see, I have given you a nice whining field? We can squash these around as we like. I am finding these characters hard to unearth. I know what Ben looks like; I worry that he will not be sympathetic. I want him to be driven in an understandable sort of way without becoming gruff or irritable. I have written a lot of scenes in which he changes from person to person, and I have not isolated anything permanent about him yet. Except that he wants very much to be able to solve problems. That is essential. He feels that he has generally been ridden by his problems, including his son's troubles, and he should somehow be taking charge. I see him as a small man who is only but definitely subconsciously aware of his smallness. Who is often faintly aware of people being bigger than he is, but determined not to notice it or treat it as if matters. Sometimes I think his wife should be protective of him. One problem is why she married him, as I see them as being very different.

The entire text of the right-hand field (Susan Romano): Virginia, this really helps. Now you are letting me inside you as author. Before when I read the character, I could only see your "discourse," the genre writing, the beautiful writing that I could not imitate, do, so could not quite grasp the significance of the variations. I'm thinking of the variations in the early beach /wind/grit scene as I had wanted to comment on these but couldn't think of anything productive to say. Finally, though I had come up with a "liking" for the scene where the wind is hounding him as he seems to be hounding the refugee/escapee. I liked the sense of each being buffetted, each struggling. Is this "naturalism" as a literary genre? I am very frustrated by my either laziness or ineptness at visual representations and would like to spend some time fooling with visual rhetoric for this project, even talking to you via the visual or responding in pictures to what you write in words (which would be particularly appropriate if I felt somehow excluded from your language). In fact I wish I had thought of that as a response earlier. The writing you have on the left side of this column is "respondable/responsible" because I recongize it as something I can do. So the pomo move, don't you think, when I try to be interactive with something I am excluded from, is to switch discourses. Finally this: I need to see more of Ben before I can grasp him as you say he is.

I think she married him because his good qualities were very important to her, and it is those good qualities she will soon see causing him to suffer. There is a lot of room here to think about how these things fit together. The mosaic grows more complex. I wish I could put graphics on these fields. My project is like an amoeba. It grows by budding, not entirely at random. I hope soon you can put on some buds.