Too passive and looking the wrong direction? Just...listening. 60 years later, holy heck.
One story, Belief, was published in Women's Studies, Claremont College, but as non-fiction with brackets around my ellipses...that editor's mistake set me back awhile. I was easily discouraged.
There were a lot of "I won't's" and running away from home(s). Early attempts at writing on napkins while acting ( waiting tables), accumulated into stories without a plot. The first ones came in a poetic style that reflected Oklahoma churches and hymns, the voices of raucous uncles and quiet aunts, and the inner life of a girl and her sexuality. Reading history brought some shocks for a white girl in a seemingly "peaceful" small town—the sounds of violence from an American state packed with conflict and repressed energy, from the native tribes forced to go there by treaty, the treaties broken soon after, from blacks finding refuge there after the Civil War, only to be betrayed at statehood by a new Jim Crow, to cattlemen, oilmen, southerners and abolitionists fighting for a place. The sounds of voices were always stronger than story.
Marlea, then known as Linda, climbing the wall of the Manning Street Theater/Philadelphia Actors Theater. The actors, mostly guys, and she roamed the Philly streets talking philosophy and politics and sex and art. And theater, of course. She loved that time in her life.
PLAYWRITING
Lone Wolf Rhapsody began as a study of two choirs, one of uncles, and the other of aunts; family conflicts, a girl's identity and five brothers struggling with the issue of integration of schools after the passage of Brown V. Board of Education. It grew into a play with music that was seen at LATC and won an LA Weekly award for Best Music Written for a Play by Marlea Evans (aka Linda Baker Evans) and her composer/arranger John Ballinger. The Dilemma of Dr. D. is based on Dr. Angie Debo, historian, whose book detailing the brazen theft of Indian land in Oklahoma was refused publication in her own home state.
Seventy is the New Sixty Nine: an imaginative memoir A memoir about living into your seventh decade, when taking 20 years off of your age doesn't work anymore, when no matter how you try, you don't look a day over 69. And when you find yourself embracing age, madness and misanthropy. GO TO MY WRITING SECTION TO READ EXCERPTS. Scroll down for each one.
Inappropriately Yours, The Adventures of Gus and Mona Lee What if an older woman and a younger man stay together.... for more than 35 years? When she discovered that she and her husband Bill were the story, after much experimentation, it fell best into fictionalized non-fiction.