Hannah Hecht's Blog

A while back, I went to the noon Bill Russell event for FIWD (although I believe it was on a Tuesday rather than a Friday). Having never heard from someone who writes plays, I found it to be pretty interesting and informative. The event that I went to focused mainly on the writing of the musical “Side Show.” The whole endeavor of writing the original play, rather than the revival, reminded me of a lot of the stuff we talk about with literary recovery. However, instead of recovering literature, Russell and his co-writers were recovering history: the lives of the Hilton twins. They had to dig through all sorts of old documents so that they could stay as true to the actual twins lives as possible. At one point, he talked about how a friend found an old pamphlet in a flee market in Texas or something that led to a huge breakthrough in historical information. Were it not for that pamphlet, they wouldn’t have been able to know near as much about the twins’ lives as they ended up knowing. When we spoke with Dr. Page at UNL, he had a very similar experience with the library book with Breuer’s writing in it. I guess that the methods of research in literary recovery can be applied to other fields as well, especially historical fiction.