Redacting Rosslyn

[Note: This story has been updated.]

I’d like to introduce you to Redacting Rosslyn, the newest theme / navigational thread to join the original three: Wanderlust to Houselust, Archeology of Home, and Rehab Ad Infinitum. (Update: Yet another theme, Houselust to Wonderlust, was added circa 2020.) For the sake of clarity and candor, I should go full disclosure before getting in much deeper. Redacting Rosslyn is actually less of a theme than it is a catch-all. Since that’s a little misleading, I’d better clear matters up from the outset. Let’s start with the idea of redaction…

redaction noun
1 The process of editing text for publication.
1.1 The censoring or obscuring of part of a text for legal or security purposes.
1.2 A version of a text, such as a new edition or an abridged version.
Origin Late 18th century: from French rédaction, from late Latin redactio(n-), from redigere ‘bring back’. (Source: Oxford Dictionaries)

Early on in the process of transforming our home and lifestyle reboot into a story, I recognized that there wasn’t a nice tidy package for Rosslyn Redux. Or better put, I wasn’t successfully wrangling this adventure into a familiar format. A book, for example. This was my initial thought, but what sort of book. Memoir? How to? Thematically structured nonfiction? Lyric essay? Poems? Scrapbook?!?!

As I mucked around collecting and creating and curating content, I needed a temporarycontainer until I could formulate a plan. The blog was born. But soon it grew sprawling and unwieldy, so met with agents and editors to pick their brains. What’s a storyteller to do when his story is wayward and willfully independent? Their advice: make it a memoir, tighten the timeline (ideally no more than a year), and focus on my relationship with Susan.

I was unconvinced. That formula might well have been sellable, but a 1-year story about my marriage wasn’t really what interested me, and it certainly wasn’t the adventure I’d been exploring on Rosslyn Redux.

So I went rogue. I developed a short, solo performance piece to

1. explore whether or not the stage might be the best vehicle for telling our Rosslyn story,
2. solicit feedback from an audience (different than the blog, I presumed) about what sort of story they thought I should be creating. Maybe they could offer some fresh insight?

On August 3, 2011 I performed Redacting Rosslyn Redux at the Depot Theatre in Westport, and the experience transformed my understanding and hopes for the project. I’ve tackled the takeaways elsewhere, so I’ll try to stay on track here.

Let’s flip back to the idea of redaction for a moment.

Origin and Etymology of redaction

French rédaction, from Late Latin redaction-, redactio

act of reducing, compressing, from Latin redigere to bring back, reduce, from re-, red- re- + agere to lead (Source: Merriam-Webster)

Reducing, compressing, and bringing back are the crux. Although Redacting Rosslyn has evolved into a fourth theme, it’s really more of a meta look at my early decision to DIY this home rehab, my decision to morph the adventure into a storytelling project, and all of the other bizarre ancillary developments that I stumbled into as I became more and more obsessed with how (and why) to tell this story in this peculiar digital age.

It’s worth noting that the flavor profile for Redacting Rosslyn differs decidedly from Wanderlust to Houselust, Archeology of Home, Rehab Ad Infinitum, and Houselust to Wonderlust. I hope that the audience overlaps, but it probably leans more toward indie authors and artists, makers, and the sort of independent (and inevitably stubborn) DIYers who’d rather figure things out for themselves. Think of it as an afterward that so far has evaded completion…