WEBVTT

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[Mary Reid Kelley: "You Make Me Iliad"]

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[You]

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[Make]

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[Me]

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[Iliad]

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Stamped Monday,

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the Doctor’s bill of health--

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Unless the Hippocratic Oaf himself

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left a blemish on my record, I'm clean.

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Good line!

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Iʼll put that in the second scene,

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along the fortress ramparts.

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Herr Lieutenant, Mach Schnell,

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you only have 10 minutes?

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Your flesh is not of interest.

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I audition characters to boost my composition.

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The verse needs local flavor to be edible,

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and as a tragic female, you are most credible.

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I've always been very interested in the history
of women--

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what women are doing, what the circumstances
of their lives are,

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how law and politics make women's lives what
they are historically.

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When I started researching "You Make Me Iliad,"

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I had looked at what women were doing

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at different points in the first World War--

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like a nurse,

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a factory worker--

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and then I knew I wanted to do a prostitute--

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a sex worker--

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but the information is so scarce.

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When I was trying to construct the narrative
of this woman,

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at first, I was trying to make it more about
her

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and imagining what would happen to her.

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But I felt like I didn't want to fictionalize
something

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that was so completely lost to history.

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And so rather than doing that,

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I put her in these bookends of these male
characters

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that provide what information we do have about
these women,

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and that was the medical officer and the soldiers
that visited them

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and wrote about them

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and let us know that they were there at all.

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I learned the Classics at my Father's Knee.

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[hymen karate fest!]

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He put verses in my mouth,

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which I’d mangle.

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[fret thy namesake!]

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A forgetful, and a frigid prodigy,

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[my frank aesthete!]

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unable to express my Sturm and Drangle...

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--Trauma, as experienced by women,

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is often cut off quite deliberately from artistic
expression or artistic experience.

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[I'll take my six percent saline solution,]

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[and flush away the Species most invasive,]

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--Many men who did all kinds of work during
the first World War

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would have written poetry--

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they would have written a memoir.

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Women just didn't have those kinds of opportunities

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to process what had happened to them,

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so they couldn't put the trauma anywhere other
than

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into the deep dark recess of history.

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In terms of what my role is in it,

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it's almost the only way that you can reconstitute
that experience that is so lost

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is through art, is through imagination.

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Do you recall my home?

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It was en route.

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Your army sacked it as I bawled my eyes out--

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quite helplessly--but in this setting

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I'm Alpha Female, and I'm Alpha Betting

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That you can author, but can’t spell, disaster.

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You're slow to learn, which makes the clean
up faster.