All my life I had supported other artists, admired them, envied them. What about me? How would this new project help move my life forward if I simply reported on another important person? Was that my life, to be a cheerleader for others? Is that what women’s lives are? With someone like Amy Beach occasionally slipping through the cheerleader cracks, and making something of herself, so we celebrate her? Did I really want to devote the amount of time it would take to write an entire new media book about Amy Beach?

Ten years before, I had quit a well-paying new media executive job with a giant law firm in Washington DC when I had an epiphany at 35,000 feet, on the way to a trial, about the fact that I did not want to look back at my life and say that I spent it helping corporations win multimillion dollar cases with my digital art and media skills. Hadn’t that epiphany driven me back to California, where I dusted off my old guitar and began searching out a simple music-filled life and real friends and family?

Well, there it was. The seed of my answer to the question: Why did I go to Amy Beach? I was once again a driven woman. As I began to buckle down and develop this book, I realized that my unconscious would be my guide, and that I should trust it. I discovered that there were mysteries about my life and about Amy Beach’s life that were truly the driving forces behind my fascination with her. I needed a music Mother, and maybe Amy Beach needed a woman to come after her to resolve the realities of her life, the historical misconceptions - and a lie she told on her deathbed. Amy’s life had been documented, but her story had yet to be told. My life was somehow wrapped up in hers, and I knew that my mysteries de[emded pm tje resolution of hers

Over coffee on the patio at Peet’s in Pasadena, I questioned myself. What were my mysteries? What did I want to know? What was Amy Beach’s life teaching me? I found this reflective period of writing to be painful. It is easy to report on another person’s life; it is tough to reflect on one’s own life in comparison to that life. continued page 6