Last night among my many dreams was one in which Kate Campbell was running a songwriting workshop at my school; I hadn’t known about it in advance, but was in charge of running all the logistics for it. Which meant that I missed a lot of the workshop. But I came into the room in the middle of an exercise she was having people do, and remembered enough of it when I woke up to write it down. Here were the instructions (for each writer): -pick a population or place (e.g. people of Cape Cod, Panamanians, the jungle, or some mythical place) -choose either a fire or a flood -write some short of vowel-based nonsense syllables that the people would say, in a chorus like thing (like “ah – hat –me – oh” or “ah la ee ya”) – do this by simply trying out singing a variety of vowel sounds to yourself -Develop a story around that, true to the words of the writer and the population, that involved this population recovering from either a fire or a flood In the dream I didn’t get a chance to do this exercise, because I was working on things like making sure that the video she wanted to show would project correctly. But I came in when people were working on it, and it seemed to be producing interesting songs. What an interesting (and not especially Kate Campbell-like) approach. I think I’ll try to write a song using this assignment, though I might wait until next month – when I’ll be trying to write 14 songs in 28 days and need all the ideas I can come up with.