Tim Lazarcik has a sink-or-swim approach to life. If there's something new to try, why not go for it, he figures. Dive in head first and find out if you can swim. He's got no time to "stand next to the lake and pretend."

His musical partner, Leslie Traun, shares that approach. Both started playing guitar relatively recently - he's been playing for about five years, she's been playing a bit less than four. Lazarcik is the guidance counselor at Viking Elementary in Holmen, and Traun is a Viking kindergarten teacher.

A few years ago, they started performing as an acoustic folk duo dubbed Speed of Light, after a song written by Julie Miller. They started playing in public, at farmers markets, open mic nights and coffeehouses, covering songs by artists as diverse as Bob Dylan, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Simon and Garfunkel, the Eagles, the Everly Brothers and Lucy Kaplansky.

Then they found out about a monthly songwriters corner that started three years ago at a North Side La Crosse bar called Teddy Bears. They jumped at the chance to play their music there, but the first time they went they ran into one stumbling block: They didn't have any songs of their own, and the rule at the songwriter's corner is you stick to your own stuff.

True to their dive-right-in spirit, Traun and Lazarcik came back to the next month's songwriters corner to debut two original songs. They

had discovered at their first

songwriters night they were

dealing with a bunch of supportive people who shared their passion for music. That empowered them to go ahead and write. Nobody was going to sink here.

Origins

Songwriter showcases have a long history in country music's capital, Nashville, most famously at the Bluebird Cafe. That's where the seeds for the La Crosse Songwriters Group's spotlight came from.

Songwriter Dan Berger has long had one foot in the La Crosse music scene and one in Nashville. He had met with some success as a songwriter in Nashville, getting his songs recorded by Waylon Jennings and other recording artists, but kept being drawn back to the La Crosse area.

Don Harvey, another Holmen School District educator gifted with musical talents, had gone down to visit Berger over the years, and they'd go to the songwriters nights. Three years ago, soon after Berger returned to the La Crosse community, he asked Harvey if he thought that would work here.

Harvey, who teaches graphic arts and photography at Holmen High School and chairs the school's tech ed department, thought it would, and Berger went ahead and organized the first songwriters night. The La Crosse area had long had open mic nights where songwriters could play their own songs, but those affairs typically featured people doing cover versions of established artists' songs. This was just for originals.

The first songwriters corner at Teddy Bears drew a respectable crowd of about half a dozen songwriters who wanted to perform their work. "That first one was kind of magic," said Harvey, who has been to every one since.

Three years later, the monthly showcase is squeezing in as many as 18 to 20 performers in a night, with 38 songwriters on the e-mail newsletter mailing list for the group that formed from the event, the La Crosse Songwriters Group.

"We fill that place up with songwriters," Harvey said.

Friendly confines

On the monthly songwriters nights, guitar cases - almost all of them containing six-string acoustics - line the wall next to the small stage, which features a glittery tinsel backdrop. It's hard to predict what - or who - will be heard any given night, but each songwriter gets 15 minutes to play.

Things get going with an hour for open mic starting at 6 p.m., and its pretty much nonstop music until closing time, with maybe five minutes between performers to do a quick sound check.

Some songwriters will only play when they've got a new song, while others relish the chance to have their older works heard. Lazarcik, Traun and Harvey said the songwriters night provides a safe place for them to try out new songs, and serves as a motivation for them to try to come up with new material.

"You want to come in there with something new every so often," Harvey said, although he added it's hard to find time to work at songwriting during the school year. Songs come fast for some writers, "but if you want to do it right you have to work at it," Harvey said, editing and experimenting to come up with the best possible song.

During the school year, he's happy if he can complete a song or two, but in the summer his aim is to finish three or four.

When Traun started playing guitar almost four years ago, she never imagined she'd be playing her own songs. "I was just hoping I could play a chord," she said.

The prospect of getting up in front of all those other songwriters was very frightening at first, Traun said, but with time she realized that the other writers knew what it was like to lay it on the line onstage and were there to support her.

Listening to the other songwriters spurs ideas for songs in most songwriters, and wanting to get up onstage with a new song keeps many of them working on new material.

"It's motivating, because you don't want to keep showing up with the same stuff," said Traun, who debuted a new song, "Late Night Lovin'" at Wednesday's songwriters night.

The kinds of songs played at a typical songwriters night can take in a lot of genres, considering there's almost 20 artists. A lot of the music tends to be solo-singer-songwriter-with-a-guitar folk, but occasionally musicians will take the stage to back up other writers with mandolin, dobro, harmonica, keyboards and percussion.

The surprising thing, Traun, Lazarcik and Harvey say, is the number of talented songwriters who live in this area. "I had no idea that there were that many people," Traun said.

As with many other songwriters, the night at Teddy Bears for Traun has become a monthly highlight, a chance to hang out with old and new friends and hear a lot of good music.

"We're just really happy that we came upon it," she said.

Stage to studio

In Nashville, songwriters go to showcases at the Bluebird Cafe and other places to get their music heard by people who might have the connections to either get them a recording deal or get their songs to a prominent artist who could record them.

La Crosse isn't exactly crawling with record execs and music talent scouts, but the songwriters night has led to a number of recording projects for its participants.

Harvey, who formerly wrote songs for a local country rock band called Tennessee, is working on a CD to be called "Blame Me." Although it's technically a solo project, Harvey has some of the area's best musicians playing on it with him, even including a guest Dixieland jazz band for one song.

Harvey, who plays in an acoustic duo called Third Planet with Dan Kerr, plans to send the finished CD - his second - to a lot of record companies, hoping to get some help in marketing and distributing the recording, which will feature a wide range of musical genres, from raucous country rock to introspective folk ballads.

While Harvey has been writing songs since college, Traun and Lazarcik completed their first CD last July, barely a couple years after writing their first song. Titled "Come With Me," the disc features mostly mid-tempo songs in the folk genre, with Traun taking most of the lead vocals. Guest musicians on the Speed of Light project included Hans Mayer on bass and mandolin and Terry Nirva on percussion, with some lead guitar contributed by Brett Huus. A songwriter, singer and musician based in Brownsville, Minn., Huus produced the Speed of Light CD at his

La Crosse studio, Sound Strations Audio Productions.

Huus also is recording Harvey's project, in addition to finishing up work on his own CD - "The Many Disguises of Zero," due out this winter - and producing a CD by another songwriters night discovery, Kelly Dawn Kron.

A San Francisco native, Kron had been singing in country cover bands in the La Crosse area for 13 or 14 years, all the while writing her own songs. She never got a chance to play her songs with those bands, but when the songwriters corner got started, she came equipped with 60 songs already done.

The songs were impressive enough to prompt Huus to agree to produce a CD for Kron, with no up front cost to her. He sees enough potential in her songs to believe he might recoup his investment later through the publishing royalties her songs might bring.

For Huus, it's a bit of a gamble but not too big a long shot, given Kron's special talent. "She knows how to tell a story and she has a unique voice," he said.

"She's just a great talent," said Harvey, who is including one of Kron's songs on his next CD.

A sculptor who also has written a novel, Kron also is working on another recording project at a home studio, which she plans to release first. With her kids grown and little to hold her here - "I make french fries for a living" - Kron is eager to see where her songs and her voice can carry her.

"There's only so many ways an uneducated woman can make money, and singin's legal," she said.

Future tense

The La Crosse Songwriters Group has been wrestling with growing pains of late, even talking about changing the format to make it more efficient. All it takes is each performer to do an extra song, running over their allotted 15 minutes, to mean an extra hour's wait for people signed up for the later slots.

The group decided not to make any major changes, but did build into the schedule a five-minute slot between performers for a sound check, and assigned time-keeping duties to artists on-deck to perform.

The new procedure is a little formal for some of the artists, but it was seen as a necessary evil to keep on schedule. The group even talked about expanding the songwriters showcase to multiple nights to give more artists a chance to play.

One drawback to the songwriters night is none of the performers get paid. There's no cover charge to get into Teddy Bears, and there's barely room sometimes just for the songwriters, let alone a paying audience. Several of the songwriters are working on a way to get a little compensation, possible putting together a package of three or four acts to play in venues besides Teddy Bears.

There also has been talk of a compilation CD spotlighting the best work of songwriters who have performed at Teddy Bears.

For Harvey, who has seen the songwriters night grow from its infancy to what might be called its troubled teen phase, the process is working well.

"I think it's going fine. We just need to tweak it and structure it," he said. "It's very cool to see that this is working so well."