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Sometime in 2015, I came across a squib in the paper about a community in southwest Pennsylvania torn apart by controversy over hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. I'd also met a strange creature in my imagination, a pianist who called herself a sleuth. It was only a year later that Fracture took me by surprise. Here are other sources of inspiration.
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PIANO MUSIC
Listen to some of Maggie's favorite piano pieces:
Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto-Fedorova
Brahms Intermezzo op.18 no2- Rubenstein
Chopin's Raindrop Prelude, Vladimir Horowitz
Chopin's Revolutionary Etude, Khatia Buniaishvili
Mozart's Concerto no. 20 in d minor, Mitsuko Uchida
Gershwin's Blue Prelude
Fracking and the People it affects
A huge topic, but if you're interested, I'd encourage you to find these three books. I owe a huge debt to each of the authors who delved in such detail to open FRACTURE's story.
Strangers In Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right by Arlie Russell Hochschild, a sociologist's search for how we can surmount the walls that divide us.
Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracking of America by Eliza Griswold. I came to prize winning book late, but it confirmed all I had feared.
The Real Cost of Fracking: How America's Shale Gas Boom Is Threatening Our Families, Pets, and Food by Michelle Bamberger and Robert Oswald. A pharmacologist and a veterinarian pull back the curtain on the human and animal health effects of hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.”
Paleolithic Caves to visit
Perhaps a random connection, but my husband and I are Upper Paleolithic junkies and it leaks into pretty much everything I write.
We've traveled to Ireland, England, Denmark, France, and sites the New World to experience burial cairns, cave art, and ancient ceremonial sites like Newgrange in Ireland; Amesbury, Glastonbury Tor, and Stone Henge in England, or in France, the ancient caves of Pont de Gaume, Lascaux, Chauvet, and ancient labyrinths.
There's a strange thrill of experiencing the art of these ancients. They were like us in so many ways--facing a changing, warming world, disappearing species, yet enthralled by the great mysteries of the Great Mother Earth. It feels like visiting kin.
And we're not done. Once travel can begin again, there are caves in Spain, the Pyrenees, Argentina, and around the world. So if tastes of this ancient world appear from time to time in my stories, you know why.
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