Midnight Radio Theater Blog

Inspiration literally means, “breathed upon.”

These pictures (taken by Erika Senese) are of my father-in-law’s house and land. He and his wife live high up in the Ozarks.  It is extremely beautiful. And very isolated. This setting was the starting point for the most recent Midnight Radio Theater episode, “Flu.” The radio drama is about a family who chooses to seclude themselves in the mountains during a dangerous epidemic of the swine flu.

It wasn’t my father-in-law’s house or even his way of life necessarily that inspired me to write this story, it was the feeling of seclusion and isolation during my visits.

What are the effects on the psyche for long-term isolation? For short-term isolation?

Without giving away too much of the story, you don’t really get to know the grandpa first hand – he only has one scene in the entire piece. You mostly get to know him through the other characters, and, on a subconscious level, you get to know him through his life choice of long-term seclusion.  What qualities make up a person who has chosen to live secluded up in the mountains for 30+ years? A renegade spirit? Strong independence? Very proud? Intense ideologies?

Last year, the global community had a pretty brutal swine flu scare. While the 24-hour news channels were spreading the virus through fear mongering (ratings boosters), I often thought about this place. I wondered if it got bad enough, would we go live up there for a little while? For a couple of weeks, maybe? A couple of months? The feeling of the place would keep coming back to me during these spells. How long could we stay up there before the effects of long-term isolation took hold? Would any of us start to lose it? And what if we got up there, and the virus found its way up there anyway? Then what would happen? These were the questions that kept running through me and holding my interest, and eventually led me to sit down and start writing.

You often hear people say, “I was inspired by my teacher,” or, “My father was a real inspiration,” and so on…I’m not sure if you can be inspired by a person or a place as much as the feeling you experience from them. In this case, for me, it was the beautiful and scary feelings of isolation during my time at this place. I was “breathed upon.”

The Disappearing Man
by Billy Senese

A disappearing man is no man at all.
This repeats over and over in my head.
I don’t know what it means.

The black spot has returned.
I wonder if it’s her fault.
It keeps following me from the other room.
It’s getting bigger.

The fucking moon, it’s too bright, it hurts my eyes.
Just a big pile of nothingness to look forward to.
I don’t like to think about it.

Fuck her, I don’t care about her.
Maybe the moon will get her, she deserves it.

She fucking deserves it.

Abandoned
by Billy Senese

He was alone, abandoned.
A cold wind slapped his face.
It was the broken window.

Leftover candy wrappers.
A few dusty lemonheads loose
at the bottom of a drawer.
Was he dreaming? He hoped so.

What was that smell? Sour milk?
Dead skin? Everything echoed like
some post-apocalyptic disaster movie.

Why did it feel like there was a big,
deep hole eating away his stomach?
He used to think it was ok to be alone.
That was another life.

Something tugged at the corner of
his mind. Something terrible he
was supposed to remember.

Each one of my stories has a starting point, the one single idea that all the other ideas come from. It’s important, when you’re looking for story ideas, not to get caught up in the hows or whys (those will come naturally later on). Instead, you want to be inspired by something. You want an idea to grab hold of you on a deep intuitive and emotional level. And when it comes to you, it’s usually never an entire picture – it’s just one small, tiny part of it. Sometimes it’s a piece of dialogue, sometimes it’s an image, sometimes it’s a sound – you never know – but when it comes to you, it’s the most exciting part of the process. It’s what you live for.

In the sixth episode of the Midnight Radio Theater series, Blood Oath, the small idea was a poem. I’m not in the habit of writing poems. I’ve maybe written 10 poems in my entire life. But when the idea comes, you don’t question it, you just go with it – no matter how unfamiliar or illogical. When you listen to the radio play, you’ll see it’s a science fiction story (my only one, by the way) that on the surface has nothing to do with this poem. But the poem was, absolutely, the driving force behind it.

Marriage and Death
by Billy Senese

Her breath is warm in my chest.
A tingling sensation, unfamiliar,  passes through me.
It’s too cold in here; I should complain to someone.

What made us think this would go on forever?
Our vows were like a blood oath.

“You believe in this, don’t you?” I say.
“There is something greater here than the
two of us,” she says.
“I don’t care about any of that,” I say.

Her hair is wet. I don’t remember…
why is her hair wet? I think I’m going
to be sick. I just want it to end.

There is someone coming; I hear footsteps.
“I don’t want to watch,” I say.
“You’re obligated,” she says.

She stares at me, the dead weight of eternity in her eyes.