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.”