 Basically, well, first I want to mention, as Joan said, this is something we've been very proud at Roger Williams to be part of, particularly in the library of collaborating with Rogers Free, with on the Jane Bodell endowment as well as on the Mary Teph White speaking series endowment as well. So we've been able to pull that together to bring people such as Jennifer here today. I want to advertise that our next event at Roger Williams, speaking event will be the 16th of this month, so a week from Thursday. It will be a poetry by Vijay Sashrati. And if you haven't heard of him before, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2014, his book. He is really an incredible poet, incredible person, an incredible intellect. And as I keep saying to the students, even if you don't think you're interested in poetry, I think most people will be interested in being in the room with him for an hour and find that to be a good use of your time. Also for here on November 29th, Anne Hood and I will be reading here. So maybe we'll see some of you as well. So quickly, just want to give you a quick snapshot of Jennifer. Hey, Jennifer's published five novels and one collection of short stories. Her first book, Mrs. Kimball, which is how I first got to know Jennifer, was in 2003, and was a pen Hemingway, was a winner of the Pen Hemingway Award for first novel, a really interesting novel of three Mrs. Kimball's with one Mr. Kimball connecting them. Her most recent book, though, is Heat and Light, which is also from a writing standpoint interesting because Jennifer's second book was called Baker Towers, and the book Heat and Light Returns to the Town, where that book took place, this time exploring a Pennsylvania coal mining town and how the industry has affected the town and the relationship to it. And this book, Heat and Light, is last year best book by The Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, really a book that's earned a lot of praise and quite well worth the praise that it's deserved. Jennifer herself is from Pennsylvania, went to the Iowa Writers Workshop. She lives in Boston. And I think as long as I've been, so 15 years you said, so that's when I first met you, 15 years, and allegedly has a corgi. If Jennifer's a typical corgi owner can spend the next hour talking about the corgi before getting to the book. But at that, let me introduce Jennifer Hage in a letter. Thank you, Adam. So about my corgi, my corgi's name is Ginger. And she is four years old. And she is sort of the center of my universe. And I certainly can talk about this corgi for some time. But instead, I will talk to you about this new book, Heat and Light. This is a novel that was published in 2016. It is, as Adam told you, a return to the fictionalized coal mining town of Bakerton, Pennsylvania, which is very much modeled on the town where I grew up. In this new book, Bakerton is a coal mining town that has lost its industry 30 years back and has really not had a lot of good news in that time until the mid-2000s when suddenly gas companies, natural gas companies, descended upon the town, offering people money to lease their mineral rights for gas drilling. So this novel examines how the town is transformed when this happens. And I'll read from early in the book. The first truck comes in springtime, a brand new Dodge Ram with Texas plates. It trawls the township roads north of Bakerton, country lanes paved with red dog, pie crust roads that have never appeared on a map. The roads dip and weave for inscrutable reasons, disused mine trails, scarred and narrowed like the arteries of the very old. The driver, Bobby Frame, is as young as he looks, barely 30, a big husky kid who might have played high school football. Up and down the Dutch road, he is welcomed warmly at the Fettersons, the Nortens, the Kipplers, Marlis Beals. Are you some kind of a salesman? He's asked at Friendly Acres, the Mackey Dairy Farm. No ma'am, just the opposite, Bobby says. At Cobb Krug's trailer, his first knock goes unanswered. When he knocks a second time, Cobb rolls to the door in his wheelchair, brandishing a shotgun. Bobby never returns. He bunks at the days in on Colonel Drake Highway, room 211, the windows east-facing for an early start. Mondays, he appears at the county courthouse as soon as it opens, clean shaven, hair damp from his shower. He has a way with the clerk, a middle-aged lady who mothers and flatters him. Bobby hands her a printed list and waits for her to bring the books, the official record of who owns what. His approach is always the same. Beautiful property you got here. This while removing his sunglasses, his eyes level blue and earnest in the morning glare. Except for Cobb Krug, folks listen as a matter of courtesy after he shows his business card and explains why he came. His explanation takes two minutes exactly. The shale lies a mile underground, has lain there since before there was a Pennsylvania, before a single human being walked the earth. Older than coal, older even than these mountains. It has an imperial name, the Marcellus. Deep in the bedrock of Saxon County, a sea of riches is waiting to be tapped. Natural gas? The words repeated with some hesitation, the first lesson in a foreign language. Vowels and consonants in odd permutations, awkward in the mouth. Those who know the local lore make immediate connections. There is a mountain spring, secret but famous, that bubbles for no reason. In the woods north of deer run at a spot called the Huffs, heady vapors seep through the rocks. The Huffs are popular for underage drinking. Teenagers pretend to, or perhaps really do, get high on the fumes. Buried treasure, says Bobby, feeling the poetry? The Marcellus shale is nature's safe deposit box. It's treasures locked away like insurance for the future. Now at last, American ingenuity has found the key. We drill a half mile down, then we turn a bit sideways. We can drill for miles like that right under your property. We're so far down you never know we're there. You wanna buy my land? The farmers ask, gobsmacked. As though Bobby has demanded a lung or a kidney, a piece of themselves God can't replace. Not buy, just lease it. You keep on farming it like usual. You get a bonus up front, 25. Later, 100, 500, 1,000. An acre, once we start drilling, you get a percent. Again and again the same response, what do I have to do? Reminding him always that they are farmers. Lives of servitude, unrelenting effort. There's nothing to do, he says with a grandson smile. Signed papers and wait for the check. Rural Pennsylvania doesn't fascinate the world, not generally, but cyclically, periodically, its innards are of interest. Borrit, Stripit, set it on fire, a burnt offering to the collective need. Bakerton understands this in its bones, a town named for a mining company, Baker Brothers, and not the other way around. Chester and Elias Baker through the first shovel bought up the farmland and hired the men, Poles, Italians, Hungarians, Croats, who came in large numbers by wagon or train. The men slept in camps and later company houses. Their wives washed black coveralls and had babies, bought groceries with company script. The babies grew up, worked, married, were drafted. The lucky ones came back to mine coal. Union wages meant fords and Chrysler's, split level houses. On Susquehanna Avenue shops opened. The new public high school had an Olympic-sized swimming pool. When the mines failed, the reverse happened, like a film run backward. Four sail signs dotted the avenues. One by one, the storefronts went dark. The miners too were extinguished, black lung or heart attacks or simple old age. Never mind now, they're all equally dead. The children and grandchildren moved away, forgot everything, only the widows remain. They will, if asked, point out the old mine roads, the clearings where tipples once stood. Baker one, Baker four, Baker seven, Baker 12. This past holds no interest for Bobby Frame, though he owes his success to it. The distant memory of boom times, the ghost of prosperity that lingers in the town. Here, grand promises are met without skepticism. The landowners are churchgoers, people of faith. The agnostics, there are few, need only look to history. Bakerton has been favored before, tapped by industry's magic wand. He lives a nomads life, which is not for everyone. Four shale plays in six years. Barnett, Hainesville, Fayetteville, Marcellus. He's a star at the company, dark elephant energy. Twice a year they fly him back to Houston and turn him loose at a training seminar. This could be you someday, the new recruits are told and take notes. If he's made sacrifices along the way, girlfriends who sent him packing the college degree he didn't finish and now doesn't need. If he missed his high school reunion, family birthdays and holidays, weddings and funerals of people he loves. If regret can sing him without warning, as he lies awake listening to motel noises, distant televisions, the ice machine down the hall. If all these things so be it. In daylight, the phantoms dissipate. He appears at the courthouse at 830 promptly, his mind clear for the mission. Beautiful property you got here. The new recruits take notes. This Monday morning, a trainee shadows him. They roll along number nine road, an old mining trail that intersects with the Dutch road. They pass Jim Norton's pine forest. Carl Nugabauer's southern pasture sits at the top of the hill. Bobby signed both properties last week. With Kippler to the east that 600 acres altogether, he tells the trainee who guzzles coffee from a giant aluminum cup. Wow, wow, that's amazing. The kid studies the topo map spread across his lap and locates each property with his finger. Kippler, Norton and Nugabauer. Well, what's in between though? It's a big one, parcel 112. There is an awkward silence. That's Mackie, dairy farmers. They need some time to think it over. Bobby keeps his eyes on the road. Both times Mrs. Mackie saw him coming and met him on the front porch. He hasn't so far made it into the house. Quickly he changes the subject. Richard Devlin Jr. owns 60 acres. By all appearances, he's just sitting on it. Bobby drives slowly along the southern edge of the property. There is a newish suburban type ranch house, prefab from the looks of it. And behind it, a patch of neatly mown grass. Beyond my acres of deciduous forest, a creek in need of dredging, a sloping pasture overrun with kudzu. They pull into the gravel driveway. Up close, the house looks naked, not a shrub or a tree around it as though it dropped out of the sky. No porch, not even a sidewalk, just a single story cracker box wrapped in aluminum siding. Bobby knocks and waits. He hears voices inside, television noises. The door is opened by a young wife in a pink quilted bathrobe. Can I help you? She looks younger than Bobby, older than the trainee, but just barely. Blonde hair and a ponytail, glasses sliding down her nose. Ms. Devlin? Bobby introduces himself and the kid whom he calls my associate. Sorry to bother you so early. In fact, it's already 10 in the morning, the sun blazing overhead. Mrs. Devlin doesn't keep farmer's hours. She squints in the bright light. Oh, that's all right, come on in. The room is sparsely furnished and away Bobby has seen before the peculiar poverty of couples with young children. There is a couch, a giant television and not much else. In one corner sits a plastic laundry basket filled with plastic toys. Mrs. Devlin leads then into the kitchen, sunny and airless, smelling of breakfast. Toast crumbs on the counter, greasy dishes in the sink. At the table, a girl child, three or four years old, eats saltines off a plastic plate. I stayed home from school, she announces. Bobby sits beside her. Though it's already late August, the vinyl tablecloth is seasonal for Independence Day with a stars and stripes motif. You look too little for school. The child takes umbrage. I'm in kindergarten. She's small for her age. Is it just me or is it cold in here? Mrs. Devlin hugs the bathrobe around her. It's pleasant, says Bobby, already sweating through his shirt. Without asking, she pours them glasses of orange juice. Rich work to double, he should be back any time now. Where does he work? Bobby asks. Out the prison. Mrs. Devlin frowns as though wondering for the first time what these strangers are doing in her house. I thought you were friends of his. Her bathrobe is floor length, bulky as a down comforter. Beneath it, presumably she has a body. Bobby thinks of women in Arab countries draped head to toe in cloth. No ma'am though, I look forward to meeting him. Your neighbor, Carl Nugabour, thought Rich would be interested in doing some business. He launches into his pitch then, though it's a clear waste of effort. He'll have to rewind the whole thing when the husband gets home. When he finishes, Mrs. Devlin looks flabbergasted. On our land, are you sure? Beneath the robe, she could be anorexic or six months pregnant, a mermaid or a double amputee. Yes ma'am, the geologists have already mapped the whole area. We'd have to do some additional testing, of course. Find a best spot to drill. At last, he hears an engine in the distance, a scattering of gravel. A moment later, a screen door slams. Bobby gets to his feet just as Rich Devlin charges into the kitchen. He is Bobby's size, a big blonde man in a green uniform. His eyes go from Bobby to the trainee, to his wife in her bathrobe. Who the hell are you? Beautiful property you got here, Bobby says. All right, so that's where the book begins. That is the moment where everything changes. As a novelist, I've always believed that a novel begins with the moment after which nothing will ever be the same. And that's how this book starts. This opportunity to drill for gas is a real game changer in this town. As I've indicated, it's a depressed area. It's a place that has lost all its industry, lost its whole reason for being. And for the past 30 years, its population has been dwindling, its tax base has virtually disappeared. So this is kind of a surprise third act for this town that was not expecting one. I came to this story sort of sideways, not because I had a particular interest in fracking or gas drilling, but because I have a long standing interest in this place, this landscape. As I've said, this town of Bakerton is very much modeled on the town where I grew up, a little coal mining town in Northern Appalachia that when I was growing up there was called Barnesboro. You know what? Really. So the story about Barnesboro is that after its mines started failing in the 80s, the town lost so much population that they really did not have enough income to cover basic services in the town. So in 2000, my hometown essentially voted itself out of existence. The town council voted to merge with the town next door. They gave it a whole new name. So now Barnesboro, Pennsylvania does not exist. You cannot find it on a map. The place where I grew up is now called Northern Cambria, Pennsylvania. It's simply the northernmost town in Cambria County. And the town, as I knew it as a child, has virtually disappeared. It is really a much diminished place. So as you can imagine, this new opportunity to drill for gas has seemed like mana from heaven to a lot of people in this town. Of course, it goes without saying that the technique of fracking that they use to extract the gas poses serious risks to the environment and the book really deals with those questions. This is a town that is really divided over this notion of whether or not to drill. There are people in the town who lease their mineral rights enthusiastically and feel it's the best thing that's ever happened to them. There are other people in town who refuse to lease their mineral rights. There are environmental activists who descend on the town, trying to convince people not to do this. So this really looks at the question of fracking from every possible vantage point. I should say that this is not a screed against fracking. I do have my own convictions about this, but that was not the reason I set out to write this book. It was simply to examine how this place changes when this happens. When I started researching this subject, this was a long and complicated book for me to write. It took about five years to research and write it. It doesn't sound like that long, but I gotta tell you, I have no life. So I'm not married, I don't have kids, I don't have a job. In those five years, I did absolutely nothing else but research and write about gas drilling. So it really did take over my life. For a lot of that time, I was doing interviews with people on all sides of this question. I talked to landowners who'd lease their rights, landowners who hadn't. I talked to people in the activist community who had very strong convictions that fracking was dangerous to the environment. I talked to geologists, I talked to industry people. And the more I learned about this subject, the more I understood that there were no villains in this story. That all the characters in this book believe they have good reasons for believing as they believe and doing as they do. So the writing of it was for me a real exercise in an extreme empathy. It forced me to see this question from the perspective of people who had very different convictions from my own. So it really was an educational process for me. I learned a lot about the issue and I learned a lot about the people who worked in the industry. So I'm happy to answer questions about that, about the research process, about the writing process of this book, questions about my earlier books, life as a writer, anything like that. They need to see things through their lens, through their eyes. And I really enjoy, because I'm definitely not a fracking person, I'm opposed. But I did get, as you mentioned, to see it from the point of view of people that were almost desperate for a salvation from their faith. And you can't blame them for taking, I mean, you can't use it. You know, that's part of why they do it. They may not like what happens afterwards. They take the course that they think they have to take. So I think, you know, you did kind of bring that to life with me as a reader and I didn't change my views on fracking, but I understand why people do what they do, as far as why they accept it. And that's a good thing. So you need some other people to do that. Thank you. Thank you for that. Yeah, yeah. I also, that it's part of the book club, and I enjoyed it very much. I have a question that at the end, I just felt like there's going to be a sequel. Because there would be so many people that were wondering what's going to happen with this person and that person. I don't know, you know, I've never written a sequel, but every time I write a book said in Bakerton, I swear to myself, this is the last time. Like, you know, I've said everything there is to say about this town. I'm done. I can move on to something else. But I've been wrong about that before. You know, when I published Baker Towers in 2005, I thought, okay, this is, I've done it. I've written the book about my hometown. All throughout my childhood, I'd grown up on these stories about what a great place it used to be, what a great place it was to live when the mines were booming. You know, my parents' childhood memories were really so different from my own experience growing up in that town. By the time I was in junior high, the mines were already failing. By the time I graduated high school, it was all over. So I had no memory of these glory days. I'd always had this urge to time travel back to when things were good there, just to see what it was like. And that was the impulse that led me to write that first, that first Bakerton book, Baker Towers, which opens in 1944 during the war when the mines are booming and goes into the Vietnam years right around the time I was born. So I was not drawing from my own memories at all. I was drawing from the memories of, you know, my parents and grandparents and older people in my family. And after I did that, I thought, okay, I did it. I didn't, you know, I time traveled back to the glory days. I'm done now. I can write books set in other places. And I did do that. I wrote a couple novels set in Boston where I live. And for a long time, I thought I was done with this little town. I thought, well, nothing else is ever going to happen there. You know, this place is ready to dry up and blow away. And it looked that way for a while, but then a few years after I published Baker Towers, I found myself thinking about those characters again, just as you say, and kind of wondering how did their lives turn out? So I wrote a short story about Joyce Novak, who's kind of the central character, the school teacher character in Baker Towers. And then I wrote a story about Joyce's brother, who was sort of a big question mark in that novel. And readers were always asking me whatever happened to Sandy Novak. So I wrote a couple stories about him. And before I knew it, I had a collection of 10 stories about people in this town of Bakerton. So I just backed into it. I had no intention of writing a short story collection, but they just accumulated over time. So then I thought, okay, now I've really done it. I've written all these stories about the aftermath of coal mining, how people manage, how they find a way to continue after the industry leaves. Then I thought, okay, now I'm really done. And then this fracking story came along. And it was just, it was too good a story not to write. So in every case, I thought I was finished. And then something else happens that leads me back to that town. So right now I feel like I'm done. I'm not gonna write another book, but don't listen to me because I've said that before. And I'm not to be trusted on that point. It's entirely possible I'll go back to this town. Yeah, okay, yeah, that's a great question. You know, I think writing fiction is a lot like being an actor, that you really do take on the identity of this person while you're writing him or her. So in the case of Heed and Light, you know, I think there are 15 point of view characters in this novel. It's got a large cast of characters. And I found that when I was writing from the point of view of the CEO of the gas company, I had to take his side. I had to see everything through his eyes. I had to see the world according to his values. Even though knowing that a month later, I would be writing from the point of view of the environmental activist who disagrees with him about everything. And so you kind of have to suspend judgment in order to write these characters. You have to take their side, at least for the time you're writing them. And I found myself doing that again and again in the writing of this book. As I interviewed people and doing research about fracking and I listened to people articulate why they believed what they believed about it, I found that I needed to create another character in each case to sort of fairly represent that person's point of view. So it's really, it is that exercise in empathy that I was talking about. It's just for the time when you're writing this character, that person is who you are. You adopt that identity. And you make common cause with that person. Even if this is a character who holds political views that you yourself don't hold or religious views that you yourself don't hold, you have to suspend all of that and just exercise loyalty to that character when you're writing that character. It's great fun really. It's a chance to steal more lives. I've heard actors talk about it that way and I think the same is true of writing fiction. We're all limited by the one precious life we get. And writing fiction and reading fiction is a way to steal more lives. It lets you experience vicariously lives that are nothing at all like yours. And I mean, that's part of the reason we read fiction to begin with. It really is the best technology we have for getting inside another person's skin. Yeah. In anticipation, Phil, you've got me awake for several nights, I have to say. I just finished meeting Mike this afternoon. But I was struck not only on your research and tracking, but there were so many other areas that I was learning about. Clearly there was drug addiction and prison guards like one child and one foster. I mean, can you talk a little bit more about the other areas in research? Yeah, absolutely. This was a hard book for me to get my hands around because when I started out writing about it, I really thought it was just a book about this fracking question. And as I went, my sense of what the book was kept changing. I did not at all set out to write a book about addiction, but in a large way, this book really is. And there are reasons for that. You know, in my part of Appalachia, addiction has been the only growth industry in the last 20 years. The central family in this book, The Devlin Family, is the prison guard you see in the excerpt that I read. A generation ago, this was a coal mining family. Rich Devlin's father was a coal miner who lost his job when he was in his 50s. So he went into business with his brother. They bought a tavern. His older son, Rich, is a correctional officer in a prison full of drug offenders. His younger son, Darren, is a recovering heroin addict who is now a counselor at a methadone clinic. So now you have a whole family that a generation ago would have been employed by the minds is now employed in the addictions business. And that mirrors the reality in these regions. That's what has happened. So the addiction piece of the story crept up on me. It was not something I set out to write about. It's something I just stumbled into. And that happened again and again with this book. Part of the reason this book has so many moving parts is that as I was researching it, I was monitoring very closely the developments in the news in New York state. And some of you probably remember this. You know, right around 2010, 2011, there was a very well-organized political movement in the state of New York that lobbied Governor Cuomo to place a moratorium on fracking. And they succeeded. That happened. So as long as Cuomo is the governor of New York, there will be no fracking in the state of New York. And I was watching this with keen interest and asking myself, well, why is it unfolding so differently in New York than it is in my home state of Pennsylvania? Why is that? New York and Pennsylvania are close neighbors, socially, economically, culturally, not all that different. Why is the story having such a very different trajectory in Pennsylvania? And the conclusion I came to is that unlike New York, Pennsylvania has always been an energy state. Most people don't know this, but the first oil well in the world was drilled in Western Pennsylvania. After that, we had 150 years of coal mining. We had deep mines. We had strip mines. We had the Three Mile Island nuclear disaster. So for 200 years, Pennsylvania has been on the front lines of energy and has benefited enormously from those industries and also at times paid a terrible price for them. And I think that people who are a product of this culture have a very different idea of what the land is for. That they view land as something to be used rather than something to be conserved. In my part of Pennsylvania, there has never been any prosperity at all except when the energy industries were doing well. So what has evolved there is this kind of binary thinking that people view it as a choice between living in a town that's kind of dirty but is prosperous and economically vibrant and has a job for everybody or a town that is destitute as it's been for the last 30 years, but perfectly clean. And so they see it as kind of either or. And that explains people's greater willingness to put up with a certain degree of environmental damage. There's just a higher threshold for it in Pennsylvania than there is in New York state. When I talk to people back home in Pennsylvania about fracking, I cannot tell you how many people said to me, well, you know, coal mining wasn't clean either. And of course that's true, I know that's true. I grew up there, I played in strip mines as a child. I know how not clean coal mining was. And so that's where the bar is. That is what people have been conditioned to tolerate. And they equate it with prosperity and economic security which has been unattainable for 30 years. Yeah, so that's how this book became this machine with many moving parts. There is a section of the book that deals with the accident at Three Mile Island in kind of exhaustive detail. I spent 10 months of my life learning about Three Mile Island, talking to people who had memories of Three Mile Island. I had childhood memories of that accident. And it was something that was so terrifying and so poorly understood, even adults didn't understand it. I always knew that I would write about that someday but I did not realize when I set out to write Heat and Light that this book was a big enough container that it also contained that. But really what I discovered is that this is a book about energy. It's a book about our relationship to energy. And all the various compromises we are willing to make in order to satisfy our need for energy. So, and that way it really is a book about addiction. It's another kind of addiction. Other questions? Yeah. You may have tremendously described the noise and then the, the, the air and the light. There's just so much description of how well constructed this for that angle that it has so much to do that it can't be on the side of it. You know, it's interesting to hear you say that. I have a college friend, a guy I went to school with who is, he is the president of the Pennsylvania Manufacturers Association. They're a lobbying trade group in Pennsylvania and they are great supporters of, of the gas industry and have welcomed the gas industry to Pennsylvania. And when he read the novel he was afraid that it was going to be an anti-fracking screen and he found it to be very, you know, that it's, it's sort of reinforced what he already believed. So it's interesting how different readers see different things in this book. I did not set out trying to change anybody's mind about everything. I simply tried to show as accurately as possible this is how it is. You know, do you want to know what it's like to have a drill rig 200 yards from your back door? This is how it is. Do you want to know what it's like to be one of these guys who's separated from his wife and children for six months at a time living basically in a work camp working 12-hour ships on a drill rig? This is what that's like. And so in every case, I just tried to show faithfully that's what this part of the story is like, draw your own conclusions. And, you know, a lot of people who care about the environment came away from the book really feeling like they, you know, they got this environmental message and that's certainly in there. It's really, you know, it depends on what you're reading for, I think. I think the thing is, there were no jobs. Well, this is an important point. Yeah, this is really significant. So part of the reason these communities in Pennsylvania have been so willing to accept gas drilling is that there is this fantasy that this is going to be like the coal mines coming back. That, you know, now once again, you know, our kids are going to be able to graduate with a high school diploma and get a good union job and support a family and send kids to college and have this kind of stable prosperity that the mines did bring. And that has not at all materialized. What has happened instead is that most of the best paying jobs have been taken by people who have been brought in from out of state because this is very, you know, this is very technology intensive work. It's, you can't hire somebody off the street to run a drill rig. It simply doesn't work that way. So the crews who are brought in to run the rigs, you know, they're entrusted with this gazillion dollar equipment and they're mainly guys who have worked on drill rigs in Louisiana, in Texas, in Oklahoma, in Arkansas. They are professionals. This is what they do. It's what they're trained for. So it has not brought these high paying jobs to local people. It's brought some jobs. You know, certainly there are a lot of truck driving jobs because this industry relies heavily on truck transport. To frack a well, you need one million gallons of water. Can you even imagine one million gallons of water? They're all brought in by tanker truck. Think of how many truck trips that is to frack one well. A well can be fracked 20, 25 times. So do the math. All that water that has to be brought in. Someone's driving those trucks. So those are the kinds of jobs that have been generated. They're not great jobs. They're jobs. But it has not fulfilled its promise to people in these communities. Yeah. Some of the storefronts to small businesses, do they come back and benefit from the large paying jobs from the people moving into the area? Albeit they're temporary, but they're still making a decent buck and they're gonna spend it somewhere? Yeah. I mean, I think restaurants have done well. Hotels have done well because that's part of the problem. There isn't enough housing in these little towns to put up all these workers who are gonna come and stay for 12 or 18 months and then leave. They need to live somewhere. So there are certain kinds of businesses that, yes, have benefited. And there are jobs in those industries that have been generated. There are waitresses have been hired. Chambermaids at the days in have been hired. This is nobody's dream job, but yes, they are jobs. So it has brought some income to these towns. Certainly no question. But part of the problem is that these workers are temporary workers. So they're not paying taxes in the state of Pennsylvania. They're paying taxes to wherever they live in Texas or Oklahoma or Louisiana. So the town isn't benefiting in that way. Yeah, they run up some bar tabs for sure. And so there's some profit generated that way. But it's not what people thought it was going to be. Yeah. No, I don't, I don't. Actually, the ending of a novel always fills me with terror. I'm always afraid I'm gonna get it wrong because you've all had this experience as readers, right? Where you start reading a novel. The first chapter is terrifically engaging and you can really engrossed in this book. You love the characters. And then the ending is so unsatisfying that you wanna throw the thing across the room. You don't remember it as that book with the great opening chapter. You remember it as the book with the lousy ending. And so I always have this fear that I'm gonna write the book with the lousy ending. It's why writing the first draft is so anxiety-ridden for me because I'm just afraid I'm not gonna find the right ending. So it's, there's definitely some trial and error involved. You know, when I look at the endings of my novels, I don't know that I can see them as optimistic or pessimistic exactly. I just try to make them true. Just try to make them true. And I think if you're an optimistic reader, maybe you see the optimism more so. But I try to make them true. Yeah. I just wanna know what made the little girl. Okay, no spoilers. So ask me later. But not everybody has read the book. So I don't wanna give away anything much about the ending. But I will talk to you about that later. Anyone else? Yeah. What are you reading now? I'm just finished reading this book of short stories that I'm so excited about. The writer's name is Mariana Enriquez. She's an Argentinian writer. This is the first of her books to be translated into English. It's, but it's a beautiful translation. You don't have the sense you're reading stories in translation. There's stories set in contemporary Argentina. And they're pretty harrowing. They're pretty dark, but they're just gloriously written. So that's something I'm just finishing right now. You know, I have something started, but it takes a while for me to know if it's going to be viable. I once spent a full year on a novel and then just threw it away. And so I always have that fear that I, you know, you don't know the book is viable until you know. And sometimes you have to invest a lot of time on the front end before you know that. So I'm still in that stage where I don't know if this one is a keeper or not. But I do have something I'm messing around with. All right then. Oh, one more. Yeah. That's the biggest thing you edited out of this particular. Okay, yeah, I have, I know the answer to that question. So I don't know if anybody here has heard about this story, but in central Pennsylvania, there is a town called Centrelia. And there is, there is a coal mine there in which a fire has been burning underground since 1961. It's still burning. It is still burning. And there was a chapter in this, in this novel that dealt with Centrelia that I ultimately ended up taking out because it didn't further the story in the way it needed to. But I'm intensely interested in that story and I have a lot to say about it. And so maybe something more will, will happen with that chapter that I pulled out. I published it in a literary magazine called, Pangyrus, so it did, it did get a life, but it didn't make it into the book. All right then. Thank you everyone for coming out. I'm very happy to sign this.