Over the next few months I will be telling you about those mysterious characters who whisper their stories in my ears. The normal person would call this “inspiration,” but in my little schizophrenic brain they are real and come and ask that I tell their stories.
This month I will start with the project I am currently working on. Think John M.Barry’s nonfiction study of the Spanish flu The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Plague in History (2004) meets Woody Allen’s film Midnight in Paris (2011). The result is a story set during the 2020 pandemic of a 27-year-old nurse, Ruth Dunn, who works in a large regional central Georgia hospital. She is given the opportunity for double pay to go to a rural South Georgia community to work for a few weeks. During the train ride south she discovers that the date is not September 30, 2020, but September 30, 1920 the height of the Spanish flu pandemic in rural Georgia: no antibiotics, no electricity, no modern medicine.
