In my opinion, fiction should have a strong moral and spiritual component. It should fill the intellectual gaps that television and popular culture leave behind. To do this, it must examine the choices individuals make, and how these choices drive and are driven by others. In doing so, it should implicitly address the question of what our nature as human beings is. For this reason I am eager to see this historical event fictionalized. Corruption is not unique to Italy, even if in Italy one finds ample examples of the harmful effect it can have on society. My work always begins with an ethical question. In this case the question I wanted to address was, Can one truly stay out of politics? Paolo Taviani hopes that he can, but, as his public life bleeds into his private, he finds himself trapped. A writer needs verisimilitude to convince his/her reader to stay with the story. Most writers use sensory details, auditory, visual, or olfactory, to convince their readers that it is they and not the writer experiencing the event. Although I believe improving my knowledge of the city important, for me developing a command of these sensory details is more important than any empirical knowledge I may gain of Rome while there.

The Nobel-prize winning author Saul Bellow once wrote a book called Henderson the Rain King, the first fifty pages of which I have read. Bellow set the other 302 pages in an unnamed place in Africa, somewhere he had never been to and claimed he did not need to visit to write about. But Bellow erred in believing that his fictional world need not be firmly based in time and place. I don't think I am alone in saying that when I read fiction, I need to believe in the place I am reading about. I need to be transported, and in order to be transported, I need to be able to see, hear, touch and smell what this other place is like. If I sense an author is tricking me or that she is too lazy or too disrespectful of the place to try to understand it, I throw the book away in disgust.

When I think of my favorite books, all are firmly located in time and place. The Catcher in the Rye has its prep school dorms, its dive hotels, and its expensive Central Park West apartments. Fear of Flying has its fat bathers on the Danube, and its widowers, bananas hanging out of their satchels, pedaling their two-speeds. Setting creates character, and vice-versa. In fact, Richard Russo, in his essay "A Location, Location, Location," argues in much the same vein. In one section of this essay, Russo describes an encounter he had with an influential New York editor, which further illustrates my point. This editor admitted that "all the books he published and wanted to publish were ones with a strong sense of place." The editor conceded he had "little faith in the vision of writers who didn't see clearly and vividly the world their characters inhabited," and that "his most powerful need as a reader was to feel oriented." Both Russo and the editor agreed that one could do this anywhere, "in the middle of an Iowa cornfield, on a boat in the ocean...but that [one] couldn't feel oriented either nowhere or anywhere."

I, too, would like my readers to feel oriented, but without a walker's knowledge of Rome, it will be difficult to convince a reader they are firmly situated in a specific time and place. It will permit me to better understand the textures and feel of Rome, the rhythms of daily life. By conducting interviews while there, I will be able to expand my knowledge of Rome's working world, so that I can present a truer picture of Rome, rather than the more commonly seen tourist's Rome. This travel award will also allow me to locate my characters, to find them specific work and home addresses, so that I can answer questions like, How do my characters get to work in the morning? Where do they shop? What restaurant choices do they have in the area? Can they afford to eat out? Do they live beyond their means? Where do they go to have fun? The scientist accumulates data through fieldwork, and the artist collects another different sort of data, that of the senses, the textures and the rhythms of a place. I know without visiting Rome I will have a difficult, perhaps impossible, time inventing these sensory details. Because of this, a travel grant will greatly aid in allowing me to fulfill my goals, both as a writer and a teacher.

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