Well, for me, really, I think it was I wanted to try and clear up some of the misperceptions that were out there and fill in some of the historical gaps.
In my stunted career as a scholar, I'd read promissory notes, papal bulls and guidelines for Inquisitorial interrogation. Dante, too. Boccaccio... But after 1400? Nihil.
I'm not trying to give any definite answer. What I'm trying to prove is that we have enough gaps, enough discrepancies, enough simple falsifications to conclude that probably this history was an invention of a later time.
As you go down the rabbit hole of reading into our history, you realize that there are so many things that history books didn't teach us about ourselves.
History is full of blank spaces, but good stories, invariably, are not.
We take it for granted sometimes that certain parts of our history are told, and we take it for granted that we know all that stuff, and we move forward along on that basis, but there are also massive gaps, and we have to try to address them.
Our history is a passion for me. I feel that we leave out so much information and huge gaps in the American story and it makes it hard for people to really understand that we are all intricately related as Americans. So I am attracted to historically based projects because we entertain and learn something at the same time. I just love that combination.
The idea that fiction can capture the stories that fall through the cracks of history informed 'A Constellation of Vital Phenomena,' which progresses across the two Chechen Wars of the 1990s and early 2000s.
