Award winning author Jennifer Haigh ’90 read two excerpts from her newest fiction book, Heat and Light, in the Stern Great Room on Monday, April 24 at 8 p.m.

About 30 people were present for Haigh’s reading. While Heat and Light is about how fracking affects the people of a fictionalized town, both of the passages she read focused on addiction. The first excerpt was about a police officer on a stake out to catch “Meth heads.” The story eventually spirals into him thinking about his own divorce. The later reading was about Darian, a heroin addict, who is in rehab for the second time, as he makes phones calls to apologize to everyone he has wronged in his life.

Kayleigh Rhatigan ’19 thought that, “Haigh’s reading was very engaging and made [her] want to read her [Haigh’s] book.”

Heat and Light, according to Haigh, is about much more than just fracking. It contains “every thought [Haigh] has ever had” as it explores how fracking affects the lives of the individuals living in the imagined Central Pennsylvania coal mining town Bakerton.

Bakerton is inspired by her hometown, but also has aspects that were created from Haigh’s own imagination.

The town is also the setting for two of Haigh’s other works, Baker Towers and News from Heaven. She stated that she never expected to be writing a third book about Bakerton, but when controversy started sprouting up surrounding fracking in Central Pennsylvania, Haigh decided to write the town a “surprise third act.”

Haigh followed the news surrounding the fracking controversy closely both in New York and in Pennsylvania. She was interested in seeing the differences in how different the outcomes and the stories were for the activists in the two states. It dawned on Haigh that Pennsylvania is an energy state and seeing “how it has shaped the culture here [in Pennsylvania]” helped to inspire her novel.

Haigh also draws inspiration from reading. Each of her works has a “touchstone” or book that helps shape it. For Heat and Light, this novel was Underworld by Don DeLillo. DeLillo’s novel helped Haigh better understand how she wanted to structure her own book.

As a Dickinson alumna, Haigh is very grateful for her education here. She maintained that she began her fiction writing in college and believes that a liberal arts education is one of the best things that can happen to a young writer.

Kristina Rodriguez ’19 said she “found it inspiring when she said that everything we learn at Dickinson could be of use to us in the “real world” once we leave, we just have to make the connections ourselves and sometimes the things we learn at Dickinson will be useful to us in ways that we never imagined.”

Haigh’s “books have won the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction, the Massachusetts Book Award, and the PEN/L.L. Winship Award for outstanding book by a New England author, and have been published in sixteen languages,” according to the Dickinson website.

Haigh’s visit was sponsored by the Department of Creative Writing and The Dickinson Review.