Nancy Horan, author of Loving Frank

Ms. Horan , do you write on location or on your desk at home?

Yes, I definitely write when I visit the location of a scene from the book I’m working on. In the case of Loving Frank, I went to Taliesin in Spring Green a couple of times, in spring and in late summer, to soak in the atmosphere of the house and its surroundings. I took plenty of notes, of course, but numerous paragraphs that were written on location did end up in the book. I drove along a two-lane highway in southwestern Wisconsin on a rainy August day and viewed the rolling hills as Mamah Borthwick and Frank Lloyd Wright might have seen them in 1911.

 ”Outside, the rainy landscape was a charcoal lesson in perspective, with the road curling like a black ribbon through the fields ahead. In the foreground, growing in ditches, sumac trees raised their rusty deltoid fingertips, while in the far distance, hills receded in deepening grays. Horses grazed midground in pastures of pale grass. From time to time the entire vista disappeared behind towering hunks of rock, shaggy with white pine upstarts rooted in their cracks.”