So I’m working on Proud Flesh right now. It’s going pretty okay - I’m in this weird transition period between acts right now that involves some rather consequential interactions between my two main characters - Iris, the veterinarian, and Dorothy, a gardener. These scenes are probably the most critical scenes in the script, and though I plan to rewrite and rewrite them until they’re right, I want to get them as close to right as possible this first time around, if only because it sets up a lot that happens in the second half of the script.

I thought that you guys might be intererested in where I get some of my ideas. Look at the above image. Those are HeLa cells.

Henrietta Lacks was a lower-class black woman from the Baltimore area who died at the age of 31 of cervical cancer. At the time just before her death, the researchers at Johns Hopkins who supervised her treatment took an unauthorized biopsy of her cancer and created a cell culture from it - remarkably, due to the unique properties of the cancer, the cells in this biopsy contained levels of telomerase production which allowed for their ‘immortality.’

To wit: a cell is ‘immortal’ if it has active telomerase during cell division, which prevents the telomeres at the end of DNA strands from being shorn off during division (this is the aging process).

The HeLa cell line is notable for two reasons: one, these immortal cells are the fountain upon which a massive base of biological research has been conducted. It’s estimated that these cells, which are so successful in their propagation that they often contaminate other samples in whatever laboratory they’re held in, are found in every major science laboratory in the world. Indeed, cancer researchers in the USSR used HeLa cells in their work. By being an immortal cell line that will propagate itself in the forseeable future independent of its source body, it can be argued that the HeLa cell line is the first new species observable by man.
The second is that it brings to bear one instance in a notoriously complicated relationship between blacks and whites in America. That Lacks was not asked permission for that biopsy is a major problem contemplated by bioethicists for years, especially considering how much good has come from research on the HeLa cell line.

It was these two major properties - the notion of a new species-like entity produced of unconsciously growing human tissue, and the troubled history of race relations in America and especially in the South (like the Lacks story, Proud Flesh takes place in one of those weird border states that have inevitable ties to Southern heritage, that have helped me to craft this story. I was also inspired by some readings I had done on horses (a creature that has, from an aesthetic standpoint, always fascinated me) and specifically the phenomenon of ‘proud flesh’ - granulated scar tissue that grows abnormally on horses’ leg injuries:

All of this, which, frankly, speaks to specific deep recesses of my mind on some incalculably horrifying level, led to Proud Flesh. And then I did research.

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