“Shale Play” at Washington College’s Lit House Examines Everyday Life in Pennsylvania Fracking Region

CHESTERTOWN, MD — Poet Julia Spicher Kasdorf and award-winning documentary photographer Steven Rubin will present elements of their collaborative photography/poetry book “Shale Play”—an immersion into the everyday world at the heart of fracking in Appalachian Pennsylvania—on November 21, 2019.

Free and open to the public, the event begins at 5:30 p.m. at the Rose O’ Neill Literary house and is co-sponsored by the Department of English and the Center for Environment & Society. Refreshments will be provided, and Kasdorf and Rubin’s book “Shale Play” (PSU Press, 2018) will be available for signing and sale after the reading.

In the parlance of the oil and gas industry, shale play refers to a region exploited for its natural gas by means of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling, commonly known as fracking. These transient industrial processes often occur far from the populations that benefit from them. Amid polarized claims about fracking and pressure to develop these areas around the world, this project gathers evidence from everyday life in the Marcellus Shale Play in Pennsylvania.

Kasdorf and Rubin follow in the footsteps of the documentarians of the 1930s, such as the artists and writers of the Works Progress Administration, gathering the stories of workers on pipelines and well pads, landowners and leaseholders, waitresses, ministers, farmers, retired miners, teachers, and neighbors. The resulting collage of vivid oral and pictorial testimony reveals the natural beauty of rural places as well as the disturbance and spectacle fracking creates.

The combination of realist photography, lyric poetry, and sociological documentary in “Shale Play” will provide attendees with a glimpse into just how many forms environmental activism, advocacy, and research can take. Between the creative craft, the deep look at the human condition, and the detailing of actual fracking practices, there is something in “Shale Play” for anyone concerned about the environment or cultural effects of this phenomenon.

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