Richard Herstek

WHY THIS? WHY NOW?

The Inevitable Maddie Forge

Here’s what I believe. Oppressed people revolt. Actually that’s not a belief. It’s a fact.

What I believe is that sometime soon, with the homeless being beaten, arrested and told that there is no place in this world for them, they will stop seeing themselves as the problem. And instead will see us as the problem.

The Inevitable Maddie Forge is a work of fiction that imagines what the world may look like when that happens. When some charismatic figure—in this case, a wise-cracking, guitar toting young homeless woman—decides that enough is enough.

Read More
Scroll to Top

THE INEVITABLE MADDIE FORGE

The Inevitable Maddie Forge is the story of a guitar-toting homeless woman whose folksy tunes gradually become more and more incendiary with every injustice that she and her friends are subjected to. Songs that ultimately end up triggering a violent homeless uprising.

Maddie comes from an impoverished little industrial town in southern Ohio—one suffering from factory closures and the opioid crisis—and makes her way to the Pacific Northwest, playing for quarters and hoping for enough to get a meal or a bus ticket. Along the way, she is assaulted, uprooted by city sanitation crews, and has watched her fellow travelers suffer and die. And she decides that she cannot stand by and do nothing.

She always dreamed that her music would make her famous and rescue her from her poverty. But, for better or for worse, it ends up making her infamous, the godmother of an angry movement demanding fair treatment and social justice.