In this episode of Process Safety with Trish and Traci we chat with Fiona Erskine, an engineer and crime novelist who has a passion for process safety. Fiona discusses balancing her engineering career with writing and how she uses her novels to educate readers about process safety and engineering concepts. Her Dr. Jaq Silver series combines thrilling plots with accurate technical details, making complex topics accessible to non-experts.
Transcript
Welcome to Process Safety with Trish and Traci, the podcast that aims to share insights from past incidents to help avoid future events. Please subscribe to this free podcast on your favorite platform, so you can continue learning with Trish and me in this series. I'm Traci Purdum, editor-in-chief of Chemical Processing. And as always, I'm joined by Trish Kerin, the director of the IChemE Safety Centre. Hey, Trish, happy anniversary. We've been at this for five years.
Trish: Oh, wow, Traci. Happy anniversary, that's pretty impressive. I didn't know it was quite that long. Time flies.
Traci: Yeah, yes, indeed, when we're having fun.
Trish: Absolutely.
Who Is Fiona Erskine And How Is She Related To Process Safety?
Traci: And in that same vein, to celebrate the anniversary, we're going to have a little bit of fun today with our guest. Fiona Erskine is engineer, writer, and swimmer. Let me first read the LinkedIn bio for her, "Engineer, working in energy and chemical sectors, successful track record leading UK subsidiaries of multinational corporations, passionate about people, technology, and process safety." She is also a professor of process safety at Sheffield University.
Now, from her author website, her bio reads like this, "Engineer by day, writer by night. In my day job, I've turned rock into fertilizer, recovered and recycled precious metals, brought medicines to market, made amazing new polymers, exported electricity, and directed international construction projects." Welcome, Fiona. Thanks for joining Trish and me today.
Fiona: Thank you very much for inviting me, and congratulations, happy anniversary.
Traci: Well, Fiona is a prolific crime suspense writer whose Dr. Jaq Silver series has earned acclaim and high marks from the likes of Specsavers Crime Fiction, the Staunch Prize, Goodreads, Fantastic Fiction, and Amazon. She is also a colleague and friend of yours, Trish. Would you care to say a few words about how you and Fiona have crossed paths in the past?
Trish: Yeah, so when I joined IChemE almost 11 years ago now, so a long time ago, I came across Fiona, a regular at our Hazards Conferences. And in fact, she's also the chair of our loss prevention board editorial panel, which is one of our very important process safety communication and lessons learned journals that we produce in the institution. And so, she and I have worked together for many, many years now, looking at ways to improve communication of process safety.
So, definitely a process safety kindred spirit amongst us all. Yeah, we go back quite some time, having crossed paths with different articles, different journals. And then, several years ago, she said, "Oh, I've just written a book and I've just released it. Here's the link, if you're interested." And I downloaded a Kindle version of the book, because I also do love a hard copy book, I do tend to read most on Kindle, I confess. And so, I downloaded the book, and I read through it, and I went, "Oh, actually, I do like a good crime series, and I'm up for this one. I quite enjoyed it," and she's continued to write many books in that series, and I have read every one of them. I really enjoy reading about Jaq Silver.
Finding Inspiration in Unexpected Places
Traci: I've read the first one, "The Chemical Detective," and that was released in 2019. And you mentioned several in this series, "The Chemical Reaction" was released in 2020, "The Chemical Cocktail" in 2022, and "The Chemical Code" in 2023. And Fiona, you also penned "Phosphate Rocks," which was released in 2021, and is based on a factory that you worked at early in your career. What came first for you, your desire to become an engineer or a crime writer? I know I read some backstories of how you started writing, but was it just that day that you decided to do it, or has this been floating around for you?
Fiona: Now, I'm definitely an engineer first, without a doubt. Engineering is what I really enjoy doing, and it's certainly better paid as well. It is quite handy. Poor old writers, it's a bit of a tough gig. But no, I'd never really thought about writing. It never even occurred to me, but I've always enjoyed finding different ways to communicate. In fact, one of the early conversations that Trish and I had was about Ramin Abhari, who does these fantastic graphic novels. And it was just such a novel; I had come across his Flixborough graphic novel, and I thought it was just such a great way of trying to tell quite a difficult story in a novel way. And I've passed that on to lots of people who've really enjoyed it.
So yeah, it's just really, I just, I love what I do, and I suppose my crime series are thinly disguised attempts to persuade you that what we do is really, really interesting. And you don't have to be a pop star, or a game show host, or a model to have really fantastically exciting and interesting jobs with lots of international travel. So I guess, yeah, that's really what that kicked it off, just trying to share how much I enjoy what I do. And just briefly, I mean, my huge inspiration was Primo Levi. Primo Levi wrote "The Periodic Table" short stories about his world as an industrial chemist. And because he's such a fantastic writer and poet, he managed to make the mundane just seem really, really interesting. And it's a book I often give to people who ask me what I do.
Traci: Well, you and Trish definitely have a creative streak and help to push forward the sense that this is an exciting career. In the book itself, "The Chemical Detective," I just couldn't put it down because it was interesting, suspenseful, and entertaining all at once, so kudos to you for that.
Fiona: Thank you. I'm now publishing it in the U.S. So, for the first time, it will be available on ebook in the U.S. and also hardback.
Traci: Wonderful. Aside from Jaq Silver, Dr. Jaq Silver, who are some of your favorite characters you've created and why?
Fiona: So, I love writing baddies, it's so satisfying. You can have so much fun with the bad guys, and they're not all guys as well. There's a couple of women who ought to know better. So yes, they're great fun to write, because I mean, I probably erred a little bit in stereotyping poor old Frank Good, who is neither frank nor good. Yeah, but people like the Spider, I really enjoyed writing. He's an accountant gone bad. There are some accountants who are good, but the Spider is not one of them.
And in "The Chemical Reaction," Madame Roux, who is a bit of a baddie, I had a lot of fun with her, because I've done a lot of work in China, and she reminded me very much of a joint venture boss that we had a lot of grief with, but who I enormously admired. And I guess, yeah, Camilla, I like having mature women in my books because I don't know about you, but I didn't have many female role models when I was... You know, my mother was probably the strongest role model, but I didn't have that many people in industry, females older than me. So, I like having grown-up, proper, sensible women with agency in my books because I think they're sorely lacking in many... Particularly in crime and thriller novels.
Traci: Trish, who are some of your favorite characters that Fiona's created?
Trish: Yeah, so good old Frank Good. Yeah, every time I start to sort of read about him, my skin crawls a little bit. But I think we've all, at some point, encountered someone very similar to Frank Good in life, which I think really makes that character a little bit more, or the response to the character a little bit more powerful as well, because yeah, he's an enduring type in industry occasionally that you do see.
Fortunately, I think we're starting to see less and less of that type as we go forward, which is good. But yeah, I think he was probably my favorite baddie character of them all, I have to say. I did also enjoy some of the other more minor characters in the book, as well. So, some of the friends or associates through the pathway, sort of interwoven occasionally into the stories. Definitely, Frank is my ultimate baddie character.
Fiona: He is a corporate psychopath, and it was much later that I realized that the person... I mean, he's an amalgamation of people. There wasn't a single Frank Good in my life, but he's got the traits of many of the most difficult people that I've almost invariably worked for as well because, depending on how... You know, in the olden days, the way people were rewarded tended to be very much single-minded, not necessarily the right goals for the organization, but the right goals for their personal bonus. And I've never got on well with people like that, so I've had lots of conflict. So, it was quite fun torturing Frank Good in my... I did intend to kill him, but I was having so much fun torturing him that I've kept him going.
Trish: Yes, he does keep popping up in the books as we go through the series, doesn't he?
Fiona: Yeah, yeah.
Trish: Frank Good is just an enduring theme.
Fiona: Yeah, he's doing some really stupid outsourcing at the moment, and he's going to get badly punished for it in the future book. So, yeah.
Trish: Cool.
Traci: He just doesn't learn.
Fiona: He doesn't.
Trish: Incapable of reflection.
Fiona: Yeah.
Traci: You had mentioned you based a character loosely on somebody you met in China. Are there any other personal experiences that influenced any of the stories or characters that you've created?
Fiona: So, am I allowed to talk about male strippers?
Traci: Please, please.
Fiona: It's the fifth anniversary, so we can let our hair down. My eldest son was doing some postdoc work in California, and we went out to visit him, stayed in Los Angeles, and to cut a long story short, we were sitting by the pool when this utterly gorgeous young man came up. Now, don't get me wrong, he was the age of my son. I was just admiring him aesthetically. Anyway, he came up and chatted to us, and just one of these fantastic young men who is very open about what they do, and he was a martial arts instructor. But every year, he and a group of his fellow instructors would go and take their clothes off in nightclubs in LA for money, and that would pay basically for the rest of the year.
And he was highly entertaining and told us all about the world of male stripping. So, my husband and I were just sitting there, completely fascinated, and from there, came the story in Shanghai. They were opening a new restaurant in Shanghai, and they decided to dress a group of young Russian men as, I think it was gladiators. Spartans, that's right. They went semi-naked through the streets, and the Chinese police thought this was so disgusting that they tried to arrest them. But of course, then the press got all these pictures of the fully clothed policemen trying to arrest these semi-naked Russians, and so the restaurant did brilliantly. It was fantastic publicity, but that one amused me so much that I was desperate to weave it into a story, so I managed.
Traci: Where we find our inspiration…
Fiona: Yeah, absolutely.
Traci: And he, as you said, chemical engineering pays your bills and stripping pays their bills.
Fiona: Exactly. I've got a much better deal, and so have the audience.
Daniela Melchior, Mila Kunis, Scarlett Johansen or Sandra Bullock?
Traci: When I was reading, I pictured... I had a couple, I did some research on this, I did some thinking on this, who would play Dr. Jaq Silver in a movie or TV series? So, I'm curious, I'm not going to tell you who I've picked, but I'm curious if you've ever thought about who would play that lead role for you?
Fiona: Well, it would be a wonderful, wonderful problem to have, wouldn't it? Yeah, that would be fantastic. It would be lovely if it was a Portuguese speaker, that's my only... I know actors are brilliant and they can do any accent, but Portuguese accent is particularly tricky. So, I guess the person who came to mind was Daniela Melchior, who starred with Jake Gyllenhaal in the remake of Roadhouse. She's a fantastic actor, Portuguese by birth. So, she was one person who came to mind. But other than that, it might be really nice if it was a completely new, unknown character. But I'm really interested to know who came to your mind.
Traci: Well, I didn't go as deep as looking for the Portuguese tie-in, but just the envisioning the action, I thought of Scarlett Johansson, I thought of Mila Kunis, just the dark brooding of Mila Kunis could play it.
Fiona: Yeah, yeah.
Traci: Or Sandra Bullock.
Fiona: Oh, yes, absolutely.
Traci: Because you, in your book, I have this book in front of me, and I have several tabs on it. You made me laugh out loud with a one-liner, or just a certain turn of phrase, and that made me think of Sandra Bullock, because of the funniness, and just she's in this whole danger zone, and all of a sudden she can bring out a funny one-liner, or think it to herself, so that's why I thought that.
Fiona: Okay, those are good choices. I like that. Yeah, if they're listening, feel free to call my agent.
Traci: I'll tag them, I'll tag them in the post.
Fiona: No, I've mainly thought about who I'd cast as the Silver Boys. So if James Bond can have beautiful disposable women, then I think I'm allowed to have beautiful disposable men.
Nancy Drew Meets James Bond and MacGyver
Traci: Interesting, and I did get that James Bond vibe. I also got a little bit of Nancy Drew, because she can do a little bit of everything. She's good at nearly everything she attempts, and that's a Nancy Drew trait. So, it was just a fun read in terms of the crime and suspense, for sure.
Fiona: And I hope MacGyver, because I think he was a big influence to me from when I was little. Well, not when I was little, when my boys were growing up. I always liked the way he could escape out of tricky situations by using his brain.
Balancing Writing and Engineering
Traci: Indeed. The one scene I'm thinking of is when she is in the hospital and contemplating why they took away her shoelaces because she could easily hang herself with her trousers. How do you balance writing with all the other aspects of your life? Both you and Trish just do so much, and then you also have this thriving career. How do you balance that?
Fiona: It's my escape, I think. I mean, I think writing, for me, it's my happy place. It's a great... Especially when there are a couple of jobs I've done where I've traveled a lot and been away from home for quite long periods. So rather than going to the bar of an evening, escaping into my world of Jaq, and Frank, and others has been a really nice... I've really enjoyed it. I think I've always been of the view that the more you do, the more you do, that a change is as good as rest. So, I rest by doing different things.
So, if I've been doing a lot of meeting people, then it's nice to go and retreat into my own world. If I've been doing a lot of, I don't know, project-type work, it's really nice to go and do something sort of imaginative. Not that engineering isn't about the most creative thing you can do, but there are aspects, the more senior you become, there are aspects of what you have to do, which become more constrained. So, it's lovely being completely freed, to let your characters run wild in your head. They're very good friends and they travel free with me wherever I go.
Traci: I like that. Trish, what are your thoughts on change as good as a rest? I like that, what are your thoughts on that?
Trish: Yeah, I think when there's something you're passionate about and you're really invested in personally, you find the energy and you find the time to actually make it successful and to do it. When you're passionate about something, you can't help but do it. It is your form of coping with the world around you when everything is building up. And so, I think for me, it's around when you find what that passion is, go for it, because that's the thing that's going to keep you sane.
That's what's going to keep you going in the tough times when the world becomes challenging and you're struggling to cope with some of the other things going on in your work life around you. Being able to delve into something that is so creative and so different is, for me, I think invigorating. And I think I see that in Fiona as well, that when she gets into her characters, it's invigorating.
Fiona: I think invigorating is a great word. I mean, I also didn't start writing until after I was 50. I've got the most wonderful partner in the world, and he's super supportive, and done a lot of the heavy lifting with our children when they were younger. But it also does get... It's different, isn't it? Yeah, so as family responsibilities have changed if you like, then there's kind of a little bit more time to be free. But you do require to have a very, very sympathetic... The people you live with have got to be pretty sympathetic, because it is quite a selfish activity, really. You would lock yourself away for a long time and sit there giggling to yourself.
Trish: Yeah, sympathetic and supportive.
Fiona: Sympathetic and supportive is really, really important.
Education Through Entertainment
Traci: You do such a nice job of entertaining, but also educating, not only throughout the novels themselves, but your author notes at the end, pointing out what is fiction, what is true, and explaining those types of things. Are there any particular scenes or passages, I'm asking about "The Chemical Detective," because that one is the one I just finished, and I have all your other books on my bookshelf that I'm going to be reading after this, so trust in that. But "The Chemical Detective", since it's your first novel, was there anything that you were particularly proud of?
Fiona: Golly, that's really hard to... I almost think it's, you know when the whole is greater than some of the parts? I think that what made me most pleased was when I could, like nested brackets in a program, where I could kind of pull all the strands which had been running away a little bit together, and bring them back. So maybe it's the structure which I was most pleased at, because I mean, it took me seven years to write, and it went through so many different iterations that I was worried I might have left some non-sequiturs there.
So, I guess if I'm proud of anything, and to be fair, this has a lot to do with my editor. It's a wonderful thing when you've been writing on your own to suddenly find yourself with a publishing house that actually pays people to read your... And help you wrestle it into shape. But no, I mean, I really wanted to represent Chernobyl. If I could have done, I would've taken Svetlana Alexievich's “Voices from Chernobyl” and try to... If I could have got copyright permission, because I don't know anyone who's done a better job of taking the story of the tragedy in Chernobyl and actually doing an oral history of the people at the time.
And she quite rightly won a Nobel Prize for literature. She's the most fantastic journalist working in Belarus. So, I was a little bit constrained by how beautifully she wrote, and I'm very much a novice when it comes to the craft. So I enjoyed writing the Chernobyl sections, but I'm very much in the shadow of someone who's done it just a million times better. That's a bit of a ramble of an answer, but I'm always fascinated to know what readers note.
Traci: Well, the Chernobyl part was the heavy part. There was a lot of heavy stuff in there. So, when you peppered in the lighthearted, funny stuff, and I'm going to read something that I tagged for myself, "Oh, great, just great. Stuck in the post-apocalyptic, radioactive hellhole on a hopeless search for a locker with a cheerleader for the God Squad." And I just thought that was just so funny, to have her in such peril, to have her in such desperation, and yet she can be faced with something that just makes her annoyed, and it made me laugh out loud.
Fiona: Poor Megan. I know I was very cruel to her.
Fiona: I'm amazed my editor let me get away with that one, actually. I think Jaq is very much... She does think in those terms. She's interested in materials, she knows her stuff. I have to go to Wikipedia or somewhere else to double check what I've remembered. But I think it's partly just in her world. She very much does look at things through the materials that they're made of. I'm not sure every editor would've let me get away with those ones.
But yeah, there are some things. I was just thinking the other day, I was remembering when I first worked for ICI, Imperial Chemical Industries, in the 1980s, that we actually had a talk given to us on... They sent around a huge reel-to-reel tape recorder with a tape so that we could sit down and listen to John Harvey-Jones talking about process safety. And I remember it, and we had a ticker tape as well. And I still remember when fax machines first came in, sort of thinking, "Why would anyone want to send something by fax? Why not put it in the post? It would be there the next day." So, you can see why I never got any jobs in sort of innovation, and research and development.
Trish: But I particularly love how, in the book, you do take the time to describe some of these things for people. Because, as Traci said, there are some people that actually, if you said to them, "It's a CD," they would have no idea what a CD was, because the world has moved beyond that now.
Fiona: Exactly, yeah.
Trish: But the way you describe the technical components of the materials that are important to the story, I think is really good for someone to understand what we're talking about, why it's important, and what the critical aspect is, even for a non-scientific person, to be able to read it and understand the detail, and understand enough of the challenge of what's going on around them.
I mean, there's discussion on explosives and all sorts of things in this book. So, I'm actually a mechanical engineer, so chemistry is not my strong suit, but I was able to go through and understand completely what was going on. So, I think the way you've been able to simplify some of that complex chemical world for people I think is really important as well.
Fiona: Oh, thank you. That's certainly one of the aims, because I do think it's fascinating, and I do think some of the discussion that you hear about, whether it be about clean energy, or climate change, or anything else, sometimes we simplify things too much. So, it looks to the rest of the world like we're idiots who are addicted to oil and gas, let's say, but, and it's not that we don't have to change, but as you and I, Trish and Traci, well, as we all know, the unintended consequences of change are a huge part of our daily lives. So yeah, that was definitely the aim, so I'm glad it worked. And I'm definitely aiming it at non-scientists and non-engineers. I have had people come up to me and say, "Yeah, didn't know anything about that before, but I've learned something," so that was nice.
Traci: Absolutely, and I am the weakest link among the three of us in terms of my knowledge in the industry. So, it was interesting and it was informative, and I'm so happy you solved the mystery for me by the end of having your chapter starters with the 87 - 223, and everything was... "And I'm like, wait a minute, why are they all the same?" And that was going to be one of my questions to you. And at the end of the book, I cheered. I was like, "That's why."
Fiona: Yes, I had fun with that.
Traci: And you championed process safety throughout the book with funny one-liners. And just when he threw the match onto the ground, where it continued to burn, where they were next to explosives, and she edged away from the tank, "Someone needed to have a chat to this organization about process safety." And then, I laughed. I thought, "They need to listen to our podcast."
Fiona: I'm also very rude about chemists, which is very mean. But I did work for one company where the chemists were addicted to large glass vessels, and I am the clumsiest person on the planet, so I was pretty keen that we found alternative materials.
Traci: And I liked some of your references, maybe they aren't references, maybe I just read more into them, but, "Nature finds a way," was a nod to Jurassic Park, and then your David Bowie, "Ashes to Ashes," and you had a Major Thomas, but I was thinking, is that just Major Tom?
Fiona: Absolutely. And you know, you can't use lyrics in books. I mean, when I first wrote it, I had lots and lots of lyrics, but to try and get permission to use them and the cost of getting permission to use them is so... You can download them for free on YouTube or Spotify. Well, you probably have to pay for that, but you can't use lyrics and books without paying a huge amount of money, so I had to kind of weave it in. Yeah, so well spotted.
Traci: Well, I enjoyed that. Any other little Easter eggs that I missed maybe, or Easter eggs that I can look forward to in the whole series of books?
Fiona: I've sort of tried to use some numbers, that usually they're the numbers of lockers or of street numbers. They've usually got some reference to the element that we're talking about. So, I've tried to do that. I don't know if there're Easter eggs. I've just tried to sprinkle it with things that people who... It's like pantomime, you can go with your kids. Do you have Pantomime in the U.S. and Australia? Is it a British tradition?
Trish: It's British, but we're aware of it in Australia.
Fiona: Okay, so it's a strange... I'm not recommending it particularly, but a couple of companies that I worked for, it would be an annual event, where we'd invite employees to bring their kids or grandkids along. And it was a very nice way of socializing with people outside of the pub, and just in a different environment. And in Pantomimes, you have many layers of absolute filth for the adults but kind of clear, lovely fairy stories for the kids. I like the idea of being able to... If you are a process safety engineer yourself, you'll hopefully spot a few more things, but it hopefully won't be annoying to the people for whom it is meaningless.
Fiona: Very soon, yes. So, it is a sort of police procedural. I know Trish has read “Phosphate Rocks.” It's slightly different from that, in that it's more of a police story and less of a series of lectures on a fertilizer factory. But basically, a body washes up in Hartlepool, in the Naval Museum, under the frigate, the HMS Trincomalee, and the Cleveland Police are called. And at first, it looks like a fairly run-of-the-mill, tragic accident. But as they begin to investigate, as DI Julie Caddell begins to investigate, she realizes that it's a little bit more complicated, and a series of control engineers have gone missing in mysterious circumstances.
And as the plot evolves, you'll find out it's part of a cyber attack. Police are pretty keen to bury the case because they think they've identified the victim and they've got a suspect who's conveniently in a coma and hospital after a motorbike accident. And so, they're pretty keen just to charge him and be done with it. But the detective inspector is pretty convinced that there's something more sinister going on, and she's right.
Traci: Trish, do you have any questions? You've been reading this series and I'm sure you have some insight and thought.
Trish: Yeah, so I guess one of the things or aspects that I really enjoyed about the Jaq Silver Series is the amount of different places in the world that she finds herself in over the series of the different books, and the different adventures that she ends up having in them I just find absolutely phenomenal. I really enjoy that. I guess, Fiona, where do you get some of that imagination? I mean, in a sugarcane train in Brazil, there's so many of these places. It's like, "Wouldn't have thought we were going to end up here."
Fiona: Well, I always start with a disaster, and I've become a bit of a disaster tourist. So, I visited Bhopal in India, I visited the Banqiao Dam in China, I’ve visited Brumadinho in Brazil. So I think, for me, I don't necessarily know how she's going to get there, but I know that one of these major accidents is going to be the core of the story. And in the case of Brazil, I've done some work in Brazil. It was a very interesting project that didn't come to anything. It's actually quite hard to do projects in Brazil, as I discovered.
And so that book slightly was born out of frustration, because when Jaq finds herself in Brazil, she isn't actually given any work to do, and I had a very similar experience. And I'm not good when I'm not busy, I do need to be busy. So idle hands start writing thrillers. But yes, so I mean, they're all places that I have visited, and when I've been working, when I've been doing construction projects, I tend to end up in... I don't get to go to Rio, I get to go to the part of Brazil which has the biggest oil refinery, so-
Trish: All the glamorous places.
Fiona: All the glamorous places, but they are fascinating. And of course, I've very often got very patient colleagues who are keen to show me around and answer my daft questions. But yes, each of them has kind of started with a major accident, and I find that mining is an area of real interest, in that... And I know Australia have done some fantastic work in this, but that it was just an absolute revelation to me that it's acceptable to take the tailings, and just stick them in a big hole, and expect that somebody is going to maintain this mud barrier between these toxic stored energy and the rest of the world.
And of course, in places where you're very far from people, it's an environmental concern, but in a very populous country, you've also got a real risk of the people who live downstream. And I just, you know, stored energy is my current passion. So, we've got to get better at storing energy, and we've got to find ways of doing it more safely as well. But yeah, as you must have guessed, I love traveling. I don't get into any scrapes. I'm very, very well behaved when I'm traveling, I promise you. Jaq is my alter ego, she does all the things I would never dream of doing.
Traci: I love it. Do your students read your books?
Fiona: So I've only just started, so I've been teaching at the University of Sheffield last semester, but I've only just started officially on the staff, so the answer is probably no. Maybe “Phosphate Rocks,” maybe I will mention to students “Phosphate Rocks,” but I have a very large range of students, so I think they can discover for themselves, but I wouldn't wish them to feel it was an obligation.
Traci: So, you do have this other life that they may not understand. I was reading your website, and you state that you write about the road less traveled, and you even quote Robert Frost's “The Road Not Taken,” "Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and sorry I could not travel both." Do you feel you've traveled both, you are a successful engineer and a successful writer, or do you feel that those are still both roads that are less traveled by?
Fiona: So that's interesting. I love that poem, and I think it's a really interesting quote. I think what I meant by that was rather that we don't write enough about the real world. We don't write about work, and there are so many great books about personal relationships and all sorts of things, but there's very little written about the realities of work. And I think sometimes when we're looking at human factors, when we're looking at all sorts of things in process safety, we don't have a lot of good examples where we can just go and pick something up, and say, "Something went wrong, but the person who did the wrong thing was trying to do 17 different things, all of which appeared to be equally urgent."
So yeah, I think, in part, I just wanted to write more about the materials in the world around us, the decisions that are made for us sometimes about energy, about environmental protection that people are surprisingly incurious about until something really bad happens. So I guess I was more sort of saying, I think, manufacturing is fascinating, and look at how the world has changed in 250 years, the things that we just take for granted now. The fact that, Trish, you're in Australia just now, and Traci, you're in the US, and I'm in the northeast of England, and we can sit and talk to each other. So, so much has changed, and I just wanted to write a little bit more about that.
But I don't see it as an either/or. I mean, I've always thought that people are made up of multiple different aspects, and that we need lots of different things in our lives. And I think for people who are non-scientists, having a curiosity about how the world works I think is really important, because that's how we make good policy. And if we only restrict it to the scientists and engineers, and we don't have the writers, and the artists, and the philosophers, and the sociologists, and the health professionals, if we don't have a wider conversation, then we won't always make the right decision. So I guess that's sort of what I try to mean by that.
Traci: Well, thank you for that. Trish, do you have anything you want to add in on this?
Trish: I'll just add in that, as you said at the start, Traci, I have read all of Fiona's published books at the moment, and I'm looking forward to “Losing Control” coming out. And I would recommend anybody to just, if you are interested in a high-quality sort of crime thriller drama, with a bit of humor and appealing to explaining what we do as engineers in a way that people can understand, just please go out, get ahold of the books, and have a read. You will not be disappointed.
Traci: Well, thank you both. Fiona, Trish is used to answering my daft questions, but I appreciate you humoring me as well. And you pointed out change is a good rest. And while today's episode was a little bit lighthearted, we needed a little bit of a rest. Unfortunate events happen all over the world, and we will be here to learn and discuss them.
Subscribe to this free podcast, you can stay on top of best practices. You can also visit us at chemicalprocessing.com for more tools and resources aimed at helping you run efficient and safe facilities. On behalf of Trish and Fiona, I'm Traci, and this is Process Safety with Trish and Traci. Thank you both.
Fiona: Thank you so much, bye-bye.
Trish: Stay safe.