Unconventions: Attempting the Art of Craft and the Craft of Art

Make Nothing Happen

75 For an anthology called The Story Behind the Story editors Peter Turchi and Andrea Barrett asked twenty-six writers who have worked as teachers in Warren Wilson College’s low-residency MFA program to contribute a story and a brief essay discussing the process that created the fiction . What follows are both the essay and the story I contributed. The story, “The Moon over Wapakoneta,” was also published in the magazine Crazyhorse. I฀write฀about฀Indiana. I consider myself a regionalist. “The Moon over Wapakoneta” is from a new book of short fiction called Planet Indiana. It is my attempt to remain true to my regional subject matter while combining it with a new, for me, genre. In this case, that would be science fiction. Science Fiction Regionalism, then, is where this contribution aspires to be catalogued. My basic take on this particular hybrid fiction is that, in the future, Indiana will be pretty much the same as it is in the present. My Indiana is a pleasant, unexciting place where nothing significant happens and from which its natives hope to one day escape. I suspect that not much happens in Indiana in the future as well. It was the case when I was in high school that underage kids would go over to nearby Ohio border towns to drink 3.2 beer. I suppose that in the future this practice will continue but that the accoutrements of travel and navigation for even those short distances will Make฀Nothing฀Happen 76฀ Make฀Nothing฀Happen be somewhat upgraded. Yes, the corn in the fields will be replaced by a crop of solar collectors. The basic poignancy, however, for a narrator, for me, of such a journey through those fields would remain consistent over time. Both in the present and future, the sense that one is in the middle of nowhere strikes the dominant chord. In the future version this might be accentuated by the possibility that the moon itself would be in the process of being settled , and that would amplify the backwater, provincial feeling of the original place. The future, and fiction that contemplates it, is often about change and the dynamic of change. I am able, given this setting, to speculate on the dynamic of stasis and static. So what does happen? A kid in the future gets drunk, looks at the moon, and goes home. Same as it ever was. Thus my particular problem was animating this sparse movement. I hoped to do it with the language of this drunken monologue, as the words of the narrator are the only thing percolating on that particular night and in this particular fiction. Fortunately for me, Wapakoneta, Ohio, one of those border towns Hoosier youth visit, was the birthplace of Neil Armstrong, the first human on the moon. The setting sets up the moon as the focus of the narrator’s howling for the evening. What form that howling would take presented itself to me as the classic Japanese haiku with a particular fondness for Basho’s frog jumping into the pond and his drunk attempting to hug the moon’s reflection in the same or similar body of water. Also, I had to find a way to play with time in the form of the story. Time, it seemed to me, is theme, subject, motif as much as place. Or, put another way, time is a kind of place, a locale. I decided to push the technique of repetition, repeating the words “moon,” “Ohio,” and “Wapakoneta” as many times as I could. I wished that the story would itself, through this incantation, set up a kind of gravitational field as well, mirroring the inescapable force of gravity present that night to this particular narrator. Though this is a monologue, the other players in the drama, for me, continued to be time and gravity and the equilibrium of those forces, now and in the future, to strongly attract and repel and thereby keep the narrator and the reader both in flight and perfectly still. ...