Old Roads, New Stories: A Literary Series
- Coastline or river? Why?
- Crow or parrot? Why?
- Snow or lightning? Why?
- Astronaut or scuba diver? Why?
- Spring or fall? Why?
Sometimes I have students get into groups and ask each other these interview questions. Not exactly Socratic, I know, but I’m not trying to be Socrates. I’m trying to get them to talk to each other and find out they’re thoughtful and interesting people. And they do wind up talking, sometimes a lot, sometimes getting into mini-debates or saying things like, “Oooo, that’s a really great answer,” which might sound like pretty low stakes, but I disagree. I think Why? is an elemental question. It’s both kaleidoscope and laser beam, both an open door and a kick in the ass to walk through and see what’s in there or out there.
Overhearing their answers is a bonus, especially since they’re never the same. Well, maybe there is one trend: It isn’t very often that I hear them picking fall, and when they do, their reason is usually the leaves—that red-orange burst along the mountains, and the overnight gold transformation of neighborhood streets. Or else they ski, so fall means it won’t be long until it’s snowing. Or else, like me, they get burned instead of suntanned, so Screw it with the summer already. Enough’s enough! I haven’t heard this one, though, or at least I haven’t yet: “I like the fall because it’s football season.”
To me, this is kind of baffling. I’ve always loved football. Those old silent Super-8 family movies?—there’s me as a toddler in a diaper and a helmet, watching my grandma’s Nebraska Cornhuskers on TV, running in circles ’round the living room, then falling down—tackled—then up again ready to imitate the next play. And when I was four, apparently I won a church raffle. The prize was an oversized football. And my dad was a high school teacher, so every Friday night from September to mid-November, we were at the games, me and my mom and my brother and also my dad, but my dad was in the booth up top, leading the singing of the national anthem then calling the play-by-play through the microphone. Sparks Stadium. Puyallup, Washington. The Rogers Rams. And the marching band. And the endless loop of licorice you bought by the inch and then someone from the DECA Club would cut off a piece with their scissors.
Brian Doyle, a writer in Portland, Oregon, had this to say in A Book of Uncommon Prayer, not about football, about basketball, but the feeling’s the same, or at least my feeling is the same, especially about the Utah Utes: “Because people leant forward in their seats or on their couches or bar stools when he got the ball and the fast break began, because they might see something they had never seen before, which is exactly why we love basketball…. Because while it may seem that basketball is a game, it is more like creative art in some hands…. And so: amen.”
Like me, Brian Doyle isn’t Socrates either. But he did say this, and his wisdom and phrasing are as resonant as anything in Greek philosophy: “Even your death will be a prayer, your last in the language of this body.”
Anyway, Why? is a pretty awesome question, and I think we can even prove it. If everyone here will use the comment box to answer one of the five questions, you’ll see what I mean.
Go Utes!
Rob Carney is the author of nine books of poems, including The Book of Drought (Texas Review Press, 2024), winner of the X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize, and Call and Response (Black Lawrence Press, 2021), and his collection of creative nonfiction, Accidental Gardens: New & Revised, is forthcoming from Wakefield Press. His work has appeared in Cave Wall, The Dark Mountain Project, Sugar House Review, and many other journals, as well as the Norton anthology Flash Fiction Forward (2006). In 2013 he won the Terrain.org Poetry Award and in 2014 he received the Robinson Jeffers/Tor House Prize for Poetry. He is a Professor of English at Utah Valley University and lives in Salt Lake City. Follow his Terrain.org series Old Roads, New Stories.Read an interview with Rob Carney appearing in Terrain.org: “The Ocean is Full of Questions.”
Read Rob Carney’s Letter to America in Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy, published by Terrain.org and Trinity University Press.
Read poetry by Rob Carney appearing in Terrain.org: 6th Annual Contest Finalist, 4th Annual Contest Winner, and Issue 30. And listen to an interview on Montana Public Radio about The Book of Sharks.
Header photo by Iftikhar023, courtesy Shutterstock.
