Old Roads, New Stories: A Literary Series
It might be the rainlessness and record heat that’s giving me these headaches, I don’t know. But I wish that I could test this theory, order up a week of rain, cool the afternoons down from 100+ to 85, and see if I stop feeling like there’s a drum corps marching in my eyeballs and forehead. That wouldn’t just be science—an experiment to test my hypothesis—that would be nice.
In the meantime, though, I’ve been thinking about stories. I think stories are an act of healing medicine.
Don’t mistake or conflate this with a happy ending. Healing isn’t limited to that. And we shouldn’t expect stories to start with “In the beginning” either. The better way of thinking about a story’s starting point is more like “At the outset.” Outset is better than beginning because, at first, we’re outside the story, still inside our own heads, lives, feelings. But then the story sets out, and we set out with it, and if the story (poem, play) is any good, then we’re already hooked.
We set out, we think, in order to find out what happens. But this is the wrong expectation, especially for 20th- and 21st-century stories. Seeing what happens next, and then next—that’s just the plot, and plot (with some exceptions) has the least to do with healing medicine. No, what’s far more central is what’s happening to us. The story creates a kind of space we enter through the imagination, and when it comes to its final word, that space doesn’t just collapse and disappear; it remains inside us. We are now deeper, wider, more.
More what? Obviously, that depends on the story and the reader. But because there are many stories, we become more of many things. Important things. Which isn’t a bad bargain, if you ask me. I like to think about it this way: At first, the story is an empty stage where characters come on and engage in a significant moment and attempt to find meaning or at least the right questions. Or the story is a submersion into wonder… if we look instead of overlook, if we hear instead of not. Or the story is a challenge to our assumptions, including our assumptions about what stories “are supposed to be” and what writers are “supposed to do or provide for us.” Or the story is a recognition of failure and fragility and confusion, none of which are synonyms for happy, and yet we do respond.
Healing medicine.
So what’s left to do—this is my own feeling, anyway, now that my head has stopped hurting—is to recommend a good story, as well as offer you one of my own. I’ll start with the recommendation: “Fires” by Rick Bass, from his collection In the Loyal Mountains. It’s seasonal, for one thing, taking place from April to August. And for another, it tells you that it won’t provide romantic fulfillment, and it doesn’t; it’s a lot stranger and wilder than that in only 13 pages. And my own is one I think I’ve shared before, but not for years, and its outcome suits what I’ve been talking about. Hopefully it opens up a space inside that stays a space beyond the end.
The Woman Who Gave Blackberries to the World
In the Old Songs about Washington, something strange appeared
in a widow’s yard. At first, nobody noticed,
or they pretended not to see.
Even ants, in their disciplined lines, marched right around.
It rose from the ground above some loneliness she’d planted,
tall enough already to cast shadows, snag fog,
and in the Old Songs, there was fog every morning that year.
By noon, it burned away, but the memory felt cold,
and knowing more fog was coming made the days seem dark.
Besides, the strange plant had spread, had overgrown her fence,
cast vines and thorns like fish nets, so in the Old Songs,
they decided to ask her to leave.
But just then, children saw the blackberries. And tasted them. And ate,
and couldn’t stop, no matter how scratched they got, and it was good.
And people came carrying baskets, telling stories.
And the woman was no longer all alone.
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 P ter Mors, courtesy Pixabay.
