Old Roads, New Stories: A Literary Series
A lot of my work could be called writing for social change. Poems and creative nonfiction aren’t the kind of writing that usually makes the news, though. That’s a bummer, but I get it. And storytelling has a different job anyway. Ideally, storytellers are writing ahead of the news rather than merely in response to it.
Here’s an example of what I mean. It’s from my flash essay “Seven Birds”:
Higher up the Wasatch Mountains, just outside of Heber, you can see these fledgling eagles learning to fly. They take turns swooping, landing in the meadow, then letting loose with an eagle shriek or Amen. And no, I can’t do impressions, can’t name each bone in their wings, but I can tell you for certain that the grasslands below them have mice, and also just a few more years before they’re gone, become infill, the suburbs covering the valley, the suburbs like a new sort of glacier made of plastic and cul-de-sac tar.
That’s the opening section, and I think it works not because I establish the setting but because I take the setting away. I’m replacing the natural with the kind of “progress” that too many legislators think is a given and a good.
Another example is in a poem I wrote 29 years ago. There’s a lesbian couple in it—they’re neighbors of the speaker—and one of these women “smokes the most beautiful weed.” Marriage equality and legalizing marijuana weren’t political likelihoods back then, not even slim ones. Yet now, at least in some states, both are actual, codified rights.
So things can change. I can’t prove that storytellers are the reason they do, but narrative, characterization, and well-constructed language—these things can move people emotionally and raise questions that won’t go away because stories can personalize social-ethical issues, and the personal can have more impact.
And then there’s this: stories are what connect us, not social media or nonstop TV news. No, those two messes are what usually divide us because it’s their actual business strategy to stoke rage and amp up people’s prejudices so that no one who’s scrolling or watching ever looks away: Ka-ching! But stories aren’t like that. They’re the opposite. People find their way through the questions raised by stories and maybe even forget why they were so rigid—so opposed to whatever issue, group, or idea—in the first place. Not all people, of course, but hopefully enough of them, and especially young people since they tend to see the world with newer and more imaginative eyes.
However, there’s a catch, and isn’t irony a bastard always out there waiting to catch us?
The catch is that I can say these things (we all can; we all should) because most writers are mostly unknown. We aren’t the daily Headline-Makers. Most of us aren’t worrying that some legislator will attach a rider to our work, declaring that it can’t be published or read unless the EPA, USAID, and the Department of Education all get defunded. If an English teacher back in high school had you read Sophocles, then it’s like being Tiresias instead of Creon, oracle instead of politician. Tiresias just has foresight, insight, and some hope that he’ll be listened to. He doesn’t have a program of falsehoods and self-servingness to care about, just the actual whole story. A mythic story. A teaching story.
I often like to use those forms myself: myths, fables, parables. In fact, I’ve got a couple parables in my newest book called “The Woman Who Kept on Talking” and “The Story of the Farmer,” and I promise they’re more interesting because they enact warnings and the need for environmental stewardship instead of just discussing those things. I mean, look at me; I’ve discussed things more than enough already. So to balance that out now, I’ll end with a story (a sort of love poem, really; Happy Valentine’s Month). It’s the story I mentioned in passing back in paragraph 4:
“If I Hadn’t Drowned in My 30s,” She Says, “Today I’d Be 73”
Processional
Madame Kafelnikov, my neighbor, is a healing witch,
but that doesn’t stop her from smoking cigars
and spying on the girls across the street,
their windows open at night when it rains,
when they light candles,
when their sky-colored curtains
float open in the wind.
She’s got binoculars
and a photo that shows she was lovely like that too,
so she ruined engagements,
so young men battled, she tells me,
breaking noses and jaw bones and knuckles to impress.
“I was like a Muse,” she laughs.
“I had the nicest body in Ukraine,”
pouring martinis,
getting me up to waltz,
calling me her Viennese, her mercenary darlin’,
her strong-backed, brown-eyed college boy with a smile.
Arrival
She’s got a magical something, for sure,
divining water for farmers
when their crops start parching,
start drying up by acres and acres and miles.
And her pies are glorious, glorious.
And I’ve seen her run out naked at sunrise
to yell at the paperboy for teasing a dog on a chain,
then uproot that Doberman’s stake, cackling
at the terrified dash,
at the barking,
at the neighborhood suddenly clanking and jangled awake…
though cackling’s not right exactly;
cackle is what a hag witch does,
and that crap’s pure Halloween.
The Fire Chief’s wife’s been accusing her lately
of levitating cats into trees,
off lazy patches of sun,
out from cool garages light as dust,
just so much dandelions airborne,
meowing conspiratorially in the elms.
Burial
Madame Kafelnikov’s a flirt, I’ll admit,
with the Fire Chief especially.
But sneering, “She’s a fat old spooky hussy,”
that’s plain wrong…
like digging for rumors,
like calling Amy and Ellen across the street “dykes.”
Amy gardens. When her sprinkler hisses,
the breeze on my porch tastes like mint.
Sometimes cilantro.
Sometimes dill.
I love to watch their laundry dry on the line: suggestive flags.
Ellen plays accordion
and smokes the most beautiful weed. Why hassle?
What use to anyone, finally, is getting in the way?
I’d hope to be remembered instead
for learning to negotiate with aphids,
for learning to intimidate hail, disease,
so they leave the wild roses by the side of my house alone…
noted for that, and this too: I listened;
I kept still and listened.
It got me that magic, a friend,
and peach pie, and the waltz.
Recessional
Each time I asked how I’ll die, she faked aphasia;
once so long I thought she’d really had a stroke,
so I gave up.
She’d rather toast Pop Tarts anyway
and steep me with tea when I’m sick,
or take me to hockey games,
or set me up with her hairdresser’s daughter
when Maggie’s not gone on a dig.
“Paleontologists are hot stuff,” she mentions,
“all that sweatiness,
all that dusting off dinosaur bones…
you oughta call that girl,” and winks.
And I might. Maybe make a lasagna.
Maybe open a Cabernet early to breathe,
place roses to pollinate every room,
and know Madame Kafelnikov’s been busy incanting
if tomorrow I’m curiously unstuck
from Earth, dazed drunk, steering for tulip beds with bees.
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 ju_see, courtesy Shutterstock.
