During-the-Event
“I want to see my grave. To make sure you’ve dug it properly.”
Otis spoke those words the day before he died. We were in the cave in Windy Butte, our home in the White Earth River valley in the former state of North Dakota. Otis was at the back of the cave, where the air was cool and damp, in a bed he’d made by nailing together peeling clapboard that he’d scavenged from the ruins of the Catholic church. I was standing near the cave’s entrance, beside the mud brick stove he’d built when I was an infant. (He’d worked with me strapped to his back with a strip of blanket, he’d told me.) I was holding a pot of corn mush and looking across the valley to Cemetery Butte, where I should have been digging his grave.
He said the first part, “I want to see my grave,” in a quiet, weak voice— maybe he had just woken up—but the words made me stop chewing and hold off on taking another spoonful of mush. I peered into the dim light at the back of the cave where he was rustling around.
He had thrown off the rabbit-skin blanket and was struggling to sit up. The bed squeaked. He coughed and hawked up phlegm, cleared his throat. Then in a stern voice, he said the second part, “To make sure you’ve dug it properly.
He seemed to accent “properly,” as though he knew what I had been up to that morning: not digging his grave on Cemetery Butte but sailing the canoe on Lake Sakakawea, an act that put me at risk of drowning and us at risk of detection, or so Otis would have reasoned. He seemed to fear being rounded up by government agents more than he feared death, although neither he nor I, alone or together, ever encountered an agent in all our days in White Earth River, perhaps because Otis sometimes rushed me into the basement or up to the cave to avoid what he insisted were agents slinking into our town.
I didn’t answer Otis right away, since I hadn’t expected that he’d want to inspect the grave and was worried he’d notice that I hadn’t dug it to his specifications. His breathing had become heavy in the past few days, as though he had to push each breath through a handful of silt to get it out. But I figured he could survive a trip up the butte. He was a tough old coot.
“Once I finish eating, I’ll take you there. On my back,” I said and then sunk the spoon into the pot of corn mush. I was starving.
“I don’t know about that,” Otis said.
“Do you want some of this?” I asked.
I held up the dented pot toward Otis. He was resting against the juniper trunks that lined the cave wall. He shook his head. There was hardly any mush left, anyway.
“Why are you stooped over?” Otis asked.
“My back is tired.”
“You look guilty.”
Otis seemed to know whenever I disobeyed one of his rules.
“It’s a weak posture, you’ll injure yourself in the garden,” he said. “Try to avoid it, for your own sake.” He hawked some more phlegm.
“Okay.”
I scraped the last scoopful from the pot and then dunked it into the wash pail.
“I’ll need my sweater. The cool season has come early this year,” he said.
“The warm season has just begun,” I corrected him. “You’ve been in the cave too long. You need some sun, that’s all.”
Where the light from the cave entrance fell off, a dresser stood with half of a broken mirror propped against the wall. I yanked on the mismatched knobs to open the warped top drawer. Inside, Otis’s red wool socks and navy blue sweater were arranged right to left.
The air at the back of the cave smelled of Otis, not just the usual smell of his body but also of his urine and feces. He hadn’t washed in a few days. Neither had he cleaned his teeth with the stick, which was perhaps why his breath smelled sour. Or maybe his lungs were infected and he was exhaling bits of decay and pus when he coughed up phlegm. I kneeled on the willow matting and began to dress him.
“Okay, give me a foot,” I said and rolled the red socks over the white cotton ones he had darned so many times that the toes and heels were a crosshatch of black threads. Over the socks I tied the wide deer-hide straps of his rubber sandals. I wore a pair of these, too; we had made them from the garden cart’s flat tire.
“Up with the arms,” I said. I slid the heavy navy blue sweater over his head and then brushed wisps of thin gray hair out of his face and tucked them into his braid.
“There. Climb on up, now. Come on. Wrap your arms around my chest.”
I squatted, with my back toward him, and grabbed his bony thighs, one in each hand. He fell against me, and I hoisted him up into the small of my back.
“Don’t drop me down the butte,” he said.
He sounded scared, so I tried to make a joke: “You think you’ll be so lucky? Just hold on tight.”
Otis gripped my arms, but as I stepped forward, he swayed backward and groaned in panic. I countered by jerking him into my back.
“I told you to hold on!” I shouted.
“I’m so weak,” he whispered in a hoarse voice.
“Okay, let me get my footing, here,” I said.
The willow mats covering the cave floor flexed under our weight. I couldn’t see very well in the shadows. Otis had skinned the bark off the junipers to brighten the walls, but the split beams that held back the crumbly sandstone ceiling were covered with a film of soot and grease from cooking and seemed to swallow light. I crouched so Otis wouldn’t bump his head or smudge the figures I had drawn in the grime when I was young.
“Sunshine! I bet that feels good!” I said, trying to sound cheerful, when we reached the cave’s entrance. Otis’s skin had turned yellow over the past few days, and I hoped the sun would make it bronze again.
“I’ve never seen such bright light,” Otis said.
“It’s always like this.”
Maybe his vision was off; the whites of his eyes had become as yellow as his skin.
I cinched him up onto my hips and started down the wind-scoured trail, avoiding the steep sandstone flanks that I usually took to and from our cave in Windy Butte. Its flanks were so dry that they seemed incapable of supporting life, but as I carried Otis through a maze of low outcrops, we passed clumps of rabbit bush, goldenrod, and grasses, which were enough to interest the pronghorns whose faint tracks I often followed along this south-facing slope. I never saw them, only their hoof prints. Sometimes I thought the prints were from animals in the spirit world that Otis spoke of; perhaps their spirits lived in the cracks and crevasses and hollows of the butte so they could see their still-living brothers and sisters walking the trails and grazing in the terraces below. I was afraid of disturbing them.
“And you thought I’d drop you, huh?” I joked when we reached the base of Windy Butte. I was relieved I hadn’t and thought I deserved a little praise, which Otis provided by saying, “This is nice, being carried. You’ve become a strong boy. We’ll have to do this again.”
His breathing was calm, now; it didn’t sound gravelly. “Sure, we’ll do it tomorrow. We can do it everyday.”
I lingered, there on the terrace, with Otis pressing into my back, and thought how well he’d done. He was fine. He wasn’t going to die anytime soon, I thought. I’m sure I was smiling, but Otis couldn’t see my face, and he didn’t say anything else.
From the base of Windy Butte, a series of terraces ran stepwise down to the road and garden along the White Earth River. During that period of my life, when Otis was dying and I was making daily trips from the cave to the garden and then Cemetery Butte and sometimes the boathouse, the terraces represented an in-between ground. Their lower elevation spared them from the dry wind higher up on the buttes, but they were well enough above the bottomland not to be haunted by the ghosts of the town people who used to tend the gardens along the river. Nor were they desolate like the abandoned boathouse and playing field and the jagged, flattened ruins of the town. They were gentle, rolling, and undisturbed, the only place in the valley not scarred by destruction or loss, and seemed to be waiting for a person to settle on their slopes and make a fresh start: the hillocks of grass, the gray leaves of sagebrush and willow, delicate ephemerals, and the spikes of orange and the soft purple of Indian paintbrush and coneflowers on the gentle slopes; and groves of box elder, a solitary elm, a patch of June berries, and a stand of chokecherry signaling that somewhere among the trees and shrubs there was enough moisture to provide a reliable trickle for drinking water. We should have lived there, instead of in the cave, especially once we were sure no one was going to wander into our valley.
I avoided the ruins of the town, which were far down and off to the right. Otis went limp as I crossed the road. For a moment I thought he had fallen asleep. I stopped short on the path to the garden and tightened my grip on his thighs. I shouted his name and bounced him up and down. He started to wheeze and then gasped.
“You’re hurting me,” he moaned.
I turned my head and spoke over my shoulder: “I didn’t want you to miss anything.”
“I’m not.”
“Okay, then.”
I backed him onto the bench in the cottonwood grove on the edge of the garden. A light breeze made the leaves tremble and show their pale undersides. Their sound calmed me. It was like the sail vibrating in the wind or water rushing along the hull of the canoe, but the sound of the leaves didn’t make me afraid, as the sound of the sail or water did. Otis’s wheezing became louder. His thin, bony frame rose and fell.
“I should’ve brought a blanket for you to sit on,” I said. “The bench . . .”
“I’ve sat on harder things,” he cut me off. “Ever wrap your legs around a steel girder? Now that’s hard. And cold! Up in that goddamn wind? Makes your balls run for cover.”
I started to laugh. Otis’s stories about iron work in the Center were some of my favorites, except for the one about the man who slipped off a beam and fell ten stories and died.
“I used to kiss Malèna on this bench,” Otis said. “After everyone else had finished working in the garden for the day and had gone home. I liked to kiss her to the sound of the river.”
He rubbed the smooth, worn bench with his fingers and looked away, avoiding my stare. I didn’t say anything.
He swallowed once and then looked me in the eye: “But I didn’t kiss her on the cheek, like I kiss you,” he said.
I worried that the story of kissing Malèna would remind him of her death, how her fever had forced Otis, perhaps, to stop kissing her and, before he knew it, take her on the train to the Center, where she died in a hospital, his last kiss probably on her forehead. She died before I was born.
“You want some water?” I almost shouted at him.
“I’m not drinking anymore.”
“Oh, yes, you are. Of course, you are.”
© Roger Wall 2019
This is an excerpt from the novel During-The-Event by Roger Wall, University of Alaska Press 2019.
“I want to see my grave. To make sure you’ve dug it properly.”
Otis spoke those words the day before he died. We were in the cave in Windy Butte, our home in the White Earth River valley in the former state of North Dakota. Otis was at the back of the cave, where the air was cool and damp, in a bed he’d made by nailing together peeling clapboard that he’d scavenged from the ruins of the Catholic church. I was standing near the cave’s entrance, beside the mud brick stove he’d built when I was an infant. (He’d worked with me strapped to his back with a strip of blanket, he’d told me.) I was holding a pot of corn mush and looking across the valley to Cemetery Butte, where I should have been digging his grave.
He said the first part, “I want to see my grave,” in a quiet, weak voice— maybe he had just woken up—but the words made me stop chewing and hold off on taking another spoonful of mush. I peered into the dim light at the back of the cave where he was rustling around.
He had thrown off the rabbit-skin blanket and was struggling to sit up. The bed squeaked. He coughed and hawked up phlegm, cleared his throat. Then in a stern voice, he said the second part, “To make sure you’ve dug it properly.
He seemed to accent “properly,” as though he knew what I had been up to that morning: not digging his grave on Cemetery Butte but sailing the canoe on Lake Sakakawea, an act that put me at risk of drowning and us at risk of detection, or so Otis would have reasoned. He seemed to fear being rounded up by government agents more than he feared death, although neither he nor I, alone or together, ever encountered an agent in all our days in White Earth River, perhaps because Otis sometimes rushed me into the basement or up to the cave to avoid what he insisted were agents slinking into our town.
I didn’t answer Otis right away, since I hadn’t expected that he’d want to inspect the grave and was worried he’d notice that I hadn’t dug it to his specifications. His breathing had become heavy in the past few days, as though he had to push each breath through a handful of silt to get it out. But I figured he could survive a trip up the butte. He was a tough old coot.
“Once I finish eating, I’ll take you there. On my back,” I said and then sunk the spoon into the pot of corn mush. I was starving.
“I don’t know about that,” Otis said.
“Do you want some of this?” I asked.
I held up the dented pot toward Otis. He was resting against the juniper trunks that lined the cave wall. He shook his head. There was hardly any mush left, anyway.
“Why are you stooped over?” Otis asked.
“My back is tired.”
“You look guilty.”
Otis seemed to know whenever I disobeyed one of his rules.
“It’s a weak posture, you’ll injure yourself in the garden,” he said. “Try to avoid it, for your own sake.” He hawked some more phlegm.
“Okay.”
I scraped the last scoopful from the pot and then dunked it into the wash pail.
“I’ll need my sweater. The cool season has come early this year,” he said.
“The warm season has just begun,” I corrected him. “You’ve been in the cave too long. You need some sun, that’s all.”
Where the light from the cave entrance fell off, a dresser stood with half of a broken mirror propped against the wall. I yanked on the mismatched knobs to open the warped top drawer. Inside, Otis’s red wool socks and navy blue sweater were arranged right to left.
The air at the back of the cave smelled of Otis, not just the usual smell of his body but also of his urine and feces. He hadn’t washed in a few days. Neither had he cleaned his teeth with the stick, which was perhaps why his breath smelled sour. Or maybe his lungs were infected and he was exhaling bits of decay and pus when he coughed up phlegm. I kneeled on the willow matting and began to dress him.
“Okay, give me a foot,” I said and rolled the red socks over the white cotton ones he had darned so many times that the toes and heels were a crosshatch of black threads. Over the socks I tied the wide deer-hide straps of his rubber sandals. I wore a pair of these, too; we had made them from the garden cart’s flat tire.
“Up with the arms,” I said. I slid the heavy navy blue sweater over his head and then brushed wisps of thin gray hair out of his face and tucked them into his braid.
“There. Climb on up, now. Come on. Wrap your arms around my chest.”
I squatted, with my back toward him, and grabbed his bony thighs, one in each hand. He fell against me, and I hoisted him up into the small of my back.
“Don’t drop me down the butte,” he said.
He sounded scared, so I tried to make a joke: “You think you’ll be so lucky? Just hold on tight.”
Otis gripped my arms, but as I stepped forward, he swayed backward and groaned in panic. I countered by jerking him into my back.
“I told you to hold on!” I shouted.
“I’m so weak,” he whispered in a hoarse voice.
“Okay, let me get my footing, here,” I said.
The willow mats covering the cave floor flexed under our weight. I couldn’t see very well in the shadows. Otis had skinned the bark off the junipers to brighten the walls, but the split beams that held back the crumbly sandstone ceiling were covered with a film of soot and grease from cooking and seemed to swallow light. I crouched so Otis wouldn’t bump his head or smudge the figures I had drawn in the grime when I was young.
“Sunshine! I bet that feels good!” I said, trying to sound cheerful, when we reached the cave’s entrance. Otis’s skin had turned yellow over the past few days, and I hoped the sun would make it bronze again.
“I’ve never seen such bright light,” Otis said.
“It’s always like this.”
Maybe his vision was off; the whites of his eyes had become as yellow as his skin.
I cinched him up onto my hips and started down the wind-scoured trail, avoiding the steep sandstone flanks that I usually took to and from our cave in Windy Butte. Its flanks were so dry that they seemed incapable of supporting life, but as I carried Otis through a maze of low outcrops, we passed clumps of rabbit bush, goldenrod, and grasses, which were enough to interest the pronghorns whose faint tracks I often followed along this south-facing slope. I never saw them, only their hoof prints. Sometimes I thought the prints were from animals in the spirit world that Otis spoke of; perhaps their spirits lived in the cracks and crevasses and hollows of the butte so they could see their still-living brothers and sisters walking the trails and grazing in the terraces below. I was afraid of disturbing them.
“And you thought I’d drop you, huh?” I joked when we reached the base of Windy Butte. I was relieved I hadn’t and thought I deserved a little praise, which Otis provided by saying, “This is nice, being carried. You’ve become a strong boy. We’ll have to do this again.”
His breathing was calm, now; it didn’t sound gravelly. “Sure, we’ll do it tomorrow. We can do it everyday.”
I lingered, there on the terrace, with Otis pressing into my back, and thought how well he’d done. He was fine. He wasn’t going to die anytime soon, I thought. I’m sure I was smiling, but Otis couldn’t see my face, and he didn’t say anything else.
From the base of Windy Butte, a series of terraces ran stepwise down to the road and garden along the White Earth River. During that period of my life, when Otis was dying and I was making daily trips from the cave to the garden and then Cemetery Butte and sometimes the boathouse, the terraces represented an in-between ground. Their lower elevation spared them from the dry wind higher up on the buttes, but they were well enough above the bottomland not to be haunted by the ghosts of the town people who used to tend the gardens along the river. Nor were they desolate like the abandoned boathouse and playing field and the jagged, flattened ruins of the town. They were gentle, rolling, and undisturbed, the only place in the valley not scarred by destruction or loss, and seemed to be waiting for a person to settle on their slopes and make a fresh start: the hillocks of grass, the gray leaves of sagebrush and willow, delicate ephemerals, and the spikes of orange and the soft purple of Indian paintbrush and coneflowers on the gentle slopes; and groves of box elder, a solitary elm, a patch of June berries, and a stand of chokecherry signaling that somewhere among the trees and shrubs there was enough moisture to provide a reliable trickle for drinking water. We should have lived there, instead of in the cave, especially once we were sure no one was going to wander into our valley.
I avoided the ruins of the town, which were far down and off to the right. Otis went limp as I crossed the road. For a moment I thought he had fallen asleep. I stopped short on the path to the garden and tightened my grip on his thighs. I shouted his name and bounced him up and down. He started to wheeze and then gasped.
“You’re hurting me,” he moaned.
I turned my head and spoke over my shoulder: “I didn’t want you to miss anything.”
“I’m not.”
“Okay, then.”
I backed him onto the bench in the cottonwood grove on the edge of the garden. A light breeze made the leaves tremble and show their pale undersides. Their sound calmed me. It was like the sail vibrating in the wind or water rushing along the hull of the canoe, but the sound of the leaves didn’t make me afraid, as the sound of the sail or water did. Otis’s wheezing became louder. His thin, bony frame rose and fell.
“I should’ve brought a blanket for you to sit on,” I said. “The bench . . .”
“I’ve sat on harder things,” he cut me off. “Ever wrap your legs around a steel girder? Now that’s hard. And cold! Up in that goddamn wind? Makes your balls run for cover.”
I started to laugh. Otis’s stories about iron work in the Center were some of my favorites, except for the one about the man who slipped off a beam and fell ten stories and died.
“I used to kiss Malèna on this bench,” Otis said. “After everyone else had finished working in the garden for the day and had gone home. I liked to kiss her to the sound of the river.”
He rubbed the smooth, worn bench with his fingers and looked away, avoiding my stare. I didn’t say anything.
He swallowed once and then looked me in the eye: “But I didn’t kiss her on the cheek, like I kiss you,” he said.
I worried that the story of kissing Malèna would remind him of her death, how her fever had forced Otis, perhaps, to stop kissing her and, before he knew it, take her on the train to the Center, where she died in a hospital, his last kiss probably on her forehead. She died before I was born.
“You want some water?” I almost shouted at him.
“I’m not drinking anymore.”
“Oh, yes, you are. Of course, you are.”
© Roger Wall 2019
This is an excerpt from the novel During-The-Event by Roger Wall, University of Alaska Press 2019.
POST RECITAL
TALK
BR: Hello Roger, and welcome to The Strange Recital.
RW: Thanks for having me.
TN: I understand you live up the mountain in the village of Pine Hill. Is that your full time residence?
RW: Yeah… well, as of November 26th it will be. In the process of relocating there.
TN: Relocating just in time for the winter.
RW: Yeah, yeah.
BR: The opposite of what people usually do.
RW: Right. Yeah, well I do like the winter but…
BR: Well that’s fortunate then.
RW: Yeah, yeah.
BR: Well regarding inspiration or your personal writing process, do you have any preference between country or city?
RW: You know it’s interesting. I probably wrote most of this book in the city but I find really that as long as I’m in a place for a while and kind of can develop a routine in that place, then it really doesn’t matter.
TN: We just heard the first few pages of your novel, During-the-Event, which came out earlier this year. Is this your first novel?
RW: It is, yeah. It was very long in the route to publication. I actually started writing it in 2002 and it was really the Permafrost Book Prize that was offered by the Permafrost Magazine in Fairbanks, Alaska that brought it to light. And winning that prize was… part of it was being published by the University of Alaska Press.
TN: That’s great.
BR: Yeah congratulations.
RW: Yeah. Thank you very much, yeah.
BR: So the book is called During-the-Event, but it takes place after the event—the event that changed everything. The reality your narrator lives in is very different from ours, and his name is unusual as well, so tell us a bit about that, and where the whole idea came from.
RW: Yeah, During-the-Event refers to a few things I suppose. The event in the novel was the time when the little town that he lives in was being emptied out as part of a… first a government relocation effort and then actually a reprisal on the town residents, who were refusing to leave and the protagonist of the novel, During-the-Event was born during this time and his grandfather actually gave him this name. He doesn’t know what his parents named him. His parents disappeared during this period of time. So the event does refer to the tragedy that befell this town, as well as his name.
BR: Say a little more about the further background before the event in the town. What was going on in the world?
RW: Yeah, so it’s a… climate change is the impetus for the disaster in the novel and the government has reacted to it by isolating itself—kind of doing a perverse action in which they think “We can save ourselves by thinning out the population to fit the caring capacity of the land.” So it’s a giant contraction—of forced depopulation, or massacre you could say, and relocating people into production preserves and a few towns with the center of the continent, the geographical center of the continent being the seat of government.
BR: In North Dakota.
RW: Yeah. Rugby North Dakota happens to be the geographic center of North America.
TN: It's interesting that we don't usually feature dystopian fiction on the podcast, but suddenly we've had two, and both of them award winners: yours and Habeas Corpus by Miriam Silver-Altman. Quite different in execution, but perhaps not so different in vision. Her story might have taken place on the way toward yours.
RW: Yeah. Well I think dystopia is in the water, you know definitely, because we’re… I think when I started writing this one it was—you know, something new. But now it’s with us every day and I think that mine is probably a little further along than Miriam’s in the sense that there really aren’t journalists in my novel.
BR: Well, I hate the marketing pigeonholes that the book industry seems to require, but I’m going to talk about them anyway.
RW: Okay.
BR: I understand that novels about climate change have become popular enough these days that there is now a genre called “cli-fi.” Perhaps your book would be in a subdivision of that, perhaps “post-climate-change,” similar to “post-oil” or “post-nuclear.” Any thoughts about this genre business?
RW: Yeah, so when I started writing it I sort of had this view that there was fiction and there was non-fiction. And I was writing fiction. And then once I wrote it, people told me: “well it’s really speculative fiction, ‘cos it’s not quite science-fiction,” and I could live with that. You know I sort of became familiar with speculative fiction and so now I think they’ve split up speculative fiction even further into these smaller categories.
TN: A major success among post-apocalyptic books and movies was Cormac McCarthy’s The Road…
BR: So bleak I couldn’t bring myself to read it or see the movie, although I am a big MCarthy fan.
TN: Yes, so Roger, your vision seems somewhat gentler than his. Unless it gets really dark later in the book…
BR: I’ve read the whole thing—your book Roger, and I can say it’s actually fairly optimistic. But I don’t want to give any spoilers…
TN: So is there hope for humanity?
RW: Yeah, so I think somebody told me that mine was not a ‘hard’ dystopia…
BR: Oh another sub-division.
RW: Yeah. So I guess mine is referred to as a ‘soft’ or ‘sweet’ dystopia, if such a thing exists. As far as the hope for humanity… you know I think it’s kind of on the individual level. There may be some hope for individuals. But the…
TN: For a certain time.
RW: Yeah the overall picture is not that great.
BR: Well regarding the book itself, I do want to say that I really liked the two main secondary characters that D.E. or During-the-Event encounters—you crafted their speech, these odd usages of words, in a really convincing way and it serves to give a picture of the mainstream urban culture of the time even though you keep the book’s action always out on the fringes—in the natural world.
RW: Right… yeah. I was hoping to introduce him to the world through both what would have been the bottom, the lower… the very lower class people living in the world and also the very upper class, and show that really there’s not much difference between how those two spectrums are being tormented in this world.
TN: Why North Dakota?
RW: I kind of came upon that location by looking at an atlas and I was looking for a specific landscape that was very open, that had a history of railroads, water, waterways and when I found out that the geographic center of North America was Rugby, North Dakota I said “Well this has to be it!”
BR: Oh yeah right. Wow. Did you go there?
RW: I did actually. I did spend about two weeks along the shores of Lake Sakakawea, camping and exploring that area.
BR: Sounds great. So what else are you doing in the writing arena? Another book in the works or anything?
RW: Yeah I’m working on a second novel that I’ve been working on for a number of years—I keep going back to it in different ways, which is a story of a father who is estranged from his son, who allegedly dies of a drug overdose in Africa and the father tries to find out what actually happened to the son.
BR: Hmm, wow.
TN: Well, we’re out of time. If we don’t stop now we’ll be moving into the future.
BR: Impossible.
TN: Thanks for joining us, Roger.
RW: Oh, my pleasure.
TN: What do you mean, impossible? I thought you always say anything’s possible.
BR: You must be thinking of someone else.
BR: Hello Roger, and welcome to The Strange Recital.
RW: Thanks for having me.
TN: I understand you live up the mountain in the village of Pine Hill. Is that your full time residence?
RW: Yeah… well, as of November 26th it will be. In the process of relocating there.
TN: Relocating just in time for the winter.
RW: Yeah, yeah.
BR: The opposite of what people usually do.
RW: Right. Yeah, well I do like the winter but…
BR: Well that’s fortunate then.
RW: Yeah, yeah.
BR: Well regarding inspiration or your personal writing process, do you have any preference between country or city?
RW: You know it’s interesting. I probably wrote most of this book in the city but I find really that as long as I’m in a place for a while and kind of can develop a routine in that place, then it really doesn’t matter.
TN: We just heard the first few pages of your novel, During-the-Event, which came out earlier this year. Is this your first novel?
RW: It is, yeah. It was very long in the route to publication. I actually started writing it in 2002 and it was really the Permafrost Book Prize that was offered by the Permafrost Magazine in Fairbanks, Alaska that brought it to light. And winning that prize was… part of it was being published by the University of Alaska Press.
TN: That’s great.
BR: Yeah congratulations.
RW: Yeah. Thank you very much, yeah.
BR: So the book is called During-the-Event, but it takes place after the event—the event that changed everything. The reality your narrator lives in is very different from ours, and his name is unusual as well, so tell us a bit about that, and where the whole idea came from.
RW: Yeah, During-the-Event refers to a few things I suppose. The event in the novel was the time when the little town that he lives in was being emptied out as part of a… first a government relocation effort and then actually a reprisal on the town residents, who were refusing to leave and the protagonist of the novel, During-the-Event was born during this time and his grandfather actually gave him this name. He doesn’t know what his parents named him. His parents disappeared during this period of time. So the event does refer to the tragedy that befell this town, as well as his name.
BR: Say a little more about the further background before the event in the town. What was going on in the world?
RW: Yeah, so it’s a… climate change is the impetus for the disaster in the novel and the government has reacted to it by isolating itself—kind of doing a perverse action in which they think “We can save ourselves by thinning out the population to fit the caring capacity of the land.” So it’s a giant contraction—of forced depopulation, or massacre you could say, and relocating people into production preserves and a few towns with the center of the continent, the geographical center of the continent being the seat of government.
BR: In North Dakota.
RW: Yeah. Rugby North Dakota happens to be the geographic center of North America.
TN: It's interesting that we don't usually feature dystopian fiction on the podcast, but suddenly we've had two, and both of them award winners: yours and Habeas Corpus by Miriam Silver-Altman. Quite different in execution, but perhaps not so different in vision. Her story might have taken place on the way toward yours.
RW: Yeah. Well I think dystopia is in the water, you know definitely, because we’re… I think when I started writing this one it was—you know, something new. But now it’s with us every day and I think that mine is probably a little further along than Miriam’s in the sense that there really aren’t journalists in my novel.
BR: Well, I hate the marketing pigeonholes that the book industry seems to require, but I’m going to talk about them anyway.
RW: Okay.
BR: I understand that novels about climate change have become popular enough these days that there is now a genre called “cli-fi.” Perhaps your book would be in a subdivision of that, perhaps “post-climate-change,” similar to “post-oil” or “post-nuclear.” Any thoughts about this genre business?
RW: Yeah, so when I started writing it I sort of had this view that there was fiction and there was non-fiction. And I was writing fiction. And then once I wrote it, people told me: “well it’s really speculative fiction, ‘cos it’s not quite science-fiction,” and I could live with that. You know I sort of became familiar with speculative fiction and so now I think they’ve split up speculative fiction even further into these smaller categories.
TN: A major success among post-apocalyptic books and movies was Cormac McCarthy’s The Road…
BR: So bleak I couldn’t bring myself to read it or see the movie, although I am a big MCarthy fan.
TN: Yes, so Roger, your vision seems somewhat gentler than his. Unless it gets really dark later in the book…
BR: I’ve read the whole thing—your book Roger, and I can say it’s actually fairly optimistic. But I don’t want to give any spoilers…
TN: So is there hope for humanity?
RW: Yeah, so I think somebody told me that mine was not a ‘hard’ dystopia…
BR: Oh another sub-division.
RW: Yeah. So I guess mine is referred to as a ‘soft’ or ‘sweet’ dystopia, if such a thing exists. As far as the hope for humanity… you know I think it’s kind of on the individual level. There may be some hope for individuals. But the…
TN: For a certain time.
RW: Yeah the overall picture is not that great.
BR: Well regarding the book itself, I do want to say that I really liked the two main secondary characters that D.E. or During-the-Event encounters—you crafted their speech, these odd usages of words, in a really convincing way and it serves to give a picture of the mainstream urban culture of the time even though you keep the book’s action always out on the fringes—in the natural world.
RW: Right… yeah. I was hoping to introduce him to the world through both what would have been the bottom, the lower… the very lower class people living in the world and also the very upper class, and show that really there’s not much difference between how those two spectrums are being tormented in this world.
TN: Why North Dakota?
RW: I kind of came upon that location by looking at an atlas and I was looking for a specific landscape that was very open, that had a history of railroads, water, waterways and when I found out that the geographic center of North America was Rugby, North Dakota I said “Well this has to be it!”
BR: Oh yeah right. Wow. Did you go there?
RW: I did actually. I did spend about two weeks along the shores of Lake Sakakawea, camping and exploring that area.
BR: Sounds great. So what else are you doing in the writing arena? Another book in the works or anything?
RW: Yeah I’m working on a second novel that I’ve been working on for a number of years—I keep going back to it in different ways, which is a story of a father who is estranged from his son, who allegedly dies of a drug overdose in Africa and the father tries to find out what actually happened to the son.
BR: Hmm, wow.
TN: Well, we’re out of time. If we don’t stop now we’ll be moving into the future.
BR: Impossible.
TN: Thanks for joining us, Roger.
RW: Oh, my pleasure.
TN: What do you mean, impossible? I thought you always say anything’s possible.
BR: You must be thinking of someone else.
