Iowa State University Capstones, Theses and Graduate Theses and Dissertations Dissertations 2014 Blasting at the Big Ugly: A novel Andrew Donal Payton Iowa State University Follow this and additional works at: https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/etd Part of the Fine Arts Commons Recommended Citation Payton, Andrew Donal, "Blasting at the Big Ugly: A novel" (2014). Graduate Theses and Dissertations. 13745. https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/etd/13745 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Iowa State University Capstones, Theses and Dissertations at Iowa State University Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Graduate Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Iowa State University Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Blasting at the Big Ugly: A novel by Andrew Payton A thesis submitted to the graduate faculty in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTERS OF FINE ARTS Major: Creative Writing and Environment Program of Study Committee: K.L. Cook, Major Professor Steve Pett Brianna Burke Kimberly Zarecor Iowa State University Ames, Iowa 2014 Copyright © Andrew Payton 2014. All rights reserved. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iii ABSTRACT iv INTRODUCTION 1 BLASTING AT THE BIG UGLY 6 BIBLIOGRAPHY 212 VITA 213 iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am graciously indebted: To the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Environment at Iowa State, especially my adviser K.L. Cook, who never bothered making the distinction between madness and novel writing and whose help was instrumental in shaping this book; to Steve Pett, who gave much needed advice early on; to my fellow writers-in-arms, especially Chris Wiewiora, Tegan Swanson, Lindsay Tigue, Geetha Iyer, Lindsay D’Andrea, Lydia Melby, Mateal Lovaas, and Logan Adams, who championed and commiserated; to the faculty Mary Swander, Debra Marquart, David Zimmerman, Ben Percy, and Dean Bakopolous for writing wisdom and motivation; and to Brianna Burke and Kimberly Zarecor for invaluable advice at the thesis defense. To Pinckney Benedict for his knowledge of firearms and good sentences, and to Adrienne Brodeur and Maurice LaMee at the Aspen Writers’ Institute. To Thom Keely and K Almond of Buckhannon, West Virginia, whose home brims with books and who fed me stories and meals while I wrote many pages in an upstairs bedroom staining their table with coffee rings. To the many activists and organizations I’ve met on my own journeys, and to the defenders of Appalachia, past and present, especially Maria Gunnoe, Wendell Berry, Judy Bonds, Larry Gibson, Jimmy Weekley, Dustin Steele, Brandon Nida, and Chuck Keeney. To Joey Coe for the lyrics of “Subterranean Coal Seam Blues” used in the fourth chapter. To Dad, Mom, Adam, and Amanda—I am blessed to have grown mad with you. And to my own grandparents, Donal and Teresa Payton, whose real lives and home places inspired the background for much of this book. iv ABSTRACT Blasting at the Big Ugly is a first-person, non-linear novel with two major thru-lines. The first is the story of narrator Ethan and his comrades Jake and Brett as they run around an active mountaintop removal coal mine in West Virginia shooting off flares and evading capture to prolong mining and to cost the coal company profits. The second thru-line details Ethan’s inheritance of family land at Big Ugly Creek from his grandfather and how meeting his eventual love interest Kate at a protest in Washington, DC, leads him to move to the land, where his great aunt Patsy still lives. Through Kate, Ethan gets involved with the anti-MTR movement in the coalfields but becomes increasingly frustrated by the lack of progress. On a five day march, Ethan meets Jake, a veteran of the War in Iraq who encourages Ethan to radicalize his protest. His friendship with the unpredictable and sometimes violent Jake, along with an episode of infidelity while she visits her sick father in Wisconsin, erodes and eventually ends Ethan and Kate’s relationship. The mousing operation quickly goes awry when Brett is captured by guards and arrested. Ethan and Jake continue for days until Ethan falls and fractures his rib. Instead of continuing with their action, Ethan surrenders himself to a miner to seek medical attention. Jake does not surrender, and in a struggle shoots a miner with a flare gun to the chest, steals and crashes a miner’s truck. Ethan is hospitalized for frostbite, a concussion, and a fractured rib, charged with trespassing and reckless endangerment, and let out on bail. Once back home, a snowstorm locks Ethan, Kate, Patsy, and Ethan’s father at Big Ugly. A few weeks later, after Jake has been arrested for the shooting of the miner, Ethan learns that Jake has committed suicide in prison. The book ends after Ethan has already left Big Ugly, on a drive to visit Jake’s family. 1 INTRODUCTION I have not been writing fiction for very long. I wrote a handful of short stories in my undergraduate, but mostly focused on poetry and screenplays. A year before entering the MFA Program at Iowa State, I tried my hand at a novel, but eventually shelved the effort as a learning experience. I wrote a few stories in my first semester at ISU, and after a handful of publications and some attention from a few literary agents, I learned what sells in the world of literary fiction is novels. And so, embarrassingly enough, began this project. I first wrote about West Virginia in an essay titled “You’re Not Welcome Here,” in which I detail my experience in the summer of 2011 visiting family land in Lincoln County a week after participating in the March on Blair Mountain, a fifty-mile walk to commemorate the 90th anniversary of the Battle of Blair Mountain (an experience I use again in this book). I am drawn to the place and its issues because I see mountaintop removal (MTR) coal mining as a visually, culturally, and ecologically heinous practice in one of earth’s most ancient and diverse ecosystems. While I have extended family remaining in coal country, many individuals, including my grandfather and his siblings, left in a mass out-migration of Appalachians after the Second World War from the impoverished mountains into the urban cities of the Midwest and East Coast. Most of what I know about West Virginia comes from summers spent on church mission trips, countless hiking and camping trips, and from my involvement with the anti-MTR movement while living in Washington, DC, and south central Kentucky. Discovering my own family history, through library research and interviews with my father, has been one of the major joys of writing this book. 2 A rough idea of this novel came to me in the fall of 2012, and by the start of Master’s Workshop (a required MFA course taken at the end of the second year, designed to help students complete first drafts of their theses) in spring of 2013 with Steve Pett I had a title, the names of my main characters, and a good deal of forward momentum. Initially I intended Blasting at the Big Ugly to be a sprawling multi-generational tale. I was inspired by first-person investigations of family like Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex and Tea Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife, fractured novels of family history such as Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine and Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, as well as historical fiction set in coal country like Denise Giardina’s Storming Heaven and James Still’s River of Earth. At first I tried to cram five generations of the Hart family into one book. About three hundred pages into my first draft, I decided to narrow my scope and give the narrator, Ethan Hart, more space in the story. Two or three hundred pages of new material later, I had a draft where Ethan occupied about 66% of the story and a collection of family members 33%. What you have here is all Ethan. In talks with my adviser, Kenny Cook, and after three drafts, I decided a smaller, more direct thru-line would greatly benefit the novel. I still wanted it to be steeped in history, lore, and generational patterns, but the simpler first-person narrative seemed a more solid book. Much of what I’ve cut I’m developing into a linked collection of stories, currently titled Overburden, which I will continue to work on after the MFA. I believe this book fits into many traditions of contemporary literary fiction. The fractured, nonlinear narrative is similar to Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife, Per Pederson’s Out Stealing Horses, and Kevin Power’s Iraq War novel The Yellow Birds. Initially, the blend of first-person and omniscient third, where Ethan narrates events he is not present for, was influenced by Middlesex, Oscar Wao, Tiger’s Wife, and Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety 3 and Angle of Repose. I was also influenced by the narrative experimentation of works such as Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried and Paul Harding’s Tinkers, where no single narrative perspective can be said to dominate. While this element is now vestigial in Blasting, this initial direction did help shape Ethan’s tone and scope. He is at once taking in the moment—evident in the present-tense “mousing” chapters—as well as considering the ecological and human history of the region where he lives, zooming in and out as needed. The stripped-down narrative that remains, focused on a few central events but influenced heavily by family history, is, in terms of narrative strategy, similar to Larry Watson’s Montana 1948 or Nino Ricci’s Lives of the Saints.