IF YOU LIVED HERE YOU’D BE HOME BY NOW by Lydia A. Cyrus A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Purdue University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts Department of English West Lafayette, Indiana May 2021 THE PURDUE UNIVERSITY GRADUATE SCHOOL STATEMENT OF COMMITTEE APPROVAL Terese Mailhot, Chair Department of English Brian Leung Department of English Dr. Kaveh Akbar Department of English Approved by: Dr. Dorsey Armstrong 2 for my mother who gave up everything to be mine 3 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS An incredible amount of gratitude to Poets & Writers Magazine for choosing a portion of my thesis as the 2019 fiction winner of the Maureen Egen Writers Exchange award. A swell of gratitude to my instructors at Purdue University. For saying yes and pushing me to write the way I wanted to. For teaching me how to write better, best. Thank you to Brian Leung and Sharon Solwitz for saying yes in the beginning. Thank you to Terese Mailhot for being the writer and educator to change so much for me and for showing me what gifts lay within my ability to write. Thank you to Don Platt, Kaveh Akbar, and Paige Lewis for accepting me and making me feel seen and heard and cared for even if I was a prose writer. Thank you to my workshop partners who read everything. Diana Clarke, Hannah Dellabella, Steven Dawson, Brian Czyzk, Katie McMorris, Kelsey Wort, Aaron M Dell, Lucas Hunter, Daschielle Louis, and Andy Nellis. Thank you to the folks outside of the MFA for being my family away from home: Erin Brock Carlson and Amanda Smith especially. Thank you to the writers, agents, publishers, and mavericks I met along the way. Thank you to my family. For I was the first among them to go to college and to move away from West Virginia. To Lynsey Jo, Erika, Sarah, Sara Opal, Paige, Virginia, the two Julias, Keegan, Eleni, Randi, Kristen, and to Kelsey Wort especially. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE ............................................................................................................................................. 6 ABSTRACT ........................................................................................................................................ 10 PROLOGUE ....................................................................................................................................... 11 HOW IT BEGINS FOR ME ................................................................................... 15 THE SIGN OF CHIRON ........................................................................................ 20 PEOPLE MADE FROM THE EARTH ................................................................. 37 LEAVING ................................................................................................................ 46 KILLING SNAKES ................................................................................................ 54 WHEN I ASK TO INTERVIEW HER .................................................................. 68 PHONING FRIENDS ............................................................................................. 79 WHO GOES FIRST ................................................................................................ 84 MARTHA SPEAKS ................................................................................................ 87 YOUR MOTHER’S SISTER ............................................................................... 97 THIS TIME, SHE ANSWERS ........................................................................... 111 5 PREFACE The phrase “if you lived here, you’d be home by now,” used to live on billboards for an apartment complex somewhere near Boston. I found out about them from a podcast where the host talked about how she saw the signs when she was stuck in traffic, the bummer to bummer kind. They were supposed to remind motorist that, technically, if they lived right there, they wouldn’t be stuck in traffic still. Immediately, the phrase stuck with me and with, at the time, the character of Lily Harlow who had some pages but not yet a novel. From the beginning of my journey at Purdue, I knew I wanted to write about Appalachia and the things I knew. Over the course of three years, the things I knew and my writing both grew. Away from home for the very first time, I was reminded of how different things were outside of my small hometown. I learned how different words sounded in the mouths of people not from West Virginia, how to ride a city bus, how to work a thermostat. I ate sushi for the first time and, surprisingly to some, lived in a place where food could be delivered to your front door for the first time ever. For my friends, I was just getting my Masters like they were. But quietly, and sometimes without thinking about it much, I was living in a space sometimes called after. As in, what happens when you finally get to leave? When you finally get a degree? I did the things so many people are doing in West Virginia now: I left. It was the hardest thing I had ever done and, as my therapist often says, proved my resiliency. When I had the honor of going to New York, I found that a lot of people there had many questions about West Virginia but almost no conception of it. I met dozens and dozens of people then and heard a lot things. Good and bad, but mostly in the middle. Fortunately, when Diane Cook came to visit Purdue and met with me, she forwarded me to a writer she thought would be crucial for me. Through her direction, I discovered Sarah Smarsh. A famed writer who works extensively to write about the working class and rural communities in America, specifically her experience (much like mine) growing up in Kansas. Her most recent book She Come By It Natural had a huge impact on the writing (and continued writing) of this novel. The book details the life of mega star Dolly Parton. Moreover, the book talks about the ways in which rural women are resilient and are making their lives known. Most importantly, for me, Smarsh writes about how women like her grandmother are feminists by their actions but not in name. This is because of a lot of things, which Smarsh articulates so much better than I can in this given space, but can be attributed to the fact 6 that those women were not college students or given access to the materials that end up creating so many feminists like myself and Smarsh. Instead, the word “feminist” has been seeped into a negative connotation that women like Dolly thought to mean “a hatred of men” rather than “equality for all”. Suddenly, I felt as though the women in my life made more sense because I had access to lexicon of words and feelings to finally place what I had always known. My own mother, like Smarsh’s, had always exposed me to feminist ideas and culture without ever knowing about the different waves of feminism or the academic language used to describe such things. Moreover, my mother (and every other woman in my life) sacrificed a lot in order to have children and begin her life as a mother and wife. Before me, my mother had always hoped she would be a nurse. In the spring of 1995, her own mother, Lydia Ruth Martin, was dying of cancer when my mother became pregnant unknowingly. Her mother died, my parents married at a courthouse in Greenup, Kentucky, and my mother moved in with her husband and mother-in-law. She never went to college. So many of the things Lily endures were things that happened to me. Going to college, having strained relationships with her parents and parental figures, wanting to be someone other than herself—or at least aspiring to be something greater. Similarly, other events in the book are largely inspired by life and the lives of my loved ones. The stories about young men joining the military simply because it was the only way out was the story for four out of the six grandsons in my father’s family. Addiction too was something we lived through when my Uncle Randy passed away from an accidental heroin overdose in the fall of 2016. Coupled with the stories I grew up with about great grandfathers or cousins or uncles and their plights with marriage, divorce, unemployment, success, love, drugs, death, and family I could see the larger picture of us. I could see the stories for us that are the same for so many in West Virginia. Even the head of the family, Martha, is named after and dedicated to my beloved Aunt Martha who passed in the winter of 2016. She loved books and was, and still is, the matriarchal force that raised me and loved me and pushed me to try. The character she is named for embodies a lot of her qualities. I have always been a fan of the work of the late Jim Harrison. In the end, it has not been any poem or novel of his that I think of most, but instead his reasoning behind why he dedicated his life to writing. After a fatal car accident killed his father and younger sister in 1962, Harrison made the decision to pursue his calling in life: writing. He said, “there couldn’t be any higher obligation on earth. Because if people you love die, what are you going to do?” I think of the quote 7 often. It reminds me of the urgency to tell the stories of my life and the lives of those I love when it is appropriate to do so. Because every bad thing that ever happened to me could always be labelled as tragedy or, simply worse in my opinion, written off as something that happens to people who are referred to as white trash. Because the very first semester I ever taught at Purdue a student said, “Isn’t it like really really poor where you’re from? Like it’s a bad place?” When left with memories of what has been, I needed to remember that those memories someday could be what is, what will be. Which is a more poetic way to echo the sentiment that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. For worse and for better, it has always been my dream and goal to create a body of work that would be my honest love letter to home. Along the way, things changed. Names, places, words. I knew from the beginning that I was never going to be a writer that was “good” at plot.