2 ABTRACT OF THESIS AUTHOR: Chase Dearinger TITLE: On Stony Ground DIRECTOR OF THESIS: Constance Squires PAGES: 313 On Stony Ground chronicles the adventures of Goose, a young runaway, and his friend Henry, a mentally handicapped man who helps Goose survive in the small town of Cimarron, Oklahoma. Goose’s journey begins when he is expelled from the storage unit that he is living in with his meth-addicted mother after a run-in with his mother’s new boyfriend. It is at this point that Goose meets Henry and the two develop a friendship that shapes the novel and provides the majority of its conflict. Goose’s father, who has recently been released from prison and is cooking meth in a local motel, soon abducts his son. Before Henry can rescue Goose, Goose must face not only his abusive father but also the Deer Woman, a Native American curse. Goose soon learns that Henry’s grandmother has died, and the two attempt to bury the body in an effort to prevent the inevitable institutionalization of Henry. The two are caught, however, and separated by the courts. Goose is sent to live with his maternal grandfather while Henry is sent to live in a home for the mentally disabled. Goose’s grandfather subjects the boy to his fanatical Pentecostalism, and Goose eventually accepts the beliefs as his own and begins to believe that he has been chosen by God to save his family. These plans are interrupted, however, when his mother’s return leads to infighting and familial strife. Goose runs, and in an attempt to rescue Henry from the home in which he has been placed, ends up getting both of them mixed up with the Goodwin brothers, two escaped convicts. The Goodwins hold the two hostage, along with Goose’s father, who owes money to the escaped convicts. On Stony Ground climaxes with the subsequent shootout and fire that the hostage situation creates. Goose survives, but Henry does not. Goose is forced to examine his role in his best friend’s death, an examination that reiterates the theme of sin that is central to the novel. 3 On Stony Ground 4 Introduction to On Stony Ground The first thing I ever wrote was a fourteen page “novel” titled The Adventures of Luke Skywalker. I was nine. The epic story chronicled the adventures of Luke Skywalker as he traveled through space and time to battle the Morlocks on my Dying Earth rendition of the planet Tatooine, which was covered in swamps (I had, at the time, made the paramount error of confusing Tatooine with Dagobah). The story was essentially a mishmash of two of my favorite stories: Star Wars and The Time Machine. I continued in this vein for a couple of years, adding short stories that explained the origins of the Morlocks and justified their existence in a galaxy far, far away, until the age of eleven, when I really turned up the heat. The result was a fifty-six-page tome titled Alienbusters. I won’t go into the gritty details of this collection of interconnected stories based “loosely” on the characters of Ghostbusters (I changed it to aliens!), but you can see where I’m going with this, I hope. Pastiche has always been my favorite form of literature, and On Stony Ground is no exception. My first complete, “real” novel is an amalgamation of some of my favorite stories of all time. In it, you will find The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Star Wars, The Violent Bear it Away, the Bible, Crime and Punishment, and reimagined characters like Lenny of Of Mice and Men and The Misfit from A Good Man is Hard to Find. The same archetypal storylines that went into these works are all also present: the rite of passage, the good father/bad father dilemma, good versus evil, the unveiling of “the One.” My use of these archetypes was both genuine and ironic; I hoped to reinforce the conventions that come with these same stories while simultaneously subverting them. My method for this approach was crude at worst and simple at best: put all of these stories and all of these characters into the 5 blender and press “puree.” Once they were broken down, I was able to rearrange them, under the guise of realism, into my own story. What I hoped to accomplish (and still hope that I did) was a mosaic, built from the scraps of my favorite stories. My intention in doing this was twofold: to demonstrate that these stories are all, in the end, very much the same, and secondly, to create the sort of flexibility that would allow me to undermine some of those conventions (despite Goose’s efforts to become “the One,” he ultimately fails). In many ways, because of this, On Stony Ground is just as much a work of “fan fiction” as it is an original work. I took the opportunity to play. This idea of fan fiction is the most rudimentary introduction to the novel, I think (I hope to show that it became and becomes far more complex), but it is an important starting place. On the subject of fan fiction, author Michael Chabon says: Through parody and pastiche, allusion and homage, retelling and reimagining the stories that were told before us and that we have come of age loving – amateurs – we proceed, seeking out the blank places in the map that our favorite writers, in their greatness and negligence, have left for us, hoping to pass on to our own readers – should we be lucky enough to find any – some of the pleasure that we ourselves have taken in the stuff we love: to get in on the game. All novels are sequels; influence is bliss. (45) I can’t stress enough how liberating that last little phrase, “influence is bliss,” was for me. Throughout my education, I have constantly been bombarded by some variation of Harold Bloom’s idea of “the anxiety of influence.” I heard the phrase so much, honestly, that eventually I began to believe it, seeing myself as some sort of martyr poet who only wanted to create something truly original. I’m not sure why I wasted my early twenties slaving over 6 originality. Most of my “original” ideas, it turned out, had already been done by a handful of authors over the last hundred and fifty years. I remember one point in my early career as a “serious” writer vividly. While gazing out my window, brooding over a super-reflective state primarily concocted of marijuana and Lacanian concepts of the Symbolic, it occurred to me that the best way to reach the truth in fiction was to – and hear was my truly original idea – use multiple narrative perspectives. I would give money to see Faulkner’s response to my genius. I have loosened up considerably, though, in a long grooming process that prepared me to write this novel. I was able to free myself of the pretentiousness (or what I see as the pretentiousness) that goes with Bloom’s idea of the poet, and was able to just start writing stories again, stories willfully influenced by my favorite storytellers, stories that had fun paying homage and twisting the words of others. Those stories eventually culminated in On Stony Ground, which thus far has been my most ambitious attempt to revel in influence. In the closing sentences of my favorite novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (I offer no apologies or qualifiers for my favoritism), Huck briefly touches on his possible plans for the future: “But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can’t stand it. I been there before” (307). This statement has always led me to great speculation. What would it be like to see Huck in Indian Territory? Could you imagine? (I say to myself). Part of this speculation, I think, comes directly from my love for the character of Huck Finn. He has taken up a place in my imagination alongside some of my greatest heroes for as long as I can remember (it was read to me by my mother, at the age of six, on a long ride from Oklahoma to Pennsylvania and was one of the first books I ever read, along with a biography of Jim Bridger and Hawthorne’s terrifying and impossibly dense The House of the Seven Gables). There was 7 (and is) Huck Finn, Luke Skywalker, Barry Bonds, Fiver, Peter Venkman, Robin Hood, Michael Jordan, Peter Pan, Sherlock Holmes, and Moses, among others. The desire to see Huck roaming my home state, free and rearing for more adventure, was a direct result of the character’s palpability and the fact that in my mind he was as real as it got. Twenty or so years later, I had the opportunity to set Huck free again, not just in my mind, but also on paper. The novel was not originally a direct response to Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Eight or nine years ago (the early 2000’s tend to blur for me), I came across a novel called Rule of the Bone by a man named Russell Banks (he has since become one of my favorite contemporary authors). The novel opens: You’ll probably think I’m making a lot of this up just to make me sound better that I really am or smarter or even luckier but I’m not.