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****Marlin Barton’s
“Pasture Art” is the twenty-fourth in a never-ending series
called INSIDE THE EMOTION OF FICTION
where the Chris Rice Cooper Blog (CRC)
focuses on one specific excerpt from a fiction genre and how that fiction
writer wrote that specific excerpt. All INSIDE THE
EMOTION OF FICTION links are at
the end of this piece.
Name of fiction
work? And were there other names you considered that you would like to share
with us? The title is "Pasture Art." I also considered the titles "Something
out of Nothing" and "Out of Nothing."
Fiction
genre? Ex science fiction, short story, fantasy novella, romance, drama,
crime, plays, flash fiction, historical, comedy, etc. And how many
pages long? It's a short story, the title story
of my most recent collection. It runs 20 typed, double spaced pages, and 17
printed pages in book form.
Has this been
published? And it is totally fine if the answer is no. If yes, what publisher
and what publication date? It
was published in 2015 by Hub City Press in Spartanburg, South Carolina.
What is the date you began writing this
piece of fiction and the date when you completely finished the piece of
fiction? I began the story about December of 2007 and finished it in
early February of 2008. It was then published in the literary journal
Shenandoah in the fall of 2010 before appearing in book form in 2015. As you
can see, writing and publishing don't happen in quick succession.
Where did you
do most of your writing for this fiction work? And please describe in detail. And
can you please include a photo? I wrote the story at my desk in my home office. The desk is
actually an old, small dining room table with the leaves removed, and it faces
a large window. I like to see the outdoors while I write. Light and space are
always good for the imagination, well, at least for my imagination.
Flannery
O'Connor wrote at a small desk facing the wall, which obviously worked for her.
I also like to keep my desk uncluttered. Too much stuff seems to clutter my
mind, though I do have a few quotes about writing framed on my desk, and a
small globe, a gift from my wife Rhonda, and a small telescope. At some point I
realized they symbolize the micro and the macro world, both of which are
important to any writer.
What were your
writing habits while writing this work--did you drink something as you wrote,
listen to music, write in pen and paper, directly on laptop; specific time of
day? I tend to write in
the mornings, at least on days that I don't teach, and I like to write from about
10:00 to 1:00.
After three hours I'm not as sharp. I need absolute quiet, some
caffeine to drink, either Diet Coke or tea, and I write with a medium-point,
blue ink pen on yellow, legal paper, and it has to be college-ruled, 8 1/2 x
11. Later I type the handwritten draft onto a computer and create a Word
document, which allows me to go back in and rewrite after I have writer friends
offer critiques. 
What is the
summary of this specific fiction work? In this story
a teenage girl named Leah is about to finish high school, and because she has
grown up with little money, no father, and a mother who drinks and does not
take care of her diabetes properly, Leah feels weighted down with
responsibilities she shouldn't have had to take on; she simply has no idea how
to escape her circumstances.
Can you give
the reader just enough information
for them to understand what is going on in the excerpt? The excerpt below is from the opening of
the story and gives readers both a sense of the circumstances Leah lives in and
a sense of the conflict between Leah and her mother.
Please include
the excerpt and include page numbers as reference. The excerpt can
be as short or as long as you prefer.
The
helicopter sits in the middle of the hay field, its blades still except when
the wind blows. Just beyond it a sailboat rides crashing waves, and the train
engine strains up the small rise, though its smokestack never blows smoke.
There are giant bugs, too, and spiders, a matador with red cape in front of a
charging bull, and a tank with its cannon raised. A huge baseball cap with an A
for the Atlanta Braves sits at the edge of the field, two eyes just beneath the
brim. It isn’t lost on Leah that her three favorites are all something she can
ride away on. Out of here by water, rail, or air—any way will do.
Pasture
art, that’s what Mr. Hutchins calls it. Leah guesses he knows what he’s talking
about. After all, he’s the one who makes it, and it is his pasture, just like
it’s his tenant house they rent and his old car they make payments on. She’s
read about indentured servants in history class.
That’s what she feels like. Cleaning his house and
cooking for him three times a week doesn’t help with that feeling, either.
He mostly
uses round bales when he works on his creations, and she’s watched him move hay
with the large fork on the front of his tractor. But he’ll use anything that
works: cut up pieces of tin, rusty fifty-five gallon drums, driftwood from out
of the Tennahpush River, a mirror he took from an old house that had fallen in,
which is what he used for the door on the helicopter. Long pieces of tin make
the ’copters blades, and old drums welded to a galvanized pipe form its tail
and back rudder. When she squints it looks almost real, as if it might lift, hover,
and be gone.
“A waste of
good hay,” her mother says from behind her. “And to think, people come out to
take pictures of it.”
Leah turns
away from the window and finds her mother leaning against the kitchen doorway
for support. She has bad feet, the bottom of one bruised over for more than two
weeks now.
“I like
looking at all of it,” Leah says.
“I don’t
know why. Looks like something a child would do.”
“It’s
different,” she says.
“It’s hay
and junk is what it is.”
Leah isn’t
going to argue. “Time for your shot,” she says, which is its own argument, but
one she feels she has to wage.
Her mother shakes her head and waves a
hand through the air dismissively.
Why is this
excerpt so emotional for you? And can you describe your own emotional
experience of writing this specific excerpt? This story began with an image
of a girl standing in front of a trailer beneath a large oak looking down the
hill at an open pasture. I didn't know what her story was, but I knew she was
trapped within difficult circumstances and did not know how to make her life
better. I felt her desperation and felt a responsibility to tell her story and
to see if I could find a way out for her. By the time I began writing, I'd
gotten rid of the trailer, the hill, and the oak tree, but I'd begun to know
and care about her. The emotional aspect of writing this excerpt really came
down to my deep need to make the reader care about Leah as much as I did, and
still do.
Were there any
deletions from this excerpt that you can share with us? And can you please
include a photo of your marked up rough drafts of this excerpt. There are
only small deletions, corrections, and changes in this opening excerpt, but I'm glad to share them. 
Writing is a lot
of trial and error, and sometimes I have to make large cuts, but not with this
particular story.
Other works you
have published? In
addition to Pasture Art, my other
two short story collections are The Dry Well and Dancing
by the River. I've also published two novels, A Broken Thing and The
Cross Garden.
Anything you
would like to add? I grew up in Forkland, Alabama, in Greene County,
and there is a man there named Jim Bird who began making pasture art in the
1980s. He is still at it, and whoever might be interested can find photos and
articles about it pretty easily on-line. The story I wrote is completely
fiction, but I always knew I wanted to find a way to use Jim's pasture art in a
story of mine.
Marlin Barton
is from the Black Belt
region of Alabama. His most recent book is Pasture Art, a collection of short
stories. He has published two novels, The Cross Garden and A
Broken Thing, and two previous collections, The Dry Well and Dancing by the River. His stories
have appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies, including Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards and The
Best American Short Stories. He has also been awarded the Truman Capote Prize
for short fiction. He teaches in, and helps direct, the Writing Our
Stories project, a program for juvenile offenders created by the Alabama
Writers' Forum, and he's been teaching in the low-residency MFA program at
Converse College since 2010.
INSIDE THE EMOTION OF
FICTION links
001 11 15 2018 Nathaniel
Kaine’s
Thriller Novel
John
Hunter – The Veteran
002 11 18 2018 Ed
Protzzel’s
Futuristic/Mystery/Thriller
The
Antiquities Dealer
003 11 23 2018 Janice
Seagraves’s
Science
Fiction Romance
Exodus
Arcon
004 11 29 2018
Christian Fennell’s
Literary
Fiction Novel
The Fiddler
in the Night
005 12 02 2018 Jessica
Mathews’s
Adult
Paranormal Romance
Death
Adjacent
006 12 04 2018 Robin
Jansen’s
Literary
Fiction Novel
Ruby the
Indomitable
007 12 12 2018 Adair Valerez’s
Literary
Fiction Novel
Scrim
008 12 17 218
Kit Frazier’s
Mystery Novel
Dead Copy
009 12 21 2019 Robert Craven’s
Noir/Spy Novel
The Road
of a Thousand Tigers
010 01 13 2019 Kristine Goodfellow’s
Contemporary
Romantic Fiction
The Other
Twin
011 01 17 2019 Nancy J Cohen’s
Cozy Mystery
Trimmed To
Death
012 01 20 2019 Charles Salzberg’s
Crime Novel
Second
Story Man
013 01 23 2019 Alexis Fancher’s
Flash Fiction
His Full
Attention
014 01 27 2019 Brian L Tucker’s
Young Adult/Historical
POKEWEED: AN ILLUSTRATED NOVELLA
015 01 31 2019 Robin Tidwell’s
Dystopian
Reduced
016 02 07 2019 J.D. Trafford’s
Legal
Fiction/Mystery
Little Boy
Lost
017 02 08 2019 Paula Shene’s
Young Adult
ScieFi/Fantasy/Romance/Adventure
My Quest
Begins
018 02 13 2019 Talia Carner’s
Mainstream
Fiction/ Suspense/ Historical
Hotel
Moscow
019 02 15 2019 Rick Robinson’s
Multidimensional
Fiction
Alligator
Alley
020 02 21 2019 LaVerne Thompson’s
Urban Fantasy
The Soul
Collectors
021 02 27 2019 Marlon L Fick’s
Post-Colonialist
Novel
The
Nowhere Man
022 03 02 2019 Carol Johnson's
Mainstream
Novel
Silk And
Ashes
023 03 06 2019 Samuel Snoek-Brown's
Short Story
Collection
There Is
No Other Way to Worship Them
024 03 08 2019 Marlin Barton's
Short Story Collection
Pasture Art
https://chrisricecooper.blogspot.com/2019/03/24-inside-emotion-of-fictions-pasture.html
Short Story Collection
Pasture Art
https://chrisricecooper.blogspot.com/2019/03/24-inside-emotion-of-fictions-pasture.html
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