I would be golden in a world where conversation consisted solely of anecdotes and everyone was left to figure out their own connections between stories instead of making the person who came up with the anecdote explain themselves....
Anyway...when I was a kid, we didn't have money. We bought our clothes at rummage sales and had a six-party phone line and in the winter sometimes you could see your breath in every room in the house. But--oh baby--we had food.
I remember reading books when I was that same kid where the kid characters were poor. They were embarrassed that they had hamburger for dinner and never had steak. And I never got that. I would read that--and it popped up over and over, as if that was one of the great divisions between poor and middle class--hamburger or steak--and think--hamburger, steak, they're both beef, right?
Because we always had steak--really good steak, too. We probably ate steak once a week. Steak or hamburger--it was a reach-in-the-freezer sort of choice.
There were a whole list of things when I was that age that I had no idea what they cost--we never bought milk or beef or most vegetables. We never bought apples or cherries or peaches. Heck, we only bought gas at gas stations when we went on long trips. Sometimes we didn't buy butter. It wasn't that I didn't get that people lived in town, that they bought their meat instead of raising it. What I didn't get was that steak and hamburger, butter and margarine actually cost different amounts of money.
My point is that despite my persistent belief that everyone has the same cultural referents that I do, this is pretty much untrue. The second part of my point, which involves taking a hard right for a moment before getting back on track, is that SarahP and I and others were having a conversation recently about the rural equivalent of urban fantasy (and for anyone who says that it's all urban fantasy even when it's in rural climes, I say...pbtttb! Because, although there is indeed rural fantasy that's totally imbued with urban sensibilities, it's not what I'm talking about. In fact, I probably write urban fantasy, when I write it, with rural sensibilities, but that's a digression for another time.)
So, the rural equivalent of urban fantasy--Chainsaw on Hand is that kind of story, as is Waking Up Dead in Iowa (unfinished) and Later, There will be Fireworks (finished, but with a totally sucky ending), and Sleeping Beauty in Upstate New York with Cows, Pigs and the Occasional Rooster (which I have only written the first two pages of) and Cowgirls in Space (which only exists in my imagination) are all totally and completely rural fantasy with non-urban sensibilities.
And one of the things that these sorts of stories have to overcome (and by god I am finally bringing it back to the steak and hamburger thing) is that hardly anyone grows up in working rural America anymore. More people than not have no idea about all the meat you could ever want and propane tanks and milk inspections and never ever waking up your parents at the crack of dawn to open Christmas presents because, first of all, they're always up, like, an hour before any kid ever thought of getting up and after that there are cows to milk and calves to feed and barns to clean and if you do that all first then you get five hours in the middle of the day when there's nothing else to do except eat a late breakfast and open presents and maybe take a nap before you have to do it all over again.
Iowa is another country (the federal government says for their purposes all of Iowa is rural, though really that isn't totally true). The High Plains is another country. Working rural America in its several dozen variations is/are another country. And when we write genre about working rural country, we write about it like we write about another planet, like the future, like lots of readers are coming to it for the first time and like it's both deep and familiar and a complete and fascinating new world at the same time. We don't take it for granted and we don't pretend it's just like the city/suburbia with fewer houses and dramatically less concrete. We don't pretend that all the animals are Bambi (and we--oh god, please--don't pretend that cows with udders are teenaged boys--yes, if someone could please shoot that movie, Barnyard, I'd be eternally grateful) and we don't pretend that they aren't occasionally Bambi-cute either (well, okay, the boy cows with udders thing, that needs to go away forever). And we tell people:
What you want, on a dark morning like that, with the wind and the cold and the knowledge that you’ll never be warm again is to pull the blankets way up over your head and never come out until spring. But this is South Dakota on the plains in winter. There are cattle waiting to be fed, counting on you as their single source of, well, everything. And because you have to get up anyway, you do.
and
Tillie has brought a flashlight with her but she doesn't need it. There's a full moon and she can see a dozen feet ahead of her as she sets out across the yard, through the fence and into the Whitby's fields. The corn was harvested weeks ago and there's just dry stubble, which crunches under her feet and occasionally causes her to stumble when she steps on a particularly fat stalk. In fifteen minutes, she has reached the Whitby's. Coming in from the field instead of from the road, she sees the house between the corners of the buildings, like a reverse shadow glowing in the moonlight.
and
It wasn't even her rooster. He belonged to the McCutcheon's down the south orchard. Every spring, just as the grass was starting to green he came over, despite the dogs, who stalked him, despite the bull in the near pasture, despite every possible discouragement, he came and perched on top of the old machine shed and crowed in the morning. After two or three days, she'd call Jed McCutcheon and he'd come and grab the rooster and take it back home.
and
Jennie Low swears to God
--I swear to God, she says--
that the best cowgirls in the world are on the Chadron in Northwest Nebraska.
So that's what I think rural fantasy sounds like. If it exists, which I'm not entirely sure that it does. It's a different language, a different culture, though sometimes it sounds so very similar to urban fantasy that you have to look closer to see where the difference lies. It's steak and hamburger, hover (pronounced hoover--don't even ask me), chainsaws on hand, and abandoned dairy barns with lime-covered floors. I've lived in town for--holy crap--a long time, but job and family and history connect me back. There are things I want to show, there are things I want to understand, and there are things I can only explain when I put them into this language and this culture.
So, rural fantasy--it's time has so totally come.
