Abstract
Flyover is a story cycle in progress which tracks a character’s relationship to masculinity, privilege, and the land and culture of the rural Midwest. The stories push at how stagnent versions of culture and identity trap individuals, making their hometowns into places they can never leave or never return to. This relationship is expressed through family dynamics, work, and football, which becomes one of the last valuable cultural expressions of the town. Football is used to protect cultural values of whiteness, capitalism, and heteronormativity in the rural setting. This project has three parts. This thesis contains selections from these three parts; Tender Beasts, Animals on the Moon, and Shells, which track different parts of the narrator’s life, from childhood through his teenage years, and into his early 20’s. At the end, the cycle returns the narrator to his home after years of escape from the responsibilities and history of the space.
Each story in the collection stands alone and is part of a larger narrative, which illustrates a relationship to place which evolves from completely embedded, to becoming a protector of the culture through a privileged status of able bodied, male, whiteness, to a parallel questioning of cultural norms, and finishing with a rejection of place. None of these stages are clear cut boundaries, but bleed into each other, tying experience to memory.
Interspersed between the stories are short prose poems which provide a way of escaping the narrative of the story, allowing for moments of intrusion in the linear timeline. The prose poems act as a new perspective or voice in the space, one which is not locked in time as the narrative is and is less grounded in the embodied experiences of the narrator, allowing for a wider shot of the place and people which occupy the story, providing context and imagery to help fill the space with life.