Aimless Exposition on Literary (?) Blogging

I've tried to write fiction, which has been mostly a joke, of course, but nonetheless anybody who wants to write fiction should be entitled to his or her own fictitious world. Mine is "Johnstown, Indiana." Nothing much arcane about that: my name is John and this is my town. (Actually, I am this town's native son.) And there is no real Johnstown in Indiana, as far as my consultations of atlases, geographical dictionaries, gazetteers, etc. show.

William Faulkner has his "Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi" and Wendell Berry of Port Royal, Kentucky has his "Port William," which I don't think he has ever explicated in his fiction is in the state of Kentucky, but there is little doubt of the setting. It turns out that Port William was actually the name of Carrollton (a few hills and hollers away from Port Royal) long ago.

And "Jefferson" down the big river is a big, ugly town, burdened with a power plant in Wendell's fiction. (It is burdened with a power plant, true.) Wendell's Jefferson, which is my Johnstown, is certainly no uglier than his Port William, power plant or not. I drove there once (while I was on my employers' clock but that's another story) and it was like a thousand "quaint, rustic" Kentucky hamlets, nothing distinguishing it that I could detect. Gossipy grocery store, hound dogs lying in the middle of the street. Bucolic charm, to be sure.

I've diddled with a number of stories, which are thinly disguised reminiscences of incidents in my youth. They're pretty much all about ME. Can you imagine that? Sure you can. Writers, even obscure ones, have big egos.

And I'm a "literary stylist" (rather than a "storyteller," one taxonomy of fiction writers). Which means I love the sound of my words and as a rule am sedulous in crafting sentences. (I confess it also means that I'm not worth a dang at making up a page-turning tale with an interesting plot.)

For example, I love to use ten-dollar words like "sedulous," as in the sentence above. I hope I'm not being condescending to my highly literate readers in defining the word: it just means "painstaking." Occasionally you might read a synonym, "assiduous," which is slightly more common. In learning to write, Robert Louis Stevenson said that he "played the sedulous ape" to writers he admired, emulating their work until he found a voice of his own.

I've read a lot of treatises on how to write, by E.B. White and Henry James and E.M. Forster and John Gardner. I took them all, like the nuts at Fisher take the nut: very seriously. Other than a couple of my stories getting read aloud at the O-K-I Writers' Roundtable one October, they haven't seen the light of day.

One of the things I've enjoyed about trying to make up stories is thinking up names for towns and characters: Johnstown is in Clifty County, the county to its north is Muscatatuck County. And so forth. I once thought of calling the fictitious town modeled on Madison by the name of "Harrison Bluff." It was meant in a non-flattering way.

Benjamin Harrison was the only U.S. president from Indiana. A surprisingly good one! He of course didn't have much time to mess up, but he was more concerned with true governance than politickin'; intelligent; a reformer; incorruptible; and he did one or two good things during his tragically short tenure -- I read it on the internet!). "Bluff" is a wordplay, meaning (a) a cliff or steep hill (of which there are many along the Ohio River) and (b) a deliberate deception by a show of self-confidence ("all blow and no show").

The "Johnstown" I came up with is less damning. The town it more or less depicts doesn't deserve being accused of bluster. And Harrison, it turns out, was a pretty decent president. Bluff should be reserved for the likes of Chicago or even Columbus, Indiana, although neither municipality varies in elevation more than fifty feet.

No, "Forlorn River," a ripoff of Gary Keillor's Lake Wobegon, better suits "little ol' Madison." The other, truly legitimate eponymous John associated with this burg is its 1809 founder, John Paul, he a genuine three-holer for the ages, not a little ol' port-a-potty like me. So Johnstown it is.