The Plow That Broke the Plains

A gloomy short story produced in a creative writing class during my first year of community college, presented here exactly as it was published in the 2018 edition of Perceptions Magazine.

This story was heavily inspired by (and loosely based on) a lot of the music I was listening to at the time (Dan Barrett & Tim Macuga, known most famously as Have a Nice Life), as well the attitude and general anxiety I felt about climate change and my own future at the time.

Some symbols and motifs are derived directly from the mythos Dan & Tim wrote surrounding their first record, Deathconsciousness, but this piece was written without the expectation that a reader would have that context. The title is referencing the name of the first disc on the LP, which itself is named after the 1936 documentary on the Dust Bowl phenomenon of the same name.

In many ways, The Plow That Broke the Plains was an experiment in open-ended symbolism. I used the class’s peer review process to gauge how readers’ inferences differed, and the different ways in which they filled in details which were intentionally left vague.

In the end, my professor strongly encouraged me to submit the piece to Perceptions Magazine, MHCC’s yearly literary magazine. It landed within the top 5 short fiction submissions of that year, and was published in the 2018 edition, when I was 18 years old.