Annie Proulx on the Allure of the Ocean Deeps and the Value of Uninterrupted Time

Your story in this summer's Fiction Issue, " The Hadal Zone ," opens with a man named Arwen Rasmont flying back to the U.S. from Iceland. When did this scenario come to you? Had you already established the world of the story? Or was this the starting point?

I wanted to write a story about the ocean deeps—why? Because they exist, and their unexplored charms are alluring. The most likely place an ordinary human would encounter the odd names and distant views of underwater features is flying above them. So it is logical to have our protagonist—our Virgil—peering out of a plane window at the unknown below.

Arwen is a handsome man—he has his dead father's high-arched nose and his yellow hair—but it's not clear that his looks have brought him much luck. How much has his physical appearance shaped his life?

Alas, not even fiction can insure that a handsome face guarantees a life of good luck.

Arwen's wife, Carolla, inherits a house built in 1772. Arwen is clearing the land when he uncovers what seems to be an old slab, possibly a gravestone, bearing a curious verse. Is it inevitable that a house like this—and its grounds—will be full of mysteries and curiosities?

The verse on the stone in the garden is an easily solved mystery if any reader cares to look into it. The author of the verse was Edward Taylor, a Colonial Congregational minister who lived and worked in Westfield, Massachusetts, from the sixteen-sixties until the seventeen-twenties. I very much like his wide-ranging mind, his rich poetry, and his uneasy metaphysical questing to make the natural world fit his religion. Quoted in this story are six lines from Meditation 14. These lines are a resting place for the reader to make of them whatever meaning suits.

When Arwen is on his way back from Iceland, a woman on the airplane scolds him for keeping his blind open. He thinks that life is full of rage—road rage, air rage. But he also snaps at her after they land and, later, he's rude to a taxi-driver. Is this out of character for him?

The woman on the plane is a common traveller type. I cannot agree that Arwen "snaps at her after they land." He is on the receiving end of her "snap." And if he is "rude" to the taxi-driver after a trip that rivals the careening descent of a runaway stagecoach down a mountainside, who can blame him? Between the woman on the plane, the missing town car, and the wild taxi ride, he has had an unpleasant day; surely some discontent is merited.

But I see now that Arwen's rudeness to the cabdriver is a shift point. We want to like Arwen, but in that mocking, racist response he shows us he has a really mean streak. The story might well have pivoted here and become something else—what is the flash point for displaying ugly behavior? The doorman accepts the nasty comment, undoubtedly adding Arwen to his inner list of everybody who is like that now, y'know? So the trajectory of the story might have lifted from Arwen and picked up the doorman. Would have been a different story.

Arwen becomes fascinated by the world beneath the ocean's surface, where there are undersea mountain ranges that can be higher than the Rockies, and by the water's layered zones, including the deepest, the hadal—or hadopelagic—zone, which gives the story its title. Has this always been an interest of yours, too? When did you start thinking about life at those depths?

I am interested in a great many things—geology, botany, archeology, travel, weaving, silver and gold, sea-level rise, statuary, knitting, broken ankles, etc. Ocean "exploration" and the coming pillage of the depths and decimation of its habitants is something now well on its way. I found it absorbing to write a story about the ocean's layers of darkness and pressure and the human penetration of the deeps.

Arwen's boss at the garden-supply company where he works is a climate-change denier and the father of a man who sends him missives about the despoiling of the planet. Do you want Arwen—and the reader—to start thinking about humankind's short and destructive time on Earth?

I assume that many readers do think about climate change and its causes. The story references such people, as well as deniers, as common folk of different opinions.

At the end, Arwen is alone. He thinks of himself as a creature of the deeps, someone who can survive the Stygian darkness that compresses even time and memory. Is he?

Of course Arwen is alone. At the end of stories, as in life, everyone is alone.

Your last book, " Fen, Bog and Swamp ," was, as its subtitle succinctly explains, "a short history of peatland destruction and its role in the climate crisis." This is the first piece of fiction you've written for quite some time. What was it like to return to the short story?

"The Hadal Zone" is only apparently the first piece of fiction I have "written for quite some time." Many other stories are half written and/or waiting to be written up in my notebooks. The problem is finding time, as it takes four to six weeks of uninterrupted work to write a short story. In fact, replying to this questionnaire keeps me from working on a story about vegetable bribery and volcanoes.

Are there any writers or stories you turn to when you're thinking about short stories?

I do not "turn to" other writers or stories in the way you suggest. I read a great deal—short stories as well as everything else. For myself, I personally find the short story to be the finest expression of serious writing. Many would argue that poetry claims that place, and for them it does. For me, the entangling strands that make up a coherent short story take skill to construct and skill to read. As for a list of writers and/or stories that I appreciate and admire, I do not have the hours—days—to make such a list. I read for pleasure as well as instruction—if that is what you are getting at. I do believe the best short-story writers are the Irish who, in a goose-down Irish brogue, can gently convince you that a tablespoon of seething wasps would be a treat.