Guest Post and Spotlight: During-The-Event by Roger Wall

Please welcome Roger Wall to the blog! Roger is the author of During-The-Event, a post-apocalyptic novel and coming-of-age story of a young man as he discover the world through a new lens. During-The-Event is out now wherever books are sold.

An introduction to the character of Otis

As a child, when our family moved from one state to another, there wasn’t always a house to move into. Often my father would start his new assignment and look for a place for us to live while my mother and sister and I stayed behind at my grandparents’ house. They had a big yard bordered by a corn field and woods—the wilderness in my imagination. 

My grandfather was newly retired and filled his life with nonessential projects. They were a type of play for him, and he was happy to have a laborer (me) to give them the appearance of importance. He taught me manual skills, like hammering, sawing, mowing the lawn, but not in the serious way my father did. His instruction was for amusement. Nothing we built relied on my abilities. He could figure out how to do most things, despite little formal education, and was a master at scrounging building materials and tools from auction, the trash, and yard sales and recycling them for projects that never seemed to take more than a few days.

My father, on the other hand, was a stern task master. An engineer by training, every project followed a detailed abstract logic that I rarely understood. There were drawings and lists of materials and tools. Work could drag on for weeks, steal precious Saturdays. I rarely had fun. I don’t think he did, either.

I think about my grandfather when I think about the imaginative aspects of Otis. Both share an earthy quality, a sense of make believe. Otis’s stern task master side, his rigidity, his adherence to complicated and illogical practices, on the other hand, is my father. 

Otis is a transitional character in a couple of ways. He’s lived through the collapse of society and the reinvention of it as climate change consumes the North American continent. At first, as an iron worker who helps construct the new North American capital, he benefits from the government’s policies. Then, as he learns of the brutality at the heart of them, he begins to resist the government—in an ideology way. The town’s government representative, a friend of his, tells him about the history of the Hidatsa people who originated in the area, and together they begin to practice what they believe are Hidatsa prayers and songs. Otis, who doesn’t know his ancestry, entertains his friend’s suggestion that he might actually be part Native American.

When government forces level his town in reprisal for murder of the government representative, Otis and his grandson, D. E. are the only survivors. Otis, desperate to give meaning to his life, as well as to hide lapses in judgement, courage, and honesty, begins to identify as Hidatsa. He believes he and his grandson have in fact returned to a pre-contact era—but one without the cultural integrity that actual tribes had and lost. 

To make sense of their life he constructs a creation myth and songs and prayers whose authenticity D. E., as he matures, questions. Then, on his deathbed, he confesses to what he’s made up, to his actual family relation to D. E., and to what he’s concealed about the fate of D. E.’s parents. 

It is here where Otis serves another transitional purpose. Not only is he literally transitioning to death but also, through his confession, forcing D. E. to transition from the life he’s known into a life he has yet to discover—his own life. Otis’s legacy to D. E., once all the constructs are stripped away, is an intimate knowledge of nature. In effect, as Otis sets the stage for D. E. to embark on a coming-of-age journey, this is the gift that he leaves him.

 

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In the near future, climate change has ravaged the United States, leading the government to over-correct through culls and relocation. Those who survive the mandated destruction are herded into “habitable production zones,” trading their freedom for illusions of security. The few who escape learn quickly that the key to survival is to stay hidden in the corners of the country. For seventeen years, During-the-Event, or D.E., has lived free in a pastoral life with his grandfather in North Dakota. But when death reaches their outpost. D.E. is forced on a journey that will change his life—and reveal surprises about his past.

Once taught that strangers are only sources of pain, D.E. must learn to trust the people he meets on his journey. During-the-Event is a soaring coming-of-age story that grapples with achingly familiar issues: coming to terms with loss and loneliness, finding what our identities really mean, and searching for love in an often strange and bewildering world.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

via author's website

As a child I lived throughout the United States—east coast, Midwest, the South, west coast—before touching down at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where I studied fiction writing. Writing and editing assignments let me explore the worlds of education, rural development in Africa, small town news, medicine, and grassroots environmental advocacy. During-the-Event is my first novel. I live in New York and the Catskills.

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