“F=d(mv)/dt” by Will Donnelly appeared in Issue 28 and can be read here.
We’d love to hear more about F=d(mv)/dt.
Believe it or not, I actually wrote this story several months before Lisa Nowak, an astronaut, drove from Houston to Orlando in a fit of jealous rage to confront Colleen Shipman, an Air Force captain, in a fit of jealous rage. When those events occurred, then, I was worried that the piece might no longer be publishable, but was fortunate when Hobart picked it up, and now Sequestrum. Really, since growing up in Central Florida, I’d always been fascinated by the perils of space travel as we know it, and I’d always felt awed by the fact that there, high above us, orbiting our planet at 17,000 miles per hour, were actual people with actual lives, actual problems and worries and desires. Really, I just wanted to write about that.
What was the most difficult part in writing this story?
The most difficult part, for me, was also the most fun, and that was the research it involved. I don’t do a lot of highly technical research for most of my writing, so this was a bit different in that regard, but the more I learned about NASA and the Space Shuttle program, the more wildly impressive it seems. Even now, with the program outdated and surpassed, it still amazes me.
Recommend a book for us which was published within the last decade.
HHhH by Laurent Binet (translated from the French by Sam Taylor). This wonderful historical novel about one of the most daring Allied operations of World War II is infused with the author’s own commentary. It’s as if, amid the story and the historical exploration, Binet is so excited to tell us about it all that he can’t keep himself out of the narrative.
If you could have a drink with any living author, who would it be?
Probably Emily St. John Mandel, and it’s all because of Station Eleven. While the COVID-19 pandemic isn’t nearly as dangerous as that novel’s “Georgia Flu” (thankfully), her story explores how one tiny virus can ripple out across the world and change nearly everything in its path. I’d love to hear how she thought that all through. Clark Thompson is also probably among my favorite fictional characters of all time, and it would be fascinating, I think, to hear how she imagined him.
What are you working on now? What’s next?
I’m slowly compiling a collection of short stories about people living in a single, relatively cheap, decaying condominium complex on the coast of Florida before, during, and after a major hurricane strikes. It’s rooted in many ways in my experiences as a child staying in just such condos on the beach every summer. And then there’s my novel, which explores what happens when a man, convicted of a crime, faces a punishment involving a sort of summer camp that seems, at first, to be somewhat pleasant, but which turns out, in fact, to be much worse than prison. In terms of nonfiction, I’m also working on an essay about the era in which we live, which I’m thinking of increasingly as the death of the Information Age. When I say “Information,” though, I don’t mean knowledge or data or any kind of scientific understanding, but rather information as it’s disseminated and increasingly weaponized and otherwise manipulated by humans, by us. What began as a sort of democratic access to the history of thought has turned, I fear, into an amorphous structure of intentionally warped ideas, information run wild, and it seems to me that “information” as we know it may be on the verge of a major change. If it doesn’t change, and if we don’t change it, I fear that our society may be in danger. (Sorry to be pessimistic! But here’s hoping that whatever comes next will be better.)
Our thanks to Will for taking the time to answer a few questions and share his work. Read Donnelly’s story, “F=d(mv)/dt,” here: https://www.sequestrum.org/fiction-fdmv-dt.
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Will Donnelly’s work has appeared previously or is forthcoming in Zone 3, Barrelhouse, Silk Road, [PANK], The Potomac Review, and elsewhere. Will is a fiction editor for Juked. Donnelly has an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a PhD from the University of Houston. He teaches creative writing at Berry College in Rome, Georgia.