Just One Thing with Rob Roensch

Rob Roensch’s short story “A Church with the Roof Torn Off” approaches a basketball season with reverence and a gorgeous, painful exactness of noticing that makes the breath catch. Here he shares just one thing about the piece:

“‘A Church With the Roof Torn Off’ is a story in sections; I often write things in sections or fragments or pieces and I’ve explained this to myself in different ways. Something about breathing. Something about paragraphs the length of attention. Something about waves. 

It’s also possible to think of a story in sections as a story in prose-photographs. A photograph is both personal and objective, full of relevant and irrelevant specific detail, focused and sharply limited yet able to mysteriously imply a larger world, more window than painting.

I collect found photographs—they are rarer and rarer these days but they still exist. (To find them, you just have to keep an eye on the ground.) I have written about found photographs—and junk store photographs and snapshots—here. There is story in such photographs, and also in what photographs don’t show, in how photographs are arranged, in the world that exists between and around them.

This photograph is of a basketball hoop at a park on the west side of the Oklahoma City metro on an already-simmering early morning a few days ago, a million miles away from the smalltown Massachusetts winter of the story, but also the same.”