On Rust, Patience, and What the Wheat Knows

We met in a room that smelled of old paper and dust, somewhere in the back of a library in Ciudad Obregon that nobody used anymore. The air conditioning was broken. Powers had his sleeves rolled to the elbows and was reading something on his phone about mycorrhizal networks. McCarthy sat with his hands flat on the table, watching a fly crawl across the wood grain. Neither of them seemed bothered by the heat, which was considerable.

I had brought notes. A folder of research on shuttle breeding, on Puccinia graminis, on the women who sit on stools in Mexican wheat fields and use tweezers to strip the male parts from flowers. I was nervous. I opened the folder and McCarthy glanced at it without interest.

You dont need notes, he said. You need to go stand in a field.

I tried to explain that the story was about a wheat breeder racing against stem rust, about the tension between genomic technology and manual labor, about—

Powers interrupted, gently. He said, You’re describing the story’s content. That’s not the same as knowing what it’s about. What is it about?

I said it was about futility. About doing the same work your predecessors did seventy years ago even though the pathogen evolves faster than you can breed against it.

McCarthy made a sound that might have been agreement or might have been the beginning of a cough. He said, Every story worth telling is about whether to keep going. The rest is scenery.

Powers shook his head. No. That’s a human-centered reading. The rust is also keeping going. The wheat is also keeping going. If this is only about whether one woman perseveres, we’ve missed the actual drama. The actual drama is three billion years of coevolution compressed into eighteen months.

That’s fine, McCarthy said. Put it in the story. But the reader follows a person. The reader needs hands, eyes, a spine that hurts from sitting on a stool all day. You cant follow a spore.

You absolutely can follow a spore, Powers said. I’ve followed a seed for four hundred years across seven chapters. The question is whether the prose earns it. If you write the rust as a blind mechanism, sure, it’s boring. If you write it as what it is — an organism with a strategy, a clock, a kind of intelligence that predates human consciousness by epochs — then the reader follows it the way they’d follow any antagonist. With dread.

McCarthy leaned back. His chair scraped on the tile floor. He said, I dont write antagonists.

I know, Powers said. That’s what makes your work terrifying. The landscape isn’t against anyone. It just is.

Right.

So the rust just is. It’s not evil. It’s not even hostile. It’s a life form exploiting a resource, the way every life form exploits every resource. The horror isn’t malice. The horror is indifference.

McCarthy looked at him for a long time. Then he said, Now you’re talking sense.

I wrote that down. The horror is indifference. It felt like the center of something.

Powers continued. He said, The breeding work interests me because it’s one of the oldest conversations humans have with other species. We reshape wheat. Wheat reshapes us — our settlement patterns, our diets, our wars. And rust reshapes the conversation every few decades by killing what we thought we’d fixed. It’s a three-body problem. The breeder sits at the intersection.

I said I wanted the three planting cycles to structure the story. Eighteen months. Each cycle a season of crossing, growing, selecting, failing.

McCarthy said, Make the cycles shorter in the telling. First one long. Second one compressed. Third one a few pages. That’s how time works when you’re losing.

I started to object — I wanted equal weight for each cycle, the symmetry of it — and McCarthy looked at me with an expression I can only describe as patient contempt.

Symmetry is a lie, he said. Nothin in nature is symmetrical. The last cycle should feel rushed because by then the breeder knows. She knows the rust is ahead of her. The crossings are desperate. Dont give the reader time to settle in. Take it away.

Powers nodded slowly. He said, He’s right about the pacing, though I’d push further. The third cycle shouldn’t just be compressed — it should feel like the prose itself is infected. Shorter sentences. Fragments. The syntax breaking down the way the wheat breaks down. The stem snaps and the grain shrivels and the sentence does the same thing.

I asked about the ending. The pitch says the breeder fails but plants seeds at the higher station. Is that hope?

McCarthy said, Dont use that word.

What word?

Hope. It’s a word for people who havent been paying attention. She plants the seeds because that’s the work. The work is the work. You dont need a reason beyond the work itself.

Powers said, I disagree. Or — not disagree exactly. I think planting is an act of faith in a system larger than the individual planter. She’s not hoping. She’s participating. She’s adding her eighteen months to a conversation that started when the first wild grass mutated a larger seed head in the Fertile Crescent ten thousand years ago. The planting is hope, but it’s hope on a timescale she can’t experience. It’s geological hope. Evolutionary hope.

Thats not hope, McCarthy said. That’s just time.

Powers smiled. Maybe time is what hope looks like when you zoom out far enough.

McCarthy didn’t smile. He rarely does, from what I’ve read. He said, Write the woman on the stool. Write the tweezers. Write the anthers falling into the paper bag. Write the sun. That’s your story. Everything else is commentary.

I said, But the genomic data, the laptop screens, the satellite imagery of rust advancing across continents—

Powers said, Yes. All of that. The contrast between the screen and the stool is essential. She toggles between a genome browser showing fifty thousand base pairs and a hand lens showing a single pustule on a single stem. Both are the same war. The scales are different.

McCarthy said, The screen is a distraction.

It’s the world she lives in, Powers said. You can’t write a contemporary breeder without the technology. Borlaug had tweezers and a notebook. This woman has tweezers and a sequencer. The tweezers haven’t changed. That’s interesting. That’s the image.

I agreed. The unchanged tool in the changed world. I wrote it down.

We sat for a while. The fly had moved to the window. Outside, the Sonoran desert pressed against the glass — flat, scrubbed, pale. The kind of landscape McCarthy had been writing his whole life.

I asked about the field workers. The pitch mentions local technicians who do the crossing work. How much should they matter?

McCarthy said, They matter the way all people matter. They’re there. They work. Give them names. Dont explain them.

Powers said, The technicians are the story’s root system. Underground. Invisible from above. But the whole structure depends on them. In the Overstory I wrote characters who spend years doing work nobody sees — planting seedlings, cataloguing species, sitting in a tree. The quiet labor is the labor that holds.

I said I was worried about sentimentality. A woman fails to save the world’s wheat, plants seeds on a mountain, the sun rises. It could easily become —

McCarthy cut me off. It wont. Not if you write it the way grain tastes when you chew it. Not if you write the rust the way rust looks — orange, thick, like something growing on a corpse. Keep the prose on the body. On the stalk. On the dirt under her fingernails. Sentiment comes from abstraction. Stay concrete and the reader does the feeling for you.

Powers said, Though I’d push back on the idea that we should avoid all systemic framing. The story needs at least one moment where the camera pulls back. Where the reader understands that this field in Mexico is connected to a bread line in Islamabad, to a futures market in Chicago, to a seed vault in Svalbard. Not through exposition — through image. A single paragraph where the scale shifts and the reader feels vertigo.

I said, One paragraph.

One, Powers said. Maybe two. The rest stays close.

McCarthy said, One.

I asked about the prose voice. How to balance McCarthy’s stripped declarative style with Powers’s more lyrical, scientifically precise sentences.

Powers said, The sections in the field should sound like him. He pointed at McCarthy. Short. Declarative. No wasted words. Dust, sun, hands, wheat. The sections with the data, the lab, the genomic work — those can be mine. Longer sentences, subordinate clauses, the kind of prose that tries to hold a whole system in a single period. The shift in register should mirror the shift in scale.

McCarthy said, Just dont let the long sentences slow the story down. A long sentence has to move. It has to carry the reader forward. If it stops to admire itself the reader puts the book down.

Agreed, Powers said. The long sentence earns its length by covering ground. Not by decorating.

I asked if the breeder should have a personal life. A family. A reason beyond the work.

McCarthy said, No.

Powers said, Maybe. Not a family in the traditional sense. But a relationship — with a colleague, with a student, with the field itself. Something that shows us who she is when she’s not working. Even if it’s just a paragraph.

McCarthy said, The work shows who she is.

I said, What if she has a former student at the higher station? Someone she trained. Someone who receives the seeds when she sends them up the mountain. That gives us the Road’s parent-child dynamic without —

Without the sentiment, McCarthy said. Fine. But dont explain the relationship. Dont have them talk about their feelings. Show us what they do for each other. Actions. Objects. A crate of seeds with a note that says nothing useful.

Powers said, The note should have data on it. Crossing numbers. Dates. That’s how scientists express — not affection exactly. Trust. The trust of someone who sends you their best work knowing you’ll know what to do with it.

I wrote that down. A crate of seeds. A note with crossing numbers.

We were quiet again. The heat had gotten worse. McCarthy pushed his chair back from the table and looked at the ceiling.

He said, The boy in the Road carries the fire. That’s what the father tells him. Youre the one who carries the fire. This woman carries seeds. It’s the same thing. It’s the only thing worth carrying. Not because it saves anything. Because the carrying is the point.

Powers said, The carrying and the planting. The act of putting something in the ground that you won’t live to see mature. Every tree planter knows this. Every breeder knows it. You cross six thousand flowers and you won’t eat the bread. Someone else eats the bread. If they’re lucky.

If the rust dont get there first, McCarthy said.

Right, Powers said. If the rust doesn’t get there first.

I closed my folder. I hadn’t looked at the notes once. The story was already different from what I’d planned — darker in McCarthy’s direction, wider in Powers’s. The breeder would fail. The rust would win. But the seeds would go up the mountain. Not as hope. Not as mere continuation. As an act so old it preceded language, preceded agriculture itself — the placing of a living thing in dirt and walking away.

McCarthy stood up. He said, Dont end the story with her watching the sunrise.

I said I wouldn’t.

He said, And dont end it with the seeds sprouting.

I said I wouldn’t.

End it with her hands, he said. After the planting. Dirt under the nails. Rust stains on the fingers. That’s your last image.

He left. Powers lingered for a moment. He said, The rust stains. That’s good. Because the orange on her skin — is it rust from the pathogen or soil from the planting? You don’t have to say which. The ambiguity is the whole story.

He left too. I sat in the hot room with my unopened folder and wrote the first sentence of something I didn’t yet understand.