Midwestern Writing

In response to Casey Pycior's book review and writing discussions blog, "The Story is the Cure," I wrote a little something about writing that is deemed "midwestern."  Never having considered this, though I've lived in "the midwest" for over twenty years (eighteen in Ohio and two in Iowa), I thought it was time.  If I consider myself a southern writer, having been raised in the Gulf Coast region, then what comprises a midwestern writer?

Here's what I told Casey:

To me, midwestern writing is broad and expansive.  It offers a view without boundaries, train rides that go on and on, cornfields and flights of geese that extend beyond the horizon.  Midwestern writing is Willa Cather and Louise Erdrich, Sherwood Anderson and Mark Twain, Jane Smiley, Jonathan Franzen, Marilynne Robinson, and Lee Martin.  Midwestern writing doesn't seek out shade and something cool to drink the way southern writing does; it roams and meanders without the need to rush headlong down subway stairs, the way east coast stories do; it doesn’t have to be coastal and effervescent in the manner of the west coast.  It is sure-footed and sure-minded and keeps the company of truth and prairie grass and Norwegian farmers.

I might say that My Ántonia, or Winesberg, Ohio, or A Thousand Acres, or even The Corrections wins the “most midwestern” writing prize.  That’s a tough one.  I might throw the favorites into the air and watch as Gilead and The Bright Forever land among the corn tassels.  It’s too difficult, though, and I despise decisions.  So instead, I gather them, happy for the armload of novels and story collections – a few slim, most weighted and thick with pages, all of them Midwestern – amazed that summer is wide open and as welcoming as these books.

If you'd like to respond yourself, with the plus of possibly winning Lee Martin's upcoming novel, Break the Skin, here's the link:

http://thestoryisthecure.blogspot.com/2011/06/book-giveaway-lee-martins-new-novel.html

Louisiana and Floods

Thinking about Louisiana, a place rich in cypress swamps and silt and wet, fertile ground. For every flood there are those who lose their homes, farms and fishing grounds, even their livelihoods. The years that mark major floods along the Mississippi River and the coastal waterways leading up from the Gulf—1882, 1927, 1965, 1995, 2005—don’t tell the entire story. One can’t help but notice how natural disasters can be diverted into manmade ones.

But this isn’t a diatribe on the history of floods. It is rather a remark on how those in small towns and in the countryside along the swollen Mississippi have been and continue to be drowned.  And now the Morganza Spillway has been opened for the first time in 37 years to divert the river floods away from Baton Rouge and New Orleans to less densely populated areas. The Army Corps of Engineers, who have decided to open the spillway, have a less than favorable reputation after forty years of making money, when they should have been making levees.

The Corps have informed those of the Atchafalya Basin that they need to evacuate as if they are moving for good. Like the folks in the wagon, the dirt road and clouded skies pressing in, photographed years ago by Eudora Welty, the Louisianians south of U.S. Route 190, who know their houses and land will be ruined by the river’s exodus through the spillway, now take to the road in their trucks and through the bayou in their boats, leaving nothing behind. Nothing but a glimmer of hope.

Jeanne Leiby: A Way to Remember

Jeanne M. Leiby was an editor beyond editors. The first woman to head The Southern Review, she had enough heart and toughness to take on that task. When I first began submitting stories to literary reviews, I knew that, for The Southern Review, I'd have to wait for just the right story, one secure in setting, with characters balanced between rocks and hard places, with language surprising and new. And eventually I did send a story, which came back to me, and which some day I’ll return to and send again, once it’s earned the chance. Sadly, very sadly, Jeanne Leiby won’t be there to read it. Still, I look to her for guidance, and though she is gone, I find just that in her words—the words and lines and passages of her stories.

The stories in her collection, Downriver, are reflective, ribboning prisms of light, mirrored in the dusty windows of houses in Riverview and Wyandotte, under the smokestacks of the BASF plant. Downriver Detroit is the landscape by which her characters find a way, where they wrestle with each other—from the father who thinks he has broken his daughter to the boy who loses an arm, from the woman who craves human contact which is rough and raw to the eight-year-old girl who wants to slip inside the fearlessness of a mistrusted teenager. Place is not kind here: it is rocky, hard, and angled with decisions that hurt. Out of the harshness of place, however, arises a caring, beholden handling of characters. Just there is a man who treasures his children, but has no idea how to approach them. And there, on another side of town, is a girl too young to know lust, but recognizes in herself the same kind of hunger for risk and danger that older, unloved girls invite. Even their names unveil the possibility and the peril inherent in this place—names like Anna and Ingo, Joseph, Al Rosa, Benny and Trini, Nyla and Petie.  These characters are so real that it seems as though we know them, we understand them, until we are them, the taste of the river in our mouths.

The language here twists in evocative, unusual ways, the kind that trace ideas and images back to their origins, that cut though chain link and back yards and lead straight into bedrooms where things are whispered and overheard. There are moments that pull the narrative down and then send it spiraling out, in directions unexpected and upended. These moments arrive without protection, asking to be further exposed, like in Joseph’s wish for a pattern in the bathroom tile work, “something cryptic and Egyptian… something to say, ‘Come rescue us because we are all certainly dying.’” [1] And farther out, at 3 a.m. from her fourth-floor balcony, Anna measures her desire for punishment in the river’s length and breadth, recalling her father’s “primary rule of the river…  Red, right, returning. Remember that. And you’ll never get lost,” [2} and in this way realizes that leaving has always brought her back. And then in the twilight of a side yard, young Petie wants to bathe in the wicked light that Trini throws, wants “to squeeze out all that danger, see it… in a puddle, run through it in [her] father’s work boots, and dance footprints all over the white living-room rug.” [3] Bare, unburdened language holds these characters and allows them a way to open themselves, which in turn opens up the stories.

Downriver is a gift from which to remember Jeanne. Though she can’t give us more words, what she has given is immeasurable. There is grit and rocky ground and disquiet in her writing that reveals so much about the writer, so much about her imagined world, its shadow far greater than even those of the BASF smokestacks. Her stories and characters keep her memory alive, and grant us a place to return, a place to come “back, and back, and back.” [4]

[1] “A Place Alone,” 17.

[2] “Vinegar Tasting,” 30.

[3] “Nike Site,” 40.

[4] “Nike Site,” 40.

"That Bitter Scent"

"I remembered when I was just five, running around wild on the shore near Cocodrie where the herons nested. Maman waved her hands at me to quiet down. Like always, she had those pink rosary beads and they caught the sun just right, glinting and shining. I sunk into the cool sand by her feet. She had some shadow, you know?" - from "That Bitter Scent" 

To read more, visit:

http://www.primenumbermagazine.com/Issue7_PrimeDecimals2.html#anchor_344

Sometimes an elephant does have wings

In mid-March 2011

Periodisa Publishing

launched the first issue of its distinctive literary magazine,

Filigree

. Publisher, Lori Gum, and editors, Tyler Yearling Hively and Laura Miller, have worked together to assemble the stories and poems of Columbus, Ohio artists, poets, and prose writers. The magazine's design is beautiful, with Gum and Christopher Brown largely responsible, and Jamarr Michael Mays' bold cover art allowing the journal its first flight.

Myth and metaphor are at work here--inspired by wings, tusks, and great gatherings of birds in silhouette. Hively introduces the inaugural issue with a piece called, "For a Parliament of Rooks," in which he retells the "obtusely poetic legend" of the thousands of rooks who listen to a fellow rook tell a story, which at end is either applauded by granting the single rook his life or rejected by attacking and killing him. Following this incredibly tongue-in-cheek introduction, whereby one hopes the magazine's readers will praise its storytellers, the writers are introduced via "a field guide to Filigree"-- a twist on the typical table of contents.

And what follows is a collection infused with wit, sentiment, revelation and lyricism--indeed, one that is worthy of much applause--or perhaps the loud, dark, breathtaking beating of wings.

To order a copy, follow this link to Periodisa Publishing:

http://periodisapublishing.bigcartel.com/product/filigree-volume-one