A bit more from the Google query I used in Part III, and also a second query ("blogs midwestern literary"). No sermons from me, but maybe a few quick comments on what I see. I am not putting up all I see, nor am I going past page 4 of the Google returns. Only so much time remains to me in this life. Besides, it will give you something to do!
The following order is what was in the tab left of this one in my Firefox browser.
Midwest Review: "...an annual literary magazine that features work by writers, photographers, and artists who live in, have lived in, or have spent time in the Midwest...." I cannot tell when they have an open submission period, or being an annual, if they remain n operation. I will check back with this one.
From there I found two connected sites: Pardeep Toor and Christopher Chambers.
Black, Indigenous & POC of all skin tones and across the gender and sexuality spectrum who identify as or connect to the experiences of being mixed-race, multiracial, biracial, multiethnic, or as transracial and/or transnational adoptees. We also hold space for interracial couples and multiracial/mixed families.
Midwest Fiction Writers: Minneapolis romance writers.
Catherine Lanser - Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, and the Brain - aspiring Wisconsin writer; I really like her from her "About" page.
The Chicago Blog - University of Chicago - if you are looking for books, more than writers.
Milkweed: Minneapolis publisher of books.
Literary Journals: The Midwest (20111). This is all I can find about him and the Midwest, but I do like the following:
The Midwest. The flyover, where even the towns have fled to the margins, groceries warehoused in Wal-Marts hugging the freeways, the red barns of family farms sagging, dismantled and sold as “distressed” wood for McMansion kitchens, the feedlots of agribusiness crouched low to the prairie ground. Of all the American regions, the Midwest remains the most imaginary, ahistorical but fiercely emblematic. It’s Nowheresville. But it’s also the Heartland. That weight again: the innocent middle. Though it isn’t innocent. It’s where the American imagination has decided to archive innocence.
The New Territory concerns itself with the states of and around Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska; what it calls the Lower Midwest.
The book’s collaboration has grown and spread slowly and carefully over the seasons, finding its right place in the hills, plains, and bookshelves of Missouri, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and Northwest Arkansas. When it feels right, we color outside those border lines.
Some things have never changed.
We know there’s something alive in this landscape that we share.
We explore it with tenderness. We ask it question after question to try and understand its many faces. We want and expect the best for its future.
We try to capture the region’s essence even though we know it can’t be contained. Not by words, not by pictures. Not even by stories, into which we put so much faith. Nevertheless, we keep collecting. We keep printing.
And twice a year, when a new issue comes out, we feel incredibly honored to add to the body of regional literary journalism, fiction, poetry, art, humor and imagination. Readers tell us they think differently about places they’ve lived their whole lives. You can subscribe here and see if that holds up.
From Reedsy comes The Best Literary Agents Seeking Submissions in Chicago. I cannot tell how old is this list, but I hope it helps as a start.
The Guardian published Chicago: reading the midwestern metropolis of American literature in 2014 and an interesting history, if I did notice the absence of Nelson Algren. Also from The Guardian: Your favourite Chicago books: check our readers' list; which also excludes Algren.
Mark Athitakis in GoodReads reviews The New Midwest: A Guide to Contemporary Fiction of the Great Lakes, Great Plains, and Rust Belt. This looks to be from 2017. I am thinking this might let you who want to write and who think the Midwest is not the place for writers a place to learn.
Thornfield Hall, a book blog from the Midwest, not a writer's blog but one I like all the same.
The Omaha Public Library posted 2022 Reading Challenge: Read a Book by a Midwestern Author, with links to Midwestern writers, some very current ones.
I found on the South Dakota Public Broadcasting site Recentering Midwestern Literature and History, an interview with from 2019 with Jon K. Lauck, a historian, who wrote From Warm Center to Ragged Edge: The Erosion of Midwestern Literary and Historical Regionalism 1920-1965:
KB: "Chapter One discusses the myth of the Midwestern 'revolt from the village.' To what does this revolt refer and why do you deem it a myth?"
JKL: "There was a construction advanced in the 1920s by a writer for The Nation, given the title 'The Revolt From the Village' and this referred to a group of works that he thought showed that Midwestern writers were attacking or rebelling against or being critical of their region. He’s referring to people like Sinclair Lewis in Main Street and Sherwood Anderson in Winesburg, Ohio, Edgar Lee Masters in Spoon River Anthology, etc. So, this little construction of the revolt from the village has kind of passed into literary history and to historical outlines and, you know, this idea is referred to often. And I taught it that way when I was -- well, three or four years ago before I dug into this, I used to teach this like 10-minute aside in a history survey course, this was the revolt from the village. All these writers turned against the Midwest. Well, I finally started digging into this in a lot more detail and turns out, this thing is completely misleading. All three of those writers vehemently denied attacking the Midwest. They said the revolt from the village is completele bologna. And if you look at the books they wrote and the essays they wrote outside of the books just cited in this Nation article, they said a lot of positive things about the region. So, at the worst, they were highly ambiguous. I think in many ways they were quite favorable toward the region. So, that’s why I call it a myth. This revolt of from the village idea really needs to be dispensed and not used anymore because it’s so inaccurate."
###
KB: "In the book, especially in the conclusion, you say that one of the main reasons Midwestern regionalism has, and you wrote, 'retreated so far into the recesses of the historical imagination is due to the omnipresence of mass culture.' And you call it the 'flood of outside generica and other sundry coercions' -- which is a great line. And you think regionalism can reinvigorate local communities if it’s given its due. So, can you tell me specifically what elements of mass culture are deadening to regionalism? What specific elements of South Dakota regionalism would you see as an antidote to that generica?"
JKL: "Well, this is particularly a concern of parents. If all our kids do is consume mass culture, which is produced in Hollywood and Manhattan, people lose their sense of connection to a particular place. They lose their sense of rootedness. And they may see their own region as something boring where nothing happens and fly-over country. So they want to move to the coasts. This is one of the problems that people in South Dakotan wrestle with. You know, the younger kids moving to other places. Part of that is they don’t really know the full story of their own place. They don’t know their own identity because it’s not taught. So, what we need to do, along several different levels, is start to teach this a little bit. It will help people. If you have a good sense of identity, in who you are and where you come from, it just makes it easier to navigate the world. And makes you more cosmopolitan in the end because you don’t really understand other places in the world unless you understand where you came from. Otherwise, you’re just kind of floating about like an atom in space, tethered to nothing. So, some of these universities put a lot of money into global studies programs, etc., which is great, but you need a place to begin from. You need to know your own space and your own history so you have some way of comparing. Otherwise, you don’t really understand why another place is the way it is. So, I think regional studies should be a part of those kinds of programs. And it’s easy for us to do in South Dakota if we just rearrange the curriculum a little bit and teach some books that are connected to this place and if we’re just conscious in our universities. And you know, South Dakota universities are much smaller. But some of these big universities, these flagship universities in particular, need to do a much better job. I was at the University of Michigan this week in Ann Arbor and was talking to the person in the American Studies department. They don’t do any of this. They don’t teach Midwestern literature or history. I mean, this is a very large department with a lot of people. So, the leadership needs to come from them. And then, young grad students come into those programs and they maybe want to get a PhD, maybe some of them will say, 'that’ll be interesting. I’ll do a dissertation on this and I’ll work with Professor X who is the expert on Midwestern studies.' But those people don’t even exist now, so you’re not teaching the next generation how to carry on this cultural tradition."
There is more, I suggest anyone living in the Midwest, anyone writing about the Midwest, read it.
The Midwestern Pastoral Place and Landscape in Literature of the American Heartland by William Barillas from the Ohio State Press with this blurb:
The midwestern pastoral is a literary tradition of place and rural experience that celebrates an attachment to land that is mystical as well as practical, based on historical and scientific knowledge as well as personal experience. It is exemplified in the poetry, fiction, and essays of writers who express an informed love of the nature and regional landscapes of the Midwest.
Drawing on recent studies in cultural geography, environmental history, and mythology, as well as literary criticism, The Midwestern Pastoral: Place and Landscape in Literature of the American Heartland relates Midwestern pastoral writers to their local geographies and explains their approaches. William Barillas treats five important Midwestern pastoralists—Willa Cather, Aldo Leopold, Theodore Roethke, James Wright, and Jim Harrison—in separate chapters. He also discusses Jane Smiley, U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser, Paul Gruchow, and others.
From a 1990 Iowa Review: Is There a Midwestern Literature? by Michael J. Rosen
Now that I'm in over my head, Imight aswell enjoy the plunge by proposing that Midwestern literature has less interest in experimentation and more in oral histories and dialogue, clear narrative and genuine conflict, and that this is attributable to the possibility that a vocation inwriting for someone in the Midwest has been, until recently, less a recognizable, knowable choice. The creative writer was less available in the form of mentors, communities, creative writing classes, bookstores. There had
been no cachet to being aMidwestern writer. Until the last two decades, writing as a voluntary enterprise (as opposed to technical writing or business writing) hasn't been held at any premium, except in elementary schools, or in some private colleges. The professions of fiction and poetry (as decidedly different from the widespread amateur's interest) weren't as imaginable, so that one critical aspect underlying much of Midwestern lit erature?and its popularity?could be this very ingenuousness about being awriter, a refreshing innocence about the plausibility of the Midwest as the setting for literature. Perhaps this lack of a late style and its problematic thrashings is what appeals to contemporary readers....
I like his metaphor of a constellation for Midwestern literature. Also, the emphasis on place influencing character.
H-Midwest under Midwestern Literature? has a bunch of links, some I have already found.
And another book: Old-Fashioned Modernism Rural Masculinity and Midwestern Literature by Andy Oler from LSU Press. The website summarizes the book this way:
In Old-Fashioned Modernism, Andy Oler explores how midwestern literature produces specific forms of regional modernity through male protagonists who both fulfill and resist traditional American narratives of economic advancement, spatial experience, and gender roles. Focusing on images of men from the rural Midwest who face the tensions between agricultural production and mass industrialization, Oler examines novels by Sherwood Anderson, William Cunningham, Langston Hughes, Wright Morris, and Dawn Powell, as well as the poetry of Lorine Niedecker. By reading literary representations of the Midwest alongside artifacts of material culture from the region, Old-Fashioned Modernism demonstrates how midwestern regionalism negotiates the anxieties and dominant narratives of early- and mid-century rural masculinities by planting formal innovations in the countryside and pitting nostalgic pastoralism against the byproducts of industrial modernity.
There I will close out. I hope I have found something useful to the Midwestern writer and the would-be writer. Good luck.
sch 11/10/22
Update: Chicagoan Joe Meno's website, and Sound and Silence: The Millions Interviews Joe Meno:
Joe Meno’s new novel, Book of Extraordinary Tragedies, is told through the eyes of twentysomething musician Aleks, who is the product of a gifted, exceedingly odd family and—in an especially cruel twist of fate—has lost much of his hearing. Set against the backdrop of the 2008 economic meltdown, Book of Extraordinary Tragedies is an incisive exploration of ethnic identity, uneasy family legacies, thwarted ambitions, and the city of Chicago itself.
This is a new name for me, but is that not the problem? Midwestern writers going under the radar?
sch 11/12/22
I found Storm Cellar, a literary journal, today:
Storm Cellar is a literary journal of safety and danger. We place a special emphasis on the Midwest, but even more emphasis on amazing writing and art. We aim to display aesthetic ambition as well as the work of authors and artists who are under-represented in the Anglophone literary world. We want everybody to get weird and enlightened and learn and fall in love and have superpowers. We want to surprise and delight and horrify and provoke. Storm Cellar is not a distraction but a cure for boredom.
Two to three issues per year in print and ebook editions. Free samples up weekly-ish
sch 11/13/22
I forgot The Good Life Review out of Omaha, Nebraska:
... The Good Life Review is committed to exploring the overlooked. Our mission is to lift the strange, the daring, the underrepresented; and reveal complexities hidden in the Heartland and beyond. We seek to elevate writing that takes risks and challenges perceptions, writing that haunts long after the last line.
sch 11/15/22
Serendipity rules! More Midwestern sites:
We are a female-led, independent publisher dedicated to retooled classics. Proudly based in Indianapolis, Indiana, we champion irreverent underdogs, the handbuilt, and the hybrid. At OIP, we love disobedient forms and books that risk something, are stylistically surprising, and embrace a philosophy of in-between.
Existing apart from traditional publishing with an entirely different set of values, we are focused on originality over sales. Every book we publish will be treated as a future classic and designed to be a cherished object.
Lakeshore Literary out of Michigan.
sch 11/16/22
One I forgot, even I submitted a piece, The Journal from The Ohio State University:
The Journal, originally titled The Ohio Journal, was founded in 1973 by William Allen of the English Department at The Ohio State University, and has been published continuously ever since. David Citino served as Editor from 1985 to 1990 and was a contributing editor until his death in 2005. Michelle Herman and Kathy Fagan became Fiction Editor and Poetry Editor, respectively, in 1990 and currently serve as Advisory Editors. The graduate staff has maintained The Journal’s commitment to publishing the best work by new and emerging writers around Ohio and the nation, including writing not easily classified by genre, excerpts from novels, longer stories, and other daring or wholly original pieces.
sch
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