I found these sites by accident on October 27. I was doing links for another post and ran the query "Midwestern Writing." When I was young, I found William Faulkner. High School and Mr. Brown's Senior English class during college and a little after I ran through more of Faulkner's novels. I had ambitions of translating what Faulkner had done in Mississippi to Indiana. I gave up. For decades, the idea trailed after me like a ghost. I fought it off by telling myself, there was no way to make any money writing, or that the history of Indiana was not as fertile as that of Mississippi. Only going to prison gave the ghost another life. KH had suggested I go back to writing fiction. CC refused to tell her story about Muncie. I learned that out East there were people interested in my stories. I started writing, using my stories for fiction, and I started thinking again on Indiana's literarture and even Midwestern writing in general.
Those are my reasons I took the time out to follow the query and do some reading.
From 2019 and Electric Lit, I found The New Literature of the Midwest . These points I found interesting to my own project, maybe they will interest you.
Is this the essential condition of people in the Midwest — nostalgia for a bygone era amid the decay of a once-great manufacturing region? As voters moved to the left in midterm elections in Wisconsin, Illinois, and Michigan, it’s become increasingly difficult to hold up this explanation of things. The idea that economic downturn led people into the arms of false promises has proven less believable than it did in 2016, and the Midwestern states now seem more mystifying than before, harder to pin down with any one theory. This is always the burden of place for writers — how to describe setting that informs the story while avoiding tropes and sentimentality. How to offer fresh details, ones that tell the whole story of the place, opening it up to greater depth and breadth of interpretation?
Sentimentality worries me. I think too much of Indiana's fiction is uncomplicated sentimentality in the sense of a candy-coated happy ending. I think of it as an antidote to slopping hogs or mining coal or slapping on parts as they go by on a conveyor belt or waiting tables. We resent and envy the Coasts. We see James Dean going to Hollywood and George Jean Nathan going to New York. Indiana produced Eugene Victor Debs and D.C. Stephenson - go figure that one out. We are contradictory.
In attempting to pin down Midwestern literature, definitions become hazy. What are we even talking about when we talk about “the Midwest,” or that more nebulous term, “The Heartland”? The region surely includes the rural parts of Minnesota, Nebraska, and Ohio, but can also stretch as far east as Pennsylvania and upstate New York, and as far west as Montana or Idaho. It’s a phrase that’s mutable depending on one’s purpose. In Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl, by Andrea Lawlor, this mutability is extended to its main character, Paul, whose ability to transform from male to female (including states in between) is the central conceit of the novel. Paul begins a man, then morphs into a woman, as he leaves the University of Iowa one winter in the early ’90s, going first across the Midwest, from Iowa City to Chicago, to the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, to the East Coast, and finally to San Francisco. (The novel maintains “he” as a pronoun, even as Paul morphs).
If we say the Midwest is the old Northwest Territories, then what about Iowa and Kansas. If they are the West, then what about California? Reading Joyce Carol Oates' When We were the Mulvaneys or Toni Morrison's Beloved, I felt at home in a way I did not quite feel with Jonathan Lethem's Fortress of Solitude. For me, the Ohio River has to play into the mix and the lack of slavery when I think of the Midwest.
It’s possible that Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl is not so much a Midwestern novel as a novel about leaving the Midwest. Though perhaps this is actually a requirement for a truly Midwestern novel — that characters from the Midwest must leave in order to be tested by the coasts. There is a long tradition of the Midwest as a place from which regular people originate before they are corrupted by worldly forces elsewhere. They get mixed up in all sorts of nasty business before looking back longingly, nostalgically, on a more idealized version of what they left behind. The Great Gatsby may be the most canonical example of this, a template for the American morality tale in which the center of the country is synonymous with a kind of moral centering, a paradise lost. What then, we might ask, could bring anyone back here?
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Ma’s novel points perhaps to how the Midwest is being remade in the public consciousness — not as a place at all, but as a product, a lifestyle “destination” designed to satisfy the nostalgia that all Americans have now for a time past. As the empire seems more precarious than ever, deeply unequal, assailed by economic competition from overseas, and increasingly prone to authoritarianism, then perhaps that nostalgia — presumed to be Midwestern — is actually a national affliction. It’s no accident that the mysterious disease that has turned everyone to zombies in Severance originates in a Chinese manufacturing plant. If the fear of national decline can be personified in the hollowed lifelessness of the human body, then the trip back to the center of the country, to simpler times, is the return the fullness of life before modernity. It sounds a lot like what Henry Ford had in mind.
But for me, there has been a long-standing feeling of colonization of the Midwest. The preceding reinforces that belief. We are not the heartland, America grew in from the East Coast. However, it was a Midwesterner, although born in Kentucky, who remade America into something closer to its ideals. A native-born Midwesterner rose to the challenge of proving those ideals, again. We may be brought low by a New Yorker.
Also, from Electric Lit, Stop Dismissing Midwestern Literature:
Edward Watts, author of An American Colony: Regionalism and Roots of Midwestern Culture, describes the Midwest of the late 1700s, when it was “the Old Northwest,” the western edge of a new country settled with the violent extermination and relocation of Native Americans. Watts argues that the Old Northwest was the first colony of the United States, and that the current cultural relationship between Midwest and East Coast still ripples out from the dynamics established in that era.
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Midwesterners aren’t an oppressed colonial minority. Watts explains that the Midwest fits in a postcolonial framework along with places like Australia where “white colonials stayed and made homes on land seized from a displaced or marginalized aboriginal population.” The Midwest illustrates the ongoing dynamics of imperialism, including the “sweeping amnesia” of colonialism that required strong identification with the centers of colonial cultural power. The Old Northwest — which Watts describes as “more diverse than the East in regard to race, class, and religion” — resisted that role but also internalized and reinterpreted its “own entanglement in empire.”
My own relationship with the small working and middle-class town of my birth is one of attachment threaded with sadness; it was a lovely yet harsh place to grow up. When I drive through hours of corn I am struck anew by the ecological costs of monocrop agriculture and the decimation of small-town life wreaked by the transition from family to factory farming. Racism forged white flight from the cities and the whiteness of sundown towns as the cities were renewed with waves of immigration. The economic upheavals of the Midwest are written in family stories: Then we moved north, the plant closed, we lost the farm. I love the place precisely because of the way all these forces weave together and find expression and evolution in Midwesterners’ lives. I don’t have a pamphlet or a sales pitch, and I’m still searching for the book that captures the essence I love. Maybe I could take you there to smell the rain, and we could set lawn chairs up in the garage to watch a storm roll in.
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In From Warm Center to Ragged Edge: The Erosion of Midwestern Literary and Historical Regionalism, 1920–1965, Jon Lauck argues that forces came together in the 1920s to turn the nation toward the coasts and to cement the image of the Midwest as the back alley of the nation. Literary editor Carl Van Doren played a large role. He penned an essay that appeared in the fall 1921 literary supplement of The Nation arguing that World War I had brought together and given voice to writers who needed to rebel against the “cult of the village” and who sought to reveal the “slack and shabby” underside of small-town Midwestern life. Van Doren pulled evidence from Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology, Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise. Masters, Lewis, and Anderson all disagreed with Van Doren, saying that he was simplifying works that were intended to portray a three-dimensional Midwest. But Van Doren’s thesis stuck, and also tanked the careers of Masters and Anderson, both of whom were dismissed after their later attempts to celebrate the Midwest were seen as sentimental schlock.
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It’s time for the Midwest to be defined culturally as a part of the country on par with other regions. Robert Dorman offers regionalism and the pride of regional cultural production as a “soft” form of identity for white people as a counterbalance to white identity and the virulence of racism. Lauck argues that our whole national culture has a responsibility to commit to a fairer view of a region “to protect it from degrading clichés and the realm of easy cynicism.”
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A tiny sampling of current Midwestern fiction I’ve loved includes Jane Smiley, Marilynne Robinson, Celeste Ng, Jane Hamilton, Angela Flournoy, Leon Forrest, and Nancy Zafris, along with many profiled in the book The New Midwest: A Guide to Contemporary Fiction of the Great Lakes, Great Plains, and Rust Belt, edited by Mark Athitakis, but this is not even a representative list. The wealth of literature — not to mention poetry and other genres best left to other writers to catalogue — quickly becomes overwhelming. What unites these writers is that they all create on the page a living place that is not so far away.
In four years, Van Doren’s thesis about the Midwest as cultural wasteland will celebrate its century of influencing American culture. And I hope that the era of the Midwest as a region too “regional” to read will slowly decline — but that requires, I think, Midwesterners like me to step out of our reticence and speak to the blankness, to say loudly what we loved and struggled with about the place that made us. When I left the Midwest for the second time, it was for a job, as happens to so many of us. My leaving was tinged with regret, and I miss my complicated homeland.
I copied so much because so much hit home. I will quibble about the colonialism, but I am thinking more about postcolonialism.
What I think needs to be done is to write. I am old, I am looking back, I am out of the swim. There has to be people younger willingly to put down on paper what they see and hear and feel about life out here. Maybe we all need to leave to see what is before us - the people and how they live and die in a home that may not mean them well. I had to go to law school to see how the auto companies made colonies of cities like Anderson and Muncie and New Castle and Kokomo and Marion. We have our own side of the Civil War to tell - the victors now burdened by the Rust Belt. I had to read Orhan Pamuk to see that story. I had to go to prison to see how strange we are to the East Coast, and that becoming the Rust Belt is analogous to Faulkner's South going from the Civil War to Jim Crow.
There will be more, for I found much that touches on what I am writing. What I need to do right now is attend to that writing. To you who would write, please get to it.
sch 11/7/22
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