Remembering Midwestern Writers. Charting A Course to the Future?

 I heard of Lingering Inland at I heard about "Lingering Indiana" at Proof: A Midwest Lit Fest - the program put on by Indiana Humanities. I bought the book, and in the past few days ran across a review from The Chicago Sun-Times, A new book makes the case for the Midwest’s literary might

Reflecting on these large-scale demographic changes, Olivarez says in his forward for Lingering Inland, “Because no one is looking to the Midwest for innovation, it has become an excellent place to experiment. The worst has already happened. Our former industries have collapsed or are on life support. What is there to do but dream a new way of living?”

“Lingering Inland” editor Andy Oler says that conception of the future happens when humans connect stories with people and places.

“What this collection is trying to achieve is to take those individual, idiosyncratic stories and start to sort of create a whole mosaic, a much bigger picture of what the region is, of what Chicago is, of like, how we think about the Midwest,” Oler said.

He hopes readers engage with the works slowly, letting the words sit with them. Each essay is around 1,000 words.

“I hope that they don’t read it all at once. I guess maybe, which is maybe a weird thing to say, but the brevity of the essays leads people to, you know, pick up one, read one or two, and put it down and then pick it up again,” Oler said. “I think that it’s something that you can sort of pop in and out of while you’re reading your coffee, while you’re, you know, waiting to leave, like, whatever it is, I think that it’s, it’s a nice little hit, and it, it lets people access it at their own pace.”

The collection is available at University of Illinois Press.

Well, that is what I am doing with the book - nibbling on it. I started with the Indiana writers - Booth Tarkington, Kurt Vonnegut, Michael Martone - and was pleasantly surprised by a non-academic approach. It is very much more oriented to what the Midwestern writer meant to the essayist, not a formal discussion of their literary output.

The choices are varied - Louis L'Amour is here as well as Toni Morrison. Oddly, no Hemingway or Sinclair Lewis or Theodore Dreiser. I don't think of Kentucky (Hunter S. Thompson) as Midwest. 

 

I do suggest buying the book for anyone interested in Midwestern writers, or just writers in general.

 

I make this suggestion not only because it endorses my idea that we out here in the Midwest have a license to experiment.

 

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