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Re-wilding the Land – a Review of Alix Hawley’s All True Not a Lie in It
All True Not a Lie in It. Ha! Daniel Boone is one of the most picked-over commodities in pioneer pop culture, (though admittedly he hasn’t had a major spike in interest since Fess Parker’s TV Boone had ‘60s kids sporting coon-skin caps). If there’s a truth left below the varnish of 250 years of… →
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Going Underground on the Eastern Shore – the new Harriet Tubman park
One of the dynamics that happens in marginalized places, (and I’ll count the Eastern Shore, where I live, as one of those), is that the people who live in them can internalize that marginalization and begin to believe that nothing significant ever happens there. Or we latch on to narrow stereotypes of what the region… →
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Reasonable Insects
I’m just saying…I have yet to meet a reasonable insect. And if they were reasonable, would we really need to control them with this device? #screenshot →
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Post-election Reading – my interview with Mark Athitakis concludes – part 3
I discovered Mark Athitakis and his new book, The New Midwest: A Guide to Contemporary Fiction of the Great Lakes, Great Plains, and Rust Belt, in an article on The Huffington Post where Mark was interviewed. Then I thought, if HufPo can do it, why can’t I? So, I contacted Mark and well, here we are. Mark’s field is… →
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Keeping the Midwest Weird: My interview with Mark Athitakis continues – part 2
In my last interview blog post with the writer Mark Athitakis, “Why we we’ve got to get Willa out of the cornfield”, we talked about the plural landscape of the Midwest, something he covered in his new book, The New Midwest: A Guide to Contemporary Fiction of the Great Lakes, Great Plains, and Rust Belt. Today we… →
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Why we’ve got to get Willa out of the cornfield – an interview with Mark Athitakis (part 1)
Mark Athitakis is one of those people who resists the impulse to reduce things to stereotype, which is one of the guiding values of this blog. Athitakis’s field of inquiry is Midwestern fiction and he has written on books for a number of publications including The New York Times, Washington Post, and Belt Magazine, which… →
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Rural is Plural
This article originally appeared in the great Topology magazine. We were in danger of becoming a caricature. When a parent stood up at a local school board meeting and expressed her dismay at a word being used in two books in the school library, blogposts and news stories from New York to Singapore decried the benighted… →
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Why Iowa isn’t Heaven
Where else would Ray Kinsella have built his Field of Dreams except in an Iowa cornfield? Am I right? A baseball diamond where the ghosts of the past could come for healing and restoration – for their own and for the living? Had to be in the heartland, where the solid goodness of America is… →
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The We of Me – Carson McCullers week continues
Don’t we long to be fully engaged? I’ve checked in with Carson McCullers a couple of times this week on the occasion of her 100th birthday. She’s often thought of as a prophet of loneliness, but I wonder if what she expressed in her writing was more a longing to be released from the silo… →
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Heartlands 