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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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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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A Heart in Darkness – Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad
The Underground Railroad By Colson Whitehead Doubleday, 2016 320 pages South Carolina seemed enlightened, until you realized that, beneath the comforts and opportunities, the plan was to sterilize the black race out of existence. North Carolina used less subterfuge, resorting to a grisly ‘Freedom Trail’ of hanging black bodies as a way of dealing with →
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Won’t You Be a Neighbor?
My review of The Neighboring Church over on the great Englewood Review of Books… →
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Heartlands 