Course on Midwest Culture: A Bibliography

Airborne, 2010; Alex Roulette as seen in fly over art

By Kenyon Gradert, Course on Midwest Culture Series Editor

A quality course begins with quality secondary sources. Such quotidian details may seem annoying for those chomping at the bit to get on to the primary stuffs of Garland, Anderson, et al, but, quite simply, it needs to be done.



Humanities-folks aren’t always much for the quantitative, but some data can help. A quick Googling of “Southern literature” reveals a Norton Anthology and 293,000 hits. The same for “Midwest literature” offers up no Norton and 72,400 hits. A region with roughly twice the population of the Midwest (according to the most recent census, including Texas) has four times as much online material. If Google accurately mirrors the grander world, then, per capita, the south gets twice as much literary attention as the Midwest. 



But we’re not starting from scratch. Fine scholars have established a modest but quality base of secondary material on Midwest literature (with far more on our region’s fine history, specifically--not included here) and, while I’m still spoiled by my university’s excellent library system, I intend to get most such books atop my desk and write all too brief reviews for your reading pleasure.

• Sisson, Zacher, Cayton, ed. The American Midwest: An Interpretive Encyclopedia (Indiana UP, 2007). The most valuable member of the pack is an eight pound beast with equally heavy endorsements from Kurt Vonnegut and Toni Morrison. Its impressive advisory board and editorial staff divide the book between “Landscapes and People” (including charming individual “portraits” of the twelve states), “Society and Culture,” “Community and Social Life,” “Economy and Technology,” and “Public Life.” Most of our time will be spent in the section on culture, of course, with a strong bent towards the encyclopedia’s invaluable section on literature. The book is both meaty and handsome, a scholar and a gentleman, and would make a fine addition to any sturdy bookshelf (and available for around $35 from the consistently impressive Abebooks.com). What the Oxford English Dictionary is for English nerds, The American Midwest is for Midwestern nerds: you page through it intending a brief sojourn and raise your eyes to discover an hour has gone by.

• Barillas, William. The Midwestern Pastoral: Place and Landscape in Literature of the American Heartland. (Ohio UP, 2006). William Barillas’ book examines five midwestern authors from a wide spread of time and genres: Willa Cather, Aldo Leopold, Theodore Roethke, James Wright, and Jim Harrison. Barillas’ introduction and first chapter may be a good place to start for the fledgling Midwestern scholar simply because it is one of the newest pieces of scholarly work. Therein, Barillas poses important questions that build upon previous scholarship: the Midwest’s relationship to America at large as a sort-of synecdochal representative; the problems with regionalisms; and, of course, the centrality of the pastoral myth in the Midwest. Barillas also writes wonderfully. He introduces us to both utilitarian individualist types like “the tinkerer” and “the booster” as well as the romantic individualists who were born and bred on the East Coast but largely shaped by the Westward movement into what would become the Heartland: Emerson, Whitman, Bryant, et al.

• Holden, Greg. The Booklovers Guide to the Midwest: A Literary Tour. (Clerisy Press, 2010). If we’re undertaking the regionalist project of studies-attached-to-place, what better guidebook than one that literally takes you up and down major Midwestern highways for a literary road trip? Just plain fun.

• Weber, Ronald. The Midwestern Ascendancy in American Writing. (Indiana UP, 1992). An eminently readable work of scholarship by Professor Emeritus of American Studies at Notre Dame, Ronald Weber, and part of the (mainly historical) Midwestern History and Culture series (Madison & Schlereth, ed.). Weber’s work is that excellent type of scholarship in which readers trust the scholar’s detachment yet feel his zeal for the subject matter. Weber’s scholarly work has a broader focus than Barillas’ six-author format, which both expands its value yet restricts sustained close textual analyses. Like Barillas, his introduction is especially helpful for students wishing to get a feel for regionalist scholarship. 

• Greasley, Philip A., ed. Dictionary of Midwestern Literature: Volume One: The Authors. (Indiana UP, 2001) Self-explanatory. A second volume is to be released, according to a contributing colleague of mine, precisely at “some time.” “These things take time,” she added.

• Longworth, Richard C. Caught in the Middle: America’s Heartland in the Age of Globalism. (Bloomsbury, 2008). So this work only tangentially focuses on literature and culture. The book is instead sociological and economic, its central thesis being that the Midwest has adapted poorly to globalization. I enjoy the book, though, because it is written by a fellow Iowan and because it is a call-to-arms, explicitly challenging readers to creatively adapt their regional home. Something is at stake. In addition, the book’s sociological and economic focus are nice “empirical glosses” on our study of nebulous words like “culture” and “regionalism.” Finally, the book starkly contrasts today’s midwest from the Midwest of the 1890s-1930s, a time period that many other scholars deem the area’s Golden Age for both literature and industry. Longworth also maintains The Midwesterner: Blogging the Global Midwest, a blog in conjunction with The Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

• Frederick, John T. Out of the Midwest: A Collection of Present-Day Writings. The late John Frederick was a fellow Iowan and founder of Midland, a regionalist literary journal at the height of Midwestern literary prominence, compiled an anthology of contemporary midwestern writings.  The anthology is available online free and in its entirety, including an enlightening introduction.

• Wuthnow, Robert. Remaking the Heartland: Middle America Since the 1950s. (Princeton: UP, 2012). Like Longworth’s Caught in the Middle, I include Robert Wuthnow’s piece as an enlightening bit of sociological analysis. Its central thesis: the Midwest is not the withering, atrophied wasteland but “has undergone a strong, positive transformation since the 1950s.”  In his introduction, Wuthnow admits he was originally “working on the assumption that the heartland was a place of withering decline...I thought that was the story that needed to be told. It made sense of small towns with empty storefronts. Large fields with no farmsteads. Reports of joblessness. But it did not square with other evidence. New technology. A surprisingly robust economy. Strong schools. An upbeat feeling among residents about the future. Clearly I needed to think harder about what was happening. By the time I finished with the research, I had a much different story in mind than when I started.”

• Cayton, Andrew R.L. & Gray, Susan E., ed. The American Midwest: Essays on Regional History. (Indiana UP, 2001). This anthology is perhaps second in scholarly worth only to the encyclopedia as all other subsequent works of scholarship on Midwest culture cite Cayton and Gray’s work. This collection of essays is the result of an experimental 1998 conference held at Miami University (Oxford, Ohio) in which historians pondered whether or not the Midwest had a regional identity--the same question that undergirds a course on Midwest Culture. The essays give a diverse but focused variety of topics: historian John Larson writes on his experience being hired by an open-air frontier museum in Indiana to dispel the folkish caricatures that had heretofore reigned among museum staff. These new historians and their more objective analysis, Larson reminisces, “were about as welcome as the Grinch who stole Christmas.” Nicole Etcheson discusses the Pioneer as the Midwest’s heroic yet unromantic archetype and ordinariness as a historic burden that can mask real issues of class and race. Quite simply, an impressive and enjoyable collection of essays.

In addition to these fine books of scholarship--the majority put out by Indiana UP to whom we owe a big “thank you”--there are more popular takes on the region, like Ian Frazier’s The Great Plains (only one half of the Midwest, we know) or My Kind of Midwest by John A. Jakle. Finally, there is the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature, a scholarly society that seems to focus on contemporary works and is anticipating a conference on Midwestern “country noir.” 



Such a spectrum provides a description of the majority of the work I’ve discovered on Midwest literature and culture. If I’ve passed over any great books or organizations, let us all know on our facebook page.

PS + Preview:

PS: My focus was on scholarly works. Have I narrow-mindedly missed great secondary sources (print or otherwise) for Midwestern culture by focusing on books published by university presses? More broadly, what ought to be a proper relationship between university work on regionalism and the actual region it studies?

Preview: Can those largely unmapped nineteenth-century territories of sprawling prairies known as “The West” be subsumed under the banner of the twentieth-century entity known as “The Midwest”? Or are they separate historical and cultural identities occupying the same geographic space? What exactly is the relationship of the West to the Midwest?


Related Articles:
Course on Midwest Culture archives

Bringing It To The Table

Arkansas State Folklorist Mike Luster at the Roundtable; Jennifer Joy Jameson

By Rachel Reynolds Luster, Contributing Editor

Last month Art of The Rural joined a host of artists and cultural workers from around the country in Fox, Arkansas for the 2nd Annual Meadowcreek Roundtable. The gathering brought together people working in the fields of folklore, literature, film, ethnomusicology, ethnobiology as well as others with an interest in community action, bioregionalism, social justice, and local food systems.

The original concept for this retreat was born from conversations following a panel presentation at the American Folklore Society Annual Meeting in 2010 where I, my husband Mike Luster, and our friend and colleague Meredith Martin-Moats of The Boiled Down Juice presented a panel entitled, Community Based Folklife Practice.

We called for an interdisciplinary holistic approach to community renewal and sufficiency, and a lively conversation followed for nearly an hour after the panel. That discussion bore an online component, the Community-Based Folklore Practice Facebook group, which broadened the conversation to include additional artists as well various voices from around the nation and across multiple disciplines ranging from community-engaged design to peace and justice activists alongside the many folklorists working in the public sector, and the Meadowcreek Roundtable was created to serve as the physical manifestation of that open conversation.

We call it the Roundtable because we firmly believe that some of the best conversations come at the table, or in preparing and enjoying meals. For three days we gather, we talk, we cook, we eat, we play music, we walk and swim. This year we enjoyed several wonderful films including Witch Hazel Advent by Fayetteville, Arkansas, filmmaker Sarah Moore Chyrchel. There are babies and dogs there too.

Angel Band by The Meadowcreek Singers by joyamerica

More than anything, we try to identify what we see that we’d like to change in terms of cultural practice and/or its impediments, the funding structures that dictate what work is fundable, how culture (whether it be rural/urban, fine/traditional) is represented in media, where we might draw inspiration from one another and those “doing it right” across the country and how we can contribute to, in Gandhi’s phrase, being the change that we want to see. And then we go home and set out to do it, renewed and inspired. This year was no exception.

The American Folklore Society has generously supported the retreat for the past two years. This year, The Arkansas Folklife Program at Arkansas State University and that school’s Heritage Studies Department sponsored the event as well. Thus far, we’ve been able to keep the gathering free for attendees including registration, lodging, food, and childcare. We prepare the meals together from scratch and everyone chips in to do whatever else needs doing. It’s a truly beautiful thing in a lovely place. The Boiled Down Juice has also posted a story about the Meadowcreek Roundtable that offers a more in-depth discussion of the Meadowcreek property and its history and links to many of this year’s gathering’s attendees, their organizations and their work.

Here's two of this year's participants reflecting on the experience:

For me, the Meadowcreek Roundtable has been an incredibly important resource. The meetings have fostered invaluable and directive conversation with peers and senior colleagues that have stayed with me long after the weekend of the roundtable. For two years, I've come in with ideas and questions about how to carry out meaningful cultural work. Each time, I have come away with substantial mentorship, leading me to ask deeper questions about the intersections of folklife and cultural sustainability, and encouraging me to proceed boldly. - Writer and Folklorist Jennifer Joy Jameson

I came away from the Meadowcreek Roundtable retreat inspired and full of new ideas. In fact, on the drive home, a fellow attendee carpooling with me and I conceptualized a creative collaboration for our own community which we are in the initial stages of implementing. Without a designated time and place for such creative incubation to occur, I doubt we would have seen this project materialize, let alone make it to fruition. - Filmmaker Sarah Moore Chyrchel

If you and your organization would like to support or participate in next year’s gathering please contact us. We’d love to have you at the ‘Table.

Lost Between The Country And The City

The Giant Swing at Silver Dollar City in Branson, Missouri 

It is significant, for example, that the common image of the country is now an image of the past, and the common image of the city an image of the future. That leaves, if we isolate them, an undefined present. 

    --Raymond Williams, The Country and the City

Course On Midwest Culture: Ray Bradbury, RIP



By Kenyon Gradert, Course on Midwest Culture series Editor

Perhaps tied with Jules Verne and J.R.R. Tolkien, Ray Bradbury may be my longest-running literary friend. His leatherbound anthology was on my nightstand for the past few months and I'd just read "The Last Night of the World," oddly enough.



His works initially sucked me in as a grade schooler on the mere creativity of their fantasy premises: incessant Venusian rains that could wash the pigments from one’s skin, a murderous hi-tech house, robot clones who fell in love with their masters’ wives. For a kid who liked comic books, the stuff was as golden as Martian eyes and apples of the sun. This initial luster was all LA and Hollywood--wizbang scifi ideas.



I kept returning to Bradbury, however, because the psychological depth of the stories grew with me. He was in that deeply-introspective American literary tradition of Hawthorne which I would grow to love.



And I return today to Bradbury to claim but a small piece of his Hollywood legacy for the Midwest. One obituary briefly deemed Bradbury’s work colored with “Midwest populism”--not taking the time to explain what exactly that could mean--and many others refer to him as a “Midwest surrealist,” mostly based upon his trilogy of bildungsromans based in his hometown of Waukegon, Illinois: Dandelion Wine (‘57), Something Wicked This Way Comes (‘62), and Farewell Summer (‘06).



Bradbury’s status as a Midwesterner--more accurately a dual-citizenship with LA--seems safe to me based on these three novels alone. Even more, though, this Midwestern-ness spills into his other works.



Growing older, I discovered in Bradbury’s short stories echoes of that Midwestern opus, Winesburg, Ohio. They weren’t just deeply, Protestantly introspective--Faulkner too grew out of Hawthorne in that respect. They were laconic, more restrained (or repressed) than violent. The extraordinary sci-fi premises of Bradbury’s stories--the Hollywood--were always captured in the plainest of prose and set in motion with rather ordinary characters and their rather ordinary, quiet struggles. Bradbury’s Anns, Toms, and Susans were bourgeois, heartland vanilla. Moderate. Normal. Nice. But amazing stories lay just beyond their heartland propriety.



The Illustrated Man and his interlocutor are representative. 

It was a warm afternoon in early September when I first met the Illustrated Man. Walking along an asphalt road, I was on the final leg of a two weeks’ walking tour of Wisconsin. Late in the afternoon I stopped, ate some pork, beans, and a doughnut, and was preparing to stretch out and read when the Illustrated man walked over the hill and stood for a moment against the sky...

    ...He seemed only to sense my presence, for he didn’t look directly at me when he spoke his first words:


    “Do you know where I can find a job?”


    “I’m afraid not,” I said.


    “I haven’t had a job that’s lasted in forty years,” he said.


    Though it was a hot late afternoon, he wore his wool shirt buttoned tight about his neck. His sleeves were rolled and buttoned down over his thick wrists. Perspiration was streaming from his face, yet he made no move to open his shirt.


    “Well,” he said at least, “this is as good a place as any to spend the night. Do you mind company?” 


    “I have some extra food you’d be welcome to,” I said


    He sat down heavily, grunting. “You’ll be sorry you asked me to stay,” he said. “Everyone always is. That’s why I’m walking. Here it is, early September, the cream of the Labor Day carnival season. I should be making money hand over fist at any small town side show celebration, but here I am with no prospects.”


    He took off an immense shoe and peered at it closely. “I usually keep a job about ten days. Then something happens and they fire me. By now every carnival in America won’t touch me with a ten-foot pole.”


    “What seems to be the trouble?” I asked.


    For answer, he unbuttoned his tight collar, slowly. With his eyes shut, he put a slow hand to the task of unbuttoning his shirt all the way down. He slipped his fingers in to feel his chest. “funny,” he said, eyes still shut. “You can’t feel them but they’re there. I always hope that someday I’ll look and they’ll be gone. I walk in the sun for hours on the hottest days, baking, and hope that my sweat’ll wash them off, the sun’ll cook them off, but at sundown they’re still there.” He turned his head slightly toward me and exposed his chest. “Are they still there now?”


    After a long while I exhaled. “Yes,” I said, “They’re still there.

    The Illustrations.

..   

   ...“How long have you been Illustrated?”


    “In 1900, when I was twenty years old and working a carnival, I broke my leg. It laid me up, I had to do something to keep my hand in, so I decided to get tattooed.”


    “But who tattooed you? What happened to the artist?”


    “She went back to the future,” he said. “I mean it. She was an old woman in a little house in the middle of Wisconsin here somewhere not far from this place. A little old witch who looked a thousand years old one moment and twenty years old the next, but she said she could travel in time. I laughed. Now, I know better.”

    …“So people fire me when my pictures move. They don’t like it when violent things happen in my Illustrations. Each Illustration is a little story. If you watch them, in a few minutes they tell you a tale. In three hours of looking you could see eighteen or twenty stories acted right on my body, you could hear voices and think thoughts.”

    …I lay back a few feet from him. He didn’t seem violent, and the pictures were beautiful. Otherwise I might have been tempted to get out and away from such babbling. But the Illustrations...I let my eyes fill up on them. Any person would go a little mad with such things upon his body.


    The night was serene. I could hear the Illustrated Man’s breathing in the moonlight. Crickets were stirring gently in the distant ravines. I lay with my body sidewise so I could watch the Illustrations. Perhaps half an hour passed. Whether the Illustrated Man slept I could not tell, but suddenly I heard him whisper, “They’re moving, aren’t they?”


    I waited a minute.


    Then I said, “Yes.”

••••••••••

POST-SCRIPT + PREVIEW: With the wonderful response on AOTR’s facebook page, I’ve decided to include this “PS+Preview” at the end of every post. Here I’ll look for your response to the current post and input on the post to come—to keep this experiment as democratic as possible.

PS: Is Bradbury more Hollywood or more Midwest?

Preview: My next post will risk boredom by looking for secondary rather than primary sources on the Midwest. Are any of you involved in some form of “Midwest Studies” (publications, conferences, societies, etc)? Does such a field formally exist? Do you have any favorite secondary publications on the culture of the region?

Idiom and Assimilation: Miles Davis & C.D. Wright

John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Miles Davis, and Bill Evans, recording in 1958

If there is any particular affinity I have for poetry associated with the South, it is with idiom. I credit hill people and African Americans for keeping the language distinct. Poetry should repulse assimilation. Each poet's task is to fight their own language's assimilation. Miles Davis said, "The symphony, man, they got seventy guys all playing one note." He also said, "Those dark Arkansas roads, that is the sound I am after." He had his own sound. He recommended we get ours.

      - C.D. Wright, Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil

Related Articles:
Rural Poetry Series: C.D. Wright

Rural Poetry Series: Paul Muldoon

Paul Muldoon was born in the countryside of Northern Ireland, between counties Armagh and Tyrone in Northern Ireland, in 1951. In his poem "Mixed Marriage," he alludes not only to the sectarian violence of the Troubles, but also to a state of cultural transition that would be familiar to many rural artists on either side of the Atlantic:

My father was a servant-boy.

When he left school at eight or nine

He took up billhook and loy

To win the ground he would never own.

My mother was the school-mistress,

The world of Castor and Pollux.

There were twins in her own class.

She could never tell which was which.

She had read one volume of Proust,

He knew the cure for farcy.

I flitted between a hole in the hedge

And a room in the Latin Quarter.

Muldoon himself has flitted between a number of categories. In the thirty years from the poems in Why Brownlee Left (1980) to Maggot (2010), this poet has made great art out of the chaos of modern life; his work confuses the lines between poetry and fiction (and our expectations of those genres) while also troubling easy cultural distinctions such as "Irish" or "American." Muldoon has lived in the United States since the late 1980's, and has served for many years as a professor at Princeton University and Chair of its Lewis Center for the Arts. For the last five years he has also served as Poetry Editor for the The New Yorker, guiding the most visible outlet for poetry published in America.

Despite this prestigious curriculum vitae, Muldoon remains a humble and open-minded figure on the literary landscape. In his more recent work, notably 2002's Moy Sand and Gravel, the poet has returned with new intensity to consider the history, culture, and language of his birthplace along the border. We see Muldoon demonstrate his gift for balancing this knowledge of the rural with his encyclopedic grasp of modern literature in this excellent interview piece for Wunderkammer Magazine:

Five Dialogues, Paul Muldoon from Wunderkammer Magazine on Vimeo.

The Moy that Muldoon returns to in his 2002 collection is one conscious of its place alongside many borders -- those between traditional and modern culture, the rural and the urban, and between a deep, almost archeological, past and a fluid present tense. In his poem "The Misfits," which places a viewing of that famous film written by Arthur Miller (with the last on-screen appearances by Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe) alongside his childhood duties on the farm, where he mines a row of potatoes, "what would surely seem / to any nine- or ten-year-old an inexhaustible seam."

This pun on visual representation and human creation finds succinct and powerful articulation in the title poem, "Moy Sand and Gravel." Paul Muldoon's website offers a reading of the poem here; please find the text below:

To come out of the Olympic Cinema and be taken aback
by how, in the time it took a dolly to travel
along its little track
to the point where two movies stars' heads
had come together smackety-smack
and their kiss filled the whole screen,

those two great towers directly across the road
at Moy Sand and Gravel
had already washed, at least once, what had flowed
or been dredged from the Blackwater's bed
and were washing it again, load by load,
as if washing might make it clean.

Related Articles:
Rural Poetry Series: Patrick Kavanagh
Rural Poetry Series archives

New Work From Places: Rural Studio, Cotton Farmers, The Sound of Music, And Our Natural Space

Bloom, 2010; Michael Lundgren 

One of the most valuable resources for considering how the arts intersect with and enliven the rural-urban exchange can be found in Places, "an interdisciplinary journal of contemporary architecture, landscape and urbanism, with particular emphasis on the public realm as physical place and social ideal."

Today we would like to offer links to some recent work from Places that expands conversations and ideas we've shared with our readers and collaborators. Below we will feature a brief selection from each piece followed by links to the larger, visually-rich articles:

Samuel Mockbee of Rural Studio

Lessons From The Front Lines Of Social Design is an essay by Will Holman that charts this designer's time spent at the Arcosanti urban laboratory, YouthBuild, and Rural Studio - while also touching on projects we've also discussed: Epicenter and Studio H. 

Below is an excerpt from Mr. Holman's time at Rural Studio:

The Rural Studio was founded in 1993 by architects Samuel Mockbee and D.K. Ruth, around the same time I was dreaming away afternoons in my elementary school library. Both professors at Auburn University, Mockbee and Ruth set up shop in Newbern, Alabama, three hours away from the main campus. Greensboro, ten miles north, along with nearby Moundville and Tuscaloosa, were at the center of James Agee and Walker Evan’s Depression-era study of sharecroppers, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men [10]. Mockbee and Ruth hoped to expose students to three things usually missing from modern architectural education: construction, clients and social engagement. “Rural Studio is what architecture should be about, not what it should theoretically be about,” said Danny Wicke, a former instructor and student. “Engaging in practice makes school real and gives it context.” [11] Mockbee died in 2001, and Ruth in 2009, but not before the Rural Studio earned Mockbee a MacArthur “genius” grant and a wave of positive press from around the world. Now directed by British transplant Andrew Freear, the studio has concentrated on raising standards of professionalism and building larger civic projects. “I want to get students to dream about our society,” says Freear. “Architects are not just playthings of the rich.”

The Hills Are Alive is an interdisciplinary and wide-ranging essay by Michael P. Branch, a Professor of Literature and Environment at the University of Nevada, Reno and a columnist for The High Country News. 

In this piece Dr. Branch takes a moment of family history - his daughter's performing a version of Julie Andrews' revelry on their Nevada hillside far -and transforms the memory into the groundwork for a meditation on romantic and ecological landscapes. Here's his introduction:

My grandmother’s highest compliment for a natural landscape was to say that it was “pretty as a picture.” Even as a kid I remember thinking that this aesthetic was somehow upside-down, that the beauty of art should be judged according to the inimitable standard of natural beauty rather than the other way around. During the late 18th and early 19th centuries, well-heeled European travelers toured the countryside looking for views that would be as pretty as a picture — or, to be more precise, as pretty as a painting. And because they had a certain kind of painting in mind as embodying their standard of natural beauty, these early ecotourists often carried with them a small, convex, tinted mirror known as a “Claude glass,” after the 17th-century landscape painter Claude Lorrain. When a picturesque landscape was encountered — say, the snow-capped Alps — the tourists would turn their backs to the mountains and whip out their Claude glass, holding it up to frame the mountains, which were not only reflected but also color-shifted to a tonal range that made them appear more painterly. And voila! The rugged Alps become not only pretty as a picture, but become a picture, as the pleased ecotourists admired not the mountains but rather the image they had created. But must we turn our backs on the land to see it as aesthetically pleasing? Why do we so often love our representations of the world more dearly than we love the world itself? 

a selection from a photograph from Kathleen Robbin's project

We also highly recommend visiting Places to view Cotton Farmers: Photographs from the American South, a collaboration between Kathleen Robbins and writer Mary Carol Miller. Ms. Robbins, whose grandfather was a third-generation cotton farmer, recently returned to her family farm for an intensive five weeks of photography and interviews, alongside Ms. Miller. (NPR also provides more of the context here.)

The Places slideshow captures the breathtaking sweep of the land, yet also communicates the physical and mental hardship of continuing these practices. Below, Mary Carol Miller's prose speaks to this situation:

We found a handful of men and women who remain where their fathers and mothers and grandfathers and grandmothers planted their flags. Each spring, they weigh the odds and walk the land, recognizing every turnrow and low point and subtle rise over a thousand or two thousand or even eleven thousand acres. And, once again, as their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents did, they will buy the seed and the fertilizer and service the tractors and the combines and hire the cropdusters and begin the daily prayers for more rain or no rain and sunshine and cool nights and no tropical storms in September and no frost in early October. And their children, muttering about the social challenges of being way out there and never having a next-door neighbor, will slowly, slowly find their own souls tied to that dirt.

Untitled, 2010; Michael Lundgren

Last week Places published a collaboration that speaks to the concerns delineated across these pieces. If There Be Such a Place is a slideshow of work by two photographers with divergent visions of the American West: Aaron Rothman and Michael Lundgren. Poet and Places Assistant Editor Josh Wallaert offers an introduction not only to their work, but to the problems of aesthetic representation in natural space. As a whole, this is an intellectually complex and visually stunning presentation, and we highly recommend it - the techniques and ideas here can find application across the American landscape. Here is a selection from Mr. Wallaert's introduction; please follow the links to larger, high-resolution examples of the photographs:

By sundown in this Western town, you’ve met an artist, likely an environmental artist, a role synonymous these days with a kind of citizen interpreter of landscape. This is a golden age for geography in art, and its artifacts range from embarrassing to inspired. We embroider birds on pillows and use historical maps for découpage; we also write gorgeous poems whose lines re-enact processes of geological transformation, engineer mobile apps that enable hikers to identify the Latin names of plants, and exhibit photographs of altered landscapes that challenge old notions about the dichotomy of built and natural environment. The artist invites the audience to participate in an active reading and interpretation of landscape. We all want to read the world these days, or, more often, have the world read to us.

These exchanges are thrilling, yes, but also dazzling — as in, they can make you go blind. An afternoon hike with a naturalist friend can feel like immersion in a hypertextual, augmented reality, where the names of wildflowers hang, shimmering, in the desert air. It’s exhausting. I have often longed for the mute world I knew as a child: where a rock was a rock and a tree was a tree, and none of it spoke to me, except through direct perception and experience. Nature offers this still, if we are willing to accept it: the blank, unreadable, unbeautiful, apolitical moment. There have been times, when I found myself staring at exposed rock on the side of a hill, that I have known something about its formation; and times when I was accompanied by a scientist or artist who was obliged to translate. But there have been many more unreadable moments, when I could comprehend nothing in that open face of the world but its presence, when I had only the desire to climb the wall or poke at it with a sharp stick.

 Untitled, 2007; Aaron Rothman

Related Articles:

The Border of Nowhere and Nowhere

Rural Poetry Series: Josh Wallaert

In Brief: Water In The West

Fiction That Crosses the Rural - Urban Line
Rural Studio and the 20K House
Studio H: Designing and Building Skills for Rural Youth

In Brief: The Food Of A Younger Land

As folks may be preparing for family meals in the next few days, here's some news on The Food of a Younger Land, a book by Mark Kurlansky that examines a national food culture project initiated by the WPA that included the likes of Eudora Welty, Zora Neale Hurston, and many local writers. Here's a portion of Maureen Corrigan's introduction to the work on NPR:

Nine years ago, when Kurlansky was doing research for an anthology of food writing, the author says he stumbled upon the dusty archives of the America Eats project — an undertaking of the Depression-era Federal Writers Project which was a wing of Franklin Roosevelt's WPA. The Federal Writers Project provided employment for over 6,000 out-of-work writers, among them Ralph Ellison, Eudora Welty, Zora Neale Hurston and Nelson Algren. During the 1930s, the Federal Writers Project produced those now classic guidebooks to all 48 states, but by 1939 it needed another assignment. That's when Katherine Kellock, the director of the program, came up with the idea of a guide to American food and eating traditions which would shed a light on everyday American society. 

A great idea; but America Eats was never completed. The deadline for all copy was Thanksgiving week, 1941; the writers, of course, dragged their heels and then Pearl Harbor and the start of World War II blew America Eats out of the water. The rough copy — typed, on onionskin — that writers across the country had sent into Washington was boxed up and shelved.

In this interview with Mr. Kurlansky in GOOD, offers a taste of America Eats:

Each entry offers a portrait of American custom and American food, before highways, modern agribusiness, or fast food. What people ate was seasonal and, above all, cultural-the traditions from one state to the next varied wildly, and reveal undiluted customs that are all but gone now. So, for example, you've got Choctaw, Sioux, and Chippewa foods; Nebraska pig fries; Florida hush puppies; Georgia possum and taters; and "Washington Wildcat Parties," whose signature draw was fresh cougar meat, which apparently tasted "a little like veal" with a "stronger odor."

Below, please find a link to an hour-long conversation with food columnist Rich Nichols, compliments of C-SPAN's Book TV:

American Georgics: Old and New

Plowing It Under; Thomas Hart Benton, 1934

To start off the week, I'd like to point folks toward a recent review published in The Englewood Review of Books by Art of the Rural Contributing Editor Rachel Reynolds Luster. American Georgics: Writings on Farming, Culture, and the Land is the latest title in the Yale Agrarian Studies Series published by Yale University Press, and it features a roster of writers who will be well-known to our readers, but also some folks new to us. 

Here's the introduction to “For Farmers, For Landowners, For Citizens and Neighbors:”

American Georgics: Writing on Farming, Culture, and the Land, offers readers a concise and well-heeled collection of agrarian thought and writings from the founding of our Republic through the current wave, including speeches, essays, excerpts from novels, and poems. The writings in this volume trace the evolution of “the economic, political, social, and ecological dimensions of agrarianism” (372). Some of the authors will be most familiar to readers of agrarian writing including James Madison, Henry David Thoreau, and Wendell Berry; others, such as Jesse Buell, Louisa May Alcott, and Nate Shaw (Ned Cobb), will come as delightful surprises. The collection is rich in many ways but one of its greatest strength comes from the variety of perspectives offered but perhaps the most striking aspect of reading American Georgics is its undeniable relevance to our current political, economic, and agricultural moment.

Georgics, as a poetic form and sensibility, can be traced back to Virgil. Unlike his Pastorals, these poems merge considerations of mythology and poetics with elaborate descriptions of agricultural practice. I heartily recommend David Ferry's translation of the Georgics; folks can hear his reflections on the poem and its translation on the excellent ThoughtCast site.

John Dryden once called Virgil's Georgics "the best poem by the best poet." Here's an excerpt from the Third Georgic, as translated by Mr. Ferry:

If raising sheep for wool is your concern,

Be sure to avoid pasturing where the grass

Grows high, and you must keep your pasture clear

Of caltrops, burrs, and other bristling growth.

From the beginning be sure to choose for your flock

Only the sheep whose fleece is soft and white; 

But no matter how white the ram, if there are veins

Of black on the underside of his moist tongue,

Reject that ram and look for another one,

So that the newborn lambs won't be dark-spotted.

O Moon, it was with a lure of pure white wool

That you, if what we're told is true,

Were captivated by Pan, Arcadia's god,

Calling you to the innermost forest glade,

And, so it is said, you did not spurn his call.

Joe Bageant: Rednecks And the Rural-Urban

Joe with younger brother Mike in 1951; The Daily Yonder 

Folks, I've returned from an inspiring weekend at BIG FEED in Yuma, Colorado -- an event so rich in ideas, music, and art that I'm going to have a great deal to share from it in the coming weeks. 

Until then, I'd like to point folks' attention to a piece that appeared in The Daily Yonder that I consider to be essential reading: it's Lisa Pruitt's thoughts on the life and work of "redneck" writer Joe Bageant. Dr. Pruitt has covered much of the same ground, though from a different disciplinary perspective, on her excellent blog Legal Ruralism, and I can think of no better introduction to the passionate, clear-eyed prose of Joe Bageant. Her response is provocative and deeply moving -- this is a voice and a critique that's missing in large part from our current economic debates, a dose of reality that we all would be wise to consider. I'll be including her insights to just those ends tomorrow.

Below, I'll also include the video embedded at The Daily Yonder:

Contexts: How The Magnet Changed A Village

 a mural outside Aracataca, Colombia, the hometown of Gabriel García Márquez

Many year later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point. Every year during the month of March a family of ragged gypsies would set up their tents near the village, and with a great uproar of pipes and kettledrums they would display their new inventions. First they brought the magnet. A heavy gypsy with an untamed beard and sparrow hands, who introduced himself as Melquíades, put on a bold public demonstration of what he himself called the eighth wonder of the learned alchemists of Macedonia. He went from house to house dragging two metal ingots and everybody was amazed to see pots, pans, tongs, and braziers tumble down from their places and beams creak from the desperation of nails and screws trying to emerge, and even objects that had been lost for a long time appeared from where they had been searched for most and went dragging along in turbulent confusion behind Melquíades magical irons. "Things have a life of their own," the gypsy proclaimed with a harsh accent. "It's simply a matter of waking up their souls." Jose Arcadio Buendia, whose unbridled imagination always went beyond the genius of nature and even beyond miracles and magic, thought that it would be possible to make use of that useless invention to extract gold from the bowels of the earth. Melquíades, who was an honest man, warned him: "It won't work for that." But José Arcadio Buendia at that time did not believe in the honesty of gypsies, so he traded his mule and a pair of goats for the two magnetized ingots. Ursula Iguarán, his wife, who relied on those animals to increase their poor domestic holdings, was unable to dissuade him. "Very soon we'll have gold enough and more to pave the floors of the house," her husband replied. For several months he worked hard to demonstrate the truth of his idea. He explored every inch of the region, even the riverbed, dragging the two iron ingots along and reciting Melquíades incantation aloud. The only thing he succeeded in doing was to unearth a suit of fifteenth-century armor which had all of its pieces soldered together with rust and inside of which there was the hollow resonance of an enormous stone-filled gourd. When José Arcadio Buendia and the four men of his expedition managed to take the armor apart, they found inside a calcified skeleton with a copper locket containing a woman's hair around its neck. 

This is the first paragraph of Gabriel García Márquez's  Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude), a book no doubt familiar to many of our readers. While it's one of the twentieth century's finest works of literary art, it also tells a grand Genesis-like story of rural place: how it deals with cultural and intellectual change, how it manages the conflicted magnet-like pull between insularity and exchange with an increasingly modern, urbanized, and technologically advanced world.

The novel's Macondo is inspired by Mr. Márquez's hometown of Aracataca, Colombia. His coming-to-terms with this place and its colonial past gave birth to the rich emotional variety of his masterpiece. As he has said, and as muralists have recorded above, "I feel Latin American from whatever country, but I have never renounced the nostalgia of my homeland: Aracataca, to which I returned one day and discovered that between reality and nostalgia was the raw material for my work."

Artists from across the globe have responded to this imperative to find the "raw materials" in their local culture. Ghanian writer Nii Ayikwei Parkes once told The Guardian that One Hundred Years of Solitude "taught the west how to read a reality alternative to their own, which in turn opened the gates for other non-western writers like [himself] and other writers from Africa and Asia." I would argue that, amongst Mr. Marquez's lush, enveloping magic-realist narrative we also come to understand how a writer from rural Columbia may have taught the city "to read a reality alternative to their own." When reading these opening lines, we see a parable for the ways in which many rural communities, from Columbia to Appalachia to China, have embraced--or have been forced to embrace--"new inventions," often resulting in contradictory ends. 

This is the first in a new series of articles we're calling "Contexts," pieces of art found from beyond the contemporary American experience that, though perhaps distant in time and geography, have important lessons to impart to our understanding of rural place and its arts and culture. 

We would love to hear folks suggestions for this series--and also to hear what American works (or art, music, literature) you might think are "equal" or parallel to Mr. Máquez's masterpiece. Which  "opened the gates" for you? Also, if we're thinking about One Hundred Years of Solitude in these terms, what is the great Genesis-like story of rural America?

Thanks again for reading The Art of the Rural; I hope everyone enjoys this new series and finds it useful to their own conversations and visions of our shared rural space.

William Faulkner At The University of Virginia

photograph from Special Collections Library, University of Virginia

The past is not dead. In fact, it's not even past.

This morning NPR featured a piece on an exciting new digital archive that should be of interest to many of our readers. It's the Faulkner at Virginia audio archive, an impressively comprehensive document of the writer's time on campus in Charlottesville during the 1957-1958 academic year.

This archive was directed by Professor Stephen Railton, with the assistance of a vast number of folks in the UVA community, and it is incredibly thorough: all facets of Faulkner's visit are covered in the contexts section of site, as this essay is complemented by ample photographs as well as dozens of primary sources from contemporary newspaper accounts and even Faulkner's own correspondence. For readers of Faulkner, this is a treasure. 

The entire audio archive of Faulkner's various lectures and discussions is included therein, and a full manuscript is also included--all of which is searchable. I have long been considering writing about Yoknapatawpha County--that landscape located between the creative mind of William Faulkner and his "apocryphal county" of Lafayette in Mississippi. This archive is a great step towards considering how this writer's visions of South, and of the rural, still haunt us and still feel so necessary to our lives. 

Here's just a taste; the audio clip can be found here:

Unidentified participant: Sir, why do you sometimes satirize the South, and at other times very—very strenuously satirize it? [And] what is your general feeling of the South, and the deep South?

William Faulkner: It's my country, my native land, and I love it. I'm not trying to satirize it. I'm—I'm trying—that is, I'm not expressing my own ideas in the stories I tell. I'm telling about people, and these people express ideas which—which sometimes are mine, sometimes are not mine, but I myself am not trying to satirize my country. I love it, and it has its faults, and I will try to correct them, but I wouldn't try to—to correct them when I'm writing a story, because I'm telling—talking about people then.

Enjoy wandering through these discussions. Also: In 2008, the University of Virginia Magazine featured this write-up on Faulkner's visit, including a video interview with alumni remembering his visit.

An Almanac For Moderns: March Twenty-First

The first entry in An Almanac for Moderns by Donald Culross Peattie.

March Twenty-First

On this chill uncertain spring day, toward twilight, I have heard the frog quaver from the marsh. That is a sound that Pharoah listened to as it rose from the Nile, and it blended, I suppose, with his discontents and longings, as it does with ours. There is something lonely in that first shaken and uplifted trilling croak. And more than lonely, for I hear a warning in it, as Pharoah heard the sound of plague. It speaks of the return to life, animal life, to the earth. It tells of all that is most unutterable in evolution--the terrible continuity and fluidity of protoplasm, the irrepressible forces of reproduction--not mystical human love, but the cold batrachian jelly by which we vertebrates are linked to the things that creep and writhe and are blind yet breed and have being. More than half it seems to threaten that when mankind has quite thoroughly shattered and eaten and debauched himself with his own follies, that voice may still be ringing out in the marshes of the Nile and the Thames and the Potomac, unconscious that Pharoah wept for his son.

It always seems to me that no sooner do I hear the first frog trill than I find the first cloud of frog's eggs in a wayside pool, so swiftly does the emergent creature pour out the libation of its cool fertility. There is life where before there was none. It is as repulsive as it is beautiful, as silvery-black as it is slimy. Life, in short, raw and exciting, life almost in primordial form, irreducible element.

Introducing Donald Culross Peattie

As spring arrives again, our thoughts turn to the fields, gardens and container plots waiting to be planted. Or, if we don't possess a green thumb, we wait eagerly for the warmer weather to bring the markets and roadside stands back into our lives, to sit down with that first bowl of spring greens, to bite into the first corn of summer or that first peach. 

As we all look ahead to these joys, let me introduce Donald Culross Peattie. He's a figure we're going to keep close by this season. Here's how one blog has summarized Mr. Peatties many contributions:

Donald Culross Peattie was the pre-eminent Naturalist of his day. After leaving University of Chicago and French Poetry for Harvard and Botany, he worked for the Department of Agriculture and produced several works of mostly scientific value—his A Natural History of North American Trees is indispensable, authoritative and exhaustive. Later, he married the novelist Louise Redfield, and turned to nature writing as a career, for which he is most remembered. Through the 30’s and 40’s he published a dozen or so books directed to the general reader which were, owing to his popularity, distributed through many book clubs; he also wrote for Reader’s Digest and produced columns for the Washington Post and Chicago Daily News.

Yet Mr. Peattie's career as a writer and a naturalist was not always so certain. It was actually a combination of the depression years and a return to his wife's rural community that provided the springboard for his many later successes. Here's Peter Friederici of Chicago Wilderness Magazine setting the stage:

In 1933, in the midst of the Great Depression, Glenview, Illinois witnessed a subdued homecoming. A couple and their three young sons returned to the state of their origin after six years in the south of France. It was early winter, and bleak; the drought of the Dust Bowl had not yet broken. Glenview was more rural than suburban. Lacking snow, the northern Illinois farmlands looked "dingy now and threadbare." The great old bur oaks of the prairie groves appeared dead.

They were both writers. Their books had found publishers but not much of an audience. Jobless, the man doubted his own ability to provide for his family. "Still to put trust in me, I thought . . . was to perform more than I ever had yet," he wrote. For what, he wondered, had they left the warm delights of the Riviera?

Such was the homecoming of Donald Culross Peattie and Louise Redfield Peattie.

The book to emerge from from these Northern Illinois fields was An Almanac for Moderns (1935) a breathtaking combination of naturalism and poetry, with  a philosophical and observant eye that prefigures many of the agrarian writings that, a few decades later, would take a stand and argue for the validity and the necessity of rural culture. Remarkably, this book is currently out of print. (But can be found cheaply here.)

Here's Robert Finch describing the Almanac in The Norton Book of Nature Writing:  

The "moderns" that Donald Culross Peattie wrote for in his An Almanac for Moderns were a skeptical generation. They were the descendents of Darwin and Freud and the inheritors of World War I, who had seen "the trees blasted by the great guns and the birds feeding on men's eyes." ... His deliberate choice of the archaic literary form of a daily almanac contrasted the stable natural order of the ancient philosophers and naturalists with the modern existential view of nature as soulless and purposeless. Its short 365 chapters not only pose many of the philosophical questions that have preoccupied contemporary nature writers, but also contain an informal survey of natural science and evocative observations of seasonal life.

In a technological and social moment when the "archaic literary form of a daily almanac" doesn't really seem that archaic, we're hoping to use this site (updated almost every day) to celebrate the work of Donald Culross Peattie--and to hopefully start a word-of-mouth campaign to give this author the new edition he richly deserves.