Course on Midwest Culture: Midwest Realism in the Contemporary Novel

Selection from the cover of Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections

By Kenyon Gradert,  Course on Midwest Culture Editor

The consistently excellent N+1 recently published a wonderful piece by Nicholas Dames. In “The Theory Generation,” Dames paints the generational portrait examined by a string of some of today’s most popular American novelists, undergraduate English majors in the heyday of academic literary theory now attempting to engage its ambivalent legacy. About half of the novelists cited are New Yorkers; more are native or transplanted Midwesterners (often from scholarly families, interestingly).

Jeffrey Eugenides cites the influence of his hometown Detroit in his life and his writing, the setting for his award-winning Middlesex. Cal, the novel’s protagonist, attempts to come to terms with his family’s conflicted Greek-American identity in Detroit and eventually escapes to San Francisco to come to terms with his own intersex identity. The novel received praise for its lucid engagement of the American Dream, an idea that gained mythic stature with Midwestern Gilded Age figures like Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie and one whose decline is especially vivid in Midwestern rust belts like Detroit. Both haunted and inspired by his city, Eugenides commented in a BOMB interview with Jonathan Safran Foer "I think most of the major elements of American history are exemplified in Detroit, from the triumph of the automobile and the assembly line to the blight of racism, not to mention the music, Motown, the MC5, house, techno.”

St. Louis’ own Jonathan Franzen (with a more ambivalent relation to his hometown) semi-autobiographically tells of a suburban Midwestern family attempting to navigate changing times in his renowned The Corrections. 

A novelist not mentioned by the article who could fit the demographic of theory-heavy realists is David Foster Wallace. Though born in New York and a professor in California, Wallace grew up between Champaign and Urbana, Illinois as his father taught within the state’s flagship university.

Ben Lerner, born and raised in Topeka, Kansas, sets his Leaving the Atocha Station as a sort-of reverse of Eugenides’ abandonment of Detroit. The protagonist Adam, a slacker poet and escapee Midwesterner on fellowship in Madrid, “invents fictional alibis for others—such as the ‘fascism’ of his kind, liberal Midwestern father. ” Free in Madrid, he remains fixated on familial roots.

Lorrie Moore; photograph by Linda Nylind

Lorrie Moore wasn't born in the Midwest, but teaches here and sets her novels in the region. What’s more, Dames latches on to such a setting by using “Midwest” as a worthwhile description of the realist style that contrasts with the metropolitan university stylings of Theory:


Take, for instance, the protagonist of Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs, a young woman named Tassie raised in rural Wisconsin, who describes the shock of her first term at her state university:

"Twice a week a young professor named Thad, dressed in jeans and a tie, stood before a lecture hall of sunned farm kids like me and spoke thrillingly of Henry James’s masturbation of the comma. I was riveted. I had never before seen a man wear jeans with a tie."

The deadpan Midwestern humor, so pointedly stark in its syntax, brilliantly evokes the moment of initiation into Theory.

With an American populace marked by quick and constant geographic flux from education and career-pursuits—well-exemplified by these novelists—it is remarkable that the Midwest still holds such adjectival power in first-rate literary criticism. This small coterie of realist, theory-drenched novelists may have transferred their geography to their style, osmosis-like. Others may argue Dames relies on hackneyed stereotypes of the “prosaic Midwest” when the region has sprouted its fair share of magical realism too.

Richard C Longworth, Senior Fellow at The Chicago Council on Global Affairs and author of Caught in the Middle: America’s Heartland in the Age of Globalism (an excellent work featured on my bibliography) summarizes on his blog The Midwesterner: Blogging the Global Midwest:

In earlier days, much Midwestern literature was super-realistic: the work of Theodore Dreiser and James T. Farrell come to mind, not to mention the wonderful work of black Midwestern authors such as Richard Wright and Lorraine Hansberry. But later writing reveals an urge to the bizarre, a sort of magic realism absent from the epics of the South or the hard-boiled policiers of the West. Keillor uses this. So does the baseball writing of W.P. Kinsella, such as Shoeless Joe (the inspiration for Field of Dreams) and The Iowa Baseball Confederacy. It's no accident that Ray Bradbury's Midwestern youth led to so much his work.

Perhaps we’re witnessing a shift back to the region’s realist origins. Perhaps, more likely, the Midwest is blooming into a wide proliferation of literary style just as in other regions, where Ray Bradbury’s spaceships and Lief Enger’s miracles can exist alongside the different realisms of Franzen et al. Regardless of style, the Midwest still serves as ambivalent setting or temporary home for some of the nation’s finest writers. Not quite dead yet; perhaps alive and well.

Rebuilding The Front Porch: An Interview With Patrick Overton

Savannah Barrett with Carlos Urlona at the Working Group meetings; Shawn Poynter

[Editor's Note: today we both welcome a new writer to the Art of the Rural staff and begin a new series of articles. We are excited to feature the work of Savannah Barrett, a writer and community arts advocate who has taken lessons learned in urban and international locales and applied them to rural contexts. She's currently completing work on a Masters in Community Arts Management at the University of Oregon. We are proud to count Savannah as our Community Arts Editor.

Her first piece is also the inaugural entry in a series we are calling "The State of the Rural Arts" -- reflections, interviews, features, and online installations that will seek to articulate the historical context surrounding this question while also expanding our common understanding of who, and what, constitutes "the rural arts" in contemporary America. As Savannah mentions below, this investigation springs from the imperatives that emerged from The Rural Arts and Culture Working Group.] 

 

By Savannah Barrett, Community Arts Editor

As a native of rural Kentucky, I have been witness to both the blessing of belonging to a country community alongside the entirety of my extended family; and to troubling and significant changes in this community and our distinct cultural traditions. These changes have taken place amidst a mass exodus of industrious young people who have left in search of quality education, employment, and social resources; and in response to a lack of investment in those fundamental needs in their home community. These experiences have led me to pursue a career in the rural community arts field. As a graduate student, I have struggled to piece together the history and dimensions of this domain, and found that history difficult to unravel and my field difficult to locate. There are few signposts in this work, yet I have been fortunate to find “my tribe” and my discourse among members of the Rural Arts and Culture Working Group. It was while there, while we collectively struggled to name our movement and identify our narrative, that I was connected with Patrick Overton.

I had discovered Patrick’s book Rebuilding the Front Porch of America while searching library databases for information related to Robert Gard and to the history of rural arts programs in the Cooperative Extension Service. I knew his work to be concerned with both the dynamic history of rural community arts development and with contemporary rural cultural policy. Patrick Overton is the Director of the Front Porch Institute in Astoria, Oregon, and has pursued community cultural development as practitioner and scholar for 35 years throughout the United States. In 1990, he defended the rural arts when called to Washington D.C. to testify in front of the House Appropriations Sub-Committee on the Interior on behalf of continued Federal support for the National Endowment for the Arts. There he conveyed that Rural Genius was one of the most important natural resources in our country, that it is one of our greatest sources of innovation, and that this resource was at risk. Twenty-three years later, I set out to ask Patrick about the current state of the rural arts, about rural genius, and about how those of us who are advocates and practitioners for rural arts and culture should move forward. 

For those interested in building a movement of folks committed to sustaining, honoring, and growing rural arts and culture, we must be cognizant of the significant historical efforts by the rural arts pioneers that have laid our groundwork, or as Patrick refers to it, the Old/New work: the Lyceum and Chautauqua movements; Alfred Arvold, Baker Brownell, Robert Gard and others who pioneered the rural arts programs of the Agriculture and Cooperative Extension; the community cultural development movement; local arts councils; and the practitioners, both in small and large communities, who have advocated for recognition in cultural policy. One of the first things Patrick told me related to the history of the rural community arts movement, and the distinctive differences between this movement and the more popularly understood community arts council movement:

“The minute you add rural/small communities to the history of community arts development, you have to push the history of the movement back from the 1950’s to 1826 with the beginning of the Lyceum movement. Now when you look at the community arts movement, you can stop in the 50s, because they really can be understood as two very different movements. A lot of what we call community arts today began as the symphony movement in the middle of the last century and evolved into what we know today as the arts council/local arts agency movement.  But the community it served was usually a large metropolitan areas. When you start talking about rural arts, rural/small community arts development, I go back to the Chautauqua and go all the way back to the Lyceum. I think it is essential because that is a distinction that we have failed to make. They really are distinctly different movements.”

…

What sets the community arts development movement apart from the Arts Council Movement is the emphasis on self-improvement and self-education.  “The community arts development movement has such a rich tradition and it’s a tradition that is very much about understanding art as a noun (a thing you have or own) and citizens as patrons, but rather understanding art as a verb and citizens as participants. And it’s that element of participating in the arts that really is distinctive difference between the two. Not that you don’t participate in the arts in the fine arts in large metropolitan areas, but there’s a level at which participation in a small community setting has a very different take and feel to it.”

Understanding the history unique to the field of rural arts helps to illuminate the challenges of our contemporary work. Rural Community Arts work, historically and presently, is slow to ripen. While we certainly need more capital and resources in this field, our work also requires human investment. Similar to the argument for slow foods, rural art and culture necessitates patience and planning. Wormfarm Institute farmer and artist Jay Salinas describes this through the use of his word Cultureshed, which he defines as 1. A geographic region irrigated by streams of local talent and fed by deep pools of human and natural history. 2. An area nourished by what is cultivated locally. 3. The efforts of writers, performers, visual artists, scholars, farmers and chefs who contribute to a vital and diverse local culture.”

If we want our work to sustain, we must listen to our places and to the people that live there and we must be patient with the process as it reveals itself, rather than implementing our individual visions. We must commit to our people and to our places long enough for our project’s ownership to belong to the soil (place) and fertilizer (people) that grew it. We must cultivate. 

Donna Neuwirth and Jay Salinas of The Wormfarm Institute

The result is authentic, is “of a place” and not “imposed on a place”, and is worth waiting for. Overton addressed the importance of investment in place in our conversation:

“If you don’t do the relationship building, in particular in the most rural and small communities, if you don’t show them that you care for them as people, then it doesn’t matter what you do for them or what you offer them. Or what you get them to do, it will not be valued if it’s not part of a relationship.”

…

“I believe community arts development and the arts in general begin with the individual. I believe that language and communication are the way individuals really do come into existence, it’s the way we say “I am.” Sometimes very special things happen and when say I am by expressing our voice, we end up inviting a relationship with somebody else who is a “you are”, and the “I am” and the “you are” become a “we”. To me that is really is the nexus of community. That’s the invitation.” 

…

“My work in rural and small communities was never about the arts, it was about the invitation. People will do what they are capable of doing if they are invited and know that they have access to it. Community arts development is about access and access to education. ”

At this point in the conversation, we turned our attention to broad based issues that are inhibiting the rural community arts’ growth as a movement and our development as a field. I and many of my rural peers are concerned with the lack of resource investment in rural communities. As Art of the Rural director Matthew Fluharty recently explained, “While Rural America stands as roughly 20% of the population, and 80% of its land mass, these artists are often isolated both from each other and from the possibility of creating a larger narrative.  As the moral failure of American philanthropy’s 1% investment in rural America suggests, too often a seat at the table for “the rural” has been withheld” (Fluharty, 2012).  Overton echoes this explanation:

“Public policy has utterly failed to recognize the essential contribution rural and small communities make…I think a lot of people who talk about rural don’t know what they’re talking about because they’ve never been there, they’ve never done it. They talk about rural as though it is a particular place, and though we know it is geographically central in our life; it’s really not about geography for us, it’s about everything that’s connected to it.”

While those of us who identify as rural are certainly dismayed at the underinvestment in rural America, we are also alarmed by the ever growing trend of our natural resource (our best and brightest young minds) leaving their home communities. They are the Rural Diaspora, born into rural areas yet relocated to more populated areas in search of educational and professional opportunity. In universities and professions across the world, we represent the rural genius’ disbursement to the cities. Yet, many of us remain tethered to our homeplaces and our rural birthright, despite our current address. Many of us do not feel it possible to live in the rural full-time and know that going home for good is complicated. Nevertheless, we are deeply committed to rural communities, particularly in regards to celebrating our cultural distinctions. Acknowledging this duality, how can we mobilize the Rural Diaspora to support a rural arts and culture movement, and to entice some of our Rural Genius back into rural communities?

“I’ve seen communities lose their identity because they’ve lost their major business, and I’ve seen populations leave. And I’ve seen the out-migration of people like you in rural communities who take it with them but live with a longing that people like you have because of the significance of that homeplace to you, I’ve watched that out-migration and the impact it has on those communities.”

…

“Rural small communities are the cultural underpinnings of what we are as a nation, those cultural underpinnings are crumbling. Our nation is at risk because of it.”

…

“The biggest need that we have is the ability to get together. I believe that ironically those communities that were founded by pioneering efforts that started this country are going to be the ones that keep it together.”

Jetsonorama participating in The Painted Desert Project; National Geographic, Aaron Lavinsky

Despite the challenges facing rural America, I feel a genuine excitement for the people, the work, and the coalitions I’ve engaged with in the past year. Constructive and critical conversations are taking place. While they are not yet ubiquitous, there are myriad opportunities for engagement in rural community arts programs across America. Organizations and individuals are leading the way in challenging the narrative of rural culture and its intrinsic value to our national cultural fabric: The field is being written about, researched, and published on more frequently; academic programs are training students to address the needs of rural communities; and some policy and funding organizations are stepping up to the plate to acknowledge rural arts and cultural work not only for the ways in which it provides access to the arts, but for the ways in which it enhances community pride and vibrancy and improves the standard of living for rural residents.

I asked Patrick to specifically comment on his perception of the state of the Rural Arts today:

“I am seeing something that I find very exciting. First, rural arts are a topic of conversation again... Now, I am hearing about and talking to younger people, like you, who are driven by the passion of the work and the important contribution it makes. The concern that I have is much of what I have been reading seems to ignore the vast, rich history of the work and the writing that has been done so many years before all of us started this contemporary expression of the rural/community arts development work. There is so much to learn from the pioneers who have gone before us – I worry about a cycle that seems to occur every twenty years with exciting, gifted, impassioned young people discovering rural/small community arts development and proceeded as if it is a new field.

It is possible we may be entering the most important phase of our history doing this work. Why? Because people are beginning to understand that if something doesn’t change, we are in deep, deep trouble in this country. And I believe rural/small communities are the most critical cultural underpinnings that keep this culture from imploding on itself. There is a need, a desire, an interest in finding alternative – constructive/creative alternatives to the social disintegration that has diseased our entire country. The arts are (and always have been) the way to authentic community expression.

This may be our time. And people like you may well be the messengers who are going to be able to tell this story and this potential and do so in a way that recognizes that the story is a long story and the contribution this story identifies is great.”

I asked Patrick to respond to thirteen additional questions regarding the “State of the Rural Arts Today.” His responses encouraged my own professional development, enlivened the tired rhetoric about rural place, and fully expressed the need to engage with and celebrate rural arts and culture as it is happening on front porches and back roads across this country. To read more about my conversation with Patrick Overton, download the PDF of our interview.

[Author’s Note: All direct quotes attributed to Patrick Overton are taken from a transcribed interview conversation between Patrick Overton and Savannah Barrett that took place on October 16, 2012. For questions, please contact the author. ©Savannah Barrett, 2012.]

Double Weekly Feed: Wild Girls, Our Town, Native Ground, Westbrook Artists, and more

 International Sonoran Desert Alliance, recipient of a NEA Our Town grant

By Rachel Beth Rudi, Digital Contributor

• Congratulations to our colleague Mary Stewart Atwell, whose debut novel Wild Girls was recently published by Scribner. "Fire-lit from start to finish, Wild Girls is a story of Appalachian magic, conflagration, and supernatural violence," writes Swamplandia! author Karen Russell. Around Art of the Rural, we call it The Appalachian Anti-Twilight. Check out the book trailer below, directed by Charlie Cline:


Wild Girls by Mary Stewart Atwell Book Trailer from Charlie Cline on Vimeo.

• GALA Hispanic Theatre is bringing a reality of rural Southwestern culture to audiences in Washington, D.C. via the Mexican dance company Teatro Linea de Sombra and their newest multimedia program. Celia Wren offers this introduction in The Washington Post: "a theatrical meditation on the harsh realities that face undocumented migrants and their families, “Amarillo” also features projections, throat singing, a surveillance camera, 100 water bottles, a 15-foot-high wall that actors climb and bounce off – and a poem by Harold Pinter." 

This event was made possible, as Wren writes, thanks to "Southern Exposure: Performing Arts of Latin America, a program of the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts and the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation, supports U.S. arts presenters that band together to bring Latin American performers to this country."

 

• National Endowment for the Arts Our Town grants fund creative placemaking projects that enliven communities through vibrant and sustainable art. Information is available online, and two webinars are scheduled to aid in the application process. 

November 6: 
http://artsgov.adobeconnect.com/our-town-guidelines-nov6/ 

November 13:  
http://artsgov.adobeconnect.com/our-town-guidelines-nov13/

Rural projects have been prominently featured in this program in the past, so folks should consider applying. We will be featuring much more information on the Our Town program in the weesks to come.

• The folks at Dust-to-Digital are directing a new non-profit, Music Memory, which will feature an expansive digital database that "will serve as a musical Rosetta Stone for future generations by showing the links and cross-influences of the many musical styles captured on phonograph records in the first half of the 20th century."

• "I'm not nothin' new 'cause I'm black. Bill Pickett was black. He was one of the greatest rodeo acts of all time. A black man, DeFord Bailey, was the first country-music superstar ever. I'm just doing what the greats have already done before me."

Wild Bill Young infuses his country singing, and his strutting, with elements of hip-hop and rap, a mixture of the musics and lifestyles of his Missouri childhood, and has found he is able to defy racist stereotypes and expand cultural understanding among the audiences he performs for across the country. Calvin Cox offers a profile in The Riverfront Times.

• On Native Ground "captures a demographic of youth through elders, and reaches past all cultural and ethnic barriers, by highlighting positive role models and current and historical events that are uniquely Native American." 

Here's the premiere episode, first broadcast on First Nations Experience on October 24:


On Native Ground vol 1 from jack kohler on Vimeo.
 

• Don't Forget This Song, the Carter Family comic book, is out now – complete with a CD of eleven rare radio recordings. Says American Songwriter Magazine: "Affectionate and admiring, The Carter Family: Don’t Forget This Song captures the family’s rise to success through numerous struggles as well as the enduring power of music and love." 

 selection from Don't Forget This Song

• Check out this great write-up on Brian Frink and Rural America Contemporary Art in The Free Press of Mankato, Minnesota. We encourage folks to check out the amazing range of work presented on the gorgeous new RACA site -- and stay tuned, RACA is about to debut its online magazine!

• Located in Madison County, Iowa, The Westbrook Artists' Site operates as "a project for exploration of the post-industrial rural condition." We are excited about their mission statement: 

The Westbrook Artists’ Site (WAS) explores the continuity between rural and urban contexts. If the rural is typically viewed as what was left behind in the process of urbanization, WAS insists, to the contrary, that rural life and landscape need to be seen as vital parts of a system that is urban and rural. WAS cultivates art and design as purposeful interventions within such an interconnected system. The WAS project mission challenges participants to find and explore the connective tissue binding rural and urban worlds and to create modes of address that speak from a rural landscape to both rural and urban audiences. 

• "Big Tex – his mouth moved as he uttered ‘Howdy, folks!’ – was celebrating its, or his, 60th birthday. But on Friday, Big Tex caught fire and was all but destroyed in the flames and thick smoke. His fiberglass head, hat and boots were consumed, as were most of his fabric clothes, leaving only his outstretched arms, belt buckle and metal skeleton intact." Folks can read Manny Fernandez's piece New York Times story here.

Left, LM Otero, Associated Press; right, John McKibben, Associated Press

Press: Des Moines Register and Createquity

Iowa: Wave The Next Time You Fly Over; t-shirt design by Raygun

We're grateful to start off the week with news of coverage of Art of the Rural in two well-respected publications. Many thanks to these writers for sharing our work!

• For years we've admired the writing of Kyle Munson, a columnist and general Iowa-culture expert for the Des Moines Register. On Sunday, he wrote about a new publication by the design-savvy team at Iowa City's Raygun, a collection entitled The Midwest: God's Gift To Earth.

At the close of Munson's meditations on this region's global presence, he turns to AOTR contributor Kenyon Gradert for the kind of critical perspective found in his Course on Midwest Culture series:

That brings me around to Kenyon Gradert, an English doctoral student at Washington University in St. Louis and a writer for the Art of the Rural — a guy who spends serious time pondering Midwestern identity.

Midwesterners have “that reflection about them,” Gradert said. We’re “hardworking but not too flashy, not too rambunctious or rowdy as some may perceive Southerners to be.”

I like how he characterizes us at theruralsite.blogspot.com as a blank canvas for the rest of the nation: “A Midwesterner is more American than Midwestern, at least in mythic identity.”

Gradert grew up on a northwest Iowa cattle and grain farm outside Ireton. With public input from the blog he’s democratically cultivating a new course on Midwest culture that he hopes to teach within the next few years.

Folks can enjoy Munson's full column here and are encouraged to check out Kyle Munson's Iowa Map.

• We are also honored to have received mention by Ian David Moss in Createquity, "a hub for next-generation ideas on the role of the arts in a creative society" that cultivates an online presence as a "virtual think tank exploring the intersection of the arts with a wide range of topics including politics, economics, philanthropy, leadership, research, and urban planning." Simply put, this is an outstanding resource with a thought-provoking perspective. Folks should add it to their feed and follow along on Facebook and Twitter.

Moss is also the Research Director for Fractured Atlas, an organization that connects artists, arts organizations and cultural practitioners in efforts to create "a more agile and resilient cultural ecosystem." I imagine that many of our readers may already be familiar with the work of Fractured Atlas; if not, I encourage folks to visit their site and learn about the range of programs and opportunities they offer to artists and organizations. Joining the community at Fractured Atlas only takes three minutes. 

Given the interdisciplinary and cross-sector ethos of Moss's work, we're grateful to be included in the conversation on Createquity. Folks can also follow this site on Facebook and Twitter. We'll include below his thoughts on The Rural Arts and Culture Map:

One of the tragic consequences of our field’s fragmented funding infrastructure is that support for the arts tends to be concentrated in large urban metros. While especially apparent in funding for art projects themselves, it applies equally to research about the arts, which means that creative activities in rural areas fly even further under the radar than they would otherwise. A new project called the “Rural Arts and Culture Map” aims to do something about this by crowdsourcing stories, media, and video testimonials about art in the boonies.

Weekly Feed: Collaboration, Ecology, Digital Media and Food for Thought

Photograph of the Fennimore Art Museum

By Rachel Beth Rudi, Digital Contributor

• "Rural art museums face distinct challenges when it comes to building audiences for exhibitions and programs," writes Paul D’Ambrosio, president of the New York State Historical Association. “Unlike our counterparts located in urban areas or population centers, rural art museums must compel their audience to travel a good distance to partake of their offerings, and they must tailor their exhibitions and programs to the particular patterns favored by those travelers. At the same time, they must do so while building a donor and sponsorship base that is likewise not local or at least only seasonal.” The Fenimore Art Museum of rural Cooperstown, NY, found a solution through regional collaboration and interdisciplinary thinking. 

Photograph from the Aldo Leopold Foundation Archives

• “Rising before daylight and perched on a bench at his Sauk County shack in Depression-era Wisconsin, [Aldo] Leopold routinely took notes on the dawn chorus of birds. Beginning with the first pre-dawn calls of the indigo bunting or robin, Leopold would jot down in tidy script the bird songs he heard, when he heard them, and details such as the light level when they first sang. He also mapped the territories of the birds near his shack, so he knew where the songs originated.” 

Using these astounding records, two University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers have managed to recreate the sounds that surrounded Leopold seventy years ago, compiling the various calls and sounds described and compressing them into one five-minute audio track. Listen here.

Folks may also be interested in perusing this 2011 program anchored at Arizona State University: Rethinking the Land Ethic: Sustainability and the Humanities. 


The Migrating Mural by Jane Kim from Jane Kim on Vimeo.

Artist and science illustrator Jane Kim is on a mission to educate travelers and everyday commuters about the wildlife around them. Following the routes of America’s endangered migratory animals, Kim pulls off the highway to transform the sides of old barns and houses into murals of the animals who seasonally pass by. View Kim’s Kickstarter video here.

New York Times; Kiersten Essenpreis

• "We’re Here, We’re Queer, Y’all" is a must-read New York Times editorial addressing regional stereotypes. Professor Karen Cox also edits the Pop South site and tweets at @SassyProf.

• Standing Bear’s Footsteps crafts workshops and classes for the youth of the Ponca Tribe in Nebraska and Oklahoma. Available on the project’s website is a collection of brief interviews conducted and filmed by Southern Ponca students in a digital media course. In this clip, "Mikhael Laravie, a 7th grade participant in Standing Bear's Footsteps Youth Media Camp, interviews his grandmother Lola Laravie asking about her childhood growing up on a farm in Nebraska."

Farmer of the Future and Harvest Public Media

Photograph by Alison Rose; Forgotonia

This morning the excellent team of reporters and editors at Harvest Public Media began a series, entitled Farmer of the Future, that considers how "technological, cultural and political forces are bringing immense change to those people who commit to building their lives around the land." 

Kathleen Masterson offers the first dispatch, a report considering how the northwest region of Iowa, with its recent population growth and cultural diversity, presents both a model for the future and set of complex questions. Here is the transcript introduction to "Blending of Culture May be Blueprint for Growth:"

Sioux County, in northwest Iowa, is known for its Dutch pastries. The landscape is dotted with Lutheran and reform churches.  But today, Catholic churches and tortillerias are creeping into the landscape — signs of the new residents joining this vibrant community.

In Sioux County, as in a scattering of communities across the Midwest, Hispanic immigrants are working in meat processing plants, dairies, egg-laying facilities and hog barns. In fact, the majority of U.S. farm laborers today were born outside the U.S.

And while some parts of the rural Midwest are hollowing out, areas like Sioux County and its biggest city Sioux Center, are actually growing as immigrant populations move in to take jobs that otherwise employers cannot fill.

Sioux Center’s population has grown 17 percent and the county is up 7 percent over the last decade. Meanwhile, government figures indicate 91 of Iowa’s 99 counties have declined by about 9 percent over the last three decades.

No surprise, Sioux Center looks very different than many other rural communities in Iowa. But although this area may well offer a glimpse of the farming community of the future, the melding of cultures is not always easy.

Masterson continues in her piece to talk with folks from all sides of the Sioux Center community. We find that, for many farmers in the region, the rhetoric of immigrants "stealing American jobs" masks the pressing need for agricultural workers. Furthermore, these new residents are contributing to an expanding local economy, in contrast with other rural regions of the state.

Harvest Public Media also provides, embedded within Masterson's report, an interactive map illustrating the influx of hispanic immigrants within Iowa.

If we consider this news from Sioux Center alongside last week's "Readings" piece on Thomas Hardy's view from rural England -- as workers fled from the fields for industrial centers, in some cases to complete against English agriculture as newly-American farmers -- then we might see this news not as a political "hot-button" issue, but as part of a larger continuum, another element of a broader arc of international rural diaspora across the last two centuries.

Related Articles:

Readings: Rural Traditions Sunk Into Eternal Oblivion

The Farmville Files: Take Our Jobs

Mexican Migrant Workers, Vermont Dairy Farmers, and Local Artists

The Tree That Bursts Through The Silo

Tree In Silo; Ken Wolf

Many thanks to María Arambula for sharing on our Arts and Culture Feed A.G. Sulzberger's latest rural dispatch for The New York Times, "Amid Rural Decay, Trees Take Root in Silos." The image of these trees bursting from disused farm structures unifies an arc of how the last century has dealt with rural place as an aesthetic ideal.

To begin, here's Mr. Sulzberger discussing this phenomenon across Kansas and Missouri:

The empty structures catch seeds, then protect fragile saplings from the prairie winds and reserve a window of sunlight overhead like a target. In time, without tending by human hands, the trees have grown so high that lush canopies of branches now rise from the structures and top them like leafy umbrellas. 

Across a region laden with leaning, crumbling reminders of more vibrant days, some residents have found comfort in their unlikely profiles. 

“It just struck me as, I don’t know, a symbol of something,” said Ken Wolf, who has spent many days of his retirement searching the area for what he calls, simply, silo trees, photographing dozens along the way. “I see it as a kind of passing.” 

Mr. Wolf's photographs present these tree-silos are a kind of vernacular architecture, not consciously assembled structures -- though they suggest this aesthetic through neglect and abandonment. As the photographer surmises, we're in the presence of a symbol heavy with historical and cultural weight.

It's jarring, then, to consider the image of this tree just one hundred year's ago, in the poetry of William Butler Yeats. In "Upon A House Shaken By The Land Agitation," Yeats laments the passing of the Anglo-Irish Ascendency who even, before the Easter Rising, were seeing their large estates broken up into smaller holdings and dispersed to local farmers. Yeats's position on the matter would be akin to many modernists, who envisioned their art free from the demands of (or condescensions to) popular audiences; the Nobel laureate saw in the destruction of an estate's "big house" a metaphor for the loss of what he would call (in another poem featuring a tree-symbol): "custom and ceremony." After decades connecting rural folklore to national literature, Yeats displays the anxieties of his class and his cultural standing -- worrying if these same people, so often portrayed by him as the spirit of the nation, would really be careful stewards of the land and its culture. He laments what is lost by allowing a tree to flourish in the place of a symbol of high cultural wealth. 

In Mr. Wolf's phtography we find a drastically different situation but, nonetheless, a structure in ruin and a landscape in transition. What is contested is what narrative we ascribe to the branches breaking free from the silo's concrete hold; is this a reclamation or a commentary on industrial agriculture, a scene of "rural decay" or something that transcends economics and cultural cliches? Is this a preface or a postscript?

Upon A House Shaken By The Land Agitation

How should the world be luckier if this house, 
Where passion and precision have been one 
Time out of mind, became too ruinous 
To breed the lidless eye that loves the sun? 
And the sweet laughing eagle thoughts that grow        
Where wings have memory of wings, and all 
That comes of the best knit to the best?
Although  Mean roof-trees were the sturdier for its fall,
How should their luck run high enough to reach
The gifts that govern men, and after these 
To gradual Time’s last gift, a written speech 
Wrought of high laughter, loveliness and ease?

Silo With Tree; Ken Wolf

A Rye Whiskey Rural Arts Metaphor

Templeton's home-grown rye crop; Brewvana

[Editor's Note: As I am facing numerous writing deadlines over the second half of February, this seems like a good time to give a retrospective glance to the first two years of Art of the Rural. Over these weeks I will feature a few new articles, but also many favorites from the archives. Thanks again to everyone who has read and contributed; what began as a labor of love has become a project far larger, and far more rewarding, than I ever could have anticipated - and I deeply appreciate the readership and participation of such a diverse audience. In March we will offer new articles and series, and share some new projects related to our mission.

[A Rye Whiskey Rural Arts Metaphor was originally published on February 9, 2011. A review of Kristian Day's excellent documentary Capone's Whiskey: The Story of Templeton Rye is forthcoming. The trailer for this film is included at the conclusion of this piece.]

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We occasionally like to dwell on issues of food culture and the culinary arts that have a particular rural connection (see the search function on the sidebar for Ian Halbert's excellent series of articles), and today we've found a controversy that has developed across the state of Iowa that may be of interest to our readers.

The story involves Templeton Rye, a small-batch rye whiskey distilled in Templeton, Iowa. With the exception of liquor connoisseurs, most folks outside of Iowa--even most folks in the midwest--probably have never heard of Templeton, despite the fact that it is one of the most sought-after whiskeys in the United States. It's also a whiskey with a compelling local and historical legacy. Here's a brief introduction from the distillery's site:

When Prohibition outlawed the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages in 1920, many enterprising residents of a small town in Iowa chose to become outlaws – producing a high caliber and much sought-after whiskey known as Templeton Rye.

Based on its extremely smooth finish, the American rye whiskey earned the nickname of “The Good Stuff” and quickly brought a certain degree of fame to the doorsteps of Templeton (pop. 350). As the premium brand of the era, Templeton Rye fetched an impressive $5.50 per gallon – or approximately $70 by today’s standards.

Over the course of its storied history, Templeton Rye became Al Capone’s whiskey of choice, quickly finding its way to the center of his bootlegging empire. Hundreds of kegs per month were supplied to Capone’s gang who in turn filled the demand of speakeasies throughout Chicago, New York and as far west as San Francisco.

Capone was eventually convicted on charges of tax evasion and sent to prison. Later legends suggest that a few bottles even found their way inside the walls of Alcatraz to the cell of prisoner AZ-85.

Although most American whiskeys ceased production after prohibition ended, Templeton Rye continued to be produced illegally in small quantities for loyal patrons. More than eighty-five years later, the infamous small batch rye whiskey finally returned – made available legally for the first time ever in 2006.

While the Capone connection may be enough to tempt a taste, the product's history is far from a gimmick; this is one of the finest, and most unique, rye whiskeys that money can buy. Beyond the connection to Prohibition and Alacatraz, this is no doubt also related to the local elements of this product's creation, to the care that the distillers--and the town itself--has put into each bottle. As their blog indicates, this distillery is intricately linked to its home region.

The Templeton controversy, however, has emerged at the convergence of all the wonderful attributes contained in the previous paragraph. Iowans want to purchase a quality drink with an Iowa connection,  stores in the state wish to stock this local gem, and--to confound this seemingly simple example of supply and demand--a huge number of urban, coastal connoisseurs are desperate to also enjoy a sip. Extraordinarily limited quantities of Templeton Rye can be found in upscale liquor stores in New York City, San Francisco and Chicago, often at considerably higher prices. Even within Iowa, it is very hard to find the product; often local stores will only receive 2-4 bottles a month. People turn to Facebook and Twitter (#TRspottings) to report when and where they have found "the good stuff."

Ironically, then, a product which began as a contraband item has, through different circumstances, become again a subject of hush-hush conjecture. This has led, within the state of Iowa and no doubt through internet chatter, to the perception that the scarcity of Templeton Rye was linked to a single likely cause: Templeton was shipping a larger proportion of its product to distant cities. As the video below and the site's allotment data indicate, this was only a perception. The vast majority of Templeton Rye stays within the Iowa border.

Herein lies a multifaceted metaphor. We see in this story those ever-present tensions between the local and the cosmopolitan, between the rural and the urban; we also see here the point at which a fantastically successful rural, regional business reaches a challenge that has less to do with profit-margins than with the community on which the entire enterprise is rooted. As a culinary art form, this is a kind of instructive tale for artists working within other mediums.

Also, looking more broadly at the well-earned success story in Templeton, we have an aspirational model for the rural arts. It's a sort of material and aesthetic challenge for contemporary rural artists in all mediums, how to balance the desires of rural and urban audiences--and how to reach one's local audience in such a way that they take the kind of ownership over their region's work that Templeton's Iowa base has exerted. While this controversy has been a challenge to the distillery, it's an envious one for most rural artists. Imagine if the words "Templeton Rye" and "Batch 4" were interchanged in the video below with any number of other words: "our recent series of paintings", "our recent book of poems", "our current recording:"