A Late May Ohio Valley Sabbatical

Flea Shack and $1 Flea Market, Outside Steubenville, Ohio; Matthew Fluharty

With Memorial Day approaching, we will be taking a much-needed break from publishing new work on this site -- though we are looking forward to new articles and projects coming at the start of June. We will be welcoming more writers to the AOTR staff, and launching some new series, while also learning more about Kenyon Gradert's Course on Midwest Culture.

To keep the conversation going during this brief sabbatical we will add frequent updates to the Arts and Culture Feed.

We hope everyone has a safe and peaceful Memorial Day holiday!

Introducing A Course On Midwest Culture

Steam Coming Off The Grain Bins, Outside Sioux Center, Iowa; Kenyon Gradert

Art of the Rural is excited to announce A Course On Midwest Culture, a new series that promises to apply a wide interdisciplinary lens to a region of the country often relegated to reductive myths and cliches. 

With this, we are also pleased to welcome Kenyon Gradert to our staff. Kenyon is a doctoral student in English and American Literature at Washington University in St. Louis with primary research interests in religion and philosophy, romanticism, and nineteenth-century American literature. He was raised on a third-generation grain and cattle farm in northwest Iowa. His father and younger brother continue to live in this region and work as cropdusters.

Kenyon will curate the Course on Midwest Culture series, a project that seeks to utilize new media to find a common ground between the discussions that occur within the Academy and those that take place everyday in the American Midwest. His introduction to this effort begins below.

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The Midwest holds a complicated spot in American cultural thought. While it has competing claims to both blasé “flyover” and that core of American moral fiber, the “Heartland,” other regions encroach upon its cultural capital. The South seems to have a monopoly on popular rurality and the East coast keeps old-school cosmopolitanism tucked in its pocket, never mind the lake cities’ key role in our industrial revolution, the historical centrality of St. Louis and Chicago in the 19th-century, and the rather straightforward fact that the Midwest today has almost twice as many farmers as the South.

Culturally, the Midwest may seem nothing more than that quaint vacuum between New York and LA without even the literary charm of the south. Indeed, some may think “Midwest culture” the height of oxymoron.

But the region has been home to significant literary endeavor--and long before the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Someday I’d like to use this literature to form a college course that challenges presumptions and assaults (im)pieties both within and towards the Midwest, a place that is neither quaint Georgic pastoral nor vacuous meth ghetto. Perhaps a bit of both, with much in between.

A Course on Midwest Culture will be a recurring series, a syllabus in the making, if you will. I’ll post a brief excerpt of a possible primary text along with my own brief observations and arguments for why such a text should be in such a course. 

Like the internet itself, this cultural studies project will be interdisciplinary. Mosaic-like, I may use a post on Hamlin Garland’s short story “Under the Lion’s Paw” to examine the rural complications of Marxist thought, meanwhile providing web links to Johnny Carson’s Public Service Announcement for the Farmers’ Crisis of the 1980s, a University of Missouri sociological study on rural versus urban poverty, or even John Mellencamp’s first Farm Aid show on the University of Illinois-Champaign campus.


Most importantly, I’ll look for your feedback. 

When it’s all said and done, my hope is that this project demonstrates the necessity of such a course offering, which I might teach at some point in my time as a doctoral student. Thus, with your help, this series becomes an experiment in a more democratic course-construction. 

Professors most often go to other professors via listservs to determine course material. Why not let Midwesterners outside of the academy help?

Eamon Mac Mahon: The Landlocked North, On The Edge Of Great Change

Photograph by Eamon Mac Mahon

Many thanks to artist Richard Saxton for leading us to the work of Eamon Mac Mahon, a photographer raised in a mining community in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies, at the precipice of the massive expanse of boreal forest. 

Mac Mahon's photographs of this place have received much attention in recent years, and for good reason. They balance a strong compositional eye with a sensitivity for cultural nuance and an awareness of the threats posed by expanded natural resource operations. An argument for environment and indigenous culture coexists with these stunning visual elements; in the hands of a lesser artist, this material would seem overly political, a strident kind of photojournalism. Instead, they alternate between wondrous and stark evocations of the landscape we would otherwise never encounter.

We will reprint below Mac Mahon explanation of the Landlocked series, alongside a few further images and an excellent multimedia piece on the work produced by Daylight, a photography magazine. The artist also places his work alongside the environmental threats to the region in a moving photo-commentary in The Walrus. Please find larger, high-resolution examples of this work on Eamon Mac Mahon's site.

This series of photographs is part of a larger project that began in the autumn of 2004 with a series of extended journeys by bush plane into the Canadian wilderness. Since that first journey, I typically spend three months each year in the north with a bush pilot in a two-seat airplane built in 1946. We set off in the autumn, at the end of the pilot's season, when we have the skies to ourselves.

In the beginning I was drawn to the boom and bust resource towns scattered throughout northern Canada. I wanted to know what happened in these places: what the people were like and what it felt like to be in a place that is surrounded by so much uninhabited, wild land. It would sometimes take weeks to make our way to these remote villages. Along the way we camped in wilderness, took shelter in fire towers, and were often taken in by strangers. When we finally arrived in an isolated community we would often get stuck waiting for the weather to change, or a shipment of fuel to arrive, or parts for the plane. Most of these communities had no access roads and had generally experienced reckless growth or stagnation, and then decline.

The surrounding wilderness has a deep effect on the inhabitants of these towns and, in turn, the towns have a great impact on the wilderness. And in these small isolated communities, it is possible to see clearly how individuals have made each community vastly different. I have become increasingly captivated by the wilderness between lonely settlements. Vast areas of land not yet exploited, or briefly plundered and left uninhabited. Growing up in western Canada on the edge of the boreal forest, I had vague impressions of mysterious and wild, yet monotonous places. I thought of the north as an endless expanse of homogeneous forests, lakes and tundra. I was wrong. I have been astonished by the variety and complexity of these landscapes. These photographs show a wilderness of increasing importance to the world, on the cusp of great change.

What If All The Natural Gas In The United States Was In Urban America?

Photograph by Les Stone

An open question for consideration: suppose that the United States' massive natural gas reserves were located exclusively beneath urban sites. Would these regions encounter hydraulic fracturing? Would the practice exponentially increase across the metropolitan areas of Dallas or Boston as it has in rural America? 

Would the political and cultural rhetoric which unites both sides of the "fracking" debate assume a different shape? What might this tell us about the place, and the value, of rural America within these debates?

Feel free to join this hypothetical discussion on our Arts and Culture Feed. 

Many thanks to Les Stone for permission to reprint his extraordinary work; please find larger, high resolution examples of these images at his photoblog and also at his official site, which presents a range of work from West Virginia to Haiti.

Related Articles:

The Language of Natural Gas Leases

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

Honey and Sustainability in Rural Nepal

Here is a new dispatch considering rural - international connections, where sustainability and food security meet, raising the quality of life and illustrating to rural youth how prosperity could be under their noses, or in the hive:

Plan International reports today on news of their work in Nepal:

Until recently, Shover Singh Praja often went to bed without dinner and had to work on an empty stomach, barely able to feed his family. Born to a poor family in Makwanpur district, central Nepal, Shover now earns way above the national average and has become a role model among his fellow Chepang, an indigenous ethnic group who depend on wild yams. The secret of Shover’s success? Bees.

For the last 2 years, Shover has looked after 55 hives and last year he netted US$1,000 selling honey, as well as hives to other keen beekeepers. Right away, the money was put to good use.

"I didn't get the opportunity to get an education when I was a child, but I send all my children to school now," he said.

Folks can continue reading here, as the article elaborates on how rural youth have found a path to success doesn't necessarily have to lead out of their home region:

Ramesh Praja, 28, cancelled his plans to go overseas.

“At home, living with my family, I can earn around US$120-300 during the honey production season and US$60-180 in the off season. When I realised this, I wondered why I should go abroad to earn a wage no more than the amount of money I can earn in my very own community," he said.

We Juke Up In Here: Mississippi Juke Joint Traditions

Red Paden at home in Red's Lounge; Lou Bopp

This month will see the release of a new documentary from Jeff Konkel of Broke and Hungry Records and Roger Stolle of the Cat Head music and art store. We Juke Up In Here, co-directed with Damien Blaylock of Atavistik Pictures, explores the living tradition of Mississippi juke joints:

We Juke Up In Here follows producers Jeff Konkel and Roger Stolle as they explore what remains of Mississippi’s once-thriving juke joint culture. The film is told largely from the vantage point of Red Paden, proprietor of the legendary Red’s Lounge in historic Clarksdale, Mississippi. Paden, a true Delta character and jack-of-all-trades, has been running his blues and beer joint for more than 30 years – providing one of the region’s most reliable live blues venues and an authentic stage for a cavalcade of veteran blues performers, both legendary and obscure.

Told through live music performances, character-driven interviews and rare on-camera blues experiences, viewers are taken below the surface of the quasi-legal world of real Delta jukes – while it’s still living and breathing. Mississippi’s juke joint culture may be at a crossroads, but as Red likes to say, “The Game’s for life . . . and that’s for damn sure!”

Konkel and Stolle previously collaborated on 2009's award-winning documentary M for Mississippi: A Road Trip through the Birthplace of the Blues. The producers have made a life's work of recording and promoting the living blues in Mississippi -- through the artists on Konkel's Broke and Hungry label and through Stolle's legendary Cat Head music and art store and his book The Hidden History of Mississippi Blues.

The trailer for M for Mississippi, also co-directed with Damien Blaylock, is included below: