Where We Write

MARK WUNDERLICH is the author of the poetry collections The Earth Avails (Graywolf Press, 2014), Voluntary Servitude (Graywolf Press, 2004), and The Anchorage (University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), winner of the Lambda Literary Award. He teaches at Bennington College and lives in upstate New York.

IN 2015 the poet laureate of Winona, Minnesota, invited me to give a reading. I was born in Winona and grew up a few miles away, just across the Mississippi in rural Buffalo County, Wisconsin. Graywolf Press had published my third poetry collection, The Earth Avails, the year before, and the idea of returning home to read from it was intriguing: My parents had never heard me read my work, and for the first time I had written a collection whose subject matter was palatable to my parents’ sensibilities. There was little sex, and it contained overt religious themes married to a consideration of what it means to have roots in the rural Midwest. I assumed the reading would be a small, rather cozy event with a few interested strangers, my parents, and the organizers. I accepted immediately and without too much forethought.

When July came, I flew from my home in upstate New York to Minneapolis and made the three-hour drive south to Fountain City. The “City” of my hometown is beyond exaggeration; its population hovers around seven hundred. An immigrant Wunderlich from Germany was one of the early settlers in the town in the 1830s, and my family has lived there ever since. Driving from Minneapolis south along the