The Best Short Stories from the Heart of the Country
On March 29, 1976, the New Yorker ran a now-iconic cover called “View of the World from 9th Avenue.” This illustration by Saul Steinberg showed the Midwest—that land of flat vowels, grain silos, and repression—as a condensed strip of Kansas Corn, Nebraska, Kansas City, and Chicago as its only landmarks. Maybe it was this mindset that, too often, led folks who grew up in the no-man’s land between the coasts to mistakenly assume their home wasn’t worth writing about.
My first realization that my hometown of Kansas City was a worthy subject for literature came when I read the novels Mr. Bridge and Mrs. Bridge. The 1990 movie that combined these two books by Evan Connell was filmed in a house right down the street from my parents.
It’s not just novelists like Connell, Gillian Flynn, John Greene, and Jane Hamilton who have turned their attention to the so-called flyover states. Short story writers have, too. Here are some collections of note:
Michael Martone, The Moon over Wapakoneta: Fictions and Science Fictions from Indiana and Beyond
(University of Alabama Press, 2018)
Michael Martone has been called a “visionary oracle of the Midwest.” He hails originally from Fort Wayne, Indiana. One of many clever stories in his latest collection is “The Digitally Enhanced Image of Cary Grant Appears in a Cornfield in Indiana.” If you’ve seen the movie “North by Northwest,” you’ll remember the scene in which Grant is chased across a dusty field by a biplane. In Martone’s fantastical retelling, Benjamin and Irene Day and their sons Norbert and August see not a flesh-and-blood movie actor but a “miraculous and seemingly spontaneous appearance of the actor … in the opposite oncoming unpaved shoulder of U.S. Route 41 at Prairie, a rural Greyhound bus stop, near Ade, Indiana, halfway between Chicago and Indianapolis.” When the apparition approaches the Days’ car and says, “Hot day, isn’t it?” Mr. Day placidly responds, “Seen worse.” Midwestern laconic at its best. The book is filled with Midwestern characters whose seemingly simple surfaces hide ironic twists. The titles alone carry this pleasurable mix of the normal juxtaposed with the bizarre. There’s “Anton Chekhov Writes to His Friend, William Sydney Porter, in the Columbus, Ohio, Federal Pentitentiary” and “Bird Boy of Fort Wayne,” about an aviation pioneer, Art Smith, who did sky writing in an early flying machine he built in his own backyard.
Lee Martin, The Mutual UFO Network
(Dzanc Books, 2018)
Pulitzer Prize-finalist Martin’s latest book is a collection of a dozen stories, all but two of which are set in the Midwest. In an interview on Authorlink.com, Martin admits he at first assumed “no one was interested in the stories of small communities and farming towns.” Reading Richard Ford’s Rock Springs changed his mind. These new stories introduce us to regular folk, witnessed by an eye insightful enough to discern their full humanity. Characters like Doogie, Maizy, and one-eyed Wink, and settings like Goosenibble, the IGA, and Mr. Peanuts, come to rich life under Martin’s skilled hand. A favorite story, “Across the Street,” shows the impact a troubled young man has on his neighbors. Here’s one conversation from that story:
“I don’t want anyone looking in.”
“What are you afraid they’ll see?”
“My heart. The inside of my head. My soul. They can’t have that, Mother. I won’t let them.”
Midwesterners are sometimes known to keep their cards close to their chest, but Lee Martin is expert at revealing the souls of these complex characters.
Bonnie Jo Campbell, American Salvage
(Wayne State University Press 2009)
As in Martin’s book, methamphetamine is an ominous presence in these seemingly innocent lands. American Salvage, a finalist for the National Book Award, opens with “The Trespasser.”
A father, mother, and teenage daughter enter their vacation cabin to find a burnt-out stove and destroyed kitchen where three men and a teenage girl have cooked meth. The two girls portrayed in this story have lived wildly different lives—one protected by an intact family, gymnastics trophies, and swim lessons; the other a runaway who trades her body for drugs. Campbell does a masterful job with the ending of the tale, bringing the dangers that sex and the outer world hold into the vulnerable naiveté of a Midwestern family.
Kelly Fordon, Garden for the Blind
(Wayne State University Press, 2015)
Also from Wayne State University Press comes “Garden for the Blind.” These interconnected stories are set in Detroit in the years 1974-2012. Here, too, we see children of relative affluence damaged by their surroundings and feel the visceral contrasts between prosperous suburbs and dangerous neighborhoods. A rash decision made by Alice Townley and her friend Mike haunts the pair for decades, and its consequences reverberate well beyond their families and friends to strangers. Neglect is an important theme, and Fordon makes clear how vital it is that we take care of each other. Despite the comforts and protection money ostensibly offers, teens are vulnerable to the indifference of their parents. The title story is especially exquisite. In it, vandals destroy a garden at a school for the blind. A monk who lives across the street, a divorced man who has lost both wife and children, struggles to understand how to rise above those who do damage. Once again, the lines between privileged and poor are crossed only through the heart.
Tania James, Aerogrammes
(Alfred A. Knopf, 2012)
Tania James was born in Chicago and has lived in Kentucky, Boston, New York, and DC. This collection followed the success of her first novel, Atlas of Unknowns. The stories here deal with geographic displacement and ethnic discrimination, and some are set in the Midwest. “What to do with Henry” tells the story of a woman from Canton, Ohio, Pearl Groves, who travels to Sierra Leone against the wishes of her family to adopt a girl, Neneh, her husband has fathered. On her trip she also decides to bring home an orphaned chimpanzee that she names Henry. Henry and Neneh grow up together in Ohio. “In Canton, Henry adapted well to their lives, eating at the dinner table and watching television in earnest, especially if a nature documentary appeared on PBS.” After Pearl’s death, when Henry has been dispatched to a zoo, a grown-up Neneh tries to reconnect with him. He takes the fruit cup she offers and Neneh “imagined his world and her world, two distinct, delicate bubbles floating toward each other, hovering as he fixed her with his faraway gaze.” Will their worlds merge or not?
In “Light and Luminous,” Minal Auntie runs the Illinois Academy of Indian Classical Dance and complains about the Midwestern charlatans who refuse to teach the students the proper names for hand gestures. “Instead of Pathaka, Alapadma, and Katakamukha, Aarti calls them Flat Hand, Flower Hand, and Deer Hand.” When her dark-skinned niece tries to lighten her face with talcum powder, Minal says, “You don’t look like you, raja.” Minal’s own skin is “the black-brown of tamarind, a hue that surpasses the spectrum of foundation colors sold at Walmart.” She works at FoodFest but shops at IndoPak. She tries to teach her students a beautiful bhajan about the poet Meerabai’s devotion to Krishna, but her vanity and nostalgia lead her to an embarrassing disavowal of her heritage.
Angela Mitchell, Unnatural Habitats & Other Stories
(WTAW Press, 2018)
The seven stories in this impressive debut collection are set in the Ozarks of Missouri and Arkansas. Mitchell herself is an 8th generation Missourian and director of the St. Louis Writers Workshop. Drugs and divorce cast their stain on rural landscapes that may once have been innocent but no longer are. Wildness appears in different forms—a bobcat kept as a pet by a man using a company called In-sur U as a front for selling drugs. A bus driver molesting a girl. Dogs chewing linoleum and bathroom cabinet doors. Throughout, there is a longing for something other than the run-down settings these characters inhabit: “Dee liked to pull the shorter layers up on top of her head and knot them off with a rubber band, creating a fountain of hair. It seemed to lift up her face, slimming it and making her eyes look wider, more exotic.”
Sherrie Flick, Thank Your Lucky Stars
(Autumn House Press, 2018)
Flick is a master of flash fiction, and her first collection Whiskey, Etc., was a Foreword Indies bronze winner for 2016 Best Book of the Year in Short Stories. There are 50 stories in this latest book, some no longer than a paragraph. Despite this brevity, the stories are long on tenderness, cruelty, and humor. Many of the tales are set on the plains of Nebraska. The opening story “How I Left Ned” manages to turn an outing to buy corn into something dark and dangerous. The heroines are feisty and strong despite their mishaps and less-than-ideal relationships.
Stuart Dybek, Paper Lantern: Love Stories
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014)
MacArthur Fellow Stuart Dybek is an award-winning master poet and fiction writer who hails from Chicago and whose work has been compared to that of Sherwood Anderson and Saul Bellow, two writers of an earlier generation who brought the Midwest to vivid life. Dybek often writes about “the city of big shoulders,” and many of his stories seem to straddle the line between fiction and personal essay. In the title story, in a restaurant that was once a Chinese laundry “… there’s nothing of heaven or earth that can’t be consumed, nothing they haven’t found a way to turn into a delicacy: pine-nut porridge, cassia-blossom buns, fish-fragrance-sauced pigeon, swallow’s-nest soup (a soup indigenous to the shore of the South China Sea; nests of predigested seaweed from the beaks of swifts, the gelatinous material hardened to form a small, translucent cup). Sea-urchin roe, pickled jellyfish, tripe with ginger and peppercorns, five-fragrance grouper cheeks, cloud ears, spun-sugar apple, ginkgo nuts and golden needles (which are the buds of lilies), purple seaweed, bitter melon …”
Compare this exoticism with the way Dybek describes a highway on the plains: “Interstate 80 shoots before us in the length of our racing headlight beams. We’re on a stretch between towns, surrounded by flat black fields, and the candlepower of the occasional distant farmhouse is insufficient to illuminate the enormous horizon lurking in the dark like the drop-off at the edge of the planet.” Dybek’s huge talent is to illuminate that exotic enormity lurking beyond the mundane realities of our lives and loves, Midwestern or otherwise. Here are cottonwoods and cattails, sunflowers and corn, Bix Biederbecke and “insect choirs amassed for one last Sanctus.”
