This week, I’m writing from Vermillion, South Dakota, where I’m savoring the sweet, powerful sounds of language produced by writers from throughout America’s too-often underappreciated midsection. And let me tell you, I, too, am guilty of underestimation. Growing up in southeastern Pennsylvania, I once was no better than the worst of the fly-over country cliché’s purveyors. Never once as a kid did I think I’d ever do more than pass over or, worse, pass through the northern plains. Now, at ten years and counting, I call this country home. And I share it gladly with writers like John T. Price and Lisa Knopp, who’ve helped me, an immigrant, learn to see and appreciate what I previously overlooked.
Last week I wrote about how early visitors to Carlsbad Caverns National Park lacked the language to convey what they saw to people who, before affordable mass transportation and automobiles, had neither experience with nor reference to anything similar. Consider the challenge. How would you describe something neither you nor anyone you knew had previously seen? This challenge is why so many American landscapes and landscape features—King’s Palace and Queen’s Chamber in Carlsbad Caverns, for instance—are named after monumental European architecture. Why so many others, like the Caverns’ Devil’s Den and Witch’s Finger, bear names signifying something unsavory. These names exist because, when coined, they functioned as metaphors the majority of Americans could imagine. Such nomenclature doesn’t appear only in reference to the Cavern, either; it’s common throughout the West. There’s Hell’s Half Acre in Wyoming, for example, and Devil’s Kitchen in Yellowstone National Park.
All of these names exist because of the stories our grandparents and their grandparents had heard from parents and churches, immigrant relatives and military explorers.
And it is stories that I am writing about here. Words and metaphors create and convey our passions and compassion for place. But what comes first? Deep commitment to place that gives substance to the stories or the stories that produce the passion and commitment? I have no answer and suspect there’s none. But one thing is certain: there’s a conversation that occurs between insiders and outsiders, between residents and immigrants, and that conversation produces, to varying degrees, commitment and stories as well as stories and commitment.
For the last two days I’ve had the good fortune to participate in this conversation that is the promise and product of the biennial John R. Milton Writers’ Conference at the University of South Dakota. And each year I have attended—this is my third since 2007—the conference has shown me, an outsider, the depth and breadth of middle Americans’—of resident writers’—combined and indivisible devotion to place and storytelling craft. Growing up—heck, even into my thirties—I knew of few American writers from the country’s midsection, however defined: West, Great American Desert, Midwest, Great Plains, flyover country, heartland, Red States. I’d read Mark Twain, Tim O’Brien, and Philip Levine; I’d heard of Willa Cather and William Least Heat-Moon. I’d heard of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa and of many of the writers it had nurtured since the 1930s.
But had I really read recent poetry, fiction, and nonfiction by people committed to living and making a life in states like Iowa, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Wyoming? Heck, no. Before moving to and learning to live, first, in Nebraska and, now, Iowa, I’d have been incapable of naming one living writer living still in one of these states, let alone in the larger region. Simply put, I was uninformed and missing out. And I wasn’t alone then, not by a long shot. So for those of you like me, if ever you have the opportunity to visit Vermillion during a future Milton Writers’ Conference, please take it. There are writers here, in America’s midsection, whose work is well worth going far out of your way to hear, and the biennial Milton conference is, in my opinion, your best chance for meeting and hearing many of these writers in one place.
In the meantime, I’d encourage you to discover for yourself the richly imagined, diverse, and beautiful fiction, nonfiction, and poetry about America written by not only the keynote and featured authors but also these few less well-known writers whom I had the luck to meet and hear read: Michael Catherwood (poetry); Neil Harrison (poetry); Richard Robbins (poetry); Robert A. Roripaugh (fiction and poetry); Miles Waggener (poetry); and Steven Wingate (fiction).
Fred MacVaugh, Staff Blogger