A Place Of Sense: Essays In Search Of Midwest

by Michael Martone

Overview

Collected here are essays by Louise Erdrich, Michael Rosen, Gary Comstock, Mary Swander and Jane Staw, David Hamilton, Janet Kauffman, Douglas Bauer, and Michael Martone. Sixteen black-and-white photographs by David Plowden illustrate the sweeping territory covered in the essays. Together they bring a new understanding of the moods, emotions, people, and places that form the Midwest, proving it to be as complex and unordinarily beautiful as it is modest.  

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781587291418
Publisher:	University of Iowa Press
Publication date:	09/01/1988
Series:	Bur Oak Book
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	170
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Midwesterner Michael Martone is the author of three collections of stories, Alive and Dead in Indiana, Safety Patrol, and Fort Wayne Is Seventh on Hitler’s List. He is associate professor of English at Syracuse University.

Table of Contents

Photographs by David Plowden following page 86 i Under the Sign of Wonder Bread and Belmont Caskets Michael J. Rosen 29 The Flatness Michael Martone 34 A Writer's Sense of Place Louise Erdrich 45 The Way the Country Lies Douglas Bauer 66 American Gothic David Hamilton 96 If You Can Talk to a Guy Jane Staw and Mary Swander 111 Grandma's Backbone, Dougie's Ankles Gary Comstock 133 Letting Go: The Virtue of Vacant Ground Janet Kauffman 143 Notes on Contributors

Editorial Reviews

Writerly concerns dominate these eight prettily composed essays that explore the relationships of Midwesterners to Midwestern landscapes. A lecturer on fiction at Harvard, Martone ( Safety Patrol ) posits poetically if not impressionistically in ``The Flatness'' that topographical ``flatness informs the writing of the Midwest. The flatness of the landscape can serve as a foil, the writing standing out . . . in opposition to the background.'' In ``Under the Sign of Wonder Bread and Belmont Caskets,'' the story of Michael J. Rosen's decision to become a writer interrupts an otherwise adept definition of his native Columbus, Ohio, in terms of the consumerism that established it as ``an official All-American City'': it contained the nation's first supermarket and first shopping center, he says, and families like Rosen's own, for whom `` `freeze-dried,' `evaporated,' `instant,' and `condensed' became the essential catch-phrase qualities.'' Perhaps the most vivid and broadly appealing are two of the less self-conscious entries: ``The Way the Country Lies,'' Douglas Bauer's empathetic examination of the farming crisis and David Hamilton's autobiographical ``American Gothic'' (``Sometimes Grandmother forgot to put in her false teeth, and her mouth sagged like a hand puppet bowing''). Readers should look elsewhere for information about the great cities of the Midwest or its racial or ethnic minorities. Photos not seen by PW. (September)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

"A Place of Sense will stir up memories of those of us who live(d) in the Midwest and give the rest of the country a sense of what they've missed."—Small Press 


"…should give any Midwesterner a sense, in both meanings of the term, of freedom of thought and feeling possible within the even metre of the streets and fields."—Indianapolis Star 


“. . . left me wanting to invite each essayist to my own kitchen table for dinner. Then I would coax more talk over a second cup of coffee, so provocatively have the writers thought about place, about the way who mixes up with where.”—Plain Dealer


“Musing on exuberant butter sculptures at the Ohio State Fair, the soul-numbing flatness of northern Indiana, a farmers’ suicide hotline in Iowa, or deserted fields gone wild in southern Michigan, the essays evoke a major American myth of simpler lives and stronger values . . . By listening to their world and telling its stories, the authors poetically document an endangered species of humanity.”—Booklist

From the Publisher