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Barnstorm
Contemporary Wisconsin
Fiction
Edited by Raphael Kadushin
Terrace Books
Publication date: February 2005
ISBN 0-299-20854-0 Paper $19.95
Reviews:
[Reviews will be posted here as
soon as they are available.]
List
of the contributors:
Dwight Allen, Dean Bakopoulos,
Margaret Benbow, Anthony Bukoski, Kelly Cherry, Tenaya Darlington,
Mack Friedman, Jane Hamilton, John Hildebrand, Jesse Lee Kercheval,
J. S. Marcus, Judith Claire Mitchell, Lorrie Moore, Ann Shaffer
and Ron Wallace
Publicity
Statement:
Flyover Zone or Overlooked Literary
Mecca? Everyone's seen by now that cartoon of a New Yorker's
vision of America, with everything from West Virginia to Nevada
broad-brushed as "Flyover Zone." It's a joke on New
Yorkers, but wouldn't some people you know say the map is a fair
cop? In other words, is it just that people on the coasts of
our country have insular mindsets, or is it simply true that
culture doesn't emerge from America's heartland like it does
from the coasts?
Our experience with a new book has brought
us right into the melee that tends to swell up around those questions
whenever you bring them up at parties (or at least at nerdy parties).
We might have expected as much from a book aiming for the national
literary stage while including "Wisconsin" in the title
(and without referencing cheese or football).
But, as editor Raphael Kadushin points
out with characteristic insightful bite in the introduction
to Barnstorm: Contemporary Wisconsin Fiction,
most regional writing really isn't "regional" anymore:
Southern writers no longer write about
church dinners in a hush puppy
voice, unless they're really bad ones, and Midwestern writers
rarely wax lyrical over barn dances and bratwurst, unless they're
joking.
Not only that—Barnstorm also
includes some high-caliber names, like Lorrie Moore, Jane Hamilton,
Kelly Cherry, and up-and-comer Dean Bakopoulos.
And yet, while many we've spoken with on
the East Coast as well as in the Midwest are intrigued by the
goals of this collection, not everyone is convinced. So apparently,
Barnstorm is more than just a collection of great
fiction writing. It's also a lightning rod for a controversial
issue. We invite you to form your own opinion. Are "flyover"
literati unjustly trivialized? Or is it our provincial
arrogance to think this particular book worthy of a small piece
of the national spotlight?
Either way, we hope you enjoy the book.— UW Press
Excerpt
from the introduction by Raphael Kadushin:
"If there is one identifiable quality
that does mark these stories as Midwestern it may be their sense
of autonomy—the fact that their authors have found their
own place in that world—and their lack of pretension. All
good writers eventually develop their own voice but any writer
living in Wisconsin finds independence quickly, because there
is no local culture club dictating style, and there is none of
the intense literary rivalry that forces urban writers to keep
looking over their shoulder for emerging fashions. Because they
are living in a place that isn't consumed by trends or momentary
culture-making—one of the reasons so many artists move here—heartland
writers can soak in a quiet that lets them develop their own
style. Don't mistake lack of pretension, though, for that butch,
flat, faux Hemingway style that is a pretension in itself, or
any kind of earthy, pioneering sensibility. In fact, a lot of
these writers wouldn't know a cornfield from a wheat field. What
an independent style really means is that you're writing a story
guilelessly, so that your only impulse is to tell the story as
truly as you can."—from the introduction to Barnstorm
Excerpt
from Kelly Cherry's "As It is In Heaven"
"When my mother wrote to me
that she had seen my father sitting in his chair in the kitchen,
I wondered if her mind was going too, and perhaps it wasn't even
Alzheimer's. I knew from experience that losing someone you love
can sensitize you to every memory of him, so that his memory
is as present to you as he used to be. It would surely not be
difficult to confuse the presence of the memory with the man
himself. 'Dear Nina,' my mother wrote back, when I suggested
this, 'don't be a dope. I do not have a sentimental bone in my
body, and if your father is not in the kitchen, who the hell
is sitting in there scarfing ice cream every night?'"
. . . When I bumped into my father in the kitchen, I told myself
I was seeing things. The power of suggestion coupled with repressed
hysteria and total tiredness was causing me to hallucinate. My
father just shook his head, slowly, sadly, the way he'd always
done when he was feeling pessimistic.
'It's true,' he said. 'I'm really here.' He sighed heavily, as
if this was not only unlikely but lamentable."
—from "As It Is In Heaven" by Kelly Cherry
Contributors'
bios:
Dwight Allen, author of The
Green Suit and Judge, worked at The New
Yorker for ten years after receiving his M.F.A. from the
University of Iowa Writer's Workshop. His stories have been published
in Georgia Review, Missouri Review, Shenandoah,
and New Stories from the South, among other publications.
He lives in Madison, Wisconsin.
Dean Bakopoulos was born in Detroit in 1975, attended
the University of Michigan, and then earned his M.F.A. from the
University of Wisconsin–Madison. His first novel, Please
Don't Come Back from the Moon, was published in 2005 to glowing
reviews from the New York Times and Publishers Weekly.
He is currently the executive director of the Wisconsin Humanities
Council.
Margaret Benbow's poems have been published in Poetry,
The Kenyon Review, The Antioch Review, The Spoon
River Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, and many others.
Her work has appeared in anthologies such as The Journey Home,
Wisconsin Poetry, and most recently the new edition of
John Frederick Nim's Western Wind. Benbow has won several
awards, including the Paulette Chandler Literary Award from the
Council of Wisconsin Writers. In 1997 she received the Walt McDonald
First Book Award for her collection Stalking Joy. Her
short stories have been published in Zoetrope, The
Georgia Review, and elsewhere. Benbow, who lives in Madison,
is currently at work on a novel.
Anthony Bukoski grew up in Superior, Wisconsin. He teaches
English at the University of Wisconsin in the port city where
his Polish emigré grandparents settled. The author of
four story collections, Time between Trains, Polonaise,
Children of Strangers, and Twelve below Zero, he has
been awarded the Creative Arts Award from the Polish American
Historical Association and has twice win the Anne Powers Book-Length
Fiction Prize from the Council for Wisconsin Writers. In 2002
he was named the R. V. Cassill Fellow in Fiction from the Christopher
Isherwood Foundation.
Kelly Cherry's most recent books are We Can Still Be
Friends, a novel, and History, Passion, Freedom, Death,
and Hope: Prose about Poetry. Her collection The Society
of Friends, from which "As It Is in Heaven" is
taken, received the Dictionary of Literary Biography Award
for a Distinguished Volume of Short Stories in 2000. Her fiction
has been represented in Best American Short Stories, Prize
Stories: The O. Henry Awards, The Pushcart Prize, and New
Stories from the South. She also holds the Hanes Prize in
poetry. She is Eudora Welty Professor Emerita of English and
Evjue-Bascom Professor Emerita in the Humanities at the University
of Wisconsin–Madison and sometimes serves as the Visiting
Eminent Scholar at the Humanities Center of the University of
Alabama–Huntsville.
Tenaya Darlington lives in Madison and writes for Isthmus.
Her poetry book, Madame Deluxe, was winner of the National
Poetry Series. She has been previously published in the Atlanta
Review, Chronicle of Higher Education, Beloit Poetry
Journal, and Southern Poetry Review. Her work also
appears in Scribner's Best of the Fiction Workshops 1998
and In Brief: Short Takes on the Personal. Her first novel,
Maybe Baby, was published in 2004.
Mack Friedman is the author of Lambda Literary Award-nominated
Strapped for Cash: A History of American Hustler Culture.
His work has also appeared in the anthologies Obsessed and
Wonderlands. His first novel is scheduled to be published
in 2005. He now lives in Pennsylvania, where the rivers run iron
oxide.
Jane Hamilton lives, works, and writes in an orchard farmhouse
in Wisconsin. Her short stories have appeared in Harper's
magazine. Her first novel, The Book of Ruth, won the PEN/Ernest
Hemingway Foundation Award for best first novel and was a selection
of the Oprah Book Club. Her second novel, A Map of the World,
also a selection of the Oprah Book Club, was an international
bestseller. Her novel The Short History of a Prince was
a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 1998, won the Heartland
Prize for Fiction, and was short-listed for Britain's Orange
Prize. Her most recent novel is Disobedience.
John Hildebrand is professor of creative writing at the
University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire. He is the author of
two books, Mapping the Farm: The Chronicle of a Family
and Reading the River: A Voyage Down the Yukon. His work
has been anthologized in Best American Sport Writing 1999,
American Nature Writing 1997, The Great Land: Reflections on
Alaska, and The River Reader. His articles and essays
have appeared in Harper's, Audubon, Manoa, Outside, and
The Missouri Review. He is the recipient of a Bush Artist
Fellowship, a Wisconsin Arts Board Fellowship, the BANTA Award
from the Wisconsin Library Association, and the Maxwell Schoenfeld
Distinguished Professorship.
Jesse Lee Kercheval was born in France and raised in Florida.
She is the author of six books, including the poetry collection
Dog Angel, the novel The Museum of Happiness, and
the writing text Building Fiction. She is the Sally Mead
Hands Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, where
she directs both the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing
and the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing. She lives in Madison
with her husband and two children.
J. S. Marcus was born in Milwaukee and graduated from
the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is the author of
a book of stories, The Art of Cartography, and a novel,
The Captain's Fire. His fiction is included in the anthology
Wonderlands. His nonfiction has appeared in many publications,
including the New York Times and the New York Review
of Books. He currently lives in Berlin, where he is completing
his second novel.
Judith Claire Mitchell is a graduate of the Iowa Writers'
Workshop and a recipient of a James Michener/Copernicus Society
of America Fellowship. She was a James C. McCreight Fellow at
the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and currently teaches
creative writing at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Her debut novel, The Last Day of the War, was published
in 2004 to critical acclaim.
Lorrie Moore is the author of five books, the most recent
of which is the story collection Birds of America, which
won The Irish Times Prize for International Literature.
She is currently the Delmore Schwartz Professor in the Humanities
at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Ann Shaffer's poems have been published in Poetry.
Her essays have appeared in Isthmus, the Milwaukee
Journal, and other publications, and her criticism has received
a Milwaukee Press Club Award. She is the author of the children's
book The Camel Express and has published numerous stories
and poems for children. Shaffer has also been a commentator on
Wisconsin Public Radio's To the Best of Our Knowledge. She
is currently writing a novel and lives in Madison.
Ron Wallace was born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and grew up
in St. Louis, Missouri. He is Felix Pollak Professor of Poetry
and Halls-Bascom Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
He serves as codirector of the Program in Creative Writing, which
he began in 1975, and as editor of the University of Wisconsin
Press Poetry Series (Pollak and Brittingham Prizes), which he
founded in 1985. His most recent poetry books include Long
for This World and The Uses of Adversity. In 2000,
he won the "World's Greatest Short Short Story Contest."
Editor's
Bio:
Raphael Kadushin is humanities
editor at the University of Wisconsin Press, editor of Wonderlands:
Good Gay Travel Writing, and a contributing editor at Bon
Appétit magazine. He contributes to a wide range of
publications—among them National Geographic, National
Geographic Traveler, Condé Nast Traveler,
Town & Country Travel, and Out Traveler—and
his work appears in a variety of collections, including Men
on Men 5, Best Food Writing 2001, and Through the
Lens: National Geographic Best Photographs.
For more information in addition
to this press kit contact our publicity manager,
phone: (608) 263-0734, email: publicity@uwpress.wisc.edu
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Cover image:
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and used in any web-based publicity for this book. For
a 300 dpi version, click here.
Editor's
photo
This image can be downloaded
and used in any web-based publicity for this book. For
a 300 dpi version, click here.
Please direct any inquiries for
further publicity materials to our publicity manager, phone: (608) 263-0734, email:
publicity@uwpress.wisc.edu
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