Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth by Sarah Smarsh

Heartland, by journalist Sarah Smarsh, already a nonfiction finalist for the 2018 National Book Award and the Kirkus Prize, is a multigenerational account of a hardworking family caught in the systemic forces that perpetuate the unknown and disdained Americans who are sometimes called “white trash.”

Despite such acclaim from the literary world, a strong review in The New York Times, and an endorsement from Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed, Smarsh’s core audience seems to be the people least likely to read her. They are Kansans and other Midwesterners, those she calls hard-luck laborers, waitresses, and family farmers of the rural working class.

Smarsh shares the wisdom of one who remembers growing up white, poor, working class, female, rural, and exhausted. She shows how sharp her memory is with comments like, it’s “not so much if you live in a trailer but where it is located.” She moved up in class, obtained a college degree, then an MFA, and has had a career in journalism, things which those of her class rarely do. Yet, once in academia, she saw that, “There was no language for whatever [it was] I represented on campus.”

In contrast to the expected tale of a person who overcomes adversity by sheer will, her memoir instead analyzes the governmental policies that created the challenges working-class people face. It’s less about herself than her family—fifth-generation, Homestead-Act wheat farmers. She describes an economically strapped people who, during good times, live paycheck to paycheck on low wages, and, during bad times, choose to informally barter with friends and family to whom they can repay the favor. Or they wouldn’t ask.

The author watches women and men suffer the effects of back-breaking work as well as exposure to industrial chemicals and harsh elements of outdoor labor on the prairie as she, too, contributes to the neverending work of a family farm. She writes in a voice reminiscent of Mary Karr, “A society that considers your body dispensable will inflict a violence upon you.”

Smarsh is unsentimental about the struggles of her people and equally unflinching about America’s lack of informed discourse about intergenerational poverty. She writes, “In the United States, the shaming of the poor is a unique form of bigotry in that it is not necessarily about who or what you are—your skin color, the gender you’re attracted to, having a womb. Rather, it’s about what your actions have failed to accomplish—financial success within capitalism—and the related implications about your worth in a supposed meritocracy.”

America’s working poor, she observes, are treated as disposable even as the country consumes the goods and services they produce. “It’s a hell of a thing . . . to grow the food, serve the drinks, hammer the houses, and assemble the airplanes . . . while your own body can’t [afford to] go to the doctor.” People in social classes above the impoverished often echo the mythic narrative that the poor bring penury on themselves through poor choices. There’s research that indicates the opposite is true. Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir presents substantial research that shows much of what people assume is inherent to the “character” of the poor is, in fact, the result of being poor.

For Smarsh, poverty is now monetized—and criminalized—through “interest, late fees, and court fines siphoned from the financially destitute into big bank coffers.” She addresses the politics of poverty as well: “Impoverished people then must do one of two things: Concede personal failure and vote for the party more inclined to assist them, or vote for the other party, whose rhetoric conveys hope that the labor of their lives is what will compensate them.”

There are some aspects of the book, sixteen years in the making, which could have been better written and rendered. First, given Smarsh’s analytical capacity, it is notable there’s no added discussion about Native Americans whose lives the Homesteaders disrupted. Native Americans were displaced from eastern states to Kansas and the territories with the federal government’s promise that they wouldn’t be moved again. Yet, moved they were, whenever it was convenient to do so. To make room for such marginalized groups that America’s founders hoped would become good consumers and laborers for the so-called higher classes is better documented in Nancy Isenberg’s 2017 White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America.

Another problem is that the narrative is not chronological. It’s often difficult to identify which family story one is following. Some readers dislike the breaks in narrative when Smarsh addresses the child she imagines she would have given birth to had she been born with more financial resources. One may choose to view this as a distraction or, more tellingly, as a painful loss that still resonates with the author. Smarsh believes a steep price has been paid for the lack of mobility she and other women of her class have endured.

Some argue that Smarsh’s book should be considered among a growing body of work addressing America’s postindustrial decline, for example, Matthew Desmond’s Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City and Amy Goldstein’s Janesville: An American City. By contrast, Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance framed more of the author’s accomplishments than his socioeconomic class.

But then, Smarsh’s main point, which she fully realizes in Heartland, might be missed. Class discrimination has existed throughout American history. Isenberg anchors the same opinion in White Trash, which documents that the working poor were, in fact, imported here as a labor resource and as consumers for the landed classes.

Smarsh gives the people she describes and the challenges they face the dignity of being witnessed by one of their own. “You can go a very long time in the country without being seen,” she writes of her grandmother who did not update her wardrobe for decades since she was miles from the nearest town, believing no one would notice or care anyway.

Smarsh did. I doubt you’ll regret the opportunity to notice and care, too.

Scribner, Simon and Schuster
 $26.00 Hardback  | Buy Now

For Single Mothers Working as Train Conductors by Laura Esther Wolfson

In her debut memoir, For Single Mothers Working as Train Conductors, Laura Esther Wolfson, an American essayist and Russian translator for the PEN World Voices Festival, has written a complex book about three interacting subjects: her Jewish heritage, marriage to a Russian man, and her difficulties as a translator of Russian literature. In a series of loosely connected essays, Wolfson tells of how she fell in love with the Russian language, but, despite translating the National Jewish Book Award-winning Stalin’s Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, her expertise with the language, ironically, meant she lost out on the nuances of Russian culture.

The main focus of Wolfson’s personal struggle lies with her inability to bridge her secular Jewish upbringing with traditional Jewish religious practices. In the essay, “The Bagels in the Snowflake,” Wolfson recounts how her parents did not celebrate Christmas, an indication and an embarrassment to the kids that they were Jewish, though they tried to hide it from everyone. Still, they bought yellow bread from the Snowflake Bakery, which sat at the heart of their Jewish neighborhood in Syracuse, New York.

Three generations before her, Wolfson’s great-grandparents fled to America, and like many Jews, left their old world and practices behind. As a child, her grandfather went against the grain, and decided to attend synagogue on Yom Kippur, but fainted from hunger and never went again. In being left out of holidays, shabbats, and trips to the synagogue, Wolfson and her siblings found it confusing to understand their Jewish identity; feeling their parents were a fraud, they grew to correlate more serious cultural and spiritual practices with a Jewish authenticity.

Even after her mother assures her that they’re Jewish, Wolfson examines how growing up without larger signifiers shaped her cultural expression. In the beautiful essay, “Haunting Synagogues,” Wolfson writes about living next to a synagogue after she got married to her first husband, Aleksandr, feeling insecure and slightly ashamed when passing by the more devout who are kibitzing before the service. This feeling of inadequacy partly keeps her from trying to engage her spirituality more.

Despite my sense that there was some action I ought to take, something that, owing to the circumstances of my birth, it behooved me to know and to do, during the fourteen months we lived next to that building, I never once went inside and never once exchanged a word with any of the people there.

Wolfson’s secular childhood means she lacks knowledge of ceremonial practices, reading scripture, and the religion’s gender roles. Wolfson writes about an evening near the end of her marriage to Aleksandr where, avoiding home and her insurmountable unhappiness, she attends a New Age Jewish meeting held in the basement of a Presbyterian church. While the group, P’nai (Path of Light), is inviting and supportive, Wolfson is anxious about basic practice: “No one seemed to see me, and I hoped that I was indeed invisible. What page were they on? I could not tell. I could not ask. I may even have been holding the prayer book upside down.” After twenty minutes, Wolfson feels too out of place and, during a lively moment in the service, sneaks out.

While she does eventually read Jewish texts and join a synagogue after her first divorce, regular worship fails to interest her. She notes, “I’ve murmured the Amidah and been among the last to sit down. I’ve recited the Sh’ma and listened as others say Kaddish. I’ve nailed mezuzahs to door frames and lit Friday night candles.” After a while, she decides that it’s not worth being a member: “The synagogue habit never truly took hold.” She has arrived too late.

Coming to things late seems to be at the heart of Wolfson’s struggle. In college, she is a late arrival with studying Russian language and literature; in Russia, her outsiderness, an American who has observed Russia through the academic and artistic lens of textbooks, novels, and reference materials, causes her problems, especially once she marries.

In the first chapter, which shares the book’s title, Wolfson writes about going to the country of Georgia as young woman and meeting her future mother-in-law, Nadezhda. While becoming smitten with Nadezhda’s son, Aleksandr (Wolfson’s first husband), and getting acquainted with the rest of the family, we listen in on conversations between Wolfson and her future sister-in-law, Julia, which illuminate the difference between Wolfson’s cultural knowledge gap as an American and the plight of women in post-Cold War Russia. In one scene, Julia sees Wolfson packing to return to America, notices her diaphragm, and asks if it’s possible for her to leave it behind. Wolfson is taken aback by the request, explaining that it might not fit. Julia counters that birth control is hard to come by in Russia; she desperately wants to avoid future pregnancies and abortions. Wolfson agrees to leave it, along with spermicide, but later notes:

Julia never had another child. Perhaps she actually used the diaphragm, and perhaps it actually worked. On the other hand, she could have had a dozen abortions, and I would never have known. (Nadezhda’s best friend, a schoolteacher like her, married to a man who didn’t like condoms—isn’t that redundant?—had had thirty. That was enough unborn children, she noted sadly, to fill every seat in her classroom).

While lacking contraception is a major problem in Russia, the bigger issue seems to be how Russian family dynamics are structured—fathers are largely absent, mothers nurse their babies, and grandmothers rear the children. To wit, Julia’s largest gripe is that Nadezhda insists on taking care of her child all day; the grandmother is so nurturing and maternal that Julia gives up caretaking the child after she’s done breastfeeding.

Not understanding that this is ingrained in Russian culture, Wolfson tells Aleksandr that they will raise their own child, once they are ready. Though he doesn’t respond to her declaration, the affable, emotionally open version of Aleksandr about whom Wolfson initially swoons, grows distant after they marry and move to America when Wolfson is twenty-four. He all but shuts down when Wolfson begins pushing the question of having a baby after six years as husband and wife.

After making up excuses and brushing it off for years, it becomes clear that Aleksandr doesn’t want to have a child he’d have to have a hand in raising. He says the baby would need twenty-four-hour daycare whose Russian expression Wolfson learns is slang for “raised by family elders.” Ultimately, Wolfson’s belief that her love for Aleksandr and interest in Russian language and history would overcome their different views on parenting dissolves. The result is divorce.

Wolfson chalks up the split to cultural differences. But she grudgingly recognizes how invaluable Aleksandr has been to her mastery of Russian colloquialisms: He taught her how to say everything from “curtain rod” to “fishing pole,” terms that can’t be easily gleaned from text books. She marries a second man, Tristan, who is pursuing a doctoral degree and who hopes she’s built for love and companionship. After they marry and he reacts angrily one day to his wife’s decision to end their union—hurling wine glasses and kitchen appliances at the wall and terrifying her enough to call the police—she can draw only one conclusion: In order to learn about herself she had to get married and divorced to a Russian.

And so: I think that it’s hard to say, thus far, which has given me a greater sense of well-being, divorce or marriage, for that depends on what I thirst for at any given time. But since divorce obviously cannot exist independent of marriage, and marriage is so often followed, early or late, by divorce, it can be difficult to know where precisely these feelings are coming from. This alone makes me think it’s time to hop off the treadmill for good. But I’ve been married, then single, then married again, and now single, again, enough times to understand that I have nothing against marriage. It’s husbands I find problematic.

Here and throughout, Wolfson is unsparing when it comes to her own inability to connect more deeply with the nuances of life. Whether it’s as a wife, translator, or American Jew, she becomes clear-eyed as to her sense of self—how she negotiates the disappointment and hurt she feels when losing a partner, how she fails to engage her latent Jewish faith simply because she isn’t equipped to fully decipher its practices.

Wolfson’s work as a translator is also filtered through a conflict similar to marriage and divorce. With translation, she must balance the authenticity of a book’s native voice and the nuances of another language. Despite her experience as a translator for Russian authors at the PEN World Voices festival, Wolfson finds herself struggling with her limitations as a nonnative speaker after a man named Arkady, the author of The Book of Disaster, asks if she would translate his work and help him sell it before his death. The book, which is about a Yiddish poet, Kazimeras and his life during and after the German occupation of Russia, was written after Arkady spent months interviewing Kazimeras about his life. Wolfson recognizes that the work would have cultural value for her:

Absorption in the work would provide respite from the thorny question of what it means to be a Jew who is not at home with rituals and prayers, allowing me to concentrate on the recent, profane history of the Jews that is documented, rather than the ancient, sacred history that is a matter of faith.

Despite this, she hesitates. The book has two first-person narrators, and Wolfson has a hard time grasping which of them is speaking in certain parts. She could work around certain issues, but the book’s oddities cause her doubt. “I could simply hew closely to the original,” she writes, “and leave the reader to guess as well. But would that be right? And how would I reproduce subtle differences in the way the two men spoke when I wasn’t sure that I was always alert to those differences?”

Ultimately, Wolfson must decide whether to opt out of the translation. Just as her shame over her secular approach to Judaism made her question her identity, she tries to garner interest in the book, a compellingly told story. It’s worth noting that Wolfson avoids sparing herself when she discusses her missteps, raising questions about her ability to do her job as an American and a translator. There is much blame to go around, and she partakes in helping spread it. This is one of the memoir’s more remarkable aspects.

A decade after passing on translating the work of the Belarusian Svetlana Alexievich, a writer who conducted interviews with survivors of World War II, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and Chernobyl, Wolfson watches Alexievich’s acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature on YouTube, commenting that her passing afforded her time for other projects, “This does little to assuage my regrets.” While her regrets remain, the way Wolfson renders these moments—her nuanced concern for Jewish identity, Russian culture, and Russian literature—awakens her to the value of being an outsider, despite the heartache that has come with it.

University of Iowa Press
 $19.95 Paperback | Buy Now

Mass: A Sniper, A Father, and a Priest by Jo Scott-Coe

A dialogue review by Renée E. D’Aoust and Thomas Larson

Note: D’Aoust and Larson reflect on the structure, style, and meaning of Scott-Coe’s research-based prose meditation on the mass murderer Charles Whitman. The ex-Marine sniper killed his mother and wife as well as more than a dozen people from the University of Texas Tower in Austin on August 1, 1966. But there’s a companion story—that of an alcoholic Catholic priest whose friendship with the killer (he married Whitman and his wife) is also core to the tale. The priesthood creates a secretive brotherhood that hides male violence, especially against women, from public scrutiny, while it sanctions the same in the patriarchy.

TL: First, I’d like to orient our readers with a little bit about Scott-Coe. She is the author of Teacher at Point Blank and the essay “Listening to Kathy,” has taught at Riverside Community College for many years, and advises the literary annual, Muse. I have much to say about Mass, which is provocative and challenging because of its unusual style and its inescapable implications about the Catholic church whose all-male hierarchy continues to hide deviant laity and sexual crimes within its ranks.

Mass is divided into three parts: the short first part is a general outline of the dutiful yet recondite life of Father Leduc, a sort of everyman priest; the short third part follows Whitman, an altar boy and lifelong friend of Leduc’s, through the terror of his childhood and adolescence with a violently abusive father. The long middle section is a gripping research narrative in which Scott-Coe traces what she can of Father Leduc whose penchant for drink and carousing has been protected by Church confidentiality. The result is Scott-Coe is even more intrigued by this “problem priest.” Throughout, she wonders what the relationship between Leduc and Whitman is and how it amounts to a condoning of male violence.

I was struck that while Scott-Coe could have foregrounded Whitman’s crime (though she does cover it), she chose to counter the typical true-crime metanarrative of rising action, conflict, and climax—and, instead, study the priest’s anonymity and shadowy influence on Whitman. I saw it as Scott-Coe’s way of posing troubling questions about how male-group alcoholism, male complicity in violence, military organizations, as well as abuse in religious and family contexts remain unexamined and ignored by the Church.

What thoughts do you have about the structural argument of the book?

RD: I immediately understood the trinity represented in the organization of Mass, but it took me longer to understand that secrets are also brought out of the shadows through the book’s structure. Perhaps that is why I found part one creepy, part two fascinating, and part three disturbing. Scott-Coe resists linearity and easy resolution; instead, we have a three-part spiral where the sections overlap and haunt us.

I love that you point out how Scott-Coe’s centers “the priest’s anonymity and shadowy influence on Whitman.” She reaches deeply into what is hidden in the Church, arguing in part that the shadows the priest carries affect the health of the parishioners. The priest is both the individual and the organization. (In her previous book Teacher at Point Blank, which I highly recommend, Scott-Coe also explores how secrets lead to violence. It, too, has a nuanced narrative structure.)

Is there a manner in which the three-part structure enacts ritual, and in doing so, helps us think about how ritual relates to mass shootings? How the USA enacts mass shootings has become ritualistic, and the lyrical writing serves as a foil to that violence. There is thoughtful, insightful analysis, and the writing itself is very beautiful. It’s also fascinating that generic terms in part one and part three, for example, “the priest,” “the man,” “the father,” and “the boy,” provide narrative distance. Here’s an example from part one: “The trauma of the priest, unlike the trauma of the man who committed the crimes and the trauma of those who suffered them, was never quite clear, and its consequences did not become visible until afterwards.” Here’s an example from part three:

The bodies of the boy’s mother and his wife were not discovered until after the shooting stopped. Across the country, eleven hundred miles away, the father holed up in his house with the two other sons, and with a priest from the parish where his wife had been faithful until she moved away.

Do you think this atmospheric lyricism and narrative distance help soften a reader’s possible resistance to a difficult subject?

TL: Perhaps those things do soften resistance and make what is inherently distasteful less squeamish. More, I think, that Scott-Coe is creating a book out of an unknown—that is, Leduc’s buried or barely recorded life in the church. I know from my own work that when I don’t have enough material about a subject, I use or interrogate my perspective (voice, style, improvisation) as an added means to create interest.

I love the idea that using those generic terms—the man, the priest, the father, the boy, etc.—indict card-carrying members of the church, the military, the patriarchal family. We are meant to see these people in her book as individuals and representations (much as the media reduces everyone to a type). More insidious, we are meant to only partially notice the invisible guy wires of complicity staking these groups to the same tree. It’s quite a sleight-of-prose.

And, of course, ensnared are “the women.” Leduc marries Charles Whitman and Kathy in a “hasty wedding . . . a foreboding of the horrible ending. Kathy had been treated as a sacramental solution for deep-seated trouble she neither could have anticipated nor ‘cured.’” This is especially creepy, that the priest (Whitman was his altar boy) joins the violent Whitman clan to a non-Catholic bride who has no idea of their violence. There is an insistence throughout the book of dominance: this is how you’ll marry, this is what you’ll know, these are the institutions that will protect you and which will control you, especially your guilt and shame in the marriage, even unto your death.

Many people who know of the Austin shooting may not recall that the marksman Whitman killed both his wife and his mother before he ascended the Tower and began shooting people. Scott-Coe points out the unthinkably obvious: that Whitman killed them to spare their suffering—his wife from his brutality and his mother from her husband’s brutality (both women were beaten). The author writes that Whitman “ordained himself high priest over life and death itself.”

And isn’t that the Church’s ploy: To ordain or appoint itself the arbiter of how personal suffering, even at the hands of the church itself, will be handled, which includes trapping it in the confessional or ignoring it outright. I’m thinking of this as the priest abuse horror rears its head again in America and travels up the chain of command from the bishops and cardinals to the Pope. This book shows us just how nefarious and underground the connection is—requiring exposure and justice.

RD: I want to return to the idea you explore about “an insistence throughout the book of dominance” and of how the hidden details of Leduc’s life, his service to the Catholic Church and in turn his relationship with Whitman, seems to shield archival materials about Leduc from access. Leduc and Whitman, as you suggest, control others, and their control wipes out the story of trauma. I mean, more clearly, that when Scott-Coe begins her research, she has to dig deeply, which is part of any research process. But even more unsettling, the priest seems unknowable, even as his connections to Whitman are knowable. It’s also completely believable that Leduc’s record of faith may be obscured, or veiled, by a Church that has hardly been transparent about its failures.

By the time Scott-Coe begins the book project, with all the research it requires, Whitman’s gunshots have all but obliterated the connection between the altar boy and the priest, making birdshot of a linear narrative. She writes:

From a storytelling point of view, the disproportion was striking: other people emphasized Leduc as a crucial figure in Whitman’s life; Leduc himself references names (and approximate ages) of Whitman’s brothers and also identifies friends as well as two other priests (now deceased) connected to Whitman, suggesting more knowledge and contact than the average busy clergyman. The FBI expended resources and time to locate Leduc—in Alaska—and interview him.

This is all information about the priest. What was the dominance—or power imbalance—between Leduc, the priest, and Whitman, his former altar boy? Importantly, Scott-Coe notes, “in the materials written in Whitman’s own hand, the priest seems barely visible.” Who was a friend to whom, and why do I find this note so chilling? It is because of the danger I read in both priest and shooter. Each man is a part of the shadows of the Catholic Church.

These shadows make me ache, which is an understatement. When the faithful have tried to investigate institutional secrets, and/or tried to report their trauma, we’ve seen the Catholic Church brush aside questions, complaints, and accusations. (As I write there are new sexual abuse cases being uncovered in the Netherlands and in Germany.) The official brush-off, but also the long history of cover-up, often causes the faithful to experience shame. A better demonstration is this example: during Scott-Coe’s research, there is a priest she tries to interview, who was a superior to Leduc, and the response comes laden with bland legalese. (She is trying to investigate “Leduc’s assignment record.”) Scott-Coe writes,

How is it that I was actually ashamed of asking? That seemed to be the key. I believe now that it wouldn’t have mattered what questions I asked, how I framed them, or in what order. Priests I interviewed had described their own depressing brush-offs in scenarios where they sought dialogue with superiors.

We’ve talked about the fascinating middle section of Mass; that section is, as you suggest earlier, a “gripping research narrative.” In large part, the willingness of Scott-Coe to share her emotional response during her research experiences layers the book with resonance and fills it with power.

TL: Indeed, the higher up the Church hierarchy we go, the more secrecy and denial there is. It is the same with the infallibility pyramid: the cardinals are almost entirely infallible while the Pope is wholly infallible. That’s why there’s only one at the top. Such is the patriarchal religions’ placing God and a savior as divinely unknowable, a great mystery no one can ever figure out. How exactly does anyone regard all this without cynicism or, at least, a critical eye?

Here’s another fascinating implication of Scott-Coe’s book. The idea has to do with Christians putting the crucifixion at the center of their religious identity, the God-ordained moral assertion that for human pain to be explained and assuaged and to demonstrate his “love,” God sent his son to earth so that we would sacrifice him and use his death as penance for our sins. Justifying this narrative has been called “sacred murder,” the sacralizing of violence or, in Scott-Coe’s phrase, “making violence holy.” One consequence of sacred murder is to make Christianity into a death cult, one that places an image of torture at the center of its worship ritual. Thus, for artists to depict Christ’s suffering in its monumental gruesomeness remains an endless pageant of the religion’s representation (see Mel Gibson’s movie, The Passion of the Christ).

This idea has been appropriated in the way we regard mass killings: children are sacrificial victims of school shootings just as Austin residents were sacrificial victims of Whitman’s bullets in 1966—in part because Americans’ “gun rights” are guaranteed sacred by the Constitution. In a sick way, shooting victims are sacrificial because this template is at the heart of enacting the Christian religion. The truly innocent, Christ included, must die. Whitman desired to spare random, innocent people from the violence of the likes of him, Charles Whitman. And, get this: He, too, is a victim of violence, in his case the Church’s, the military’s, and his father’s.

As we’ve said, the other sacrificial victims are women, Whitman’s mother and wife, whom he killed and who needed to be killed first—crucified—to make his further violence holy, not that much different than a Muslim terrorist who suicides and kills the innocent as a means to martyrdom. Murder is bad enough without making it sacred.

I see no other way to read the big meaning of Scott-Coe’s book than as a morality tale about Catholic/Christian institutional violence, which is replicated by male brotherhoods throughout American society. I realize the hugeness of this claim; it may sound as if I’m indicting all Christians and all gun-owning Americans. But I think individual faith and individual actions are not at issue. What is at issue is the horrific consequences of not exposing the obvious links between Christianity, nationalism, and violence.

Your thoughts.

RD: I think what you write is profound—and accurate. I don’t read that you are indicting, as you write, “all Christians and all gun-owning Americans,” and I agree, as you also write, that “individual faith and individual actions are not at issue.” To clarify, though, while individual faith is not at issue, the individual act of killing is at issue. I agree that these mass shootings reenact ritual torture and a broader culture of violence. The issue, too, is that our denial is such that we refuse to expose obvious links; I think this is now breaking down. People need to read books like Mass to see these deep connections. Those links are so embedded in our culture that we look away; however, we are also conditioned to think of this level of violence as normal. Now the aftermath is ritualized, too.

Last year I was in a grocery store in the U.S. in an open-carry state and a man seemed to be shadowing me. It turned out he, a white guy, was waiting for his wife, but he had a handgun on his belt and wore a Confederate flag on his blue-jean jacket and dark shaded glasses. I couldn’t see his eyes, but I could see his handgun. I left my basket of groceries in an aisle and left the store.

How do we unpack denial? Denial is a key part of the North American insistence on positivity and a perverse insistence on my individual right as greater than the public right to safety. There has been so much pain, and the domestic terrorism is so clear, that I think we are now unpacking it. It is time for the legislators to catch up.

As we finish this conversation, I want to list recent mass shootings from October 27 to November 7, 2018: the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh with eleven people killed and seven injured; two African-Americans shot in a hate crime in a Kentucky Kroger by a man who tried to enter an African-American church first; two dead and five injured at a Tallahassee, Florida yoga studio; and the mass shooting at bar in Thousand Oaks, California (12 killed, including one young man who had survived the Las Vegas mass shooting in 2017, plus 10-12 injured). In 2018 so far, according to the Gun Violence Archive, there have been 12,618 deaths from gun violence in the U.S.A.

Part of our reason to have this conversation about Jo Scott-Coe’s Mass, in addition to discussing an incredible book, is to build conversations around these issues, to figure out how to talk about horrific acts.

Pelekinesis Press
 $22.95 Paperback | Buy Now!

Wisconsin Death Trip by Michael Lesy

Neglected Nonfiction Classics

At first glance, the photographic record of Black River Falls, Wisconsin, shows an average town for the time, from 1890 to 1910. The wallpaper was patterned, the furniture solid. Some citizens were old, others young, some were black, others Native American, most were white. The living sang, farmed, posed in their best clothing, played with their children, went on errands. The dead looked out from open coffins in parlors.

These are some of the images that author and historian Michael Lesy saw when in the late 1960s he explored a collection of nineteenth-century photographs by Charles Van Schaick. Van Schaick, like most commercial photographers of the day, captured quotidian and celebratory moments of people, in his studio, on the streets, and in homes. He also produced memorial photography—images of loved ones bedecked in their coffins—the final memento of a child, a mother, a husband, gone to their reward.

For what became his Ph.D. dissertation, Lesy curated less than two hundred images, which contain “sufficient information” about the era, from a collection of nearly thirty thousand photos. He originally intended to make a movie, a project that proved too costly. Instead, Lesy punctuated selected images with unrelated text from several contemporaneous years, published in the local Badger State Banner newspaper. In doing so, he created a remarkable book where text and image collide.

In the forty-five years since its publication, Wisconsin Death Trip has become a cult favorite, an example of hybrid nonfiction narrative about more than an era and its people in Black River Falls. Lesy created a story of the seen and unseen, the spoken and the silent in small-town America at the end of the nineteenth century. Still writing, Lesy is a professor of literary journalism at Hampshire College and the author of thirteen books, many based on historical and archival images.

“The pictures you’re about to see,” Lesy writes in his introduction, “are of people who were once actually alive. The excerpts you’re about to read recount events these people, or people like them, once experienced. None of the accounts are fictitious.”

What we see of these strangers’ stories, he contends, reflects our own. His arrangement of text and image reveals, in his words, “a flexible mirror,” probing who we were and what we thought might lie around life’s next corner. That “mirror,” he writes, “if turned one way can reflect the odor of the air that surrounded me as I wrote this; if turned another, can project your anticipations of next Monday; if turned again, can transmit the sound of breathing in the deep winter air of a room of eighty years ago, and if turned once again . . . can fuse all three images.” Wisconsin Death Trip, Lesy continues, is “as much an exercise of history as it is an experiment of alchemy.”

Of course, we understand when viewing images made in the time before today’s photo-editing software that what we’re seeing is true, at least, factually. (A discussion of the so-called spirit photography of William Mumler, William Hope, and others, roughly contemporary to these images, is another topic altogether.) But by putting forward the seemingly self-evident claim that the photos are true, Lesy invites us to question what we think we know about what we’re seeing.

Wisconsin Death Trip is not abrupt or uncomfortable, at least in its construction. There’s a rhythm to the organization of photographs and text. The narrative recalls a musical composition, Lesy explains, “obey[ing] its own laws of tone, pitch, rhythm, and repetition.” Much like good music, Wisconsin Death Trip does not leave your memory easily. In a 2003 interview with the digital magazine Identity Theory, Lesy explained, “there are funereal images, but there are images of [a] stallion and the young man showing his muscles. Families and youth and marriage and happiness.” A harmony and a melody.

The book is also a choose-your-own-adventure story. Frozen, haunted—and haunting—quotidian moments in Black River Falls fill the pages, one photo to a page. None has a caption, an editorial choice that startles the reader and pushes us into a narrative freefall. Who is this dead baby? What about this well-dressed woman hurrying past the city library? I have nothing but what my expectations allow me to bring to the picture.

This one, for example. A woman of indeterminate age, outdoors, laughing. Her face is in shadow under a hat big as a bicycle wheel. She’s laughing, open-mouthed, absolutely delighted. The day appears hot. The grass looks blistered, the sun is bright. A wooden bench is upended behind her. Has she kicked it over? But I notice something disturbing after I’ve smiled back, intuitively, to her compelling grin. She’s holding three very big snakes. The first one is coiled around her neck, The snake dangles heavily to her waist. Her left hand hovers near another snake flexed at her breast. Her index finger is flexed above the snake, perhaps petting it. In her right hand, a third snake extends its neck across her chest, as if seeking a place to rest.

Why on earth was a woman in a field in Wisconsin gleefully holding three active snakes? I will never, ever, know. And there’s the reason I can’t look away. How and why are never answered. This is up to me to decipher.

Turning to a section of text offers no clarity. The sheriff’s house and jail at Medford were burned. The society people of Kenosha are worked up over the discovery that a person known as “Mrs. Howe” is not a woman but a man. These are two excerpts from the three pages that begin 1892, the year boxed in bold. What does the fire at the jail have to do with “Mrs. Howe”? We learn nothing more about this person, or the fire. Edited into fragments, the text is the equivalent of a snapshot.

As pages of written excepts from the newspaper accrue, they build not traditional narrative, but narrative tension and the thrill of narrative incompleteness. In that space between knowing and not knowing, Wisconsin Death Trip becomes mesmerizing. Tragedy is a cozy neighbor to a smiling woman bathing a plump infant. Something awful and unnamed lurks just outside the image of a marching band in full uniform and posed beneath a stand of pines. That’s my reading. You? Depends on your interpretation.

Wisconsin Death Trip is an exercise in divining a world from fragments of narrative. The photographs exist without captions, dates, or explanation beyond what might be represented in the photograph itself. As a result, Lesy’s meditative historicism invites us to examine not only the pages before us, but to look inside ourselves for the surprising relationships between our own stories and images of what we fear, what we miss, what we celebrate, what we long for.

The text selections themselves are dark, perhaps inadvertently funny, strange, and beautiful. For example, under the title box, 1894, we read, the trouble was that Tom was in love with one of the twins, but she wasn’t in love with him. State Chemist Daniels has furnished an analysis of Ashland’s drinking water and says that it is contaminated with sewage.

The lack of connection is the point. This disconnection demonstrates the imaginative and poetic opportunities in creative nonfiction. In an interview with the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, Lesy spoke about contextualizing the images of dead bodies and images of the living in his book. He said, “I wish to remind you that these images of death are within a flow of images with other meanings in addition to suffering and death.”

What of that horse, with the crimped mane reaching the ground like a bridal veil? And the group of white fellows in blackface, their gazes toward the ceiling, mouths open in what, harmony? Humiliation? An apology across the ages?

A rear view of a nude body builder, displaying his biceps, before he, what, dives into a pond? Goes for a run? Engages in an act of love? This leads into the section titled, 1898. Sudden baby death Sad insanity Smallpox scare Sets Fire to herself reads the text, and we are far from, and yet emotionally exactly next to, what may be on the mind of our unguarded body builder. Perhaps he read the Badger State Banner that very day, or, for good reason, feared smallpox. Perhaps there was an insane person in his life, or a fire. Perhaps not.

Wisconsin Death Trip remains in print, reissued in 2000 by the University of New Mexico Press. The book inspired a docudrama of the same name. Stewart O’Nan’s A Prayer for the Dying (1999), a novel of diphtheria, death, and post-Civil War trauma, was influenced by Lesy’s book, a debt O’Nan acknowledges on the first page.

My first exposure to Wisconsin Death Trip (one weird inheritance among many in my family) was a gift to my parents from an aunt both mordant and beloved, herself a curator of words and images. The book fascinated me then and haunts me still. Aunt Talie’s typewritten note to my mother remains tucked into the book’s last pages. “I won’t say ‘enjoy,’” she advised. “I don’t think that verb is applicable in the case of Wisconsin Death Trip. However.”

However. Every page is its own “however.” Here’s a series of images of mustachioed gentlemen, proudly posing with their prosthetic legs on, then off. Here’s a section of text headed, 1896. The hard times Sabotage—tramp—High school motto—Smiling youth.

However. Here’s to the good citizens of Black River Falls, once alive, none fictitious. They are our mirror.

Wisconsin Death Trip by Michael Lesy

University of New Mexico Press
 $34.95 Paperback | Buy Now!

I’m pretty sure that the day Thomas Larson asked me to write a review of creative nonfiction chapbooks was the same day I said to a room full of people at AWP, “I don’t know what a chapbook is.” The fact that I was on a panel about chapbooks (and am rumored to have published one) only underscores the truth that I am probably the wrong person for this job. Or, conversely, maybe exactly the right one.

If you Google “what is a chapbook?” you’ll learn that nobody else knows either—when it comes to creative nonfiction. You’ll learn that it’s small. It might be handmade. It might be thirty pages, possibly hand-stitched. It might be one folded sheet of paper. It’s almost certainly an art object with a short publishing run. It might be a brochure. It’s most definitely poetry.

My extensive field research at the 2018 AWP book fair brought credibility to the results of this (not remotely extensive) Google search. I’m certain I would have landed a major book deal for myself had I not been so busily consumed with finding every CNF chapbook in the room, which totaled exactly four. Publisher after publisher said, “Yes! We publish chapbooks!” Then, “Oh. Creative nonfiction chapbooks? Uh . . .” (Blank look. Scan of titles on table.) “Well, this one is poetry, but it’s got a narrative approach.”

No.

I came home with four titles, and they seem to represent a range from something like a prose version of the handmade items described on Google to something much shinier and more like a traditionally published book.

The books I came home with are: Devotional by Randon Billings Noble, Puzzle Pieces by Bernard Grant, Kindling by Lisa Laughlin, and In Defense of Monsters by B.J. Hollars. In this sample size of four, three have that handmade look and feel. They’re stitched or glued and the paper is toothy. One of them unfolds a little bit like an accordion. Another has a perfect circular cutout on the cover, and a translucent velum forest peeks out at us. The remaining one looks like a traditional book. It has a shiny cover and both blurbs on the back refer to it as a book. Thus, my research has to conclude that look and feel alone are not enough to define the form. (How do I know that last one is really a chapbook? I don’t. But its author tells me it is, and he would know.)

Devotional by Randon Billings Noble is a crafty little book, both in terms of how it’s physically constructed and its incisive writing. A collection of eight short shorts, the book is a tribute to the acts of longing and noticing. Noble writes of storm clouds and coffee cups, cattails and sleepless nights, loblolly pines and, yes, devotion. The first piece creates a space of longing, and the last one asks us to remain there, waiting to be relieved. The book opens in “the hour of the radiator’s hiss, the mouse in the wall” and tells us that “these are the hours when I reach for you, forgetting that you sleep now in another’s bed[,]” and we’re brought into the concreteness of that moment by the first-person, present tense constructions and the precision of the words. We exit the book with the author questioning, “How many hours I have spent waiting for you to appear. Have these hours added up to a day?” The pieces in between are tiny by any standards, just a sentence or two, each pinning down another exacting image, another moment of a moment. It’s a job, perhaps, that only a very short form can do so beautifully: to say more could diminish the impact, so why say more?

The book is physically constructed of bright-colored papers, adorned with a flowery print. It manifests a star fold, which means if you open it up all the way (so back cover and front cover meet), you’ll hold in your hand a twelve-point star with gorgeous words tucked inside. The object itself is artistry, and the words deliver as much beauty and insight as much longer volumes. As a bonus, it nicely matches all my pre-conceived ideas about what a chapbook is, right down to the name of the press: Redbird Chapbooks.

Chapbook? Definitely.

Kindling by Lisa Laughlin from Sweet Publications is made up of three short pieces that are less short than Devotional, but still very short: the book has only 23 pages. The small pieces tackle the big subjects (place, family, mortality) the medium subjects (agrarian lifestyles, flora, fauna) and the small subjects (wild fires, desert rain, barbed wire). Laughlin deftly wraps up notions of all things being temporary through the telling of a wildfire story that didn’t touch her personally, but it could have. Another fire might. She writes, “We didn’t lose our home or any members of our family. But I realized that night the loss was inevitable; if not that year, the next.”

In these pieces, which are highly personal and completely detached all at once, Laughlin collects bits of jasper in her pockets, watches speckled hawks spiraling above, and digs wild onions. Each sentence, each image brings the reader farther into the very specific part of earth known as Washington state; each is also loaded with the personal/universal meanings we expect from creative nonfiction. When she writes of a harvest, “We take what we can of the grain that we’ve planted, then move to the next field, and the next,” we know she’s talking about more than wheat farming. Again, like Devotional, Kindling’s literary strength is in its brevity. Why say more?

Physically, the book is also fancy and delicious, with a stitched binding, cover made from three layers of tactile-satisfying papers, and pages that are thick and feel like watercolor paper. Again, this delicious object wants us to run our fingers over it.

Chapbook? Definitely.

Puzzle Pieces by Bernard Grant is the least fancy of the four. Created by Paper Nautilus Press, the book is printed on normal, letter-sized paper, folded in half, and stitched down the fold. It doesn’t bother to be a tactile experience, which does nothing to detract from how compelling and deft the language is inside. Composed of seven sections, the book attacks questions of identity, race, family, mortality, violence, connection: all the big things in a small format. Grant’s work seems to press us forward from behind, urging us to consider whatever might be coming. He writes,

Morning. Early morning. So early you haven’t yet burned your hand on the stove or spilled hot tea on your sweater. . . . The flat tire light hasn’t blemished your dashboard on your way to work and you haven’t stepped in a puddle of piss headed inside. Not yet. You’re not at work which means you’re also not dressing and cleaning grown men who play with toys and piss themselves. Not yet.

It’s a clever way of delivering the bad news by wrapping it up in the good: it’s a great day until it inevitably isn’t great anymore. It’s fitting energy for the experience of Grant, a young black man trying to fit into a white subculture: disaster hasn’t come today, but it might. He recounts the familiar story of Eric Garner and writes, “He can’t breathe. He can’t breathe. He can’t breathe. He can’t breathe. He can’t— ”

So far, my research has made it easier for me to get my head around this question, “What is a chapbook?” It’s a book with a handmade feel and a small number of pages. The pieces inside are shorter-than-the-usual-essay, and they do not arrive carrying the luggage of research. They are personal. The language is lyrical. Right?

No.

Enter In Defense of Monsters: Essays by B.J. Hollars, and now I officially have no idea what we’re talking about anymore. This book has a glossy cover, a bar code, and blurbs on the back that call it a “book.” I had to contact the author for clarity, and it turns out there’s a story. (There’s always a story.) Hollars first published Monsters as a full-on chapbook with Origami Zoo Press in 2011, and Bull City Press re-published it in 2017.

In this tightly-written book, Hollars makes a smart, fun case for the existence of Bigfoot, Nessie, and a giant turtle named Oscar. Or, at least, he makes a case for being open to the possibility of a lot of things, including our urge to “give logic permission to supersede imagination,” which is more limiting than it is useful. He makes us want the doubters to be wrong, which they very well might be, given how little we know about the world. He does that thing that we expect from a certain flavor of CNF: he broadly assesses the human condition. (Spoiler: he finds it lacking in imagination, but rich with the capacity to needlessly divide and create dangerous hierarchies.)

Hollars extrapolates our tendency to focus on irrelevant differences between us against our likely refusal to accept the existence of things we can’t see. A 1934 resurgence of Nessie-related interest occurred alongside the rise of Hitler in Germany and a tripling of American lynchings. “Yet despite these backward steps,” writes Hollars, “Chicago’s 1933 World’s Fair championed the phrase ‘A Century of Progress,’ though their exhibits seemed to prove the contrary—a ‘Midget City,’ as well as various other racially offensive displays.” The point seems to be that humans are often (a) not as smart as we think we are and (b) unwilling to learn why.

But the existence of Monsters (the book, I mean, not whatever lives at the bottom of Loch Ness or in the hearts of humankind) challenges my preconceived notion of what a chapbook is, which again is maybe clearer if we can determine what it isn’t.

Some wide-ranging and possibly (ir)relevant questions to help (maybe) zero in on the answer:

Q: If a volume is first published as a collection of micro-essays, but then someone removes the page breaks and the individual titles and re-releases it as a memoir, is it still a collection of micro-essays?

A: No.

Q: If a script is first composed by the author writing it in the sand with a stick, and it’s later released as a feature-length film, is it still sand writing?

A: Ridiculous example, I know, but still, No.

Q: When I’m listening to an audiobook in my car, am I reading a book?

A: I think yes, but I got into an argument about this on Facebook once, so I’m going with a firm maybe.

Q: If the writing is good, does it matter what we call it?

A: (Say it with me, now.) No. No, it does not. (I’ll stand by that, even on Facebook.)

Hollars writes, “the unknown far outweighs the known.” As writers, we not only live in that unknown, we love it. What if there were no more questions or doubts? If all things were known/classified/categorized, what would we do with our time? What would we explore? And aren’t we always pushing against the unanswerables? Visual artists utilize negative space on the canvas or in the air: we work with information gaps that include, it seems, not knowing what we’re writing. And isn’t that one of the reasons to do it? To find out? Or am I rationalizing because opening doors is more satisfying than closing them?

Yes.

And so: I end this review exactly where I started it. I don’t really know what a creative nonfiction chapbook is. Maybe, like Bigfoot, its existence is elusive and most of the fun is in not knowing for sure. Maybe, like Nessie, we should accept that we might not not ever know, but we can be open to possibility. Maybe chapbooks are explorations of explorations and we’re still figuring it out. Maybe that means we get to make our own rules. Maybe half the fun is making this all up as we go along. And maybe that’s how—and why—we like it.

Regardless, these are gorgeous little books. Read them, and I promise it’s the gift of the words that will stay with you, not the wrapping.

Bull City Press
 $12.00 Chapbook | Buy Now!