snurri | Just Don't Ask Me To Sing the Powdermilk Biscuits Song

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Just Don't Ask Me To Sing the Powdermilk Biscuits Song

Some of the things

mrissa said in her review of Superpowers (see previous post), and

barthanderson too, have started me thinking. It has become clear to me, to my slightly bewildered amusement, that to people who meet me at conventions and such that I am (or can be) a bit of a regional character. Which is to say, my accent (which I myself am rarely aware of) and, I assume, other personality quirks of mine are seen as particularly Midwestern or Minnesotan or both. Which, to be clear, I am entirely fine with, as to date this has not included assumptions that I:

1. know more cows than people;
2. am a casual bigot and/or cultural Stone Age-r of the sort which often represents Midwesterners in Hollywood (I am looking at you, Aaron Sorkin);
3. will never truly blossom unless I move to New York, L.A., etc.

In other words I'm fine with being a type, as long as it's not a stereotype. I can't deny that I am a Minnesotan and a Midwesterner, even if I'm not sure how that looks to other people. I'm proud of it, and sometimes a bit defensive. At times I am provincial about it, but this does not particularly worry me. (In my experience--to make a somewhat recursive statement--the most provincial people of all are from New York City.)

It's begun a bit of a re-identification, though, and that's interesting. (To me, at least.) I've always thought of myself, politics and patriotism aside, as a very American writer, and that's been a conscious thing. As a fantasist (fabulist? imaginist? wanker?) this can be tricky, because the genre is so very rooted in works from Europe and particularly the UK. Works that I love, but which it feels very strange to claim as my own and to build on, because I am not European (at least, not in the sense of being from Europe). There's a disconnect in writing about kings and queens and ancient ruins, because these are not part of my daily life or even my accessible history. Which is not to say that I haven't done it and won't keep on doing it, because at this point it's idiom, and it extends beyond place into folk and fairy tales, and it's something that's immediately understood by readers. But I feel the need to do it slant. To give you an idea of my zeal for this, at one point I made the decision to ban the spelling "grey" from my writing, because it was (from my perspective) reflexively used by so many American fantasy writers in an attempt to borrow gravitas from the British fantasists.

This is not meant to be a diatribe or a criticism of how or what anyone else chooses to write. I think "choice," though, is an important word in this context. For me, someone who spent his first eighteen years in essentially the same place, place is important. The exotic is important in my work, but it begins to lose that value unless I stay aware of where I'm from. I think this is a mistake that beginning writers make; they borrow someone else's context. Imitation is a legitimate way to learn, but if you are from Texas and you're borrowing Tolkien's worldview, or from St. Paul and borrowing Garcia Márquez's (ahem), you're only going to go as far as mimicry can take you. One of the dynamics of maturation, at least for me, has been reconciling myself to my past, which depending upon your viewpoint was stable or boring or safe or sheltered. (Not all of our autobiographies are dense with material.) It's in those early years that we learn how to look at the world. That is sometimes what we have to unlearn, in order to see clearly. It may not be a matter of standing still to look--some people spent their childhoods constantly on the move, and maybe that means a multiplicity of simultaneous perspectives. I can't say. But I think we have to choose to acknowledge the various lenses that we see through in order to account for our personal distortions.

What I'm seeing right now is that perhaps I am a Midwestern writer first, and an American writer second. This feels true because--for one thing--I know that I'm much more likely to get my back up when someone slams the Midwest than I am when someone slams the U.S. (Hell, I'm usually the one slamming the U.S.) But also because--and this is probably what I'd say if I sold a story to one of the Interfictions anthologies--there's one lesson that is brought home very clearly when you grow up in a place that other people refer to as flyover country. The lesson is that when things are happening in the world, almost without exception they are happening somewhere else. And while I'm guessing there are many places that feel like that, and most of us probably feel like that when we are starved for excitement, it's something that's built into the culture of the U.S. Television shows take place in L.A. or New York. Movies make fake snow out of potato flakes (I can always spot it--it's in how it reacts to being driven on) and pretend that Vancouver is Iowa or Detroit. Yes, there is Chicago, but Chicago is in some ways both the epicenter and glaring exception to the Midwest. We aren't the flyover states so much as we are the Between States. Which, now that I look at it, implies transformation, and mediation, and connection. Which is hopefully what all of this is about.

(Revisions, you ask? Why they're going so well that I took the afternoon to write this post instead of ~~wrestling~~ ~~struggling with~~ ~~weeping over~~ the next chapter that needs to be completely ~~fucking~~ rewritten.)

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I'll just pitch in and say "Yes." though in a slightly different way. I'm very much an American writer, which, as you say, is very difficult to do in the fantasy genre, even in the more modern post-tolkein meaning of that word. Let's be honest...at some level, every new weird cityscape interpolation is really just London or NY. NY or London.

I don't really self-identify as from the midwest yet, because I grew up in the south. But I don't really ID as a southerner either. I suppose I'm an american first. Mileage varies.

And yes, I'm also taking a break from revisions, but only because I have to go back to them after dinner and get two more chapters accomplished so I only have the slightly reasonable volume of five chapters to do tomorrow. I'm sure that'll work out.

Headache.

I do agree that your work--what I've read of it--is indeed very American; it has an industrious, boom-town sort of feel (or maybe boom post-crash, post-initial boom).

Revisions hurt.

I don't think it'll surprise you any that I, too, am more likely to get my back up if someone slams the Midwest than if someone slams the US. The thing is, I don't really understand, on an emotional level, how someone could be an American the way I'm a Minnesotan or an Upper Midwesterner. It's just too darn big. It is really, really not the same to be in Austin or Berkeley as it is to be in Madison. And I just don't know how people can make that kind of connection with the whole thing.

I hope it's also clear that when I say you're very Midwestern or Superpowers is very Midwestern, it's something I find charming. It's not that I like all Midwesterners, obviously, but it's part of who you are, and it's part of what that book is. And in both cases I like how it's a part, if that makes any sense. If I have managed to phrase that without sounding like I am a) five years old, b) hitting on you, or c) (for maximum social bonus points!) a five-year-old who is trying to hit on you.

I think people who like me either have to like or decide to live with the Midwesternness and the Minnesotaness. I don't think it's something anybody could look up in the middle of a friendship and say, "Wait, you're from where? I never knew." And I think you're like that, too.

I just don't know how people can make that kind of connection with the whole thing.

Word to that. But I know people who do.

And I absolutely took what you were saying as a positive. Almost to the point where I wonder if some of the less-than-glowing responses to it have not been as keyed in to that aspect of the book.

Oh, right, I'm not doubting that they do; I just can't make it go, in my own head. It's like people who have thirteen kids: when they say they love all their kids a lot, and love them all equally, I believe them. It's just that if I try to put myself in their position, I keep coming back to, Holy shit, thirteen kids? Thirteen? Kids? Really? Thirteen?

And I've run into an unfortunate number of people who think they are all-over Americans because they think that their region is what everything else is like. So I have to try not to assume that other people who self-identify primarily as American are being like that.

My understanding of how regional I am came when I realized that other regions do not routinely describe their (in-nation) immigrants as being "from away."

I do find it interesting that the phrase "flyover country" is a post-rust belt elocution. During the grand age of manufacturing, Detroit and Milwaukee and St. Louis all had such a different place in the meaningfulness of the American self-concept than they do now. As the rust belt has faded in the last 50 years, I think that the concept of where the flyover begins has inched eastward: Toledo, Columbus, Pittsburgh.

Really, I flew in to Madison last year vaguely convinced I would be landing in some windswept prairie wilderness. I'm about as provincial as you could expect, and I was pleasantly surprised that Wisconsin has trees and lakes.

"From away"; I have never heard that. But then I am guessing that you don't hear people say "Uff da" very often.

It's an odd phenomenon that the transition from railroads--and in some ways, the success of the railroads themselves--seems to have fragmented the country into regions rather than into points on a line. I've been reading a lot of local history recently, and when St. Paul was the terminus for the railroads it was a boomtown; when that went bust, it never really recovered its national cachet. Which is kind of adjacent to what you were saying, but I like to ramble.

You will be pleased to know that, north of Madison, there are even hills :-)

Mostly I just assume y'all don't like spicy food. You personally may like it fine, but it does seem to be the safest default assumption.

really, though, it's the safest assumption for pretty much all suburban/rural Anglo/white Americans. Not just Midwesterners.

Seriously, though, the thing that gets me about Anglo-American writing, and particularly about Anglo-American fantasy writing? Is the zeal with which we seem to thrust our European-derived mythologies (fairies, white stags, knights, Greek gods, Vikings, etc.) onto American landscapes, all the while ignoring that there were deep, already-existing mythologies already associated with those landscapes. It seems like a low-level-but-constant cultural rehashing of the imperialist conquest of the New World, and it increasingly makes me very uncomfortable.

I'm with you on that, although it's something of a double-edged sword; for many people it is decidedly Not OK, for instance, for an Anglo-American writer (to use your example) to "borrow" Native American figures and tropes for their fiction.

I think that the melding of different so-called Old World mythologies and legends can be interesting in an American context--American Gods if, say, American Gods had been good. But you've struck on the problem exactly, in that part of the problem of coming from such a young culture, or a young blend of older cultures, is that the sort of deep resonance you want for your mythic work is much harder to reach.

Marguerite did a good job with this in "Angels of a Desert Heaven," I think:

http://literary.erictmarin.com/archives/Issue%2024/angels.htm

I think the key to this is in exactly how you put it: "we seem to thrust our European-derived mythologies onto American landscapes..." Yup, that we do. I think you can see it two different ways, though. The way you've interpreted it (which I think is incredibly valid) and also in the way that it mirrors not just the imperialist conquest of the New World, but the immigrant experience as well, bringing their mythologies with them, rather than thrusting them onto the landscape. Usually it's the thrusting I see in fiction, though, not the "bringing over". I'm not as bothered by the "bringing over" type as I am by the "thrusting" sort that pretends these mythologies were always a part of this landscape and culture.

Yeah, I agree about the immigrant experience thing. And Dave's point, too, about how it's often seen as offensive to simply appropriate the Native/Amerind experience... I mean, it's impossible to escape the fact that Europe is the cultural tradition from which we hail--just as it is impossible to escape the fact this is the landscape in which we live.

I guess what I'd like to see is more white American writers who are aware of and willing to acknowledge that we are a nation full of recently displaced peoples, not all of whom have been happily living side-by-side. Because that's a much more complicated, potentially much more interesting story to tell. (As well as a truer one.)

Right; this is what I was going to say. The Irish brought the sídhe with them; this is not imperialist, this is just bringing your culture and beliefs along with your extra change of clothes. We changed them into twee dancing cartoons, us Americans, which is where I think the imperialism starts to raise its head.

Have you read Marguerite's "Angels of a Desert Heaven?"

http://literary.erictmarin.com/archives/Issue%2024/angels.htm

Yes I have! Hey, we've even talked about it, you & I... yes, she does a good job. "How to culturally appropriate appropriately."

What I'm complaining about is more, say, Gaiman's American Gods. Or Windling's The Wood Wife.

I thought we had.

Confession: I'm pimping her story in case someone else is reading the thread. Also I have a terrible memory and I wasn't sure.

On second thought, the Windling really isn't so bad--it's really one of those more complex cases, closer to what you'd want.

In which case, let me change the foci of my complaints to Gaiman's American Gods and Emma Bull's War for the Oaks.

Obviously I'm sensitive to this subject as well. I get really annoyed constantly seeing movies and books set in NYC or LA, with the occasional one set in SF, Chicago or...or...heck, it's been like two decades since we've seen something come out of Pittsburgh (Chabon). The opposite side of this are the Southern books, where we get the endless faxes of To Kill a Mockingbird. The Midwest has a rich literary history, but not a grand present day representation, from what I've come across. In fact, I'd say the idea of place in fiction has taken a backseat to plot and character, which is why we get a lot of stories that seem to take place in no place in particular. This is troubling to me because I think the plots of stories and the characters in stories are, to a great extent, determined by place.

With the railroads, you can blame air and automotive lobbyists--they killed the rails largely, to cut out competition and force the automobile per individual culture and created the flyover country that we live in now. And along with the political maneuverings over which kind of transportation would be given the most political sanctions, the unleashing of the corporate world to basically go to third world countries and abuse people who were used to an even worse life than the working classes of America who were getting uppity and demanding fair wages and work regulations and had begun to organize into powerful unions, you get the poverty-laden landscape of the Midwest today. I haven't laughed so bitterly as I have all this past year as I've met more and more people who seem to have heard about the decline of the Midwest for the first time in their life as it hit the media again during the democratic nomination period. Apparently, many people on the coasts seem to have thought that everyone was middle class and worked white collar jobs and had everything a person basically needs to do well and had all the same opportunities as anyone else in the country. I'm sure they've forgotten about it already again. Economic problems bore people who don't have them, usually.

In any case, I think it's interesting when people react to midwesternness in fiction--I came across that sometimes with my book when it came out too--and I think that the incomprehension of and almost exoticized response to that landscape and its people and their problems and habits and manners is indicative of a huge blind spot in the landscape of fiction as well.

What I dislike more than anything is when people think stories based in locales like Madison (or, in my case, a nameless small rural town on the outskirts of a dead steel town in Ohio that people largely forgot about even though the Boss tried to memorialize it) are quaint. Quaint is a typical response to the midwest. I think there are certainly aspects that are quaint, but there are other aspects of it as well.

In any case, it sucks when you see people talking badly about something you've spent a lot of time and energy in making, and made as best you could at the time. It feels like poison in the well when you come across stuff like that. Best to shrug it off and walk away, unless something they've said actually resonates. I find that it rarely does, though.

I'm almost at a point where I feel guilty for not writing more fiction explicitly set in the Midwest. And yet I want to be able to write about other countries, and space, and places that don't exist. I am, through my research, building up an idea about the history of St. Paul. I just can't write everything at once!

It's kind of strange to have grown up with the assumption, more or less, that where I live has always been Nowhere as far as anyone not living here is concerned; and yet what's being driven home to me by my research is that the opposite is true. The fact that cities exist at all means that, at some point, there were fortunes made there, and trade and industries booming. The small town my mom comes from in Northern Minnesota has less than 600 people living in it today, but back when the stage (and later the railroad) ran through there it had a brewery of its own and several hotels and mills. Almost all of that is gone now.

I have yet to be accused of being quaint, and I haven't had anyone react negatively to the specifically Midwestern aspects of the book. Unfavorable reviews are part of the game, I think, and for the most part they haven't bothered me. What I do find frustrating (but need to get over) is when it feels like the reviewer is making a lot of assumptions about my knowledge and intent based on nothing more than his or her dislike of the text. But, I am not going to be one of those people who argues with reviews. That way lies madness--and worse!--unproductive madness.

Totally not worth it to argue with reviews, except privately with friends, of course. haha. I hate the sort of reviews you describe as well. I also hate the reviews where someone "can't relate" or "identify with" or "like" a character. I just don't understand the point of reading about only characters you can relate to. I guess I'm more interested in ones that have different experiences than my own. Maybe that's not the dominant way people read, though, because you always hear people using this kind of language, so maybe a lot more people read to find themselves in the book rather than to find other sorts of people. For me, though, growing up, I found mostly characters who had lives very unlike my own (unless it was reading backwards in time, to like, agrarian and small town fiction, but then that didn't feel right either, because there was a lot of different stuff in those narratives because of historical changes in even agrarian, small town life). So maybe this is why I'm wired to read for the experience of others than to locate characters that are similar to me in some way.

We've been told we're from nowhere when it's not true. That's a very midwestern thing, I find. There were a lot of small towns like your mom's. Some people would argue that the changes that have occurred were inevitable, but I think they mainly changed to make a small group of people wealthier mostly, and not much care has been taken about preserving communities as they changed the rules of the game. Youngstown once had 180,000 people. It now has 85,000. I guess I'm not cool with the whole go where work is thing, either. It just feels wrong, despite it being the thing people have done throughout history when work migrates to other places. I'd rather go down with the ship and flip the world the finger than stay in it and play that sort of game. Unwise, but it's how I feel.

I know what you mean about wanting to write about other countries and space and places that don't exist, too, and wanting to write about the Midwest as well. I think you can do both. I'm trying to do that, too. Hopefully we've got a lot of years of ahead of us to do what we want! (Oh look, the optimist in me came out.) :)

I hear you -- I'm a midwesterner by transplant, but I've lived in Indiana since 1996 so I suppose I'm a Hoosier.

A couple of years back I had a fantasy story set in a rather generic fantasy-type locale, and it improved exponentially when it ended up set in the Indiana Territory in the early 1800s. That's when I realized that if I want to write about somewhere with which I'm familiar, though I grew up in North Carolina, I've lived away from there long enough that I'm more comfortable writing historical fantasy in my new home state.

But it still pisses me off when people talk about "the south" as if the people there are a bunch of ignorant, racist hicks, and assume if you come from there you should feel very lucky to be anywhere else.

So I suppose I'm bi-regional.

The south gets it a lot worse than the Midwest, generally. I feel like I ended up bitching more than I intended here :-) because in general it's easier being invisible than it is to have everyone and their brother default into a generic twang whenever they're pretending to be someone ignorant.

I know more cows than people, and nobody's ever told me they thought I was a Midwesterner.

Fair point, sir. In fact it points back to the way that people have tunnel vision about regions other than their own, because before I knew you I wasn't really aware that there were dairy farms in Caintuck.

Dude, milk ain't all that transportable. There are dairy farms in _all_ states. That's why dairy production numbers, with some exceptions, closely map to population numbers. California is the biggest dairy state by far, and New York's a big one, too. Wisconsin comes in between them at #2, and is something of an anomaly because of the cheese thing--a lot of their production doesn't go to potable milk. Of course, the fact that they've got Milwaukee and Chicago and even the Twin Cities as their big milk customers pumps that up, too. Minnesota is #6 and Kentucky is #24.

Well, sure, when you use "logic" and "reason" it all makes sense.

My maternal grandparents had a dairy farm; nowadays there are no cows, and the land is used to raise corn and soybeans. Except for the pasture, which has been divvied into lots for summer cabins.

One of my favorite bits of trivia stuck to the roof of my brain is that cattle outnumbered people in Wisconsin until 1977.

I continue to be bewildered by your refusal to accept Chicago as the Midwest.

Is this somehow related to your casual bigotry and intimate association with cows?

I suppose the distinction I would make is that while Chicagoans in general are certainly Midwesterners, the city itself is far more national and even international in character.

Ah! I never lived in the city itself.

Minneapolis is getting that way, I think, although East Coasters would laugh at me for saying so.

I think Minneapolis thinks it is that way. But then it was founded by fascist East-Coast old money, so that's probably always been the goal of the secret charter.

Can you get in touch with me? I need to talk to you.

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Just Don't Ask Me To Sing the Powdermilk Biscuits Song

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