New Stories from the Midwest 2012

The editors selected twenty stories from more than three hundred submitted by literary journals, magazines, and small presses and arranged them to make up New Stories from the Midwest 2012. Editors Jason Lee Brown and Shanie Latham explain that the goals of the series are to “celebrate an American region that is often ignored in discussions about distinctive regional literature and to demonstrate how the quality of fiction from and about the Midwest (Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, and Wisconsin) rivals that of any other region.” In the introduction, Guest Editor John McNally, born and raised in the Chicago suburb of Burbank, writes: “If all politics is local, as Tip O’Neill once famously declared, then so is all fiction. The best fiction, it seems to me, is always strongly rooted in place.” These stories are linked by place, specifically the Midwest, where fierce winds blow in off the plains, corn stalks tower in ubiquitous rolling fields, snow begins before Thanksgiving and lasts long into spring, and ice freezes summer lakes. While the landscape and weather provide the settings and common themes for these stories, their universal appeal lies in the characters whose lives inhabit them.

The editors selected twenty stories from more than three hundred submitted by literary journals, magazines, and small presses and arranged them to make up New Stories from the Midwest 2012. Editors Jason Lee Brown and Shanie Latham explain that the goals of the series are to “celebrate an American region that is often ignored in discussions about distinctive regional literature and to demonstrate how the quality of fiction from and about the Midwest (Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, and Wisconsin) rivals that of any other region.” In the introduction, Guest Editor John McNally, born and raised in the Chicago suburb of Burbank, writes: “If all politics is local, as Tip O’Neill once famously declared, then so is all fiction. The best fiction, it seems to me, is always strongly rooted in place.” These stories are linked by place, specifically the Midwest, where fierce winds blow in off the plains, corn stalks tower in ubiquitous rolling fields, snow begins before Thanksgiving and lasts long into spring, and ice freezes summer lakes. While the landscape and weather provide the settings and common themes for these stories, their universal appeal lies in the characters whose lives inhabit them.

Brutal winter weather provides the backdrop for scenes of violence in several of these stories. In Brenda K. Marshall’s story “In Which a Coffin Is a Bed But an Ox Is Not a Coffin,” the female protagonist and one of her husband’s farm helpers seek shelter from a blizzard in an old cabin, where they find the original owner’s coffin bed. The next morning, delirious from cold, she imagines a friend’s voice calling from inside a slain ox directing her safely home. In “The State Bird of Minnesota,” Charles McLeod tells the story of a man who for years lives alone in a remote cabin on a lake. McLeod uses the landscape and weather to describe the man’s desperate isolation, preparing the reader for the moment when he commits several nationally publicized acts of violence.

Violence is also at the center of “The Five Points of Performance” by Christopher Mohar, in which two childhood friends struggle to cope with the aftermath of war and the death of a mutual friend. When one accidentally kills a fawn, the other comforts him, “There was nothing you could do. . . . There was nothing any of us could do.”

In “Mr. Scary,” which he dedicates to writer Richard Bausch, Charles Baxter writes about a Minneapolis woman who worries about her grandson—overweight, sedentary, a friendless social misfit and victim of his classmates’ relentless bullying, abandoned by his wild, rebellious mother—for whom she wishes a normal life. In the final scene, both are playing in a softball game, the grandmother in the outfield, worrying about the boy’s imminent crushing collision with the first baseman, when the boy glides into a quiet instance of “normal” as his fly ball floats into his grandmother’s outstretched glove. The lonely, grieving young widower who is the protagonist in Dan Chaon’s “To Psychic Underworld:” longs for a return to normalcy after his wife’s accidental death and moves with his toddler daughter to live with his sister in Toledo, where he finds several mysterious handwritten messages. The final scene reveals the depths of his despair, “all the little messages that the world was bearing away.”

Hope is at the heart of Anthony Doerr’s “The Deep,” about a Detroit boy born with a genetic heart ailment in 1914. Having outlived his life expectancy, he reveals his outlook, “the world will never run out of life. And we’re all very lucky to be part of something like that.” One of the bleakest stories in the collection, Roxane Gay’s “Down to the Bone,” set in the stark far northeast corner of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, also ends with a note of hope. In the startling opening sentence, the protagonist declares, “WHEN I AM FIFTEEN, MY FATHER rapes my best friend Shelby.” The protagonist reveals that her widowed father routinely rapes her, as he previously did her older sister, who committed suicide. The sister shares a cryptic dark secret before her death, about which the protagonist has an epiphany at the end. Though it will haunt her for the rest of her life, this secret gives the protagonist a sense of love and hope, and it will linger with the reader as well.

In “Drunk Girl in Stilettos,” Lee Martin writes about a mother’s love and forgiveness. Several months after a notorious DUI arrest, the protagonist and his friend redeem their reputations in a funeral home in a heroic act that reconciles the dead man’s daughter with her mother, after which the narrator reflects: “I can only hope that they finally saw the good. I hope my own mama knows it too.” In Christine Sneed’s “Twelve + Twelve,” the protagonist is a 24-year-old nurse, whose lover, the father of a friend who recently died in a car accident, is twice her age. As snow and ice cling to the landscape, the woman and her lover cling to each other for comfort until the climactic moment when they interact with a young man who is convalescing from a car accident.

The writers collected here deftly employ their settings, using the Midwest’s flat landscapes and harsh weather as sharp edges against which to hone the basic truths of each of their diverse characters. In demonstration of McNally’s former editor’s theory that “all anthologies, regardless of the subject, were just an excuse to celebrate the short story,” this stellar collection succeeds in reaching beyond geographical boundaries to explore the depths of the human heart.