Delights in 17 Hundreds by Kimberly Pollard, Mae Bennett, Christopher Schaberg, Charles Anicich, Alexandro Lopez, Benjamin Ebert, Halealuia Gugsa, Tyler Turner, Emily Livingston, Maya Krauss, Angelle Lemoine, Madeline Ditsious, Analene McCullough, LillieMarie Johnson, William Kitziger, Breanna Henry, & Olivia Delahoussaye

DELIGHTS IN 17 HUNDREDS

by Kimberly Pollard, Mae Bennett, Christopher Schaberg, Charles Anicich, Alexandro Lopez, Benjamin Ebert, Halealuia Gugsa, Tyler Turner, Emily Livingston, Maya Krauss, Angelle Lemoine, Madeline Ditsious, Analene McCullough, LillieMarie Johnson, William Kitziger, Breanna Henry, & Olivia Delahoussaye

*

Midway through the semester in our Contemporary Nonfiction class at Loyola University New Orleans, we read portions of Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights and Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart’s The Hundreds. Channeling these two quite different books, we wrote paragraphs of exactly 100 words, each on a specific “delight.” Not all of us felt at home with Gay’s experiment in delights; The Hundreds was plain dizzying. But we wrote with these two constraints as our guides, and we collect them here as flash essays that, together, reflect us. The results were exhilarating, and gelled in ways we never anticipated.

*

I leave cheap (but not cheap) kibble in a Tupperware next to my stairs; every morning the bowl is empty, clean, often dragged a yard away. I call one of the strays Miss Ma’am—she’s a dilute tabby with these wide-set, ochre eyes, and the left one’s been oozing clear. She sprawls in the garden’s dead leaves (the elephant ears that couldn’t abide the freeze), and nips at the green gloating weeds. She turns her white-tuft ears to every crunch, car horn, or crow; stops her rolling to investigate only for as long as she has to. I’m watching her eye. 

*

Simplicity is a delight of its own. The word itself is a delight. The word holds so much meaning in four concise syllables, perfectly summarizing its very definition. I went on a bike ride through the park today and was awestruck by the beauty of the simple pleasures surrounding me. The monotonous motion of pedaling the wheels was its own form of meditation. The crisp air circulating through the ancient New Orleans oaks refreshed the essence of my soul. The chatter of pedestrians created a perfect symphony harmonizing with the breeze. There is something rejuvenating about noticing the simple things. 

*

I’ve been delighting in the willow in our backyard. A few weeks ago the end of last year’s scraggly leaves finally dropped, resulting in a wispy skeleton. When it warmed up last week, I noticed hints of kelly green bursting from the brown bark. The baby leaves would grow a few millimeters daily, pushing out and curling up. The floral plumes even started to appear! Catkins, they’re called. During a remote learning ‘share time’ last week, my six-year-old daughter told her class (without any prompting from me, I swear) that she was happy because her willow was growing new leaves.   

*

Cooking is the easiest art to learn but the hardest to master, with the journey being full of delights. Every burned meal turns into a reminder to lower the flame, every heavy sauce a sucker punch to add less cream. But when that once-impossible recipe becomes basic you begin to venture out into deeper waters, tackling dishes that chefs in restaurants make every night. Soon you wish Gordon Ramsey would talk about how you inspire him. But after that wave washes over you and you become comfortable in the kitchen, you happily take the job of chef of the household.

*

Barbecue delights in its minutiae, the pathological attention to every detail and how it impacts the delicious flavors it produces. A delicate dance of smoke and heat, it takes a practiced and skilled hand to create the mouthwatering flavors that go into the perfect bite. A discipline that takes decades to master, I devote an entire afternoon. With every ounce of my modest barbecue knowledge and skill, I nonetheless delight in the process, reveling in the smoke and heat as I micromanage my pit, the sun hanging overhead like an expectant guest. A full stomach is my only tangible reward.

*

One more sip of my PBR and another turn of the page; Albert’s absurdly coercive claim: the innocence of murder in a blind, sweltering nonchalance. Beads of sweat dripping from my nose stain the word “liberty.” Am I alone? The grass is green, even in February. I hear a melancholy voice singing a somber song, and gaze at a seagull suspended listlessly in the air, un-flapping over the white shimmering flecks of a midsummer Mississippi. It’s warm today. The echo of techno under the hangerbase-like metal canopy reinforces my feeling of warmth, the rusted wharf now reappropriated by roller skaters. 

*

There’s nothing like a good clean. It is the renewal of what was once old, a rebirth, revival. Cleaning your house, not because someone asked you to, but by your own accord, is the most gratifying thing in the world. Set your playlist on shuffle and mindlessly sway your mop back and forth to the groove of the music, get reacquainted with songs you haven't heard in years. Open your window and allow the larks of sunshine and life into your space, suddenly the dust and plants will come alive. You’ll soon realize this is anything but a solo dance. 

*

Streaming services have allowed me to escape the nightmare reality I have been living in for the past year. Movies starring nostalgic characters from my youth, such as Sonic and Tom and Jerry, have replaced the thunderstorm of anxiety and depression in my head with childlike wonder. Seeing the creativity and detail in shows like WandaVision has motivated me to continue pushing through the trenches of Loyola in order to write something that could be as good as that. I have become grateful to my friends for letting me masquerade as them under their account. Freebies  are always a delight.

I park my car a few blocks away from work. The humid air in the spring smells happy. I put in my headphones and walk through the sunlit street to work. As I turn the corner I wave to the bodega worker across the street. These four minutes each morning set my mood for the day. I have to do this, but it is simply joyful. I get to see New Orleans as it is. People going to work, children walking to school. The simplicity of everyday life is more beautiful than the flashing lights and beads that we love. 

*

I went to the beach today. The beach brings me more peace than my mind ever could. I grew up on an island so going to the beach was threaded into my daily schedule. The beauty of nature always astounds me. Seeing the clear blue water as it comes up to the shore and feeling the ocean breeze makes me appreciate nature. There was a tsunami warning today yet, you wouldn’t have been able to tell because of how beautiful and calm it was. I walked along the shore feeling the sand melt underneath my feet, finding peace once more. 

*

I’ve realized that taking walks around my neighborhood is a delight of mine. Not by myself though, my mom and aunt have to be there too. They’re basically my therapists. The delightful part is that they just listen to me, no lecturing. They’re quiet, and then speak when the silence gets too loud. The best part is that I’m their therapist too. I find comfort in giving them advice from my point of view. I try to make them see the world through my eyes. I find delight in that too. Sometimes our relatives are the best therapists, I think. 

*

Visiting my mom’s house is a delight that does not come as often as it should. Our lives consume us and time escapes us, but in those rare moments where the hour-long drive is worth the trip, life seems so much easier. My mom, my brother, and I, watching movies and eating some sort of gluten-free dairy-free delicacy she’s prepared. Not a lot of words get exchanged between bites, it is simply a time of peace and joy. After my mom goes to sleep, usually too early, the nights always end with my brother playing video games and pure joy. 

*

One delight that I cannot help but write about is very ordinary: taking my dog for walks. Walking is one of his favorite activities, thus making it one of my favorites as well. He’s very strong and always pulls me along, searching for scents and new friends. Sometimes I wonder if he even remembers that I’m still behind him, getting dragged along as we make our way around the neighborhood. He never looks backwards, always forwards (unless I ask him to slow down, then I get the look). Then he spots another dog, and suddenly I am being dragged again. 

*

A simple delight that I have grown to love is tea, specifically sweet tea, but there isn’t too much to specify. Since I stopped drinking sodas in eighth grade, tea grew on me until it became a drink that I looked forward to on a daily basis. I find that I am at my happiest when I am able to have some water and tea within my day. Sweet tea is a reminder of family weekend dinners and late nights spent around the people you love. So I drink sweet tea and remember those nights with the ghosts of memories.

*

Nothing can beat the raw exhilaration of discovering that you have far much more free time than you once believed. You may find your mind locked in on a single task that fate seems to treat as an elevated experience. I may spend two or three hours behind a microphone, but father time will look down kindly upon my efforts and return to me a parcel of my youth. You may even feel his electric finger of restoration gliding down your vertebrae as your face shines radiantly at the lower than expected numbers displayed on the microwave oven’s eternity counter.  

*

I saw her as I was coming back from checking out camera equipment. Although my hands were full, I dug out my phone, zoomed in best I could with one hand, and snapped a shot before she saw me. In our Chi Alpha group chat, we’ve made a game: if we see one of us around campus, we have to sneakily take a picture of them and send it in the GroupMe for points. She won last semester, so I was determined to catch her off guard. Afterwards, I yelled out to her. “Hey Tomi!” She waved back. Got her. 

*

I’ve always thought that the color orange has always been too bright and a little too overbearing. Recently, I’ve semi-adopted an orange tabby cat, who I have named Bug. He is, like his color, too bright and sometimes overbearing. But he is a wonderful companion. He likes the quiet but is always willing to start a conversation; he’s a drop of honey in an unsweet world. He likes to bathe in the sun, his fur shifting and reflecting various shades of orange as he breathes in the warm air. I’ve come to know happiness in those varying shades of orange.

The #Midwessay: Rilla Askew, Belonging

Ancient mountains (now hills), ancient ocean beds (now plains and prairie), tornado alley, tablelands, highlands, cross timbers, caves, the Ozarks, cypress swamps and forest—we've got it all in Oklahoma, baby. This place favors writing about landscape—it's embedded in us in a way I suppose other writers feel. For me, why I write about Oklahoma, why I care about its history and future, the legacies it will and won't claim, has something to do with the sight of a flat blooming canola field straddling a wet red dirt road beneath striated grey and white clouds after a spring storm. And, that this place has been and is filled with a mix of people—displaced, wandering, outcasts who are still often overlooked. The late Barry Lopez (RIP; not an Oklahoman) wrote, "If we could speak more accurately, more evocatively, more familiarly, about the physical places we occupy, perhaps we could speak more penetratingly, more insightfully, more compassionately about the flaws in these various systems which, we regularly assert, we wish to address and make better." Each of the Oklahoma writers for this series speak to the physical place well, and each asks us to consider what that place (and its people) has to offer, or not. —Liz Blood, Oklahoma Coordinator

 

Belonging

Rilla Askew

*

     

You could shrink a map of the continental U.S., lop off the protruding tips of Maine, Florida, and Texas, superimpose that map on Oklahoma, and the regional identities would match up. In Oklahoma, Back East (Tulsa) meets the Deep South (Little Dixie) meets the American Southwest (Wichita Mountains) meets the mythic West (the Panhandle), meets the Midwest—or one version of the Midwest—in the tallgrass prairie region along our northern border with Kansas. That’s where I grew up, in a white-dominated midsized town, Bartlesville, where we rooted for the St. Louis Cardinals, listened to WLS Top 40 Radio out of Chicago, and on weekends, for entertainment, drove a twisty two-lane blacktop 25 miles north to Caney, Kansas, to barhop.  

     Some maps of the Midwest include Oklahoma. Most do not. But my piece is Midwestern, or the piece of my raising is. How do I know? My hometown was built up from a prairie outpost to a thriving company town by Midwesterners, particularly an Iowa barber whose last name graced a plethora of Phillips 66 service stations, downtown office buildings, and my daddy’s paycheck. The city’s most famous building, the Price Tower, was designed by the nation’s most famous architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, a Midwesterner who described his anomalous skyscraper as “the tree that escaped the crowded forest.” My daddy helped build that lonesome-tree skyscraper on the prairie. 

     In Oklahoma we claim several pieces of the Midwestern character. Friendliness, for sure. Oklahoma has it in spades—so much so, in fact, that we had “Drive Friendly’ enshrined on state highway signs.

     Anonymity? Check. Who outside the region can tell you where Iowa lies in relation to Indiana, or Ohio to Illinois, or Oklahoma to any of the above? 

     America’s Heartland? Check. To confirm this, just review news stories about the Oklahoma City Bombing. Count how many times the term “heartland” is used.

     Flyover state? Check.

     Self-identified decent, hardworking, neighborly people? Check. 

     Wishful white people who paper over the darker parts of their history? Oh, double, triple, quadruple check. Here I’m talking about our intentional suppression of the Tulsa Race Massacre, our sanitized reframing of the Trail of Tears, and other such collective forgetting.  

     But I realize I could be wrong. Maybe public amnesia about the dark past is not a classic Midwestern characteristic. Maybe Midwesterners in Minnesota actively recognize the mass hanging of 38 Dakota men at Mankato in 1862, and Indiana teaches its youth about the 1930 spectacle lynching at Marion, and Chicago deeply and truly owns the 1919 racist assaults that devastated the South Side. Maybe public reckoning with such dark histories has long been a part of Midwestern ethos. If so, then my home state is only now just beginning to belong to the true heart of the Midwest.

The #Midwessay: Mason Whitehorn Powell, Okie Midwest, the “Other Space”

Ancient mountains (now hills), ancient ocean beds (now plains and prairie), tornado alley, tablelands, highlands, cross timbers, caves, the Ozarks, cypress swamps and forest—we've got it all in Oklahoma, baby. This place favors writing about landscape—it's embedded in us in a way I suppose other writers feel. For me, why I write about Oklahoma, why I care about its history and future, the legacies it will and won't claim, has something to do with the sight of a flat blooming canola field straddling a wet red dirt road beneath striated grey and white clouds after a spring storm. And, that this place has been and is filled with a mix of people—displaced, wandering, outcasts who are still often overlooked. The late Barry Lopez (RIP; not an Oklahoman) wrote, "If we could speak more accurately, more evocatively, more familiarly, about the physical places we occupy, perhaps we could speak more penetratingly, more insightfully, more compassionately about the flaws in these various systems which, we regularly assert, we wish to address and make better." Each of the Oklahoma writers for this series speak to the physical place well, and each asks us to consider what that place (and its people) has to offer, or not. —Liz Blood, Oklahoma Coordinator 

Okie Midwest, the “Other Space”

Mason Whitehorn Powell

*

Deep into midwinter and the pandemic, I’m standing around a backyard fire with my wife and two childhood friends. It’s nighttime in Hominy, Oklahoma, and we’re doing what we’ve done much longer than the law has allowed us: drinking cheap beer.

     “Do you think this place is cursed?” I say.

     “Hell yeah,” one friend replies.

     When we gather, my wife, who’s from Italy, is subjected to stories of what we witnessed here. What people did to others, the things we’ve done, friends and family lost to this place, of some that lost their minds—to drugs, to ideologies, to life lacking definition. If there is a curse, it is that Oklahoma reveals the truth of America’s founding and troubled identity, yet rejects it and denies how we arrived here. At the end of the Trail of Tears is Indian Territory, at the end of Indian Territory is Oklahoma; and Oklahoma statehood robbed its Indigenous and Black diasporas of their agency and freedom.

     To truly see this place is to look through a glass, darkly. I’ve known this for a long time, that I grew up in territory that was hard to define except by its degeneration. It was my wife, an outsider, who caused me to question if this land might be cursed.

     In her first essay collection, Most American: Notes from a Wounded Place, Oklahoma writer Rilla Askew helps frame Oklahoma’s history and invokes our contradictions. “Oklahoma is a wounded place,” she writes. “The country as a whole is wounded, but my home state, birthed as it was in such profound hope and greed, violence and promise, is wounded in a particular way.”  

     Many writers in Oklahoma are moved by the tension of longing for definition and our inexplicability; cut off from a past our ancestors were forced to break from and facing the same indeterminate future. Askew’s essays remind us that Oklahoma represents what it really means to be American, with its legacy of violence, which other states have been quick to forget. America’s troubled past lingers in Oklahoma in tangible ways.

     She writes in “Most American”: “This state that had long been a cipher and a mystery, and, like an illegitimate child, was unclaimed by any region, is not the heartland: it is the viscera, the underbelly, the very gut of the nation. … Paradox and dichotomy dominate Oklahoma’s character, and this is part of what accounts for our mystery, for why we cannot be classified, categorized.”

     Rilla’s writing helps put Oklahoma’s past in perspective, but how does one accept their place among such unkind revelations? The closest I’ve come to answers for these questions, to understanding the space Oklahoma occupies in this nation, is in French philosopher Michel Foucault’s concept of the Heterotopia, or “other space.” (source)

     Heterotopias are physical spaces connected to but removed from society and culture. They are both real and mythic, because access to them goes against and inverts conventional systems and circumstances. As examples, Foucault mentions boarding schools, charnel houses and burial sites, ceremony, colonies and colonization. Oklahoma has been a prominent host to each of these. From pre-colonial earthen mound complexes by Mississippian culture such as Spiro, used for rituals and to inter the dead, to Indian Boarding Schools of the 19th and 20th centuries—the legacy of this place is composed of heterotopic spaces that we have yet to escape. Considering Indian Territory and contemporary issues concerning tribal sovereignty like the McGirt Supreme Court decision, or the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre in Greenwood, and a current reparations lawsuit against the City of Tulsa, Oklahoma still resists and contests the other while championing itself a mythical place of resilience. 

     This is a place of inequality, tribal sovereignty, and nostalgia. In Oklahoma, we are caught in a heterotopia that reveals our true nature, that the state occupies a space that splits past and present, lawlessness and justice. To paraphrase Foucault, he says Heterotopias are both isolated and penetrable, they are not “freely accessible like a public space,” but the barrier to entry is either compulsory or requires rites and purification. Oklahoma is the land of broken treaties, land runs, sundown towns, and overpopulated prisons—purification was once Native American dances, war paths, and rituals, now this land is molded by megachurches and socio-political ineptitude.

     The circumstances of Oklahoma can either be regarded as a curse, or a path towards empathy and understanding. As Oklahomans, our otherness is a balance between reality and myth, sin and forgiveness. Askew says, “those worst sins are balanced here by the better part of human nature—the best of what’s worst and best in us.”

     For me, with a case of beer, friends, and backroads, the imagination opens. 

The #Midwessay: Gordon Grice, Midwest Death Trips

Ancient mountains (now hills), ancient ocean beds (now plains and prairie), tornado alley, tablelands, highlands, cross timbers, caves, the Ozarks, cypress swamps and forest—we've got it all in Oklahoma, baby. This place favors writing about landscape—it's embedded in us in a way I suppose other writers feel. For me, why I write about Oklahoma, why I care about its history and future, the legacies it will and won't claim, has something to do with the sight of a flat blooming canola field straddling a wet red dirt road beneath striated grey and white clouds after a spring storm. And, that this place has been and is filled with a mix of people—displaced, wandering, outcasts who are still often overlooked. The late Barry Lopez (RIP; not an Oklahoman) wrote, "If we could speak more accurately, more evocatively, more familiarly, about the physical places we occupy, perhaps we could speak more penetratingly, more insightfully, more compassionately about the flaws in these various systems which, we regularly assert, we wish to address and make better." Each of the Oklahoma writers for this series speak to the physical place well, and each asks us to consider what that place (and its people) has to offer, or not. —Liz Blood, Oklahoma Coordinator

 

Midwest Death Trips

Gordon Grice

*

 

Can this really be the same notebook, here in my travel bag, that I took for the last family death? That was six years ago, but here are my journal entries, scribbled in hotel rooms. Writing goes slow in my ragged hand. 

     It was summer then. One entry tells of a thunderstorm. It came as if to verify my stories of Oklahoma, so my children would believe. They grew up near Minneapolis. The usual Oklahoma rain ripped through, tossed handfuls of lightning, then had somewhere else to be. From my hotel window I saw a child standing in it (not one of mine), just beyond the eaves, holding his hands out to grasp. 

     In the morning we found an elm tree had lost a branch thick as a thigh, its wood broken and blond.

*

“I never travel without my diary,” Oscar Wilde said. “One should always have something sensational to read in the train.”

     My old notebook is not sensational. Mostly it’s blank. Plenty of room for fugitive scribbles I’ll make on this trip. I don’t expect to get any “writing” done. But I know that, in the cannibal manner of my kind, I will eventually return to make something of these pages, or waste more paper trying.

     It’s winter now. The hawks start in Kansas, on an eternal stretch of Highway 54. On a post the first of them sits fluffed against the wind, chocolate spots on a white breast, decapitated—or so it seems, with its head tucked like a turtle’s. Five miles further on another glides over billows of winter grass, turns, stoops—but we’re beyond him, too fast to see what he’s about. The next I would have taken for a plastic bag tangled in last year’s weeds, except that we know their colors by now. We know he’ll step any moment into the air.

*

The night after he died I dreamt my father forded a snowy river, which was also the street we lived on when I was five. His white hair streamed behind him. On the far curb, he lay back exhausted. His feet dangled in the river. Or maybe he had no feet. In real life I had worried he’d lose them. They were always thick as snakebite and leaking plasma and he hated to take his diuretics. 

     “I worry about your heart,” I said to him in the dream. 

     “It only takes a heartbeat to turn things around,” he said. “Yesterday they thought I was finished.”

*

I live at the ends of a lightning bolt, north for everyday, south for death. It hurt my father when we left. Now he’s left. My move won’t hurt him anymore.

     I don’t know. Writing for me has something to do with where I came from. My wife said one time maybe all my writing troubles would disappear if we went home and stayed there. It’s a small town. It’s bleak. I was never happy there. 

     And yet. 

The #Midwessay: Kathryn Savage, Fly-Over

Ancient mountains (now hills), ancient ocean beds (now plains and prairie), tornado alley, tablelands, highlands, cross timbers, caves, the Ozarks, cypress swamps and forest—we've got it all in Oklahoma, baby. This place favors writing about landscape—it's embedded in us in a way I suppose other writers feel. For me, why I write about Oklahoma, why I care about its history and future, the legacies it will and won't claim, has something to do with the sight of a flat blooming canola field straddling a wet red dirt road beneath striated grey and white clouds after a spring storm. And, that this place has been and is filled with a mix of people—displaced, wandering, outcasts who are still often overlooked. The late Barry Lopez (RIP; not an Oklahoman) wrote, "If we could speak more accurately, more evocatively, more familiarly, about the physical places we occupy, perhaps we could speak more penetratingly, more insightfully, more compassionately about the flaws in these various systems which, we regularly assert, we wish to address and make better." Each of the Oklahoma writers for this series speak to the physical place well, and each asks us to consider what that place (and its people) has to offer, or not. —Liz Blood, Oklahoma Coordinator

Fly-Over

Kathryn Savage

*

 

Lights flank tarmac. Everywhere, staircases on wheels waiting to be rolled beside small planes, wet from rain. At the airport, at night, in the Midwest, a plane descends slowly and I watch a man in a reflective vest out on the ramp wave it down like he's nudging a shy animal from the sky.

     Boarding the plane, a man in first class, the aisle, brazenly watches softcore on his cellphone. Women’s bodies tangle the way new puppies do, all that flesh and sucking. I take my seat, watch the others who board see his screen and look down instinctively. This is a small plane. We are shoulder to shoulder, flying between small midwestern cities. 

     I remember this party in high school. Then I'm going into a bedroom with my friend R and this guy who wants to have sex with us together. There was a desktop computer in the corner of the bedroom, screensaver rotating through a pattern of abstract geometric shapes. The emanating light dull and soft as the belly of a flower. We took our clothes off, licked and felt. We were clownish, a performance. Hair all down my back, skin strangely lit. I wanted to be a performance, a painted on grin of a body.

     The plane lifts. All last year, I kept recording dad's dying body with my phone. His voice, his walking, his words, so I could play him back. Then I couldn't watch any of it. To see him performing his living was also to see him performing his dying. After the funeral, me and some cousins screamed along to the radio, speeding and drunk through night-shaded cornfields. It was a beautiful feeling—the cool wind and the cigarettes we smoked down one after another and our shared youth and blood coursing between us. 

     Eric Gamalinda: “Because memory moves in orbits of absence.” The women on the man's phone in first class were on their knees in a kind of worship. They performed presence and aliveness so well. I used to want to be a good performance too. Then I changed. The cars I've driven too fast in. The bad parties. People I've loved and fucked and hated here. My Midwest is so many small monuments. Memories that orbit, and depart, and resurface. Here’s a memory: When we lived in extended stay motels, me and dad, I remember watching Arachnophobia starring Jeff Daniels and John Goodman. It was the first film I watched entirely while jumping on the bed. 

The #Midwessay: Becky Carman, It's Not That, Either

Ancient mountains (now hills), ancient ocean beds (now plains and prairie), tornado alley, tablelands, highlands, cross timbers, caves, the Ozarks, cypress swamps and forest—we've got it all in Oklahoma, baby. This place favors writing about landscape—it's embedded in us in a way I suppose other writers feel. For me, why I write about Oklahoma, why I care about its history and future, the legacies it will and won't claim, has something to do with the sight of a flat blooming canola field straddling a wet red dirt road beneath striated grey and white clouds after a spring storm. And, that this place has been and is filled with a mix of people—displaced, wandering, outcasts who are still often overlooked. The late Barry Lopez (RIP; not an Oklahoman) wrote, "If we could speak more accurately, more evocatively, more familiarly, about the physical places we occupy, perhaps we could speak more penetratingly, more insightfully, more compassionately about the flaws in these various systems which, we regularly assert, we wish to address and make better." Each of the Oklahoma writers for this series speak to the physical place well, and each asks us to consider what that place (and its people) has to offer, or not. —Liz Blood, Oklahoma Coordinator

 

It’s Not That, Either

Becky Carman

*

The colloquial Midwest is a huge swath that none of us can accurately draw borders around, so forgive me, Chicagoans, for focusing on the prairie, where our whole thing is talking about leaving or not talking about staying. Re: us, everyone else’s thing is fixating on our most apparent qualities. The bad ones. Thanks a lot, John Steinbeck (who was from California).

     From the inside out, it’s a chip on our shoulder—a conjoined pride and shame about our theoretically idyllic, if flyover, way of life, with our ample parking and slow summer nights and giant grocery carts. From the outside in, it’s the Dust Bowl and then corn fields and also complicated family dynamics centered around religion. 

     Even the prompt for this essay—”What is the #Midwessay? What is the Midwest?“—emphasizes the writerly burden of geographical and cultural exposition, whether to readers or to ourselves. We’re in the netherworld, called western but really central, with a coastless, varied landscape most people couldn’t describe if asked. Flat, kind of? But hills, sometimes. Cities! Small ones. Low cost of living and driving to food trucks, for some reason. Good veterinary schools. Nobody needs to ask Joan Didion what New York City is like to understand what she’s talking about.

     Being Midwestern is about recognizing one’s roots if not one’s home. As essayists, it’s apparently to write despite one’s circumstances instead of because. We cling to the idea of expatriates having done us proud instead of, more truthfully, abandoning us, trying to prove our worth. Anyway, humorist Will Rogers was born in Oologah, Oklahoma, left as soon as he could to make his name as a globetrotting Hollywood film star, and died in a plane crash in Alaska. We named Oklahoma City’s international airport after him.

The #Midwessay: Phyllis Brotherton, My Midwessay

Ancient mountains (now hills), ancient ocean beds (now plains and prairie), tornado alley, tablelands, highlands, cross timbers, caves, the Ozarks, cypress swamps and forest—we've got it all in Oklahoma, baby. This place favors writing about landscape—it's embedded in us in a way I suppose other writers feel. For me, why I write about Oklahoma, why I care about its history and future, the legacies it will and won't claim, has something to do with the sight of a flat blooming canola field straddling a wet red dirt road beneath striated grey and white clouds after a spring storm. And, that this place has been and is filled with a mix of people—displaced, wandering, outcasts who are still often overlooked. The late Barry Lopez (RIP; not an Oklahoman) wrote, "If we could speak more accurately, more evocatively, more familiarly, about the physical places we occupy, perhaps we could speak more penetratingly, more insightfully, more compassionately about the flaws in these various systems which, we regularly assert, we wish to address and make better." Each of the Oklahoma writers for this series speak to the physical place well, and each asks us to consider what that place (and its people) has to offer, or not. —Liz Blood, Oklahoma Coordinator

 

My Midwessay

Phyllis Brotherton

*

The Midwest for me will always be home, and even though “home” has been many places over the years: Chicago, Tehran, Fresno, California, and now Reno, Nevada; Oklahoma City, my place of birth and life for the first 25 years, will always signify my origins and claims a forever hold on my heart. 

     What could be considered more “Mid” than Oklahoma City, a short 355 miles +/- south of Lebanon, Kansas, the geographic center of the 48 contiguous US states? What Neil Gaiman describes in American Gods as “a neutral ground where the modern and old gods can meet despite the war between them,” which seems particularly percipient, given the area’s 35+ registered Native American tribes and the crisscrossed remnants of former federally demarcated Indian Reservations. Though the West long ago was designated as everything beyond the Appalachian Mountains, exploration, migration and settlement later shifted that “frontier,” so that the vast expanse west of the Mississippi River became known as the West.

     My Midwessay would include the farm where I grew up, just south of Oklahoma City, where when asked, my family described, in our linguistic-lazy Okie accents, as “six miles south-a the airport, a mile west-a Meridian” and eight miles west of the town of Moore, where I attended all twelve years of primary and secondary school. The dirt road leading to our rented 100-year-old farmhouse nestled on forty acres, was lined all along the south side with hickory trees and still is, though they are shadows of their former selves now, ravaged by Wizard-of-Oz tornadoes and Northers certain to storm through every year, over and over, like clockwork. That rickety cellar door Dorothy stomped her foot on to get in, blown back again and again as she tried, was the spitting image of mine.

     The pecan tree in the backyard, beyond the cellar, windmill, and outhouse we used when the toilets clogged or the septic tank filled up, still stands in all its Papershell Cultivar glory. It watched our young family of four move in, shaded my Dad’s greyhound dog pens, and saw us pull out of the sandy driveway twelve years later, to a new home further south, all our own. On a visit a few years ago, on yet another drive-by to see how the place was getting on, I’m greeted by the owner, who shares that the tree, likely two centuries old by then, produced over 400 lbs. of pecans that year, almost ten times the average. I immediately write down this happy longevity story in my notebook. Of course, the old house and even the cellar by that time, only existed unseen below ground, since the former had been dozed and buried on its very spot, while the latter ultimately caved in on itself.

     For me, my Midwest Essay is full of color: the red dirt of the South Canadian River, the red cardinals perched on snow-drifted fenceposts, the golden sway of wheat fields, the black-green sky of a Cat. 5, the flaxen hair of broom corn, and the clear colorless glass of icy highways. And smells: fresh-baled alfalfa, the petrichor of raindrops on parched soil, the must of fallen leaves or the sharp scent of the first cold spell that pierces your nostrils like a dull knife. The Oklahoma winds could have their own dictionary, and maybe they do. All of this, the shade and scent of nostalgia, of childhood memory, of that place that was your first remembrance, and really your only—home.