Into the Gritty Heartland

This new quarterly lives up to both parts of its name. Midwestern Gothic publishes fiction and poetry inspired by the oft-maligned swollen middle of our country. In fact, founding editors Jeff Pfaller and Robert James Russell, working out of Ann Arbor, aim to make the literary journal a definitive resource on the Midwest region — that is, a region “ripe with its own mythologies and tall tales.” While gothic fiction is welcomed, it’s not a specific requirement that submissions be dark or macabre; ultimately, Midwestern Gothic publishes work inspired by the Midwest that illustrates real life, “good, bad, or ugly.”(For submissions, send up to 10K words of fiction or up to 3 poems; photography submissions also welcome. See website for format requirements and contact info).The journal is available in hardcopy and less expensive e-reader and pdf versions.

Much of the 160 or so pages of writing in issue 1 is seasoned heavily with despair, the characters often ahold of lives that seem as bleak as long harsh winters. I read tales of jail time and car crashes and bar fights; addiction and animal cruelty and cutters. There’s a creepy junkyard and mule tending and a nine-inch Bowie knife and a whole jug of peyote tea. A pitchfork even makes an inauspicious appearance on the last page. It’s safe to say that in their inaugural issue Pfaller and Russell have assembled a formidable line-up of writers able to go to some dark and unsettling places. It’s a promising debut.

I found mystery and hard-won beauty in these pages. Poignancy and lightness arrived in five small words scratched into flaking paint, a garden nursed among crumbling buildings, the relief and escape of music, and freedom from the chains of youth. Moments such as these seared bright streaks of grace across the dim prospects assigned to so many, with the result that I wasn’t able to read Midwestern Gothic quickly. I kept needing to take breaks to keep from being unnerved.

One of my favorite pieces here is Nick Arvin’s story “The Beauty Engine.” Elegant, controlled prose tells the story of an engineer who constructs a machine that mysteriously improves life for those nearby, people who go to the barber and the diner and teach band practice and mow their lawns. The measure of betterment is in the details: “Don B. abandoned his comb-over…. In the high school hallways, Kelly C.’s posture improved… The dogs along State Street howled in harmonies at night.” When things aren’t going so well, we know because Kelly C.’s shoulders hunch, arthritis invades joints, and children argue and “turn specialness into an insult.” There’s a vein of dreaminess running alongside the commonplace, which must be faced head-on by a barber who fears what he can’t comprehend. In the end, Arvin strikes an aching awareness of the division between beauty and pain.

A brittle, noble humor runs through much of the work here, as in the suicide attempt in Geoff Hyatt’s “Home Fire”: “When I stood up to look for a better belt to hang myself with, I started laughing. At least my pants didn’t fall down.” Micah Riecker in “Trixie” nails the wicked impulse for retaliation in a woman who’s been hurried into a nursing home by her two adult daughters: “She wanted to do something senior to wipe off those smiles. Start raving in broken Latin all the proper names of cherry trees, something to scare them.” In Thomas Horan’s “Cotton Mouth”—a hung-over, thirsty journey though Bethlehem, Illinois, in a musician’s tricked-out truck (think disco lights, red shag carpet)—tongue-in-cheek humor is cut with hapless pathos.

The gothic really revs up in stories like Roxane Gay’s “Down to Bone” and Jesse Eagle’s “When I Was Expectant.” Here is Eagle’s description of his protagonist’s first date with the man she marries, who will soon find a taste for blood -- his own and others: “After we ate, we watched television until the murder was solved. We searched the channels for something sexy. War fussed with everything and we gave up. I rolled my socks down to my ankles and gave him my legs. His face was a lotus-eating monster. I loaded my gun and took my pills. You came to write me out, Charles, I said. So wring me out.”

I don’t think I need to write spoiler alert to warn that there’s no happy ending to that wild ride, and the same is true in Gay’s “Down to Bone,” an aptly titled, relentlessly harrowing story of incest. The narrator describes her hometown in the northern Upper Peninsula of Michigan as “dark and cold and strangled beneath a thick blanket of ice and snow and profound sorrow.” The narrator’s life heads downhill from there, but I kept reading. Midwestern Gothic is full of accomplished writers and it’s hard to look away.

“On Being the Daughter of a Man in Prison,” by Anna Clark, has one of my favorite moments in this issue. The teenage narrator skips school and wanders into Detroit searching for a solace no one can give her, and visits the company her jailed father used to head up: “…it’s empty, of course, behind a chain-link fence that’s not hard to climb. I read graffiti. I touch rust. I pray for the first time in a long time. But a prayer’s just thoughts, empty as an exhale, so I found a pen and scratched the words out on the flaking paint of…[the] front door and made it legible: For us three, please God.” It’s a desperate prayer, hanging from a last shred of belief, and it’s answered with kindnesses delivered in minuscule doses.

Several of the poems in Midwestern Gothic (poetry editor is Donora Hillard) evoked the landscape I recall from my own time living in the Midwest, an open flatness that invites as much a feeling of expansion as it does detachment. Dan Lewis’s “Iowa Gothic” perfectly sums up the effect of a monotonous drive from a farmhouse in Iowa to a motel in upstate New York: “In the blood-red dark it is impossible / to know who you are.” Katherine Riegel echoes this solitude in “The Farm Wife,” musing: “In stories of the old Midwest / someone always goes crazy / from the sound of the wind and no other human voices.” In “His Wife Called Him Moose,” Paul Scot August responds with a sound as devastating as Riegel’s wind, as an old man sits in his home at sunset by the Clam River, bathed in radio static while “the river washes itself / through cattails, the sound like the final sigh of a dying wife.”

Mary Biddinger, whose bio proclaims that “Midwestern Gothic is a way of life,” provides an alternative glimpse into Midwest ethos. Words and images tumble through her poems like clothes in a dryer at the Laundromat. Here’s part of “Occupation: Hazard”:

…A line in the paper claimed
my photographs no longer powerful, and then assaulted
a local bakery for mundane flatware, tore the top

off the couple celebrating 67 years of absolute torture.
My shirts were packed with explosive grudges,
their residue. You said I might need to be reinstalled.

Weam Namou presses on the notion of borders and demarcations and what purpose they truly serve, asking in “That Line,” “Who casts the vote on where the east and north end, / and the south and west begin?” She continues:

Where is that line that is as perfectly drawn on the map
as the decorations of a wedding cake,
or the hem on my blouse and skirt?
If it’s not visible on soil and grass
how am I expected to grasp it in my head?
Should I force myself to pretend it’s alive, not dead?”

There isn’t enough room here to mention every work in issue 1, but take my word for it: the editors have built their quarterly around a region to be mined not just for what it can tell us about tractors and cornfields, engines and rust, rubber and industry—but also for what it knows in its soul about life and death and blood and survival. That’s Midwestern Gothic.