unclesam

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/uncle-sam-wagging-finger-prayer/"></div>Somewhere on Interstate 80 in Nebraska, between my true home in Colorado and my current one in South Dakota, I saw a sign painted on the back of an 18-wheeler: Uncle Sam wagging a scolding index finger at me and asking DID YOU PRAY TODAY?
In fact I had prayed that morning, as I do most mornings before I get out of bed, though I couldn’t remember what for. Probably something simple, like me not dying on the road or my country not destroying itself. But I didn’t like Uncle Sam telling me I was supposed to pray because it’s way beyond his purview. Even though I’m a garden-variety churchgoing guy, I don’t want Uncle Sam leaping over the wall of separation between church and state into my religious life any more than garden-variety atheists want a platoon of ministers, rabbis, and imams to jump over that wall into their government.
There was Uncle Sam on the back of that truck, though, leaping over the wall at me. It might be more accurate to say he was burrowing under it, because America is experiencing a consistent, premeditated undermining of the separation between religion and government. Our legislatures are full of conservative “patriots” who don’t see any problem with Uncle Sam wanting us to pray, and they’re enacting policies all around the country — often in the name of a “religious freedom” that seems to apply mostly to their own faith. Policies that blend the religious and the political are piling up around us and risk putting America increasingly in the grip of the de facto public religion it has gradually embraced over the last four decades: a gun-toting, flag-waving quasi-Christianity that shines its blessings down on white supremacy and American imperialism.
It’s descending on us not like some toxic Christofascist storm, but like a slow and pervasive mist. Take, for example, what just happened in my adopted state of South Dakota. In late March, new Governor Kristi Noem signed into law <a href="http://sdlegislature.gov/docs/legsession/2019/Bills/SB55ENR.pdf">Senate Bill 55</a>, which requires that “the national motto of the United States, ‘In God We Trust,’ shall be displayed… in a prominent location within each public school… and may be no smaller than twelve inches wide by twelve inches high.”
No big deal, supporters will say, since “In God We Trust” has been our national motto since 1864 and even appears on our money. American courts have consistently rejected attempts to remove references to God in public discourse and spaces, such as in the Pledge of Allegiance and on our currency. In 2018, the <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-religion-motto/us-court-rejects-atheists-appeal-over-in-god-we-trust-on-money-idUSKCN1LD24K">8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals</a> in Minnesota ruled against an atheist lawsuit that wanted to take “In God We Trust” off our money. Those hoping to fight South Dakota Senate Bill 55 as a separation of church and state issue should expect a rough, unsuccessful time in court.
You can view this bill, if you wish, as base-pleasing gesture in a deeply red state that currently has zero Democrats holding statewide office. But similar laws have been enacted or are being considered in (at least) Nebraska, Indiana, Louisiana, Arkansas, Tennessee, Florida, Alabama, Kentucky and Arizona. They are connected to a nationwide effort by the Congressional Prayer Caucus Foundation called <a href="https://cpcfoundation.com/first-freedom-coalition-project-blitz/">Project Blitz</a>, which intends to “protect the free exercise of traditional Judeo-Christian religious values and beliefs in the public square, and to reclaim and properly define the narrative which supports such beliefs.”
The Congressional Prayer Caucus Foundation even has a <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwfCh32HsC3UYmV0NUp5cXZjT28/view">how-to guide for promoting such legislation</a> posted on Google Drive. (Guidelines for creating a National Motto Display Act, for instance, are on page 10.) The front page of this document displays the logo for the <a href="https://wallbuilders.com/about-us/">WallBuilders ProFamily Legislative Network</a>, which is “dedicated to presenting America’s forgotten history and heroes, with an emphasis on the moral, religious, and constitutional foundation on which America was built — a foundation which, in recent years, has been seriously attacked and undermined.”
WallBuilders, huh? Why does that sound so familiar? Dig around in the agendas of organizations like these even for a moment and it becomes clear that they don’t simply want to fill our hearts with patriotic slogans. They’re after the return of “Judeo-Christian religious values” — a code phrase for a host of ultraconservative policies that smell an awful lot like the white nationalist agenda. This crowd marches through America holding up religious freedom at the head of its parade like some prized heifer. But behind it follow a whole barnyard full of policies that make South Dakota Senate Bill 55 look like the thin end of a painful, restrictive wedge. Also listed in the Congressional Prayer Caucus Foundation’s policy guidebook are plans for creating a “Resolution Establishing Public Policy Favoring Intimate Sexual Relations Only Between Married, Heterosexual Couples,” a “Resolution Establishing Public Policy Favoring Reliance on and Maintenance of Birth Gender,” and a “Resolution Establishing Public Policy Favoring Adoption by Intact Heterosexual, Marriage-based Families.”
This looks to me like a version of the Westboro Baptist Church’s pithy “God Hates Fags” mantra, only watered-down and filtered through legalese. Many values we might properly call Judeo-Christian — such as radical hospitality toward strangers — don’t get included in the vision of America that contemporary religious freedom advocates are trying to force through legislatures all around the country. What’s wrong with wanting a Christian country? these folks ask. But that question isn’t too far off from asking What’s wrong with wanting America to be for Americans? and What’s wrong with wanting America to be a white country again? Just ask Representative Steve King of Iowa, <a href="https://steveking.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/king-americas-judeo-christian-heritage-not-a-political-bargaining-chip">himself a longtime supporter</a> of America’s Judeo-Christian heritage.
Thanks to people like Rep. King and his ilk, “Judeo-Christian” is such a loaded buzzword that one can barely use it today without invoking the white nationalist agenda. This agenda protects the right of Americans to legislate against gays, Muslims, atheists, and anyone else they deem insufficiently in accord with their beliefs. It is not the agenda of a first-century Jew named Jesus, but that of a narrow band of his followers who would love to make America a Christian nation.
Unfortunately, the values of this few are precisely what Uncle Sam will want us to pray for once he burrows the rest of the way beneath the wall of separation between church and state and wags his quasi-religious finger at us. The religious freedom crowd wants to Make America Judeo-Christian Again — a nice campaign slogan, though too unwieldy for a red baseball cap — and this garden-variety churchgoing guy wants none of it. I’ll stick with praying to a God who has no interest in being used as a prop to support the agenda of those who tolerate things like family separation of asylum-seekers and using Christianity to justify <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2018/05/07/jesus-loves-me-and-my-guns-faith-and-firearms-touted-at-the-nras-prayer-breakfast/?utm_term=.280bc4e4e43f">gun-toting xenophobia</a>.
The Congressional Prayer Caucus Foundation and its allies will say that the “In God We Trust” movement is about nothing more than wanting to restore American patriotism — that it’s got nothing to do with religion at all. Our problem today is that people with money and a clear legislative strategy are trying to create an America in which nobody can really tell the difference between government and a nationalistic faith. Someday, I fear, I’ll be driving between South Dakota and Colorado again and see that Jesus has replaced Uncle Sam on the back of that same 18-wheeler. What will the text around his lantern-jawed, caucasian face say? GOD BLESS AMERICA? No, that would be too gentle. OUR COUNTRY, STAY OUT would be more like it. Or he might have no words at all — just an AR-15 crooked in his right elbow and a big ol’ American flag waving on the pole in his clenched left fist.
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Steven Wingate’s novel Of Fathers and Fire, set during the Iran Hostage Crisis and the run-up to the Reagan presidency in 1980, was published in April 2019 by the University of Nebraska Press as part of its Flyover Fiction Series. He teaches creative writing at South Dakota State University. Visit <a href="http://www.stevenwingate.com">www.stevenwingate.com</a>.
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Uncle Sam and the Wagging Finger of Prayer

wingate-fountain

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/interviews/post-mortem-2018-midterm-elections-ben-fountain/"></div>Until this fall, readers knew Ben Fountain almost exclusively as a well-decorated fiction writer. His debut short story collection, Brief Encounters with Che Guevara (2006) garnered a PEN/Hemingway Award and a Whiting Award. His first novel, Billy Lynn’s Long Half-time Walk (2012) earned him a National Book Critics Circle Award and a finalist nod for the National Book Award, and in 2016 it was adapted into a feature film by Ang Lee. That’s quite the résumé. 
But Fountain’s latest book is nonfiction, and in it he has plenty to say about America. Beautiful Country Burn Again (2018) examines the sleazy underbelly of American politics that has led us to our current moment: a cold civil war that, thawed too long in the microwave of fear-mongering and ignorance of the past, threatens to blow its top and leave a mess all over every kitchen in the country. Its title, taken from a Robinson Jeffers poem, refers to “those 80-year cycles of crisis and reinvention” that Fountain finds us going through again today. First the Civil War, then 80 years later the Great Depression and the New Deal, and 80 years further on to 2016 — the year when, as he writes in his prologue, “all the crazy parts of America ran amok over the rest.” 
The book is, as one would expect from Fountain, dazzling in its prose. It’s full of dark, gallows-ish humor in the form of one-liners (“fear is the herpes of American politics”) and devastating descriptions (of Ted Cruz: “You’d think he gargles twice a day with a cocktail of high-fructose corn syrup and snake oil”). Kaleidoscopic scenes of crowds — at the Republican and Democratic conventions, at a gun show in Louisville, Kentucky, and others — are Fountain’s forte, and he brings them alive with mad, rollicking sentences. In its quieter moments the book reveals a historian’s steady eye that is not satisfied to merely observe the present, but wants to dig back into our past toward the roots of all our ills. 
Beautiful Country Burn Again is a must-read for those who want to know what has brought us to this tipping point in American politics — and especially for those who have the stomach to watch as Fountain strips the country’s sacred cows of the trappings that make people find them holy. We corresponded via email immediately after the 2018 midterm elections.
¤
STEVEN WINGATE: Let’s start where you live. You’re a Texan and witnessed Beto O’Rourke’s “close but no cigar” moment up close. What does this moment — both his rise to national awareness and his ultimate fall back to reality — mean for Texas and the nation?
BEN FOUNTAIN: Well, he’s a hopeful development in several ways. He came closer to winning statewide office than any Democrat since the early 1990s, and he did it by running a campaign which deliberately, systematically emphasized the distinctions between the progressive Democratic agenda he espoused and the party-line GOP agenda of free-market fundamentalism, low taxes, low regulation, and shitty quality of life championed by Ted Cruz. For several decades we’ve seen promising Democratic candidates here in Texas get reined in and tamped down by “experts” from the Democratic establishment coming down from Washington to advise on their campaigns. Wendy Davis is a prime example of this, a promising candidate with some real fire in the belly who got turned into milquetoast, i.e., Republican-lite, by the Democratic industrial-election complex, to the point where she wouldn’t even say whether she’d voted for Barack Obama over Mitt Romney in 2012. Stand for something, dammit! If you’re going down, at least raise a few consciences while you’re doing it.
Another hopeful aspect of O’Rourke’s campaign was his refusal to take PAC money, and he was still able to mount one of the best-financed Senate campaigns in recent history. I say “still,” but maybe it’s because he refused PAC money. Enough regular people took note of the authenticity of that gesture — a confirmation of his progressive politics — and decided this was a candidate worth supporting financially and otherwise. And a third aspect — O’Rourke busted his butt going to every single county in Texas, including the very reddest places in the state, and forcefully making his case. Part of the job of a campaign is to educate, to raise awareness, and to give people a real choice. The Democratic establishment’s triage strategy of the past 40 years has been disastrous not just for the party, but for the country, too, the party ceding large swaths of the rural midwest and the south to the Republicans. Beto went everywhere, and didn’t cede anything.
Okay, bottom line is, he lost. He was up against an extremely well-financed, extremely disciplined candidate with a high-functioning campaign, and an incumbent at that. For O’Rourke to win, one of two things would have had to happen. One, Cruz needed to make a major mistake, and Cruz doesn’t make many mistakes of any kind, much less big ones. Or, O’Rourke needed to turn out massive numbers of new voters. It looks like he made significant gains there, but not enough. But his example gives liberal candidates a template going forward on how to run a campaign that stands for something, that finances itself in the right way, that gets a lot of mileage out of grassroots campaigning, and that generates unprecedented support in deep-red territory.
The book doesn’t let Democrats off the hook. At one point you say: “If the party can’t transform itself into an instrument of genuine resistance and renewal, then let it die and make way for the necessary new thing.” How are Democrats doing on that front after this midterm?
Better, but still not great. The Democratic establishment continues to view liberal candidacies with extreme wariness, if not barely suppressed terror, and for good reason: the agenda of genuinely liberal Democrats threatens the privileges and advantages of the Democratic establishment’s big-money donor class. For God’s sake don’t piss off the rich uncle! Had the Democratic establishment known that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was the threat to Joe Crowley that she turned out being, you can bet they’d have come down on her like a ton of bricks in the same way that, say, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee sabotaged a promising, talented candidate like Laura Moser, who was running in the primary for Texas’s seventh House district. But at least the Democratic establishment came up with a winning message this time around, and it’s the right message: focus on things that are really going to help working people, like healthcare and lunch-bucket issues. You saw Conor Lamb do it in western Pennsylvania, going hard in defense of the Affordable Care Act and union rights, and there were plenty more like him who had success with that message. The Democratic establishment needs to take note, and not only continue with this message, but hammer harder. Workers’ rights, collective bargaining, fair pay for overtime, fair wages generally, skyrocketing executive compensation, the future of work in the age of robotics, and so forth. If the Democratic Party is going to appeal to large numbers of working class voters — white as well as people of color — it has to speak to their fundamental economic needs in a genuine, systematic, thoughtful way.
What response do you expect from the Trump army now that the Republicans have lost some ground? I don’t mean only the people in politics, but the Trump Troll Army as well.
Well, I’ve yet to see Trump and his supporters get nicer, and I’m not holding my breath now. Exactly the opposite, in fact, and you saw it in Trump’s “warlike response” threat shortly after the election; he has even more incentive to go to the mats, now that the Dems are going to have control of the House. Up to a point, this is just politics as usual, opposing parties knocking heads, but we’ve gone far, far beyond the head-banging of normal politics. One of the characteristics of the last 25 years of American politics is, it only gets meaner, lower, more partisan. How did it get this way?
For some answers, we could take a look at the dismantling under Reagan of the Fairness Doctrine that had governed editorializing on American TV and radio for some 50 years, and the dismantling of rules governing monopoly ownership of media outlets, also under Reagan. From that point forward, tremendous profits — not to mention political advantage — were to be had in plying the fertile ground of rank partisanship, as demonstrated by the booming of fortunes of people like Rush Limbaugh and the late Roger Ailes. The net result for the country has been toxic polarization and tribalism. And Trump.
The current administration has weaponized immigration. First we had “build the wall,” then children in cages, then threats (later reversed) to shoot at the migrant caravan. What have we learned from America’s reaction to this, and what do you see being weaponized next?
What we’ve learned is, first, all too often it works, and second, over the long term it’s tremendously destructive. It degrades not just our politics, but our humanity as well, and it can’t help but corrupt the life of the country. Clearly, Trump’s had tremendous success with this kind of sewage, and he amped it up even higher for the mid-terms, nativist rhetoric raised to hysterics. One of the encouraging things about this election is it looks like significant numbers of people are fed up with it. The suburban congressional seats that flipped from red to blue, the substantial gains that the Democrats made in state legislatures and governors’ races — I expect disgust with Trump helped make that happen. Of course the Republicans picked up seats in the Senate, but for the most part those were hardcore red states where Trump’s immigration hysterics were naturally going to find a sympathetic audience.
As for what’s next? My greatest fear is a new war — Iran or North Korea. The political weaponization of war; there’s ample precedent for that in our recent history. Trump ramping up the war rhetoric to the point that he loses control of it. Or maybe, short of war, it will serve Trump’s purposes to go full-freakout on House Democrats if they take even the most basic steps toward meaningful oversight of the executive branch.
In the book you reference a century-old quote from historian Henry Adams: “Politics is the systematic organization of hatreds.” Will the midterms have any effect on the reorganization of America’s hatreds, or do you think they’re well-defined right now?
Oh, I’d say our hatreds are pretty well organized at the moment.
You call upon a lot of American history in the book, much of it cyclical. Which phase in our history should we be reading about to avoid repeating it? 
The 1850s might be illuminating. And the Gilded Age (1870-1900), continuing up through about 1945. The social democracy established by FDR’s New Deal has been so successful in American life that it’s become invisible. Too many people take for granted the tremendous prosperity and opportunity that resulted from the New Deal; you have Libertarians and the hard-right running around bashing government when they might well not even be here if the New Deal hadn’t literally saved their grandpa’s butt back in the day, this same New Deal that led to tremendous advancements in infrastructure, medicine, public health, technology, education, and so forth, and created a stable system of banking and finance, and saved American agriculture. I think it’s hilarious to see Libertarians and Republicans talking anti-government guff into their cell phones, when those cell phones wouldn’t even exist without the tremendous government investments in basic science and technology that followed World War II.
You close by saying the suppression of historical and political consciousness “will destroy the best part of America.” When I look at voter turnout — the highest for a midterm in decades, yet still only 49% — I fear that the suppression is well underway. What will it take to un-suppress that consciousness?
Calamity. Nothing like a reality check to wake us up.
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A Post-Mortem of the 2018 Midterm Elections with Ben Fountain

virgilwander

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/interviews/busy-born-interview-leif-enger/"></div>It can be hard for people who know that Bob Dylan comes from northern Minnesota to think of the region without thinking of him, too. In Leif Enger’s Virgil Wander, set on the shore of Lake Superior north of Duluth, Dylan appears as a cameo character passing through the downtrodden fictional town of Greenstone. But there’s also a thematic echo of Dylan in this book, Enger’s first in a decade, and it’s embodied in a line from “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)”: “He who is not busy being born is busy dying.” 
There’s a whole lot of being born in Virgil Wander, starting with its titular narrator. A staid and modest Midwestern theater operator and civil servant, he inadvertently hits the reset button on his life by driving off a road into Lake Superior. His re-entry into Greenstone’s daily round is complicated by the arrival of a grizzled Norwegian named Rune who comes to town in search of a son whose existence he only recently discovered  — and who has in fact disappeared, leaving behind a wife and son. The Virgil/Rune encounter sets off a chain of rebirths, since the people of Greenstone, as down in the mouth and lost as some of them may be, have no interest in busying themselves with dying. Even the town itself, a former mining hub, tries to reboot. But success is not guaranteed, and for some being reborn turns out to be no more than a roll of the dice. 
 Readers of Enger’s earlier novels — Peace Like a River (2001) and So Brave, Young, and Handsome (2008) — will recognize Enger’s spacious landscapes from his earlier books, as well as his deft hand at rendering the tight fabric of small groups of people via moments of self-revelatory connectedness. But Virgil Wander has its own identity. It is more intensely lyrical than its predecessors, in large part because the narrator sees his defamiliarized natural surroundings in new ways. That lyricism burns brightest in moments when Virgil is closest to feeling undone and helpless, which also happen to be the moments he comes closest to understanding the whole of life. Leif Enger and I talked via email as he toured cross-country with the new book.
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STEVEN WINGATE: During your first reading from the novel at the South Dakota Festival of Books, you started off by telling us that we were the first people to “meet” Virgil after you’d known him for a long time. Did you feel this way about all your novels, or is that feeling particular to Virgil Wander because his name is your title?
LEIF ENGER: I’ve felt close to all my narrators but none more so than Virgil. He’s nearly my age, living in a place not far from me, doing a job I always viewed romantically but was lucky enough not to try.
Virgil talks of his pre-accident self as a “previous tenant,” as if its another person hanging around in his present life. I can’t help but see a parallel here with the fact that you wrote an entire previous version of Virgil Wander and scrapped it as unsatisfactory. Is the ghost of the previous version hanging around like a “previous tenant” in the finished work, or were you able to make a cleaner break from the past than Virgil did?
That’s a funny observation and I would definitely go back and compare old versus new if I hadn’t deleted the original entirely. One thing that happened repeatedly was that crucial scenes in the first version looked utterly different the second time round, which led to different outcomes, partly because there were new characters involved, and partly because Virgil himself was so altered from that first-draft protagonist — his manners, his means of self-defense in social situations, his whole way of responding to people set the narrative on a different course. Sometimes the things he said made me laugh out loud, but on the whole he’s much more who he ought to be in the final version. If there’s an alternate universe, as in Fringe, then somewhere lives an uptight projectionist fretting by himself on the shore of an inland sea. It’s unlikely we’ll ever know.
In conversation with Laurie Hertzel at the Minneapolis Star-Tribune you mentioned that “You have to have the right voice or the book is doomed.” Was there a particular moment when you knew you had Virgil’s voice?
Once it became the tale of a damaged man mending, the voice clarified straightaway. The early chapters came fast and all the gears worked. Of course there were still bumps in the narrative but I could see how to work them out. There’s something appealing about the first-person underdog discovering, or re-discovering, his world, learning who his friends are, getting the occasional adjective back, questioning old assumptions or in some cases just forgetting them; it also provided an arc that’s by nature questing and hopeful, which made it more fun to get up and work on every day.
Virgil gets a chance to start over after his accident, which a lot of people wish for. It’s also a dream situation for a fiction writer — the chance to build a new character on the hulk of an old one. Were there places the “new Virgil” led you to to that you didn’t expect, or places you thought he’d take you but refused to?
Both those things happened. Maybe the nicest surprise was realizing that Virgil’s not the only one getting an Act Two. Nearly all the main characters and most of the minor ones are looking for exactly that — a fresh start, a clean shot, a new socket set to fix whatever isn’t working. And somehow Virgil seizing the day — which he does reluctantly, because of being tired and sore and unbalanced and forgetful — is a catalyst for change in the lives around him. That’s something I didn’t expect, or even notice was happening until fairly late in the game.
I know I won’t be alone among your readers in finding Rune, the Norwegian kite-maker, to be my favorite character. You’re a kite man yourself, and you’ve written recently in Literary Hub about your love of flying and building them.  How do you imbue characters with something you personally love in a way that lets them love it in their own way and not yours?
The best way to know someone is to understand what they love, or have loved, or might love eventually. Music, gardening, Dr. Who, skull rings, knitting, aromatherapy, Airstream trailers, giant sturgeon — at the coffee shop where I’m sitting there’s a man wearing the most conservative suit imaginable who’s braided his beard into a hatch of pale snakelets. So much work! Most of my characters show up with some obsession already in hand, usually one I admire but haven’t had the excuse to explore.
Everything in the world is worth a closer look. To your question, my habit when working with a new character is to write tons of backstory. Where did they grow up, in what ways did they disappoint their parents, what’s the gap between what they wanted and what they’ve so far accomplished, do they like poetry and if so is it the rhyming kind? Almost none of it will make the final draft, but it opens a window into their lives, suggests the origins of their language and habits, and gives me the sense they have things going on outside the book’s horizon. Do they then love things in a different way than I would? No idea. It’s probably inevitable that they all carry my fingerprints, but there’s nothing I can do about that.
Your novel takes place in a small, tight knit, semi-rural community. Yet Virgil talks in an early chapter about being completely unable to ask for help even though he’s a fixture in his town. This goes against our stereotypical vision of “heartland” America as being a place where we’re always connected, where we’re just one more plant growing out of the soil. How do you as an author attune yourself to capture that sense of isolation in different settings?
Isolation is as much the rural Midwestern experience as community — more so, I’d guess. Connectedness is admired, but self-reliance is venerated. A few years ago I was walking and it began to rain, so I stopped at the house of a neighbor at the dead end of the road. Carl was eighty, lifelong bachelor, drove into town a few nights a week to eat at the Legion or the bowling alley. He kindly asked me in, invited me to watch the rest of the Twins game with him and led the way to his little television through a maze of ice cream buckets and dutch ovens and Dinty Moore cans he’d set out to catch the water coming through the roof. When it started raining harder the dripping got so loud he had to turn up the TV. I asked if he’d like some help with his roof and he said, “What for, I got plenty of cans.” He had that arid humor, and he also preferred coping with stuff on his own. Isolation is the default setting — it’s community that has to be constructed intentionally, no easy task. Nothing is more terrifying than a church potluck, no matter how much you might like everyone there.
Minnesota is a literary hotbed, with many fine writers and equally fine publishers (Graywolf, Milkweed, Coffee House, etc.) and it’s the nexus for a very large region that stretches across some large states. Historically we’ve talked in America about Southern literature. Do you think the upper Midwest/north central region has a literary identity, and if so what do you think characterizes it?
People love this question of literary ID and I never know how to answer it. Virgil Wander is written in the tradition of the provincial Midwesterner at once comfortable in his pastoral world and dying to bust out, but we don’t own that idea, and anyway it’s a small slice of what actually emerges from this fertile part of the map. I like what Jim Harrison had to say on the topic, essentially that there’s no such thing as regional literature — a piece of writing is literature or not depending on its merits and not on its geography. Would I still want to read Flannery O’Connor if she’d set her stories in Osakis, Minnesota? You bet I would — in fact, I wish she had.
Now that you’ve moved from central Minnesota to Duluth and have started writing about the life around Lake Superior, do you think your fiction will stay there too? What do you have cooking now?
I’m too superstitious to say anything about the next project, but Lake Superior is medicine too powerful to ignore if you live anywhere close, which I do.
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Busy Being Born: An Interview with Leif Enger

My L.A. in Four Locations: Wrecking a Dream in the Nineties

Steven Wingate’s novel Of Fathers and Fire, set during the Iran Hostage Crisis and the run-up to the Reagan presidency in 1980, was published in April 2019 by the University of Nebraska Press as part of its Flyover Fiction Series. He teaches creative writing at South Dakota State University. Visit <a href="http://www.stevenwingate.com">www.stevenwingate.com</a>.

Steven Wingate

Steven Wingate’s novel Of Fathers and Fire, set during the Iran Hostage Crisis and the run-up to the Reagan presidency in 1980, was published in April 2019 by the University of Nebraska Press as part of its Flyover Fiction Series. He teaches creative writing at South Dakota State University. Visit <a href="http://www.stevenwingate.com">www.stevenwingate.com</a>.